Herbert Marcuse
| Western Philosophy 20th century | |
|---|---|
| 200px | |
| Name: Herbert Marcuse | |
| Birth: July 19, 1898 (Berlin, Germany) | |
| Death: July 29, 1979 (Germany) | |
| School/tradition: critical theory | |
| Main interests | |
| social theory, marxism | |
| Notable ideas | |
| The Totally Administered Society | |
| Influences | Influenced |
| Kant, Heidegger, Hegel, Lukacs, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Husserl | Angela Davis, Abbie Hoffman, Jürgen Habermas |
Herbert Marcuse (July 19,1898 – July 29,1979) was an influential German-American Marxist philosopher and sociologist and a member of the Frankfurt School.
Biography
Herbert Marcuse was born in Berlin in 1898 to a Jewish family. He served in the German Army during the First World War and became a member of a Soldiers' Council that participated in the aborted socialist uprising of November 1918, which was crushed by the German Freikorps.
After the war, he attended the University of Freiburg, where he studied Marxism, but never took part in the Communist movement. After completing his Ph.D. thesis in 1922, written on the German Kunstlerroman, he moved back to Berlin, where he worked in publishing. He returned to Freiburg in 1929 and studied philosophy under Martin Heidegger. In addition to his Marxist leanings, he was greatly influenced by the existentialism of Heidegger. In order to qualify to become a professor in Germany, Marcuse wrote a habilitation entitled Hegel's Ontology and Theory of Historicity. Although it was published in 1932, Heidegger rejected the completed manuscript, and Marcuse's academic career was blocked.
In 1933, Marcuse was invited to join the Institute for Social Research, founded by the Frankfurt School. He then left Germany, following the members of the institute to Geneva and Paris before finally settling in New York, where he worked at the institute's Columbia University office. He became a naturalized American citizen in 1940 and remained in the United States for the rest of his life. In 1940 he published his first English work, Reason and Revolution, a dialectical work studying Hegel and Marx.
During World War II, Marcuse worked for the U.S. Office of War Information (OWI) on anti-Nazi propaganda projects. In 1943, he transferred to the Office of Strategic Services (a predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency), where he did research on Nazi Germany and denazification. After the dissolution of the OSS in 1945, Marcuse was employed by the United States Department of State as head of the Central European section, retiring after the death of his first wife in 1951.
In 1952, Marcuse began a teaching career as a political theorist, teaching briefly at Columbia and Harvard University and then at Brandeis University from 1958 to 1965, where he was a professor of philosophy and political science. During this time, he published Eros and Civilization (1955) and One-Dimensional Man (1964). His last position, teaching at the University of California at San Diego from 1965 to 1970, gained him notoriety as the intellectual head of the nationwide radical student movement. He was a friend and collaborator of the historical sociologist Barrington Moore, Jr. and of the political philosopher Robert Paul Wolff.
Marcuse's critiques of capitalist society resonated with the concerns of the leftist student movement in the 1960's. Because of his willingness to speak at student protests, Marcuse soon became known as "the father of the New Left," a term he disliked and rejected. His work heavily influenced intellectual discourse on popular culture and scholarly popular culture studies. He had many speaking engagements in the United States and Europe in the late 1960's and in the 1970's. He died on July 29, 1979 after suffered a stroke during a visit to Germany for a speaking engagement.
Philosophy
Marcuse was a philosopher in the tradition of the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School and is known for his astute critique of post-war capitalist society. Like most of the Frankfurt school, he was greatly influenced by Georg Lukacs's theory of reification in his book History and Class Consciousness. Like Lukacs, Marcuse believed that the citizens of capitalist democracies were unwittingly enslaved and dehumanized by the economic and political system. In One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse describes these as "totally administered societies" whose economic affluence has not helped but victimized its participants, the working class, by generating a variety of "false needs" that needed to continuously be satisfied by the very system which created them. In such an environment, the working class, ignorant of the nature of the system which controls them, is unable to carry out its revolutionary role as prescribed by Marx. Marcuse and other members of the Frankfurt School saw it as the role of Critical Theory to criticize and debunk these totally administered societies.
Marcuse had a more optimistic outlook than that of other Frankfurt School thinkers like Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, who together wrote the Critical Theory treatise Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947). Marcuse hoped that, despite the existing capitalist system, "the outcasts and the outsiders" who were not enslaved by the society would initiate a social revolution to overthrow capitalism.
In Eros and Civilization, Marcuse combines the ideas of Marx and Freud to describe a peaceful society free from suffering and capitalist oppression.
Marcuse was the most explicitly political and left-wing member of the Frankfurt School in the post-war period, continuing to identify himself as a Marxist, a socialist, and a Hegelian, while Adorno and Horkheimer became increasingly conservative.
Influence and Criticism
Marcuse had a notable influence on many radical scholars and activists, including the Black Power activist Angela Davis and the anarchist author Abbie Hoffman. Both were students of his at Brandeis who admired his philosophy, and Davis eventually followed him to San Diego in the 1960's.
Among those who critiqued him from the left were Marxist-Humanist Raya Dunayevskaya, and fellow German emigre, Paul Mattick, who both subjected One-Dimensional Man to a Marxist critique. Marcuse's 1965 essay "Repressive Tolerance", in which he claimed capitalist democracies can have totalitarian aspects, has been vilified by conservatives. Marcuse argues that genuine tolerance does not tolerate support for repression, since doing so ensures that marginalized voices will remain unheard. He characterizes tolerance of repressive speech as "inauthentic." Instead, he advocates a discriminating tolerance that does not allow repressive intolerance to be voiced.
Major works
- The Struggle Against Liberalism in the Totalitarian View of the State (1934)
- Reason and Revolution (1941)
- Eros and Civilization (1955)
- Soviet Marxism (1958)
- One-Dimensional Man (1964)
- Repressive Tolerance (1965)
- Negations (1968)
- An Essay on Liberation (1969)
- Counter-Revolution and Revolt (1972)
- The Aesthetic Dimension (1978)
ReferencesISBN links support NWE through referral fees
- Callinicos, Alex (1998). Marcuse, Herbert. In E. Craig (Ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. London: Routledge. Retrieved May 31, 2007, from http://www.rep.routledge.com/article/DD042
- Critical Theory by James Bohman, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
External links
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