Barry Katz

Art of Liberation
 ^ ~ (3

B arry K atz was born in 1950 in Chicago, Illinois. He

studied the history of social and political thought at
McGill University, Montreal, and went on to do
postgraduate research at the London School of Econo­
mics and then at the University of California, Santa
Cruz, where he received his PhD in 1980. Barry Katz
currently teaches in the Program in Values, Culture and
Technology at Stanford University, California, and is
editor of the forthcoming Decision: An Anthology of Free
Culture.
Barry Katz

\ferso
Herbert Marcuse
and the
A rt of Liberation

A n Intellectual B iography
An early version of chapter 1 appeared as ‘New Sources of
Marcuse’s Aesthetics’ in New German Critique, 17, spring 1979.

First published 1982

(c) Barry Martin Katz 1982

Verso Editions and NLB

15 Greek Street, London VV1

Filmsct in Baskerville by
Wayside Graphics, Clevedon, Bristol

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

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British Library'
Cataloguing in Publication Data

Katz, Barry
Herbert Marcuse and the art of liberation
1. Marcuse, Herbert
I. Title
193 B33035.M/

ISBN 0-86091-050-4
ISBN 0-86091-750-9 Pbk
C ontents

Acknowledgements 9
Introduction 11

PART ONE ORIGINS (1898-1920) 13

i. ‘A Berlin Childhood Around 1900’ 15
ii. ‘Berlin Alexanderplatz’ 23

PART TWO FOUNDATIONS (1920-1941) 35

1. The Aesthetic Dimension 37
2. Heidegger and Concrete Philosophy 58
3. Horkheimer and Critical Theory 87

INTERREGNUM ART AND POLITICS

IN THE TOTALITARIAN ERA 109

PART THREE DEPARTURES (1950-1958) 141

4. Matters of Life and Death 143
5. Years of Cheerful Pessimism 162
6. The Permanence of Art 193

CONCLUSION THE PHILOSOPHICAL DIMENSION 215

Bibliography of the Writings of Herbert Marcuse 222

Index 231
 To the Katz family
To the memory of Herbert Marcuse
We must do something about this immediately!
H erbert M arcuse
 A cknowledgements

From 1976 to 1979 I held intensive discussions with Herbert

Marcuse on biographical and theoretical aspects of this work. I
believe I have honoured the agreements that existed between us, but
he did not live to see this study in a complete or finished form, and it
must therefore be regarded as my personal interpretation and
appreciation.
Many friends and relatives of Herbert Marcuse assisted me with
interviews, correspondence, or informal discussion which I hope I
have used in a responsible way. I wish to thank Dr and Mrs Eric
Marcuse, Mrs Else Dannen, Erica Sherover-Marcuse, Mrs Harriet
Henze, M r Osha Neumann, Professors Leo Lowenthal, H. Stuart
Hughes, Bernard Morris, Jurgen Habermas, Carl Schorske, Gabriel
Almond, and Victoria Bonnell.
A number of friends and scholars, including Drs Thomas Bass,
Jonathan Beecher, Josef Chytry, Martin Jay, Conrad Johnson,
Francis Mulhern, and Hayden White have been generous with their
time and uncompromising in their criticism. To thank them at this
point may be superfluous, but I am happy to do so once again.
Professor Norman O. Brown - a model, for me, of a certain kind
of teacher and intellectual - pronounced a severe judgement upon
what I naively believed to be a final draft. I recognize that the
extensive revisions and corrections that followed only begin to meet
his objections, and that to do so fully a different book would be
required; I hope he writes it.
Finally, I wish to thank the various agencies of the University of
California at Santa Cruz that provided me with the institutional
and financial support that enabled me to complete this project: the
Board of Studies in the History of Consciousness and especially my
friend Billie Harris who must by now be aware of my admiration

9
10

and appreciation, Provost Joe Silverman and the staff and fellows of
Stevenson College, Mrs Joan Hodgson and her Inter-Library Loan
staff, and my friend Sharon Baez who performed so heroically at the
typewriter.
 I ntroduction

Herbert Marcuse died in Starnberg, near Munich, as the conclusion

of this biography was being prepared. In the course of winning his
cooperation in this project, an exchange took place in his living-
room that may reflect him as precisely as anything written here. I
had made the mistake of quoting Marcuse to himself in order to
combat his reticence: ‘Historical Materialism has never denied the
individual as a historical force.’ (1929) He raised his eyebrows and
gave me what I deserved: ‘Aber ich bin keine “geschichtliche
Kraft!”.’ In the following study of the course of his life and thought
I suggest that Marcuse was mistaken in his modest but undialectical
claim, and I regret that I have not been able to confront him with
my final conclusions.
It is gratifying to find examples where the turning points of a
century - their given character, but also their historical constitution
and future potentialities - are so precisely reflected in the evolution
of an intellectual career: the decline of the prc-1914 imperial
bourgeoisie, two world wars, the betrayal of both European
liberalism and Soviet Marxism, and the present period of apparent
stabilization - but also the insistent presence of a radical opposition,
the militant fellowship of intellectual comradcs-in-arms, and the
perpetual flowering of a defiant avant-garde. Is it really so unlikely,
then, that his work should have become a ‘historical force’ in the
world of politics and ideas?
Parallel to this historical argument runs a philosophical interpre­
tation which proposes that the work of the Marxist Herbert Marcuse
can best be understood as an attempt to articulate a dimension of
life and a corresponding domain of consciousness in which a frankly
transcendent standard is operative. This suggests not a metaphysical
quest, however, but a political one, for the practical function of this

//
12

theoretical construct has been to provide a standard of criticism

against which the prevailing reality may be judged and condemned
in terms of its own potentialities. The praxis of political revolution,
then, is always mediated by the poiesis of the aesthetic imagination,
and the truth, for Marcuse, lay in the tension between the two.
Indeed, although philosophical and psychoanalytical categories
provide the vehicle for his quest at important stages of his career, the
clearest access to this dimension has been through the work of art;
consequently, the primacy of aesthetics in the evolution of his
thought will prove to be central to this interpretation.
Herbert Marcuse was neither systematic nor always explicit in his
view of the integration of the political and the poetical transforma­
tion of the world. As a result, it has not been possible to confine this
presentation to an explication of a body of published books and
essays, and support has been drawn from unpublished writings,
personal interviews, declassified government documents, as well as
from the historical contours of the life itself. If Marcuse derived the
poetic standard from the timeless and unchanging reaches of
aesthetic Form, the practical imperatives were imposed by the
events of the twentieth century, and these will enter the discussion in
so far as they entered his philosophical work. Similarly, there are
periods in which Marcuse’s personal circumstances provide a
necessary backdrop to an understanding of his intellectual work,
and these will also be recorded where appropriate. It may be added,
however, that parallel to his advocacy of a political life was his
abiding concern over the erosion of the private sphere in the
advanced industrial societies, and this theoretical and practical
concern has been respected. Those who are interested in knowing
more about ‘what kind of a man he was’ can really do no better
than read his books.
PART ONE

ORIGINS
(18984920)
 1
‘A Berlin C hildhood
Around 1900’

At the end of 1879, in the first of a celebrated scries of articles, the

distinguished historian Heinrich von Treitschke sounded an alarm
to the German nation: ‘Year after year there pours over our Eastern
frontier . . . from the inexhaustible Polish cradle, a host of
ambitious, trouser-selling youths, whose children and children’s
children are one day to dominate Germany’s stock exchanges and
newspapers . . If Treitschke had included radical leftist politics in
the spheres of modern Prussian life to be dominated by the
descendents of those ‘ambitious, trouser-selling’ Jewish youths, his
prophecy would have been complete, and he would have accounted
for the ancestry of Herbert Marcuse.
Carl Marcuse was born in 1864, into a prosperous family of
horse-traders in the Pomeranian village of Greifenhagen; there is some
evidence to suggest that his ancestors had drifted north following
the expulsion of Jews from Spain at the end of the fifteenth century.
This was the beginning of a period of mass internal migration from
the eastern provinces of the empire to the urban centres, and true to
Treitschke’s formula, he and his two brothers became part of the
continuous shift to the capital which had swollen the Jewish
population of Berlin to nearly five per cent by the turn of the
century. Although his gradually acquired ‘Junker habitus’ hardly
fitted the pervasive stereotype of the typical trouser-selling Eastern
Jew - a photograph shows a huge equestrian in a commanding pose,
manoeuvring his horse through the Griinewald - he did indeed
enter the expanding German textile trade. He started young, but
advanced steadily to a full partnership in his firm, and was already
a successful Berlin businessman when, in 1895 or 1896, he married
Gertrud Kreslawsky. She was a talented and literate woman whose
family (originally from East Prussia) owned a paper factory that

15
16

specialized in gilded book edges, and thus owed its fortune to an

affluent and increasingly cultivated German bourgeoisie. The first
of their three children - Herbert - was born on 19 July 1898; a
sister, Else, followed in 1902, and a brother, Erich, in 1907.
The children were raised in a period of general economic
prosperity that especially favoured the expanding industrial and
commercial middle class. With the reversal, beginning in 1896, of
two decades of economic depression, a temporary, deceptive ebbing
of the wave of anti-semitism that had welled up in the 1880s and
1890s lent a further sense of security to a conspicuous part of that
class.1 The circumstances of the Marcuse family in particular were
quite comfortable, for Carl Marcuse was an enterprising individual,
far-sighted and versatile. He had begun his business career,
moreover, in circumstances that were excellent from a commercial
point of view. The peace terms of the Franco-Prussian War, out of
which the German Reich had emerged in 1871, provided for the
annexation of the territories of Alsace-Lorraine, and with them
Germany inherited a mature network of weaving and spinning
mills. Interrupted only by a decade of economic liberalism in the
Caprivi era, the German textile industry was to flourish, under the
benevolence of a system of state protectionism and moderate tariffs.'*
The personal fortunes of Carl Marcuse ran parallel to those of the
industry generally, but with success came boredom. After the birth
of their third child, he shifted his business interests into real estate -
building and property development - and the resultant firm of
‘Friedenthal und Marcuse’ brought an architect and a businessman
into mutually profitable alliance. Herbert Marcuse, then, like
Horkheimer, Lukacs, and a significant number of other radical
social critics of his generation, grew up in an extremely comfortable
household that extended to him the material offerings of the
capitalist system. It is significant that his later challenge to the
bourgeois social order was to be directed against its moral and 12

1. Sources for (his period include Peter Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in
Germany and Austria, New York 1%4, pp. 75-126, and Werner Angress, ‘Prussia’s
Army and the Jewish Reserve Officer Controversy Before W W I\Jam es Sheehan,
ed., Imperial Germany, New York 1976, pp. 93-115. (Much of the material
presented in part 1 is drawn from interviews and correspondence with Herbert
Marcuse and members of his family over the years 1976-79.)
2. Cf. J. H. Clapham, Economic Development of France and Germany, 1815-1914,
Cambridge 1966, ch. 11; Gustav Stolpcr, German Economy 1870-1940. Issues and
Trends, New' York 1940, part 2, chs. 2, 6.
 ‘A Berlin Childhood Around 1900* 17

cultural foundations, presupposing at least the possibility of a

substantial measure of economic well-being.
There is, however, little in this ‘Berlin childhood around 1900’
that appears directly to prefigure the directions he would later
follow - indeed, in its broad outlines his early biography corre­
sponds closely to the social history of the ascending industrial-
commercial bourgeoisie of the late empire.3 The family was solidly
patriarchal, dominated by a strict and imposing father against
whom Frau Marcuse served as ‘a softer counterweight’. Together,
the parents fitted well enough into the cultural stereotype o f‘typical
Jewish liberals’, well-to-do and comfortably assimilated into the
German upper middle class: they attended synagogue twice annual­
ly on the Jewish High Holidays, expressed a fashionable and
probably self-conscious distaste for the conspicuous wave of Ostjuden
that followed them to Berlin, and celebrated Christmas for its
prominent, pagan ‘Natursymbol\
In the political sphere, their electoral allegiance ultimately came
to rest - predictably enough - with the prestigious German
Democratic Party, created out of the shambles of post-war German
political life. Prior to the First World War, Carl Marcuse’s liberal
principles may have occasioned some sympathy for the Progressives,
the left wing of middle-class opinion, but the Progressive Party drew
little support from the industrial and commercial bourgeoisie, and
the class identification of the family was clearly with the protection­
ist, expansionist, and anti-socialist National Liberal establishment.
For the elders of the Marcuse family, disdain for the Social
Democratic Party was more a matter of class snobbery toward the
Arbeiterpartei, ‘the party of the working class’, than of politics.
At the age of six, Herbert Marcuse was enrolled in a Berlin
Vorschule or preparatory school, already a fact not without signifi­
cance in Wilhclmine Germany where the educational system was a
consciously and conspicuously organized facet of a hierarchical
society confronting modernization. Unlike the eight-year Volksschule,
which the vast majority of German school children attended in the
course of being fashioned into the industrious producers, obedient
soldiers, and loyal subjects of the Reich, the exclusive Vorschulen

3. Walter Benjamin’s highly personal memoirs - ‘Berliner Kindhcii urn Ncunzchn-

hundert’ (Gesammelte Schnfltn, IV, i, Frankfurt 1972) and Berliner Chromk, Gershom
Scholcm, ed., Frankfurt 1970, capture some of the social and domestic ambience
of their generation.
18

provided a three-year course of instruction designed to prepare the

children of parents who could afford it for admission to a
Gymnasium at the age of nine or ten. In 1907, on schedule, the
nine-year-old Marcuse entered Berlin’s Mommsen Gymnasium,
named after the only prominent ‘mandarin’ academician to rise
publicly against the nationalist and anti-semitic excesses of
Treitschke.
Throughout the nineteenth century, the classical German
Gymnasium had been the route to the universities, and then to the
higher ranks of civil service, most professions, and the host of special
privileges and offices open to the proportionately small educated or
‘cultivated’ elite. In the traditional social order, this was a highly
functional hierarchy in which an academically trained elite was
groomed for careers of power, status, and influence, while the Latin
secondary schools, the Realschulen, trained young people for technical
and clerical positions in commerce and industry.
Viewed against the rapidly shifting class structure of Imperial
Germany, the content of primary and secondary education, as well
as the very organization of the school system, ‘served as a brake
upon social mobility and tended to freeze the existing social
system’.4 In a period of widespread accommodation to norms
increasingly set by industry and technology, however, the classical
Gymnasium education, structured around Greek and Latin and
devoted to traditional humanistic ideals of self-cultivation, no
longer guaranteed access to the highest economic and political
positions. If prominent members of the entrepreneurial classes began
to allow their sons to pursue the classical, humanistic course of
higher education, this would have to be regarded as a luxury item of
secondary practical value, a link with old elites at the level of status.
Carl Marcuse, nouveau riche and himself with no more than a
Gymnasium education, seems to have had a strong sense of the
limits of mere wealth in a society - even a changing society - that
had traditionally conferred distinct status privileges upon its

4. Gordon Craig, Germany, 1866-1945, Oxford 1978, p. 189; cf. also Fritz K. Ringer,
The Decline of the German Mandarins, Cambridge 1969, pp. 42-61; Thomas
Alexander, The Prussian Elementary Schools, New York 1918, ch. 3; and R. H.
Samuel and R. H. Thomas, Education and Society in Modem Germany, London 1949,
chs. 1-2. On the accommodation between new and old classes, cf. James
Sheehan, ‘Conflict and Cohesion among German Elites in the Nineteenth
Century’, in Sheehan, ed., Imperial Germany, New York 1976, pp. 62-92.
 ‘A Berlin Childhood Around 1 9 0 0 ’ 19

academically educated citizens, for this was the course chosen for his
eldest son at an early age.
Marcuse’s conscious immersion in the tradition of Western
intellectual and aesthetic culture really began, then, at the Kaiscrin
Augusta Gymnasium in the fashionably modern suburb of Charlot-
tenburg —in 1911 the family and household staff had moved from
the crowded central district into a luxurious ten-room apartment in
the building in the Bismarckstrasse designed and built by the firm of
‘Friedenthal und Marcuse’.5 Berlin had been transformed, almost
literally within the space of a generation, from an austere and
regimented imperial Residenz into an industrial capital and the
political and economic hub of the most advanced nation in
continental Europe. After the turn of the century its cultural
evolution began to keep pace with the commercial and administra­
tive importance of the city in ways that would have been plainly felt
by an alert secondary school student. Indeed, it was the feeling of
Stefan Zweig, who has left a richly textured (if politically naive)
description of Berlin in these years, that with its generously endowed
museums, theatrical productions, and musical offerings, it held out
tremendous promises precisely to the young, for ‘just because there
was no real tradition, no century-old culture, youth was tempted to
try its hand’.6
From the very beginning, it was this ‘high culture’ to which
Herbert Marcuse was drawn. Indeed, by way of contrast, it was only
for a very brief and not especially memorable period in his early
adolescence that he participated in one of the great movements of
‘popular culture’ of Imperial Germany. By joining a group of boys
in a hiking club he became part of the sizeable and controversial
social movement known in its first phase (until 1919) as the
Wandervogel, which swept the urban, middle-class youth of his
generation. However diverse, unsystematic, or overtly apolitical its
proclamations may have been, the camaraderie and rebellious
idealism of the Wandervogel themselves suggested an alternative to
the mundane bonds of bourgeois existence: N ature, Eros, the
Volk’ were celebrated as the basis of genuine community. The fact,
however, that in his teens Marcuse evinced only the most short-lived

5. iristopher Isherwood leaves some illuminating descriptions of this district in his

hn Stories (1935). _ , ,
6. fan Zweig, The World of Yesterday, New York 1964, p. 112; cf. also Gerhard
isur. Imperial Berlin, New York 1970, chs. 3-5.
20

and half-hearted interest in the German Youth Movement - with its

characteristic Volksgemeinschaft rhetoric and profoundly bad artistic
taste - strongly suggests that his cultural orientations were already
developing in the direction of an elitism of a quite different sort.7
Though the status of the ‘Jewish Volk' within the Wandervogel
movement was always problematic, this uncertainty did not dam­
pen the enthusiasm of numerous Prussian-Jewish schoolboys of
Herbert’s age and background, and it was surely not this feature of
its ill-defined Weltanschauung that drove him from its ranks. Indeed,
he was at this time not much more attentive to ‘the Jewish Question’
than his parents, for, like a conspicuous number of his later
colleagues, he was born into a well-assimilated Berlin household
against which he felt little inclination to assert a distinct Jewish
identity. In general, the family felt itself to be solidly German: Carl
Marcuse’s gentile associations were numerous - mostly arising out of
his passionate devotion to his riding club - and no noteworthy
incidences of anti-semitism disrupted the complacent routine of
their lives.
The three children, in their turn, attended synagogue indifferent­
ly, resistantly, and only under the moral compulsion of their
(maternal) grandparents. Herbert in particular, in addition to his
regular course of Gymnasium studies, did attend weekly religious
instruction, but brought to it such an evident lack of seriousness that
the presiding rabbi felt moved to assure him that it was most
doubtful whether he would ever become a useful participant in
society. Unshaken by this admittedly ambiguous prophecy, Marcuse
concluded his religious studies with his Bar Mitzvah in 1911, and it
reflects further upon his milieu that the gifts he received (and
continued to value) were mostly secular books. The fine sets of
Schiller, Grillparzer, and Shakespeare in the Schlegel translation
that lined the walls of his living-room in Southern California surely
represented a most tenuous link with his Jewish ancestry.
The Bar Mitzvah, then, like the sporadic and ceremonial
participation in the Jewish community of Berlin generally, had
more the character of a bourgeois than of a specifically Jewish

7. On the Wanderwgel movement, cf. Walter Laqueur, Young Germany, New York
1962, esp. chs. 5 and 9; George Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology, New York
1964, pp. 171-89. Gustav Wynekcn’s group, to which Walter Benjamin had
belonged, advocated political liberalism, religious toleration, and artistic experi­
mentation, but was definitely a minority faction.
 (A Berlin Childhood Around 1900* 21

experience, a realization that served to persuade him that being

Jewish was a mere historical accident, a matter of relative unimpor­
tance both to himself and to the surrounding social and cultural
environment. Even when this widely held indifference was brutally
corrected by the events of the 1930s, Marcuse revised not the
subjective side of his estimation of-the importance of being Jewish,
but only his view of its objective significance in modern European
society: if his Jewish ancestry became a conscious factor at all in his
identity, it was because he was so defined, rather than due to any
internal motivation.
It was rather his secular studies that engaged Marcuse in this
period, although intellectual stimulation could not come from many
points in the still rigidly structured curriculum and disciplined
environment of the Gymnasium. History was still the official
Regierungsgeschichte, classical languages still constituted the focal
point of instruction, and the prevailing social and political conven­
tions of Imperial Germany were filtered down to students in such a
way as to discourage the formation of critical perspectives: ‘It sought
to instil not so much the concept of the rights of the citizen but the
duties of the subject.’8 The life of the Gymnasium student could be
so effectively insulated from the realities of political life that the
young Marcuse was not particularly aware of the rising political
tensions within the European political system during those years.
Even the outbreak of the war, two weeks after his sixteenth birthday,
caused no serious disruption in the routine of his life: seized neither
by the prevailing war fever, nor by youthful sentiments of opposi­
tion, he recalled viewing it all as ‘a damned nuisance’.
This is surely an exaggeration, however, for there clearly were, in
those critical years, strong influences coming from the Gymnasium
environment - not from the official curriculum, to be sure, but from
the ‘underground’ fellowship of certain among his schoolfriends. He
was already reading constantly, if not compulsively, but, little
attracted by the absurdly virtuous Nordic supermen of the popular
Wandervogel novels, he was drawn almost instinctively to the great
works of every period and culture. At the same time, however, he
and his friends were also reading theories of modern architecture
and following the course of the Viennese Sezession, and had begun to
explore sophisticated movements of literary modernism: in his years

8. Paul Kosok, Modern Germany: A Study of Conflicting Loyalties, Chicago 1933, p. K>4.
22

as a Gymnasium student Marcuse came to know the writers of the

French avant-garde, especially Gide, the esoteric critical, historical,
and poetic works of Stefan George and members of his circle, and
also the early novels and short stories of Thomas and especially
Heinrich Mann. And admittedly, even his classical studies were not
sheer drudgery, for he was given a lasting sense of the vitality of
Greek thought, above all through a course on Plato’s Apologia taught
by the director of the school.
It was, then, a secure and comfortable Berlin childhood, sheltered
by a close-knit nuclear family, money, spacious homes, servants,
European holidays, and summer excursions to the country, but also
exposed both to the traditional monuments of the European
cultural inheritance and to modernist experimentation. Freedom
from pressing material concerns helped to distance the young
Marcuse from the practical, social and political issues created by the
expanding empire, and rather opened up for him the transcendental
realm of art and ideas. The illusory serenity of the bourgeois way of
life had already sustained heavy losses by 1914, however, and was
completely shattered by the war that had broken over Europe in
August. In the spring of 1916, the seventeen-year-old Herbert
Marcuse was forced to conclude his Gymnasium studies with the
emergency wartime Notabitur as he was conscripted into the Imperial
German Rcichswehr.
 • •

11
‘Berlin A lexanderplatz’

In the last months of the war, the twenty-year-old narrator of

Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front summed up the shock and
dislocation felt by a whole generation: ‘Had we returned home in
1916, out of the suffering and the strength of our experiences we
might have unleashed a storm. Now if we go back we will be weary,
broken, burnt out, rootless, and without hope. We will not be able to
find our way any more.’ The experience of the war was decisive for
Herbert Marcuse as well. He entered as a bookish high-school
student from a comfortable upper-class suburb; two years later his
role was that of a young revolutionary and militant assigned to
stand in the Berlin Alexanderplatz with a rifle and return sniper fire.
Although the war had been raging for nearly two years by the
time of Marcuse’s conscription, its full impact had thus far been felt
only on the front lines and in informed military and industrial
circles. Fought on foreign soil, and filtered back to Germany in an
indirect and distorted way, it still seemed remote to the civilian
population. Wages dropped and prices rose, but the increasing
subjection of civilian life to military control was not yet apparent:
‘The belief was firmly held in Germany that the war would be
fought by the military forces alone. It would leave civilians to
continue their peaceful trades or professions .. .’. 1
To a certain extent, then, it is understandable that in its earlier
stages the war did not figure more prominently in the life and
thoughts of the young Gymnasium student. Germany’s war aims
were presented in a chain of contradictory, ambiguous, and
duplicitous official statements, and the war itself was being prose-1

1. Albrecht Mendelssohn-Bartholdi, The War and German Society. The Testament of a

Liberal, New Haven 1927, reissued 1971, p. 215.
24

cuted under a cloak of propaganda, censorship, suppression of

public debate, and outright deception that extended to the highest
levels of civilian life. It is telling that, after a year of desperate
fighting on two fronts, the press in Germany was preoccupied with
the extent of the territorial concessions to be demanded of France
and Russia.
Herbert Marcuse was drafted into military service in the middle
of 1916, one of the most disastrous years of the war for Germany,
and was sent for training to Darmstadt, near Frankfurt, where he
joined an army reserve unit, Train-Ersatz-Ableilung 18. By this time
the prospects of military victory had come to look uncertain at best,
as each of the three active fronts began to show' serious signs of
strain: in the West, early departure from the Schlieffen Plan had
resulted in Germany’s becoming stalemated in a protracted confron­
tation with more-than-equal enemy forces; this had prevented a
decisive victory over the Russian armies on the Eastern front,
despite the brilliant military manoeuvres of Hindenburg and
Ludendorff; and on the domestic ‘front’ the Burgfrieden or ‘Civil
Truce’ with which the Kaiser had lured the parliamentary parties
into unanimous support of the war effort, had begun to bicak apart
as the war dragged on and confidence in the Military High
Command and the Imperial Government began to vanish among
sections of all classes of the population. On the left, the hitherto
dormant socialist opposition was finally stirred into activity, as
dissident factions began to crystallize out of the ranks of the S p d
around prominent critics of the war such as Eduard Bernstein,
Karl Kautsky, and the militant radicals Karl Liebknecht and Rosa
Luxemburg.
In August 1916, amid food riots, the first important political
strikes, and the heightening of tensions between labour, industry,
the bureaucracy and the military, the gradual militarization of
broad spheres of civilian life became official with the accession of
Hindenburg and Ludendorff to the Supreme Army Command, the
latter’s de facto seizure of absolute political pow'er. From that point
the course that Germany was to follow' for the duration of the war
was set.
Marcuse was fortunate, however, for his late-night readings of the
European avant-garde now paid off handsomely: he had ruined his
eyesight, and had to remain throughout the war in Germany. After
his initial period of military training in Darmstadt he was
 ‘Berlin A lexanderplatz ’ 25

transferred back to Berlin early in 1918, and he spent the duration

of the war in the comparative safety of the LuftschiJfe-ErsaU-Ableilung
1 - the Zeppelin Reserves - in Potsdam. These airships had scored
some devastating tactical successes against London and other British
targets in the first half of the war, but as they began to succumb to
new anti-aircraft•defence systems, their military effectiveness was
drastically reduced and only four bombing raids were carried out in
the last year of the war. Accordingly, the military regimen of the
soldiers connected with the Zeppelins became considerably relaxed,
and Marcuse was even able to gain permission to attend lectures at
Berlin University on an irregular basis. As long as he was not
transferred, he enjoyed the wartime luxury of being able to concern
himself with matters other than bare survival.
Even if he took every occasion to affirm his fittedness for the life
of a scholar over that of a soldier, Marcuse could not and did not
remain unaffected by his military environment. The reserve batta­
lions, especially those garrisoned on German soil and virtually
inactive throughout the war (as were, most significantly, the crews of
the great battleships of the High Seas Fleet moored in Kiel and
Hamburg), were the scene of some of the first challenges to the
traditional military-feudal authorities, which were charged with the
responsibility for bringing about and prolonging the increasingly
unpopular war. Just as the contrast between general hardship and
flagrant war profiteering, exploitation of labour, and political
persecution was serving to exacerbate the civilian class tensions
under the harsh conditions of war, dangerous antagonisms were also
beginning to be felt within the Army and Navy, where the system of
privileges enjoyed by the officers seemed insupportable. The excesses
of the elite officer corps were especially obvious among the military
units stationed at home, where no common danger mitigated the
rigid military hierarchy, and the boredom and drudgery of endless,
pointless drilling fuelled popular resentment and provoked a
marked rebelliousness.2
As the promised six-week war entered its third year, confidence in
the Imperial Government began to turn into outright hostility
among still small but growing sectors of the German civilian

2. This characieristic pattern was confirmed in conversation as the experience of

Marcuse. For background, cf. Arthur Rosenberg, Imperial Germany. The Birth of the
German Republic, Boston 1964, ch. 3; A. J. Ryder, The German Revolution of 1918,
Cambridge 1967, passim.
26

population, and there were likewise signs of radicalization among

certain domestic military reserve units. It was in these circumstances
that Herbert Marcuse, stationed in the political centre of the
country, began to develop political consciousness. More mystified
than outraged by the senselessness of the violence, he began to
follow the debates being carried on within the opposition parties in
the Reichstag, and increasingly to engage in political discussion
himself. In 1917 he joined the Social Democratic Party, his first and
last formal party affiliation.
The decisive factor in his radicalization was the war, which had
brought the whole structure of German politics and society to the
point of crisis, and had left him with powerful but inarticulate
feelings of revulsion. In these critical years the search for alternatives
was understandably widespread within his generation, and as the
future of the German Empire was being threatened from without by
military defeat, joining the S p d meant challenging its legitimacy
from within. It was a fitting response from a hitherto apolitical
young man of the middle class, and can be seen as a radical break
with his past, even if membership involved little active participa­
tion, and even if the S p d was by this time a most uncertain heir to its
revolutionary ancestry. Indeed, although it had frequently served as
a powerful opposition party during peacetime, it was only in the
year Marcuse joined that German Social Democracy was finally
shaken into opposition to the war - at the heavy cost of socialist
unity.
The S p d leadership had been lured into support for the war
policy of the Imperial government by the promise of political and
social reforms that would repay the German workers for their
patriotic service to the national cause, and its members were bound
to unanimity by the time-honoured principle of socialist Fraktionsdis-
ziplin. There was, in addition, the spectre of the defeat of the nation
that had engendered the most powerful and best-organized
working-class movement in Europe, at the hands of Tsarist absolu­
tism. As both the promises and threats bound up with the war effort
came increasingly into question, however, so too did the party
discipline that had imposed a fragile truce upon opposed factions
and personalities within the party. Debate was reopened, not just
around the issue of the proper socialist attitude toward the war, but
on the very goals and tactics of the socialist movement itself.
Although the roots of disunity reached far back into the history of
 ‘Berlin Alexanderplatz’ 27

the S p d , by the time of Marcuse’s affiliation the break-up of

German socialism was complete and involvement meant a choice
among at least three political options.3
The S p d was guided by the moderate reformism of the Second
International, and its position on the war was summed up by the
slogan ‘peace without annexations’, reflecting the belief that Ger­
many was engaged in a war of national defence against British and
French imperialism in league with Russian absolutism. As early as
December 1914, however, this official party line had been chal­
lenged by the lone dissenting voice of Karl Liebknecht in the
Reichstag debate on the renewal of war credits, and by the spring of
the following year a broad opposition group had begun to take
shape. Dominated by such politically diverse figures as left-radical
party leaders Haase and Ledebour, the centrist theoretician Karl
Kautsky, and Eduard Bernstein on the right, this group, which
came to be formally constituted in April 1917, as the Independent
Social Democratic Party ( U s p d ), embodied many of the same
internal conflicts as the socialist movement as a whole.
Still, the greater part of the U spd membership stood decidedly to
the left of the so-called ‘Majority Socialists’ of the S p d , irreconcila­
bly opposed to the war and poised between the alternatives of
parliamentary democracy and revolutionary proletarian dictator­
ship. This latter position was upheld by the revolutionary Spartakus-
bund, or Spartacus League, a militantly anti-war and internationalist
group that had come to operate semi-autonomously within the U spd
since July 1916. Though the following of the Spartacus League was
never large, the sophistication of its political analysis and the
commanding presence of its leadership - Liebknecht and Rosa
Luxemburg - made it a conspicuous force in 1917, and one to be
reckoned with by socialists.
None of the socialist parties presented a powerful and united
opposition - the Independents were weakened by the attempt to
contain widely divergent positions on the war and on socialism
generally, and the Spartacists suffered from a hopelessly small base
within the German working class - and the Majority Socialists
remained the party most closely associated with the established

3. On ‘the development of the great schism’ within the Spd, cf. Carl Schorske,
German Social Democracy, New York 1963; also Georges Haupl, Socialism and the
Great War, Oxford 1972, for international ramifications.
28

government and its policies. For Marcuse to have joined the S p d at a

time when its platform was being openly attacked and the
hegemony of its leadership over German socialism publicly chal­
lenged cannot, therefore, have been entirely fortuitous.
Nor was this an unlikely identification for him at this time, for he
was young, inexperienced, and came from a solidly middle-class
background in which politics did not figure at all prominently. Like
so many others of his generation, Marcuse’s political education was
acquired abruptly, imposed upon him by circumstances. At this
juncture, the contradictions of the Wilhelmine political order had
been exposed by the war, but it can hardly be said, even in
retrospect, that the lines of a realistic socialist alternative were
obvious. Nor can it be assumed that at this early point in his
political career Marcuse felt that he had no stake whatsoever in
certain of the economic and cultural institutions of the society in
which he had been so comfortably raised. Accordingly, it is not
surprising that his involvement in the S p d during the final years of
the war was not that of a party activist, and involved little more
than paying dues and reading Vorwarts.
However cautious his commitment may have been, this was
nonetheless the period of Marcuse’s political initiation: he remained
a Social Democrat until the end of the war, and although he never
became a party activist, he recalled that it was at this time that he
began to explore the theoretical underpinnings of the socialist
opposition in the writings of Marx. By the last months of the war,
when military defeat had finally settled the fate of the Second
German Empire, Marcuse was again called into action - not in the
service of the Reich this time, but in the defence of the revolution.
Marcuse’s situation was typical, in the months that saw the
collapse of Germany in war and revolution. By the end of 1917, the
threat to the socialist working class represented by Tsarist absolu­
tism had been permanently removed, and together with the rapidly
deteriorating conditions in the German cities, the argument for
peace and reform seemed plain. It was the Berlin working class,
behind the revolutionary shop stewards movement, that staged the
first challenge to the virtual military dictatorship, launching a
massive general strike at the end of January 1918. The Imperial
Government held fast, however, and the socialist working class
opposition, like the new leadership of Soviet Russia, was compelled
to submit to the will of the General Staff. All was quiet now, except
 1Berlin A lexanderplatz * 29

on the Western Front, as Quartermaster-General Ludendorff

prepared to mount his final offensive in the spring of 1918.
The account of what followed belongs to the annals of military
history, for it was the reversal of the great offensives in northern
France that were to cost Germany the war, and it was the military
defeat that made social revolution a possible, if not inescapable,
course. On 29 September the Supreme Command, no longer able to
guarantee a German victory, issued the famous demand for an
armistice, and began to make arrangements for the reform of the
Prussian suffrage, revision of the Bismarckian constitution, and the
return of political power to the Reichstag - the democratization of
the political system which the German middle class had abandoned
after 1848. Despite the initiation of the process of reform, the
Reichstag had lost touch with the nation and the masses had lost
confidence in the Reichstag, which was unable to stem the rising
tide of popular discontent. The revolution finally reached Berlin, via
Kiel and Munich, on Saturday, 9 November, ‘the day on which it
was just impossible to carry on any longer’.4
Herbert Marcuse was still in Berlin, fortunate in not having been
called to the front in the late months of the war when the American
presence shifted the balance of fighting forces decisively in favour of
the Allies. In the first week of November, once the sailors revolt had
broken out in Kiel, army reservists whose discipline had already
been in a state of the utmost fragility joined the revolutionaries, and
the military revolt spread rapidly from Hamburg across Germany.
Workers and Soldiers Councils were formed everywhere, and in a
northern working-class suburb of Berlin, where understanding was
low but excitement high, Marcuse was elected to the Reinickendorf
Soldatenrat. Thus he found himself, as a soldier, a socialist, and an
elected delegate of a Soldiers Council in Berlin, in the political
storm-centre of the country.5

4. Philip Scheidemann, D a Zusammenbruch, p. 210. For (he German revolution

generally, cf. A. J. Ryder, The Gaman Revolution of 1918, Cambridge 1967; D. W.
Morgan, The Socialist Left and the Gaman Revolution, Ithaca 1975; G. Ritter and S.
Miller, Die deutsche Revolution 19/8-19/9. Dokuments, Hamburg 1975, and the
highly informative Illustrierte Geschichle da deutschen Rewlution, Berlin 1929.
5. Conversations with Marcuse (HM). The typical character of his experience is
confirmed by Heinz Occkel, Die revolutiondre Volksivehr, 19/8-19, Berlin 1968, pp.
75-140, and Ulrich Kluge, Soldatenrdte und Revolution, Gottingen 1975, chs. 1.5 and
11.2,3; cf. also the review of Kluge by David Morgan, Central European History, X,
3, September 1977, for more on political attitudes among the soldiers.
30

In the last months of the war, Marcuse’s politics had evolved

beyond those of the S p d , which was solidly a part of the government
and its policies and devoid of a creative socialist vision. Although
most of his comrades from the Soldatenrat were inexperienced
political moderates, largely without ideological preconceptions and
still prepared to endorse the Majority Socialist call for a constitu­
tional republic, this course was becoming increasingly problematical
for Marcuse. At the other political extreme, the Spartacus League
saw the events of the first week of November as signalling not the
conclusion, but the beginning of the revolutionary process, which
must now be pursued through the dictatorship of the proletariat in
alliance with international socialism. In the following weeks,
Marcuse was to attend meetings at which Liebknccht and Rosa
Luxemburg spoke, but he did not in fact ally himself with the
Spartacists because, as he later claimed, their intransigent revolu­
tionary aspirations were still remote from the reality of German
working-class consciousness. Although the theory of an objectively
possible class consciousness which could be rationally ascribed or
‘imputed’ (zugerechnet) to the working class was to be formulated for
the first time only two years later,6 if Marcuse’s retrospective
evaluation is accurate, he was already applying a standard that
would theoretically justify his distance both from the reified
consciousness of the ‘empirical’ proletariat, and from those socialists
who identified themselves with it uncritically.
Poised between the demand for an early return to a national
constituent assembly and for the expansion of the revolutionary
council structure, the Independent Socialists were now showing signs
of the very schism that had splintered the socialist movement during
the war. Although Marcuse was already approaching the categorical
refusal to compromise with a ‘bad reality’ that was to become
associated with his name, his attraction to one revolutionary
scenario enacted by the U sp d should be recorded: in Munich, an
Independent Socialist faction headed by the visionary poet and
idealist Kurt Eisner stepped into a momentary political vacuum and
proclaimed a Bavarian Socialist Republic. Eisner, who was eulogized
after his assassination as ‘a Schwdrrner, and at the same time a tireless

6. By Georg Lukacs in his essay, ‘Class Consciousness’ (March 1920), published in

his Ge'schichle und Klassenbewusstsein (1923); trans. Rodney Livingstone, History and
Class Consciousness, London 1968, pp. 46-81, esp. p. 5 If.
 ‘Berlin Alexanderplatz* 31

student of reality , attracted a following that included the idealistic

poets and playwrights Ernst Toller, Erich Muhsam, and Gustav
Landauer, and other young philosophers, artists, and litterateurs.
Their attempt to transform revolutionary politics into an ethic and
an aesthetic ended in murder, prison, and ridicule, but Marcuse
nevertheless regarded the specifically ‘aesthetic’ dimension of
Eisnci s political movement with admiration, and always considered
it to have represented one of the most progressive tendencies of the
German revolution.7
The last weeks of 1918 were decisive - for the revolution, for
Germany, and for Marcuse. He continued to attend political
meetings, rallies, and street demonstrations, and, as part of the
Sicherheitswehren, the civilian security force mobilized to defend
against counter-revolution and reluctantly supported by the Soldat-
enr'dte, he was sent to the Alexanderplatz, detailed to return the fire
of snipers. Such duties hardly found him in his proper element: he
was frankly relieved by his discharge in December, and later
confessed to his brother, ‘I must have been crazy!’
The fledgling German Socialist Republic was also under fire
during those weeks, maintaining a precarious existence amid
heightening violence and internecine strife. Towards the end of
December the three Independent People’s Commissars resigned
from the compromise coalition government whose foundations had
been laid only six weeks earlier, and shortly thereafter the new year
was ushered in on a wave of strikes, demonstrations, and street
actions in Berlin. The conservative S p d leadership now turned
vigorously to the consolidation and defence of its own position, not
against the threat from the right, but against the radical challenge
of the Independents and Spartacists (now constituted as the German
Communist Party), and the ultra-militant revolutionary shop
stewards movement. The fatal alliance between the ruling socialists
and the deposed military command was struck during those critical
days, which climaxed on 13 January with the abduction and
murder of Karl Licbknecht and Rosa Luxemburg.
Thus the ultra-nationalists - in the form ol the reactionary

7. Conversations with HM, in which he compared Eisner’s impulses with those that
surfaced in Paris in 1968. On the Bavarian revolution of 1918-19, cf. Allan
Mitchell, Revolution in Bavaria: The Eisner Regime and the Soviet Republic, Princeton
1965, and the article by Falk Wiesemann in Karl Bosl, ed., Bayern in Umbruch,
Munich and Vienna 1969.
32

Freikorps assembled by the Socialist Defence Minister Noske - were

drawn into the service of the socialist government.8 Four days later
the issue of the revolutionary councils was closed, as national
elections charged the S pd with the task of forming a constitutional
government in coalition with the Democratic Party and the
Catholic Centre, and the final, desperate rising of the radical
opposition in early March left 1,200 dead in the streets of Berlin.
The first battle of the German revolution, or, as Max Weber put it,
of ‘the enormous collapse which is customarily called the Revolu­
tion’, was over.9
Of course, possibilities for organized political action on the left
remained, but the prospects of success came to look only more
distant. Marcuse had already withdrawn from the S p d in reaction to
the assassinations of Luxemburg and Liebknecht, for which he held
the party leadership accountable. His perception of the growing
rigidification of the Independents, and of the incipient submission of
the new K p d to Soviet influence, only added to his discouragement.
Now, with the apparent closure of the political system and the
collapse of the leftist opposition, he allowed the question of the link
between theory and practice to lapse and prepared to resume his
studies.

Marcuse entered the Humboldt University in Berlin where he

studied Germanistik for the four regular semesters of 1919 and 1920,
continuing the humanistic education of his Gymnasium years. This
was obviously his first love, but at a deeper, still unreflective level,
this decision clearly anticipates his later theoretical position that the
intellectual and aesthetic ideals of bourgeois culture can themselves
serve simultaneously as a point of retreat and resistance in the face
of bourgeois society.
His studies were not confined to the deeply traditional and
hierarchical university setting in the post-revolutionary period, for
he also met frequently in those months with a dozen friends in a
left-radical literary group. His regular comrades included Walter
Benjamin, the expressionist playwright Walter Hasenclaver, and
the poet Adrian Turel - all to become major figures of the literary

8. Cf. Robert G. L. Waite, Vanguard of Nazism: The Free Corps Movement in Postwar
Germany, 1918-1923, New York 1969, ch. III.
9. Max Weber, ‘Politik als Beruf (lecture, Munich 1918), in C. W. Mills and H. H.
Gerth, eds., From Max Weber, London 1948, p. 113.
 lB erlin A lex cinderp latz ’ 33

avant-garde themselves - and they were joined on his occasional

visits to Berlin by Georg Lukacs, who had recently become a
Communist, and had by that time already embarked on the writing
of History and Class Consciousness. Marcuse evidently came into
contact with Lukacs’s thought at this point, but it must be recalled
that he was still barely twenty, and only beginning to explore the
dimensions of cultural and political radicalism that were opening up
to him. He declared himself an ‘existentialist’ in those days, one for
whom the experiences of life in Berlin could be appropriated not
merely as events, but as comprehensive world-views: poetry ‘als
Weltanschauung, drunkenness 'als Weltanschauung’, sex ‘als Weltan­
schauung’. He and his literary accomplices met through 1919, when
this little-known stage in the prehistory of the Frankfurt School
ended abruptly with the unexpected return of his father in the midst
of one of their‘existential evenings’ in the Marcuse living-room.
The Humboldt University was even less receptive than Carl
Marcuse to intellectual and existential experimentation. Its political
ambience in the first years of the Weimar Republic is reflected in
the fact that when the ultra-rightist Erhardt Brigade marched
through the Brandenburg Gate on 12 March 1920, under the
leadership of Ludendorff, Liittwitz, and Dr Wolfgang Rapp, and
declared the republican government deposed, their attempted
putsch was publicly applauded by the Rector on behalf of a large
part of the university professors, and the reactionary rebels enjoyed
the further support of a majority of the students.10
Nor was the intellectual environment congenial to Marcuse,
although he did attend lectures by the great and controversial
theologian Ernst Troeltsch, as well as those of Carl Stumpf, one of
the commanding figures in the prehistory of the phenomenological
movement and also of Gestalt psychology. Nonetheless, much of the
university’s nineteenth-century eminence in the intellectual-
humanist tradition had by this time faded, and it was more in the
physical sciences than in literary or humanistic studies that new
directions in thinking were welcomed.
The Albcrt-Ludwig University of Freiburg-im-Breisgau contrast­
ed sharply with the austerity of Berlin, and was emerging as a new

10 Heinrich Strobel, The German Revolution and After, London 1923; cf. also Jurgen
Schwarz, Studenten in der Weimarer Republik. Du deutsche Studentenschafl in der Zeit
1918 bis 1923 und ihre Stellung zur Pohtik, Berlin 1971.
34

centre of experimentation in the humanistic disciplines. It thus

offered a more congenial environment for a student whose ties to the
prevailing bourgeois order were wearing increasingly thin, and it
was to Freiburg that Marcuse transferred for the following academic
year.
 PART T W O

FOUNDATIONS
(19204941)
 1
T he A esthetic D imension
- (1920-1928)

The departure of the 22-year-old Herbert Marcuse from revolution­

ary Berlin to the serene university town on the edge of the Black
Forest was more than a merely geographical retreat from the
turbulence of German political life. Indeed, nothing in his move, or
in his activities in Freiburg, suggests that there was any direct
political continuity between the brief episode of militancy during
the revolution and his subsequent period of university study. The
opposite appears rather to have been the case, and consequently,
such continuity as exists must be sought at a deeper level; only in
retrospect is it possible to appreciate the full significance of the
Freiburg period for his later political and intellectual career.
In contrast to a syndrome especially well documented among
upper-rniddle-class youth of Marcuse’s generation, his own flirtation
with radical politics and departure from the already tenuous
religious identification of his parents did not create bitter genera­
tional antagonisms within the Marcuse family, such as those that
characterized the early years of his later colleagues Max Hork-
heimcr and Walter Benjamin.1 Marcuse tended to be somewhat
intimidated by his domineering father, and avoided confrontations
- indeed, at an early age he had headed almost instinctively for a
realm over which his father could exercise no authority. Carl
Marcuse in turn (and notwithstanding the fact that his name grows
out of the same genealogical roots as that of Karl Marx!) found1

1. On Benjamin, see Hannah Arcndt’s introductory essay to his Illuminations, New

York and London 1969; Horkheimer’s passing domestic difficulties are recorded
in Helmut Gumnior and Rudolf Ringguth, Max Horkheimrr in Selbstzeugnissen und
Bilddokumenitn, Hamburg 1973.

37
38

himself unable to extend much influence over his two radical sons (it
was unquestionably the younger Erich who was the real activist in
the family) and his strong-willed daughter. But even when the
patriotic elder volunteered for the citizen Burgerwthr to defend the
newly-born Republic against leftists like his sons, relations between
them never became so strained as to leave him disinclined to support
their university studies.
Carl Marcuse was both willing and eminently able to do so, for
long before this time he had transferred the bulk of his business
activities from manufacturing to real estate. The wisdom of this
decision now became manifest, for the textile industries, subject to
wartime unemployment, emergency legislation, and deprived by
the blockade of essential raw materials, were among the hardest hit
by the war.2 Nor did the end of the war signal recovery, for under
the terms imposed by the Versailles Treaty, the textile mills of the
Alsace region suddenly ceased to be one of the most profitable parts
of the German textile manufacturing industry and became instead
its chief competitor. Deficit spending and the massive destruction of
capital during the war years, and the domestic turmoil that followed
its conclusion, were already creating a dangerously inflationary
situation,3 and in such conditions, investment in fixed capital - real
estate - was one of the few guarantees of relative financial security.
Those who, like Carl Marcuse, had been able to afford the initial
investment were able to recover well enough from the severe
privations of the great inflation.
As little as financial security had been an issue for Herbert
Marcuse was it interesting to him: supported by a regular stipend
from home, he occupied himself at Freiburg with subjects far
removed from the practical world of business and administration.
At the Albcrt-Ludwig University he did shift his studies to a more
contemporary course than that which he had followed at Berlin,
where the curriculum in German studies (Germanistik) had been
oriented toward the classics of the intellectual and cultural tradition.
Although these works provided a lasting foundation for his thought
(if subject to radical reinterpretation), he now undertook a some­
what less orthodox course of studies in which modern German

2. Gerald D. Feldman, Army, Industry, and Labor in Germany, 1914-1918, Princeton

1968, part 1.
3. Fritz K. Ringer, The German Inflation, Oxford 1969, pp, 44-7.
 The A esthetic Dimension (1920-1928) 39

literature constituted his main field, supplemented by lectures in

philosophy and political economy (Nationalokonomie). Reflecting his
lack of interest in concrete political analysis at this time, his work
within the social sciences was minimal - probably no more than
necessary to meet the requirements of a minor field of study.4
Indeed, although the philosophical implications of his research
into modern European literary history were considerable, and he
drew widely from classical as well as modern writings on aesthetics
in establishing the foundations of his work, even his formal studies
of philosophy remained secondary to his main interests. The fact of
Marcuse’s immersion in literary studies even in the years in which
the philosophical faculty was dominated by Edmund Husserl seems
already to call attention to the dichotomy between art and
philosophy that was to stimulate some of the most radical concep­
tions of his later career.5
Husserl was by this time at an advanced stage of his career, and
phenomenology already constituted a systematic philosophical
method, having reached a mature formulation in the first volume of
his Ideas (1913). Marcuse attended Husserl’s lectures (as did, for a
semester, Max Horkheimer6), as well as those of the prominent
neo-Kantian Alois Riehl, the influential neo-Thomist Josef Geyser,
and a number of less eminent philosophers, but there are no
resonances whatever of Husserl’s radical new directions in pheno­
menological analysis in his own writings at this stage. To the
contrary, it will be seen that the essential philosophical authority for
Marcuse in his early Freiburg years was already Hegel, then only
beginning to attract renewed attention as a possible key to the
neo-Kantian deadlock that had dominated German intellectual life
in the years before the war, and never a serious influence upon the

4. This is surely a fair assumption, judging from the professors whose lectures he
heard: Hermann Schumacher was an entrepreneurial economist whose work was
consistent with the line of the conservative, anti-Socialist DVP; Paul Mombert
was a more critical thinker, but still solidly within the mainstream of bourgeois
economics, as was Rudolf Ebcrstadt. Only Karl Diehl, a Proudhon scholar,
addressed topics in radical economic theory which might have engaged Marcuse
in the light of his recent political initiation, although Marcuse himself would
never admit to any youthful anarchist sympathies.
5. Husserl replaced the neo-Kantian Heinrich Rickert who had moved to Heidel­
berg in 1916, leaving his younger colleague Jonas Cohn, a philosopher of culture
whose lectures Marcuse attended, and whose Allgemeine Aesthetik (1901) contri­
buted theoretical support to his dissertation.
6. Noted in Gumniorand Ringguth, p. 22.
‘tO

development of Husserl’s own ‘phenomenology’.7

It was rather in the study of modern German literature that
Marcuse found his most congenial home, and within this faculty he
prepared his doctoral dissertation on the German Kunstlerroman
under the direction of Professor Philipp Witkop. Witkop
(1880-1942) was a relatively unorthodox literary modernist in his
sympathies, with leanings toward the poetic and critical (and
avowedly anti-political) csotcrism of the Stefan George circle, to
which Marcuse had himself been attracted since his later
Gymnasium years. He also had a considerable body of publications
to his credit, however, covering nearly the whole tradition of
German lyric poetry, and was thus able to serve as a stimulating
critic to the young scholar. The dissertation in the history of modern
German literature was successfully defended against the faculty -
including Husserl - and Marcuse was awarded the PhD magna cum
laude in October 1922.
The dissertation itself dealt with an important but fairly
conventional topic within German literary studies, the Kunstlerro-
man. 8 A sub-type of the German Bildungsroman, the novel of
‘education’ or ‘inner development’ wherein a central character
passes from innocence to mature self-consciousness as the story
unfolds, the Kunstlerroman defines the hero to be an artist. Accord­
ingly, the complex of situations and events represented generally
refers to the development of a specifically artistic self-consciousness
and mode of life, and the attendant tension with the surrounding
world. However traditional a subject matter for an academic
dissertation, Marcuse’s work, simply entitled Der deutsche Kunstlerro­
man, contains embryonic formulations of so many of the themes of
his later intellectual projects that it is necessary to examine it - his
first piece of sustained writing - in some depth.9

7. Husserl followed his own teacher Brentano in regarding Hegel as a case of the
‘extreme degeneration of human thought’, an estimation revised slightly upward
late in his career; cf. Herbert Spicgelberg, History of the Phenomenological Movement,
The Hague 1969, vol. 1, pp. 13-14.
8. The Kunstlerroman (literally: ‘artist-novel’) is a characteristic genre of many of the
great European literatures, but the Kunstlerroman outside of Germany was drawn
into Marcuse’s discussion only ‘in so far as it brought new, decisive formulations
and changes of the problem’ (p. 333). Since it is considered only from within the
context of the German literary' tradition, and there is in any case no equivalent
English term, it will be left untranslated here (similarly Kurutlernovelle, its
short-story form).
 The A esthetic Dimension ( 19 2 0 - 19 2 8 ) 41

Marcuse established the problematic of the Kunstlerroman in terms

of the sought-after accommodation between Kunstlertum and Men-
schentumy the artistic existence and the fully human existence. This
dualism carries with it the implication that a genre of fiction in
which the artist assumes the central role is a possibility only in a
society that has developed lines of differentiation and stratification
that permit the ‘artist’ to be identified as a specific social type: ‘the
dissolution and tearing asunder of a unitary life-form, the opposi­
tion of art and life, the separation of the artist from the surrounding
world, is the presupposition of the Kunstlerroman, and its problem, the
suffering and longing of the artist, his struggle for a new communi­
ty.’ (332) The artist thus appears set against a non-artistic environ­
ment and its modes of life, which are themselves alien and
antagonistic to the artistic experience: the goal of the artist’s life
(and consequently, the characteristic theme of the Kunstlerroman in its
historical manifestations) becomes the solution or resolution of this
alienation.
In the forceful and at times almost rhapsodic prose of his
theoretical introduction, Marcuse examines the significance of a
work of fiction in which a distinct social type or mode of life - that
of the artist - is depicted in its uniquely characteristic outlooks,
conflicts and aspirations. The very fact of this distinctiveness
presupposes that the life of the artist, indeed, the essence of the
artistic existence as such, is somehow at variance with the subjective
and objective realities of the surrounding culture. In contrast to the
great national epic, which reflects in verse the collective life of a
whole people and out of which the novel emerges, the Kunstlerroman
becomes possible ‘only when the artist represents a specific life-form
[Lebensform], when the life-forms of the totality no longer correspond
to his own essence, that is, if art is no longer immanent in life’.(lO)
The artist thus represents ‘a life-form which does not fundamen­
tally coincide with the surrounding world’, (12) a social and human
type whose essence it is to stand outside of the limits of the
established society, estranged from it in ecstasy, anger, or despair:
the substance of this life is beauty, but the life-form is alienation and9

9. Herbert Marcuse, 'Der deutsche Kunstlerroman’, Phil. Diss., University of Freiburg-

im-Breisgau, October 1922, 454 pages. Page numbers (in parentheses) refer to the
text recently published by Suhrkamp as Volume I of Marcuse’s SchnJten
(Frankfurt 1978); all translations arc my own, and arc based on the original
typescript, obtained through the courtesy of the Univcrsitatsbibliothek Freiburg.
42

the impossibility of integration. The struggle to overcome this

debilitating schism is activated by the conception of a primordial
state of harmony in which no opposition exists between artistic
subjectivity and the life-forms of the surrounding world, indeed,
between subject and object, Idea and reality, art and life; where, in
Nietzsche’s classic evocation, ‘man is no longer an artist, he has
become a work of art’. 10 Invoking a candidly mythic view of history,
Marcuse identified the pre-Socratic Greek culture of the time of epic
poetry, ‘where life was itself art, and mythology life’, (10) and - at
the origins of the Germanic Grist - the tightly integrated culture of
the Vikings, wherein ‘the perfect unity of art and life’ spoke through
the ancient bard. (11) In such heroic epochs the world itself
appeared as the embodiment of art, and the artistic mode of life
merged undistinguished into the collective life of the people.
The dialectical method of his argument necessarily presses on to a
darker picture of that originary unity torn asunder, of a long
‘historical’ epoch of division and difference, with inner life and outer
world cast into glaring opposition. This is the European world of the
repressive Church and the bourgeois city, an environment contin­
uous with our own, in which the subject, like Grimmelshausen’s
Simplizissimus, confronts a world ‘utterly devalued, impoverished,
brutal, and hostile, offering no fulfilment’. (14) With the reception
of the dogmas and institutions of Christianity and the consequent
‘flight of the gods’, life gradually ceased to provide in itself the
material and the form of aesthetic fulfilment: ‘devoid of art and
distant from the Idea, it became a “problem” ’. (13) As the age of
chivalry was closed, however, a new group of figures emerged, in the
form of a counter-culture made up of a restless ‘travelling communi­
ty of musicians and mimes, but in particular, young clerics and
students . . . whose assault shatters the stability of the established
and ecclesiastical restrictions . . . They are totally outcast, perman­
ently excluded; for them there is no place in the life-forms of the
surrounding world. Too arrogant, too wild in their ecstatic pursuit
of freedom to seek compromise or conciliation, their lives vanish into
the mists of restless wandering, of dissolute vagrancy.’ (13) On the
shadowy margins of pre-modern society, irreconcilable opposition
was being raised to a life-principle. The dignitaries of Church and

10. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), irans. Walter Kaufmann, New
York 1967, p. 37.
 The A esthetic Dimension (1 9 2 0 -1 9 2 8 ) 43

State were supplanted by the dignity of the free spirit, and the
prevailing orthodoxies of ideology and authority rejected in favour
of rebellious images of eroticism and play. From within this migrant
underground fellowship of the medieval period, the poet steps forth
to give voice to this new attitude toward life, and thereby becomes
perhaps the first self-conscious artist, in whom artistic necessity
stresses the life of wandering, the state of opposition to the
surrounding world’. (13)
There is, then, a third component that comes into view, through
which the resolution of this condition of alienation is prefigured,
though not accomplished: even in a time of universal suffering and
oppression, the lost values of a world at one with itself, of the
immediate unity of the artistic life and the fully human life, arc
preserved - if in attenuated form - in the shape of artistic
subjectivity. With its evocation of the fully developed artistic
self-consciousness, the Kunstlerroman thus represents both a symptom
of the devaluation of the world, of a reality estranged from its own
potentialities, and a concrete anticipation of the negation and
transcendence of this estrangement. The alienation of the artist from
an artless world, which is embodied in the lZwischen-zwei-
Weltenstehen’ of literary characters from Werther to Tonio Kroger, is
the guarantee of a refuge of transcendent ideals against a deficient
reality. O f the suffering of the artist we may say, as Hegel said of
Schiller, that ‘in this respect he only paid the debt of his times’.11
In this account, Marcuse reveals the first sign of the sensitivity to
the ‘underside’ of the respectable tradition of European thought and
culture which was to become one of the central motifs of his later
thought. His analysis describes the artistic existence being carved
out of the opposing forces of an expanding bourgeois world and the
unrestrained protest against that world in spiritual and mystical
lyricism. The true artist emerges for the first time as a specific
human type, an embodiment of negation, straining against the
oppressive restraints of the established society: ‘He finds no
fulfilment in the narrow confines of the life-forms of the surround­
ing world; his nature and his longings do not merge into them or
unfold within them, and he stands alone, over and against reality.’
(16) With the progressive articulation of an artistic self-con-1

11. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art (1823-29), trans. 1 . Knox, Oxford
1975, vol. I, p. 61.
44

sciousncss and a faintly outlined aesthetic dimension of life, the

conditions finally exist for the emergence of the Kunstlerrornan.
Inevitably, it will represent the antagonism between the artist and a
contemptuous or uncomprehending world, and will express the
desperate striving to create a new resolution of this unendurable
alienation: ‘The artist must break out of this division: he must strive
to achieve a life-form which binds the inner disunity into a new
wholeness, resolves the opposition between spirit and sensuality, art
and life, the artistic existence and the surrounding world.’ (16)
On the basis of this formulation, Marcuse proceeds to examine
exemplars in the evolution of the nineteenth-century Kunstlerrornan,
disclosing the range of possibilities through which they confront the
contradiction between the artistic life and the totality of mundane
social life-forms. The two forms of the ‘resolution’ lie at the opposite
poles of the century-and-a-half tradition of the Kunstlerrornan: the
triumphant integration of Wilhelm Meister and the disintegration
of Gustav von Aschenbach represent the two outcomes of the
sought-after accommodation of the artist and society, the reconcilia­
tion of Kunstlertum and Burgerlichkeit, the artistic existence and the
bourgeois way of life. Detailed textual studies of works from the
sorrows and strivings of Goethe’s artists to the K'unstlemovellen of
Thomas Mann make up the body of the dissertation.
Historically, the rise of the Kunstlerrornan is inseparable from the
liberation of subjectivity forged out of the opposing forces of pietism
and enlightenment rationalism: it is prefigured philosophically in
the thought of Hamann, Rousseau, and Herder, and in the ‘longing
for the unlived life’ (Novalis) associated with the literary currents of
the Sturm und Drang period. Though the writers of Sturm und Drang
(notably Wilhelm Heinse and Karl Philipp Moritz) failed to grasp
the essential problematic of the dualism between art (the artistic
existence) and the prevailing cultural and material realities, Mar­
cuse nevertheless regards their efforts with unmistakable sympathy,
for they represent ‘the first attempts of the liberated artistic existence
to press forward to a new life-form’. (40) In particular, their writings
contained concrete anticipations of the fulfilment of the artistic
quest in their characteristic ‘feeling for Nature’ and ‘the experience
of Love’: ‘Only in two spheres did reality itself make a bid to lay
hold of the Idea: in Naturgefuhl and in the Liebeserlebnis. In the
complete surrender to nature the Sturmer und Dranger experienced the
Soul of the World [die Seele des Alls], the radiance of divine beauty,
 The A esthetic Dimension (1 9 2 0 -1 9 2 8 ) 45

the purity and immediacy of the cosmic force . . . And indeed, so is

the case with the experience of love.’ (42) At these two points, the
artist grasps at a ‘separate reality’ {die Einzel- Wirklichkeil) within the
Finite and human world. In the writings of the young Goethe this
drive attains its first mature formulation, and there the Kunstlerroman
historically begins.
In the special studies that follow, Marcuse examines the two-
dimensionality of the Kunstlerroman by tracing the attitudes and
actions through which this dichotomy between the real and the
ideal has been either sustained or overcome. The ‘rhythm’ of his
argument is in fact determined by the two polar conceptions of the
artistic experience which appear in the Kunstlerroman of each literary
period: the ‘subjectivistic and realistic, romantic and epic, the
artistic life which flees the world and that which penetrates it’. (332)
These alternative orientations, which correspond to very broadly
conceived historical categories, translate into two literary-
philosophical modes: the first would submit the world to an
ultimate aesthetic standard that can never be concretely realized, as
in the transcendental rejection of reality by the early Romantics
(Tieck, Schlegel, Novalis) or the aesthetes of Tart pour Tart, who
create in their work ‘a poeticized reality, a dream-like world which is
in the final sense no longer a “problem” to the artist’. (104) The
second mode of response is developed in the novels of the later
Romantics (Brentano, Hoffman, Eichendorff) or the politicized
writers of Young Germany (Theodor Mundt, Heinrich Laube, Karl
Gutzkow), in whose partisan novels ‘the demand for the radical
restructuring of life-forms came to be formulated in practical terms
as demands for social and political reform’. (180) Here the artist is
rooted in the deficient world as it actually exists, but is committed to
its practical transformation.
Once Marcuse had established the theory and method of ‘the
German Kunstlerroman’ in this manner, the inherently critical cate­
gories that guided his interpretation could emerge plainly and
powerfully. Modern society was characterized in its agony as ‘die
entgotterte Welt’ (14), a world within which the magical powers of
gods and heroes can no longer be exercised and whose enchantment
finds refuge in an underground counter-culture of spiritualism,
mysticism, and the occult; he suggestively raised an ‘essential’
standard of truth, transcending the objectively posited facts of the
material world, and visible in the surrender to Nature and the
46

embrace of Love; and almost as if he were delimiting in advance the

competing claims that were to define the remainder of his career, he
identified two tactics for realizing it: the practical and the poetic
transformation of the prosaic reality of everyday life.
Clearly, Marcuse’s doctoral dissertation cannot be regarded as
purely linear survey, assembling and ordering material in a simple
internal chronology. There is rather a continual movement between
two poles, the subjectivistic and the realistic, through which the
historical, dialectical progression of a literary genre is developed.
Nor is the course of the argument arbitrary: however much some of
his formulations may suggest the liberties of a youthful romanticist
fancy, his work is grounded in the aesthetics of Hegel, ‘the most
serious of all serious philosophers'. ^
The turn to Hegel was one of the most outstanding features of the
reorientation of German intellectual life in the early decades of this
century.1213 The first major contribution to this revival ‘in which the
findings of the Hegelian philosophy were concretely applied to
aesthetic problems,’ had appeared in 1916 when the ZeitschriJ't fur
Aeslhetik und AUgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, a journal under the editorial
direction of Marcuse’s former professor, the Berlin aesthetician Max
Dessoir, published Georg Lukacs’s pioneering study The Theory of the
Novel. 14
Marcuse had studied Lukacs’s elegant, pre-Marxist writings on
literature - The Theory of the Novel and the earlier Soul and Form (1911)
- and it was through Lukacs that he came to work with the
Hegelian principle of the historicization of the categories of
aesthetics and the dialectic between genres of literature in ‘integrat­
ed’ (geschlossen) and ‘problematic’ (problematik) civilizations. This
distinction stipulates the existence of a unified society, a homogen­
eous world in which ‘essence’ is manifest in the concrete forms of
social life and individual action, and in which ‘art’ did not exist as a
separate category, since the ideals and aspirations of the artist stood
realized in the closed circle of existence. Lukacs characterized the
Homeric world of the Greeks as such an age, contrasting it with the
12. The phrase appears in an extraordinary disputation with Norman O. Brown in
the summer of 1967 (reprinted in Marcuse’s Negations, p. 229).
13. Cf. Heinrich Levy, ‘Die Hcgcl-Renaissance in der deutschcn Philosophic’, in
Philosophische Vortrage, Chariot ten burg 1927.
14. Georg Lukacs, Theone des Romans, first published in book form in 1920; reissued in
1962 with a new Preface by the author from which this quote is taken (trans.
Anna Bostock, Cambridge 1971, p. 15).
 The Aesthetic Dimension (1 9 2 0 -1 9 2 8 ) 47

modern age of the differentiation of social functions and the

fragmentation of social roles, a world whose ‘very disintegration and
inadequacy . . . is the precondition for the existence of art and its
becoming conscious’. 15 Jt j$ evident that Marcuse had taken over
Lukacs’s neo-Hegelian framework, adapting it to the problematic of
modernity as represented in the Kunstlerroman. 1516
It had been Hegel’s great insight that genres of art, like modes of
thought, stand in an internal dialectical relation to one another as
well as to the external historical conditions within which they are
produced. In Lukacs’s adaptation, the art form most expressive of
integrated cultures is the great national epic in which the world at
large appears as a true home for the human spirit; where the
relation of culture and society has become ‘problematic’, and the
world has lost its all-embracing mythic aspect, art turns inward and
the modern novel ultimately takes shape, giving expression to a
‘transcendental homelessness’. In a passage in which Marcuse
himself found a concise formulation from which to begin his own
study, Lukacs wrote: ‘The epic and the novel . . . differ from one
another not by their authors’ fundamental intentions, but by the
given historico-philosophical realities with which the authors were
confronted. The novel is the epic of an age in which the extensive
totality of life is no longer directly given, in which the immanence of
meaning in life has become a problem yet which still thinks in terms
of totality.’17
In their respective works, Lukacs and the younger Marcuse both
incorporate the Hegelian dialectic of the literatures of the modern
age, and both share Hegel’s metaphysical disdain for the ‘abstract­

15. Ibid., p. 38.

16. In fact, the ‘Hegelian framework’ had been substantially modified by Lukacs,
whom the young Marcuse seems to have followed rather uncritically, apparently
having no independent conception of Hegel’s treatment of art in Greek culture.
There is no evidence - nor any reason to believe - that Marcuse was at this time
familiar with the most important of Hegel’s writings on this subject, namely the
basic treatment of the Hellenic Kunslreligion in the section of the Phenomenology of
Mind entitled ‘Religion in the Form of Art’ (trans. Baillic, pp. 709-49) which
receives no mention; nor do the much later Lectures on the Philosophy of History
where the ‘aesthetic state’ is characterized as the ‘political work of art’ (trans.
Sibree, pp. 250-74). In both cases, and in the Hegelian philosophy generally, it is
not Homeric Greece but the radical democracy of the classical Athenian polls (for
Hegel, 492-431 bc ) in which free individuality is reflected in the free collectivity,
whose basis was uniquely expressed in art (cf. also Charles Taylor, Hegel,
Cambridge 1977, pp. 200-6).
17. Lukacs, p. 56 (quoted in part by Marcuse in ‘D a deulsche Kunstlerroman’, p. 2).
48

ness’ of the real world - abstracted, that is, from its Idea in a
situation rendered problematic by the work of art: ‘Fallen gods, and
gods whose kingdom is not yet, become demons; their power is alive,
but no longer penetrates the world, or does not yet do so . . . The
demons’ power remains effective because it cannot be overthrown
. . . The novel is the epic of a world that has been abandoned by
God.’1819Though the metaphorical brilliance of the expression itself
argues against an overly literal reading, the remoteness of the two
young critics from their later Marxian formulations is nonetheless
clear. At most, one can interpret the ‘abandonment of God’ as the
flight of intelligibility from the modern, bourgeois world, but surely
this was a stance shared by such evidently non-Marxist cultural
critics as Nietzsche, Spenglcr, and Weber: the passage to Marx
remained possible but was, at this point, by no means necessary.
In the last analysis, then, it is Hegel’s Aesthetics (1823-29), as
adapted and ‘applied’ by Lukacs, that provides the theoretical
underpinning of Marcuse’s Kunstlerroman thesis. He drew especially
heavily upon Hegel’s discussion o f‘epic poetry’ in the last section of
the Aesthetics, where it is contrasted with the modern condition in
which ‘the spirit of the artist is different from that through which
the actual life and deeds of the nation described acquired their
existence’ - a disunity which Hegel, like Marcuse after him, finds
‘inappropriate and disturbing’.iy
The unique character of the heroic age of epic poetry, in Hegel’s
presentation, and that which proved so compelling to the young
Marcuse, is that ‘epic’ refers not simply to one of the genres of
poetry, but simultaneously to the ‘poetically ordered world’ that it
depicts and within which it necessarily and exclusively exists. It is, in
other words, not solely an art form, but a historical category
describing the constitutive principle of the world that it reflects and
within which it is possible: the epic world of poetic embodiment
demands ‘a new domain, a new ground on which we can tread only
after forsaking the prose of the theory and practice of our ordinary
18. Ibid., pp. 86-8.
19. G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungtn uber die Aesthetik; trans. T. M. Knox, Aesthetics, Lectures
on Fine Art, Oxford 1975, vol. 2, p. 1047 (some translations will be slightly altered
where Marcuse has misquoted Hegel). Again, Marcuse does not explicitly
acknowledge his departure from Hegel, for whom epic poetry was clearly a
deficient mode of art, corresponding to a deficient reality - deficient because the
individual was at that stage still in a state of undifferentiated ‘immediacy’, still
predestined to his role.
 The A esthetic Dimension (1 9 2 0 -1 9 2 8 ) 49

life and way of thinking’.20 It is thus contrasted throughout with the

more familiar historical world of actuality, accuracy, and accident,
of the narrowly circumstantial ‘prose of commonplace thinking out
of which art struggles on its way to truth’.212
The epic world is one in which a national spirit has awakened
and begun to be objectified in.the collective life of a people, and the
life of the individual is not yet fragmented by the conflicting claims
of private rights and public duties, feeling and will, heart and mind.
This ‘immediately poetic existence’ binds all aspects of life together
within an integrated social ethic under shared and universal
principles, and stands prior to the ‘prosaic’ articulation of separate
spheres of religion, civil and moral law, and political constitution
which impose substantive obligations as a necessity external to the
individual. In this community of freely willed thought and action,
portrayed most perfectly in the Homeric poems, we find for the first
time, ‘a world hovering beautifully between the universal founda­
tions of life in the ethical order of family, state, and religious belief
and the individual, personal character; between spirit and nature in
their beautiful equipoise, between intended action and external
outcome, between the national ground of undertakings and the
intentions and deeds of individuals’. Marcuse himself adds, referring
again to Hegel, that this is evidence o f‘a reality akin and friendly to
art’.23
The organic whole of the epic world as interpreted by Marcuse,
governed and transformed by art, indeed sets a standard of
individual and collective life against which the modern world of
machines and factories, of politics and law, appears pathetically
impoverished. ‘For the whole state of the world today’, Hegel
concludes, ‘has assumed a form diametrically opposed in its prosaic
organization to the requirements which we found to be irremissible
for genuine epic’.24 Accordingly, since epic poetry is the natural
expression of an entire world outlook, with the passing of this world
the original poetic inspiration passes into new forms of art, which
Hegel is able to trace through the beginnings of the novel in his own
time: against a decidedly ‘prosaic’ reality, romance, the modern
popular epic . . . regains for poetry the right it had lost ,25

20. Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. 2, pp. 1011-2.

21. Ibid., p. 968.
22. Ibid., pp. 1098-9.
23. Marcuse (p. 17), quoting Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. 2, pp. 1092-3.
50

There is a sense in which the youthful Marcuse, writing almost

exactly a century later, was continuing the investigation of the
dialectic of literary genres begun by Hegel: indeed, he picked up the
theme of the world-historical significance of the novel with Goethe,
precisely where Hegel had laid it to rest. It was ‘Georg von Lukacs’,
however, who was his guide through Hegel, and it is consequently
not surprising that Lukacs’s retrospective evaluation of his own
work relative to Hegel should apply equally to Marcuse: although
Hegel had focused upon the fractured unity of art and life, he had
been concerned with the ‘prosaic’ character of reality only in so far
as it had rendered art problematic - not as problematic in itself.
Lukacs regarded his own work as having represented a critical
advance over Hegel by accepting the general Hegelian method but
substantively inverting it: the problem of the novel-form became
‘the mirror-image of a world gone out of joint . . . a symptom,
among many others, of the fact that reality no longer constitutes a
favourable soil for art’.242526 Both the Theory of the Novel and ‘The
German Kwisllerroman’ are critical works, more explicitly so than
Hegel’s and subversive of the prevailing orthodoxies of the bour­
geois world of prose, not just the aesthetic form which corresponds to
it.
Indeed, although the author of ‘The German K ’unstlerromari
generally recedes far into the background of the text, his voice can
be heard in an unmistakable sympathy with the plight of art and
the self-conscious artist confined by a narrowly materialistic society,
a sympathy whose standard is the poetic world of the beautiful, but
which extends to ‘the struggle of the German people for a new
community’. (333) The last chapter of the thesis offers a penetrating
account of the final stage in the development of the Kunstlerroman in
the form of an analysis of Thomas Mann’s resolution of the artist
into bourgeois society, both in his own literary career and in that of
Gustav von Aschenbach, the semi-autobiographical ‘master crafts­
man’ of Death in Venice (1911). The earlier novellas - especially Tonio
Kroger (1903) - had depicted the artist ‘suspended between two
worlds’ (Zwischen-zwei- Weltenstehen), aspiring to the ordered perman­
ence of the bourgeois way of life, but remaining foreign to it. To this

24. Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. 2, p. 1109.

25. Ibid., p. 1092.
26. Lukacs, p. 17.
 The A esthetic Dimension (1 9 2 0 -1 9 2 8 ) 51

outsider condemned to a life of human impoverishment, *Burgerlich-

keit assumes ever more of the splendour of a distant longing’, (307)
and his art itself seeks out the narrow measure of a bourgeois
profession in order to secure ‘a sphere where a certain kind of
communion can exist, a sphere where the eternal loneliness stops’.2?
With Aschenbach ‘ - or von Aschenbach, as he had been known
officially since his fiftieth birthday - ’2728 the problematic of the
K'unstlerroman would appear objectively to have been resolved: ‘The
artist is no longer poised between two worlds, he is no longer an
outsider, excluded and stigmatized: Burgerlichkeil had taken him up
and established him, his art had entered into its values and become
an ethical calling’. (326) It is precisely Aschenbach’s achievement,
however, that betrays the hopelessness of the artistic quest for
accommodation with the bourgeois world which had been the
generic theme of the Kunsllerroman. For all his honours and acclaim,
for all the heroic determination that enabled him to regulate his art
by the bourgeois standard of an ethical calling, the artist Aschen­
bach served drives that were darker, deeper, and demonic: ‘he
belonged to a different order of humanity, to a different world, and
in the face of the Dionysian forces which have their roots in that
humanity and that world, no heroism or determination could
protect him . . . if they break through only once, they demolish the
bourgeois existence, shatter all harmony, bring to ruin all stability
and order.’ (326) Beneath the superficial forms of bourgeois
respectability, the artist is powered by elemental forces that the
bourgeois way of life cannot contain and which take precedence
over it: the striving for the pure Eros of aesthetic form.
‘The German K'unstlerroman’ thus carries within its concepts and
categories a distinct, if evasive, denunciation of contemporary
European society. It is nevertheless the case that the implicit
critique of Burgerlichkeil is a long way from an explicit critique of the

27. Lukacs’s insight into the bourgeois professionalism of the writer I heodor Storm
was another important source for Marcuse: ‘Burgerlichkeil und fart pour Cart’(1909)
in Georg Lukacs, Die Seele und die Formen (1911); Saul and harm, trans. Anna
Bostock, Cambridge 1974, p. 57.
28. Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Stories, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter, New
York 1954, p. 57. Marcuse verified a further autobiographical reference in Death
in Venice when he sent his final chapter to its author. Thomas Mann, like Gustav
von Aschenbach, replied in a prompt, cordial note of appreciation - identical to
all the others sent out in gracious but perfunctory response to ‘a daily post heavy
with tributes from his own and foreign countries’, (p. 9)
52

capitalist mode of production that sustains it. Marcuse’s aesthetic

analysis remains abstract, and is conducted on a philosophico-
literary plane far removed from concrete socio-historical institutions.
Even when he is not flirting audaciously with the mythological, his
historical categories are of an extremely general, if not impressionis­
tic character - for example, the pre-1830 period o f ‘absolute power
and orthodox intolerance’ (174) or the post-1848 climate of
‘advancing technology and increased alienation’ (232) - intended
more to set a thematic context than to provide any sort of social
history of the novel.29
Neither does the author of ‘The German Kilnstlerroman assume a
partisan stance of his own on the politics of the novel, even where his
own recent experiences in the streets of revolutionary Berlin might
have found an easy parallel with the German artists who, during the
uprisings of 1848, ‘entered on the side of the revolutionary Volkes,
shared in their strivings and sufferings, took part in their attack
against the old life-forms’. (195) Marcuse, like the artists of
Germany’s earlier {verfehlte Revolution’, had discovered that a direct
alliance with the revolutionary masses was not conducive to his own
manner of political praxis. In the end, neither the political nor the
poetical restructuring of the world was explicitly called for, and he
looks toward the future with a mixture of anticipation and
resignation: ‘For the German Kilnstlerroman\ he concludes, ‘commun­
ity is not something given, but rather something given up’.30
Marcuse’s thesis is by no means a conservative work; its elements
are, however, unselfconsciously fused, and it was only fifty years
later that the critical, subversive implications of its concepts were
fully assessed and their profoundly radical content rendered explicit.
At this juncture, it can only be noted that he has programmatically
outlined a principle of life - Kiinstlertum, the artistic-aesthetic mode

29. Again, the veiled politics of Marcuse’s early aesthetics appear to correspond
closely with LukAcs’s repudiation of the war and bourgeois society at the time of
the Theory of the Noi>el (1914-15): assuming the downfall of the three empires, he
asked ‘who was to save us from Western civilization?’ ( Theory of the Novel, p. 11.)
Ferenc Feher, in his essay ‘Is the Novel Problematic?’ writes that Lukacs’s study
‘transforms the defence of progress through contradictions into an overtly
romantic anti-capitalism that nevertheless also contains a specifically revolution­
ary viewpoint’ ( Telos, 15, spring 1973, p. 47).
30. 'Fur den deulschen Kunstlerroman ist die Gememsamkeit nichts Gegebenes, sondem ein
Aufgegebenes’, (333). ‘Aufgegebenes’, has a double meaning here, suggesting ‘some­
thing given up’ as well as ‘something to strive for’, ‘a task to be carried out’.
 The A esthetic Dimension (1 9 2 0 -1 9 2 8 ) 53

of existence - that is in its essence irreconcilably opposed to the

prevailing society. He has implicitly put forward the notion that an
abstract concept and its embodiment in a concrete social type can
express a persistent critical standard, immune to the integrative
forces of the status quo - of any status quo. Thus, while he has
plainly concerned himself only marginally with the material
realities of society and history, he has provided himself with the
conceptual armament for a socio-historical critique which extends
far beyond the scope of any conventional materialist analysis.

Marcuse returned to Berlin toward the end of 1922, a time of

desperation for many sectors of the German population, and had his
father’s holdings been elsewhere than in real estate, the period of the
great inflation might have had a more lasting impact upon him. As
it was, the state of emergency that prevailed throughout 1923
passed, leaving in its wake only a dangerous conjuncture of events
whose long-range implications were not yet obvious: the ruin of
much of the middle class, the inflammatory French-Belgian occupa­
tion of the Ruhr, waves of political assassinations, Hitler’s first bid
for power in Bavaria, abortive uprisings in Saxony and Thuringia,
and the physical collapse of Lenin, incapacitated by his third stroke
on 9 March.
It was in this critical period that Marcuse undertook his really
systematic study of Marx. In Berlin he began to follow Lukacs’s
path out of Hegelian literary criticism to Marxist political criticism,
but unlike Lukacs, who had entered the Communist Party in 1918,
Marcuse retained his political independence. He and his friends
read sympathetically the Internationale Presskorrespondenz, the news
bulletin of the International, but his perceptions of Soviet penetra­
tion of German socialism left him with deep misgivings, which were
only compounded by Stalin’s first major purges of 1926-27.31
In general, there appears to have been a gradual intellectual
radicalization during the years Marcuse stayed in Berlin, but there
is no evidence of any overtly political involvement. Indeed, the
respective political careers of Lukacs and Marcuse diverged radical­
ly after their early, pre-Marxist writings on aesthetics, and have

31. Conversations with HM; on the Soviet intervention into the affairs of the
German K p d , cf. Louis Fischer, Russia’s Roadfrom Peace to War, New York 1969,
ch. 11; and E. H. Carr, The Interregnum, Hannondsworth 1954, ch. 7.
54

come to represent alternative paradigms of leftist politics in the

twentieth century: Lukacs was to maintain with increasing deter­
mination that disciplined allegiance to the only organized arm of
the revolutionary proletariat, even entailing obligatory intellectual
and political obeisances to Stalin, was a tactical necessity, ‘an entry
ticket to all further partisan warfare’,32 while Marcuse was already
in the uberparteiliche stance of the ‘homeless left’ which was to become
virtually emblematic of later phases of his career.33 Confronted with
the submission of the German K p d to the dictates of the embattled
Soviet state, and the Social Democrats’ ‘alliance with reactionary,
destructive, and repressive forces’,34 he refused to make an impossi­
ble choice - a refusal whose political implications were distinctly
prefigured in the estranged figure of the artist in the Kunstlerroman
thesis, though still to be developed into a consistent theoretical
principle.
The Kunstlerroman thesis, especially where it had touched on
Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, had also hinted at the theatre as offering
an image of liberation, and living in Berlin in the twenties Marcuse
had almost unimaginable opportunities to test this conjecture. He
was, in fact, more actively engaged in the luminous cultural life of
the Weimar Republic than in its darker political course, becoming a
habitue of an avant-garde theatre dominated by the personalities of
Max Reinhardt, Erwin Piscator and Brecht, and although he
personally had neither instruction nor talent, he further pursued the
aesthetic dimension into the now-legendary opera houses and
concert halls of the city.
Marcuse was not entirely relegated to the audience of the Berlin
avant-garde, however, for he even collaborated in a memorable, if
short-lived, publishing venture: Das Dreieck, a Berlin monthly with
an expressionist slant which he edited with his friend Walter
Gutkelch. Its first issue provocatively appearing in a triangular
format (yet printed in the Gothic Altschrift as if to heighten the

32. Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone, London
1971, p. xxxviii, from the 1967 Preface.
33. On ‘The Search for a "Third Force" in Pre-Nazi Germany’ cf. George L. Mosse,
Germans and Jews, New York 1970, pp. 3-33 and 171-225; also Istvan Deak’s fine
study of the shades of left-wing non-partisanship among the Weltbuhne circle:
Weimar Germany’s Left-Wing Intellectuals, Berkeley and Los Angeles 1968.
34. Marcuse’s statement in the course of lectures given at the Free University in
Berlin in 1967, published in Five Lectures, p. 103.
 The A esthetic Dimension (1 9 2 0 -1 9 2 8 ) 55

tension between the avant-garde and the old culture), Das Dreieck
was an eclectic review that ranged freely between cultural and
political criticism, original mythopoeic verse and prose, and polemi­
cal reviews and commentaries. ‘Why Triangle?’, its first number
demanded rhetorically - for publicity, to be sure, but also to assert
an annoyingly visible presence.against bourgeois conventionality.
But this was obvious, it continued, ‘for the answer, of course, stares
out of the question itself: The Triangle is the face of the Trinity - a
tragic Trinity, that is, which finds expression in Philosophy, Poetry,
and Criticism . . . the three stages of the retrograde march of spirit
towards the intellect.’35
Although its editors asserted the principle of ‘methodische Physio-
gnomielosigkeif (which might best be rendered as ‘methodical feature­
lessness’), the anti-bourgeois, oppositional character of Das Dreieck
gave it a clearly left-wing aspect, and Marcuse’s (pseudonymous)
editorial involvement brought him into contact with the work and
also the persons of its many well-known contributors: his good
friend the critic and publicist Siegfried Jacobsohn, the novelist
Alfred Doblin and playwright Carl Zuckmaycr, Leo Lania (who
had been Piscator’s early theatrical collaborator), the prominent
expressionist writers Ernst Toller and Kurt Pinthus, and Egon
Erwin Kisch, one of Europe’s most feared and respected investiga­
tive journalists. Though Marxists and other radical political writers
were represented in the columns of Das Dreieck during the brief
period of its appearance, Marcuse was, perhaps more significantly,
presented to people who conceived of themselves as revolutionaries
in a sense that was not confined (and perhaps did not extend) to the
political.36
The distorted universe of expressionism and post-expressionism
was not the one through which Marcuse habitually travelled during
the Weimar years, however. He was in fact living a more settled
existence, installed in a lower floor of the family s apartment

35. Das Dreieck. Monatzeitschrift fur Philosophie, Dichtung, und Knttk (lit. 1 he Triangle.
Monthly Journal for Philosophy, Poetry, and Reviews), hrsg. Walter Gutkelch,
Berlin, April 1924 - March 1925; seven issues appeared (obtained courtesy of
Schiller-Nationalmuseum, Marbach a.N.). All translations are my own.
36. On the cultural politics of the independent intellectual left and the attempt to
bridge the gap between Geist and political power’ in this period, cf. Lewis D.
Wurgaft’s study, ‘The Activists: Kurt Hiller and the Politics of Action on the
German Left, 1914-1933’, Transactions o f the American Philosophical Society, Decem­
ber 1977.
56

building in Charlottenburg with his wife Sophie, a former student of

mathematics and statistics at Freiburg, whom he had married in
1924. Their flat soon became a sort of revolutionary salon, with the
younger Erich often slipping down the back stairs to attend spirited
discussions of Marxian theory, Gestalt psychology, abstract paint­
ing, and fashionable currents of contemporary German philosophy.
His father had meanwhile helped him to buy a partnership in the
firm of the publisher and antiquarian book dealer S. Martin
Fraenkel, where he worked primarily as a catalogue researcher and
bookseller. Despite his ongoing studies of Marx and his turn toward
a more rigorous brand of philosophy than that which had formed
the apex of Das Dreieck, it is not surprising that his own first
publication should have taken the form of an assignment in the
Anliquariat: a scholarly revision of the Tromel bibliography of the
writings of Schiller.•i7
The Schiller-Bibliographie was the first comprehensive record in
sixty years of the numerous editions of Schiller’s poetry and prose,
and while it is fully annotated, the notes are of a purely technical
and organizational nature and reveal nothing of the personality or
priorities of the editor. Still, Marcuse’s immersion in the works of
Schiller - the poet who had declared beauty to be a standard of
judgement transcending the narrowly political demands of the
revolutionaries in eighteenth-century Paris, and who raised the
banner of the aesthetischer Stoat high above that of the French tricouleur
- cannot be overlooked. Schiller’s influence would reappear, explicit
and acknowledged, in Marcuse’s later works, conveying a critical
sensibility that would be central to his own attempts to devise an
‘aesthetic education of man’. But in fact, it is not necessary to
anticipate, for the strains of aesthetic idealism can be detected in his
thought from the very outset.
The strains in the political life of the Republic are less easy to
identify in Marcuse’s development. At the end of February 1925 the
Social Democrat Friedrich Ebert had died, and in the close-run
elections held two months later the presidency passed to Hindcn-
burg. Marcuse cast his vote for the K.p d candidate (Thaclmann), as37

37. Herbert Marcuse (hrsg.), Schiller-Bibliographie. Unter Benutzung der Trbmelschen

Schiller-Bibliothek, Berlin 1925, in three parts: I. Collected Works to 1840 II. Single
Works to 1805 III. Important Editions since Schiller’s Death. Marcuse’s senior
partner, Fraenkel, ended his career in prison following a conviction for fraud and
shady business dealings.
 The A esthetic Dimension (1 9 2 0 -1 9 2 8 ) 57

was his custom when he voted at all, but without much conviction.3#
Despite the return of the aged general to power, however, the
middle twenties in Germany were a period of relative political
stability, diplomatic initiative, economic recovery, and cultural
efflorescence. An event that caused a far greater disruption in
Marcuse’s life was the publication in 1927 of Heidegger’s Being and
Time. Marcuse studied it with his closest friend of that period, the
similarly-inclined Alfred Seidemann, and where other German
students found a volkische Lebensphilosophie, they saw what they
thought was the missing dimension of Marxism.3839 Marcuse resolved
to return to Freiburg and resume his academic career in philosophy.

38. Marcuse’s recollection, in conversation. Buck-Morss confirms the widespread

sympathies of non-afTiliated Berlin intellectuals for the Kpd (p. 207, n. 195), as
does Mosse.
39. On Heidegger’s reputation among Marcuse’s generation at that time, cf. Hannah
Arendt, ‘Martin Heidegger at Eighty’, trans. Albert Hofstadter, New York Review
of Books, vol. XVII, 6, 21 October 1971.
58

2
H eidegger and
C oncrete P hilosophy
(1928-1932)

The year in which Marcuse returned to Freiburg to study with

Heidegger was one of the most hopeful in the life of the Weimar
Republic. Under the diplomatic leadership of Stresemann, Ger­
many’s post-war status in European politics had been negotiated
dramatically upward, culminating in the Kellogg-Briand pact of
August of that year which promised a new era of peaceful
international relations; huge American loans artificially buoyed
production and employment, and for the first time since 1914 the
masses of Germany enjoyed a measure of political security and
material well-being. The electoral results of 1928 reflected the
enhanced confidence of the population: at the expense of nearly
every one of the non-socialist parties, the S p d and the Communists
registered impressive gains.1 Shortly after the Social Democrats
re-entered the government, reviving the Great Coalition with the
Catholic Centre and Stresemann’s People’s Party, the new Chancel­
lor could declare with confidence that ‘the foundations of the
Republic stand firm and unshakable’:12
Other foundations had been laid in that year as well. In 1928,
Carl Marcuse fulfilled an ancient dream when he and his family
moved into a palatial modern mansion in suburban Dahlem -
custom built, needless to note, by the architectural firm of
‘Friedenthal und Marcuse’. The luxuriously fitted home, with its
five reception rooms, elegant English fireplace, and accommodation
for a household staff of two housemaids, a cook, a pair of laundry

1. Erich Eyck, History of the Weimar Republic, New York 1962, vol. 2, p. 155. The year
1928 was also one of the worst for the political fortunes of the National Socialists.
2. SPD Chancellor Hermann Mueller, quoted in S. William Halperin, Germany Tried
Democracy, New York 1965, p, 361.
 Heidegger and Concrete Philosophy (1 9 2 8 -1 9 3 2 ) 59

maids, and the driver of the family Packard, epitomized the

self-assurance of the wealthy Republican bourgeoisie. Their new
residence also reflected the precarious situation of the German Jews,
however, for from his upstairs bedroom - bedecked with posters of
Marx and Lenin - Herbert’s brother Erich could look onto the
house of their next-door neighbour, an unemployed provincial
schoolmaster named Bernhard Rust, soon to become the powerful
Nazi Minister of Science, Education and Popular Culture.
Less visible were the subterranean forces that were already
undermining the foundations of prosperity and security: the
unimpaired autonomy of the army, the concentration of the mass
media and certain heavy industries in the hands of wealthy
industrialists with links to splinter parties of the extreme right, and
Germany’s vulnerability to fluctuations of the American economy.
In fact, the forces were now being consolidated that would soon
push the Republic into its final phase.3
At that time, however, Marcuse was still more preoccupied with
the consolidation of his own intellectual forces. He had, in his
ongoing private studies since his university years, surveyed much of
the landscape of contemporary European thought, touching down
in such areas as art criticism and Gestalt psychology, though always
remaining at a theoretical remove from the practices they em­
braced: he seems not to have tried his hand at any medium of
artistic creation, just as he never ventured from the theoretical basis
of modern psychology into either individual therapy or clinical
training. But even as he ascended into ever more rarefied zones of
philosophical speculation, his own private footpath (to borrow
Nabokov’s excellent metaphor) continued to run parallel to the
great road of that troubled decade. The centrifugal tensions that
were tearing at the social and political fabric of the Republic
registered in his thinking in the very way he struggled to outline the
field of a radical philosophical project in those years: philosophy
could not claim validity unless it were able to grasp the existential
realities of everyday life, and enter into them. In short, philosophy
must become concrete.

3. Marcuse commented on the later period of the Republic in May 1974; cf.
‘Heidegger’s Politics: An Interview with Herbert Marcuse by Frederick Olafson’
in the Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, vol. 6, no. 1 (winter 1977), p. 34
(hereafter ‘Olafson’). The interview took place in San Diego.
60

The movements of thought that dominated the German universi­

ties during the first decades of this century were not equipped to
meet the demands of the generation that studied in Germany after
the First World War, and with which Marcuse felt a strong
identification.4 Reflecting the disproportionate successes of the
natural sciences during the preceding half-century, especially rela­
tive to the humanistic disciplines, prevailing intellectual priorities
concerned the epistemological foundations of the various sciences.
Shallow extrapolations, popularizations, and critiques - the latter
often taking the form of calls for a neo-idealist ‘renewal of the
humanistic disciplines’ - became especially conspicuous during the
Weimar period.5
Among the most extreme of the mainstream philosophical
positions concerned to establish philosophy as a rigorously scientific
system was the logical empiricism of the Vienna Circle (represented
in Germany by Hans Reichenbach), whose militant neo-positivist
programme simply dismissed as ‘metaphysics’ all presumptively
philosophical undertakings that departed from strict logical or
empirical criteria as the basis of their investigations. More in­
fluential in Germany were the competing currents of neo-
Kantianism, whose common foundation was the Kantian premiss of
the cognitive inaccessibility - and thus the practical autonomy - of
the ‘things-in-thcmselves’ of the real world of sense and experience.
Whether in its logical and natural-scientific orientations or its
cultural and historical concerns, the necessary dictate of neo-
Kantianism was the radical separation of the subject of a priori
consciousness from the natural or cultural object of knowledge and
action.6
For Marcuse, the decisive challenge to the prevailing currents of

4. Marcuse on several occasions stressed the ‘generational’ character of his

philosophical restiveness; cf., for example, Olafson, p. 28, and Jurgen Habermas
el at, Gespr'ache mil Herbert Marcuse, Frankfurt 1978, p. 10.
5. Cf. Fritz K. Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins, Cambridge 1969, pp.
305-434 for a lucid survey of themes and thinkers, many of which were raised by
Marcuse in his writings of this period in order to be summarily dismissed.
6. These were among those specifically cited by Marcuse as ‘the philosophies which
at that time had dominated the German universities’ (Habermas, pp. 10-12;
Olafson, p. 29). For fuller characterizations of the German philosophical milieu
and the issues involved, cf. Lucien Goldmann, Lukacs and Heidegger, London 1977,
pp. 1-24; Fritz-Joachim von Rintelen, Contemporary German Philosophy, Bonn 1970;
for the background of ‘the revival of neo-Kantianism in German social and
historical thought’, cf. Thomas Willey, Back to Kant, Detroit 1978.
 Heidegger and Concrete Ph ilosophy ( l 9 2 8 - 19 3 2 ) 61

philosophy unquestionably came from Freiburg. Husserl had been

the first to hold out the possibility that rigorous philosophical
analysis could regain access ‘to the things themselves’ closed off by
the neo-Kantian dualism of knowing subject and the world to be
known and transformed, as well as to suggest the complicity of
modern scientific rationality in sustaining and in fact embodying
this false dichotomy - a critique that was to survive as a central
element throughout Marcuse’s later thought.7 It was in the work of
Heidegger, however, that the real breakthrough from ‘essences’ to a
genuinely concrete philosophy of Being appeared to have taken
place: this was a philosophy that took as its starting point the
Existenz of human beings in their world.
The two young Marxists Herbert Marcuse and Alfred Seidemann
had not simply read Heidegger’s Being and Time: together they
undertook an exhaustive line-by-line critical analysis of the text, and
on the basis of this’study, Marcuse announced his intentions in his
first philosophical essay. Following Marx, whose Critique of Hegel’s
‘Philosophy of Right’ had first been published in the same year as Being
and Time, Marcuse outlined his understanding of the current relation
between thought and history: ‘[Heidegger’s] work seems to us to
indicate a turning point in the history of philosophy: the point
where bourgeois philosophy transcends itself from within, and opens
the way to a new, “concrete” science.’8 Heidegger had returned
philosophy to its proper foundations by redirecting it to the concrete
conditions of human life in a natural and social world, and in the

7. In Die Knsis der Europaischen Wissenschaften und die Transzendtnlale Phdnomenologie,

Husserl maintained that post-Galilean science, by virtue of its mathematization
(abstraction from empirical reality), in fact abrogates the transcendence of
Reason and submits to a hidden ‘lebenswelthche a prion’ which is thoroughly
empirical, historical, and normative. Although the first part of the Crisis was not
published until 1936, Aron Gurwitsch states that ‘some of his preparatory studies
for that book . . . date from the late twenties when Marcuse was still his student;
cf. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, New York 1965, vol. 2, p. 291.
8. Herbert Marcuse, ‘Beilragc zu eincr Phanomenologie dcs historischcn Matcrialis-
mus\ Philosophische Hefte, 1 Berlin July 1928, reprinted in the first volume of
Marcuse’s Schriften, Frankfurt 1978, p. 358; trans. ‘Contributions to a Phenomen­
ology of Historical Materialism’ in Telos, 4 (1969), p. 12. English sources will be
cited where available, although I have not hesitated to make frequent adjust­
ments in existing translations, especially in order to render Marcuse’s termino­
logy consistent with that of the Macquarrie and Robinson translation of Setn und
Zeit. Consequently, in this chapter only, page numbers of the original (or, if
possible, of Schriften, vol. 1) will be cited following the citation of existing English
versions (for example, p. 67/42). All other translations arc my own.
62

concept o f ‘authenticity’ (Eigentlichkeit), had confronted the possibili­

ty of a meaningful existence. For Marcuse, however, philosophy had
at that point defined a problem whose solution was a political one.
As Marx had written of Hegel, ‘it is now the philosopher in whose
brain the revolution begins’.9
The immediate consequence of this discovery was that Marcuse
resolved to return to Freiburg and resume his academic career under
the direction of Heidegger himself. The task he had undertaken,
however, was not solely to bring the practical imperative of
Marxism to bear upon Heidegger’s ‘revolutionary beginnings’.
Marxism itself had come to an impasse, as evidenced by its failure to
provide theoretical guidance to German socialism in the period
following the defeat of the revolution. Indeed, the mechanical
subjugation of conscious political praxis to the inflexible dictates of
historical laws - the theoretical legacy of the Second International
associated in varying degrees with the German socialists Kautsky
and Bernstein - corresponded to premisses not far removed from the
dualisms characteristic of academic neo-Kantian and neo-positivist
thought, which Heidegger had overthrown.101A vital question, then,
is why Marcuse appears not to have been equally attracted to the
philosophical work that had accomplished a comparable renewal
within Marxist theory itself: Lukacs’s pathbreaking studies pub­
lished in 1923 as History and Class Consciousness.
The dualisms of both academic philosophy and vulgar Marxism,
which had in effect removed man from the world of objects and
experience and thus limited his power over it, were explicitly
attacked throughout History and Class Consciousness, which had
reintroduced the Hegelian category of ‘concrete totality’, of ‘the
all-pervasive supremacy of the whole over the parts’,11 as the

9. Karl Marx, ‘A Contribution to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right:

Introduction’ in Early Writings, New York 1975. In general, the recapitulation in
the 1920s of the themes of the nineteenth-century Kant-Hegel-Marx transition is
often profoundly suggestive.
10. This familiar assessment is sketched briefly but persuasively by Goldmann who
notes: ‘Although for political reasons, Marxists could not enter the university
before 1918, the entry of Marxists into the German-speaking universities did not
involve any upheaval: their contribution was limited to the creation of a small
number of courses scarcely dilTerent from those already in existence.’ (p. 3)
11. Georg Lukacs, Geschichte und Klassenhewusslsein (1923), trans. Rodney Livingstone,
History and Class Consciousness, London 1971, p. 27. Cf. also the essay by Istvan
Meszaros, ‘Lukacs’s Concept of Dialectic’, in G. H. R. Parkinson, ed., Georg
Lukacs. The Man, His Work, and His Ideas, New York 1970, pp. 34-85.
 Heidegger and Concrete Philosophy (1 9 2 8 -1 9 3 2 ) 63

epistemological means of transcending this fragmentation. Unlike

Heidegger, however, Lukacs had drawn the political consequences
of this philosophical position: in concrete terms, this appears as a
social totality integrated under the universal form of commodity
production. Under the domination of the commodity structure, a
‘phantom objectivity’ is conferred upon human relations, transform­
ing social relations into relations between things; subjectively, the
consciousness of individuals comes to reflect and reproduce this
system of domination, giving it the character of a ‘second nature*.
Extending Marx’s analysis of the fetishism of commodities, Lukacs
describes this process of the ‘reification of consciousness’ as the most
immediate obstacle to the liberation of the proletariat from these
very conditions.12
In view of the impact of the book on the radical intelligentsia of
Central Europe, and the close affinity between Lukacs’s concept of
reification and his own (admittedly much later) analysis of the
mental reproduction o f ‘one-dimensional* society, Marcuse’s posture
remains a matter for speculation - and here we are hardly guided by
his sparse remarks at the time or his subsequent recollections. It is
clear that he knew the book, for he referred briefly to its ‘inestimable
significance for the development of Marxism’ in an essay of 1930,1314
and the ‘Lukacs-Debatte>in any case dominated theoretical discussion
on the left for ten years after the publication of History and Class
Consciousness.14 Marcuse’s strident attacks against the philosophers
Heidegger and Carl Schmitt a few years hence permit the conjecture
that he may have found Lukacs to be guilty of an intolerable
intellectual compromise (with official Communism), but that politi­
cal considerations argued for silence rather than adding one more
divisive statement. For whatever reasons, the fact remains that he
turned not to Lukacs but to Heidegger in his search for a properly

12. Lukacs’s analysis is centred in his essay, ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the
Proletariat’ (1922), esp. pp. 83-110. Two recent studies of Lukacs’s early work are
Andrew Arato and Paul Breines, The Young Lukacs and the Origins of Western
Marxism, New York 1979, esp. part 2, and Michael Lowy, Georg Lukacs - From
Romanticism to Bolshevism, London 1979.
13. Herbert Marcuse, ‘Zum Problem der Dialektik I’, review of Siegfried Marck, Die
Dialektik in der Philosophic der Gegenwart, Die Gesellschaft, 7 (1930), pp. 13-30;
reprinted in Schnften, I, p. 421. He would later acknowledge that Lukacs’s
philosophical reconstruction of his dialectical underpinnings of radical thought
encouraged him in his belief‘that Marxism can be seen as more than a political
strategy and a political goal*. (Habermas, p. 12).
14. Fora thorough account, cf. Arato and Breines, p. 163-189.
64

ontological underpinning for Marxian revolutionary theory.

The project outlined by Marcuse in his essay ‘Contributions to a
Phenomenology of Historical Materialism’ (1928) thus entailed the
reciprocal critique of existential phenomenology and Marxism.15 In
the broadest terms, phenomenology had penetrated to the essential,
underlying structure of human existence and disclosed its funda­
mental and universal character; historical materialism, enriched by
the ontological understanding of this structure of life, could grasp its
concrete historical variations. The resulting ‘dialectical phenomeno­
logy’ would permit analysis of the concrete possibilities contained
within the bounds of any actual historical situation and indicate the
scope of the revolutionary praxis that would transform it in the
direction of this essential humanity. ‘This’, wrote Marcuse, ‘is the
extent of the validity of the dialectical phenomenology . . . it points
to historical human existence, both in its essential structure, and in
its concrete forms and configurations.’16
In identifying two planes or dimensions of human existence - the
‘essential structure’ uncovered by phenomenology and its ‘concrete
forms and configurations’ as analysed by historical materialism -
Marcuse had outlined the intellectual project that would occupy
him in varying forms throughout the rest of his career: the effective
integration of an essential standard of criticism with its material,
historical objects. The first anticipations of this project were already
evident in the aesthetic dimension portrayed in his 1922 Doktorarbeit
as the domain of Wilhelm Meister, Keller’s Heinrich, and Gustav
15. This essay and its implications have been examined in exhaustive detail: Alfred
Schmidt’s essay, ‘Existcntial-Ontologie und historischer Materialismus bei Her­
bert Marcuse’ contains the most balanced critical exposition of Marcuse’s early
‘marxistische Geschichtsontologie' (in Antworten auf Herbert Marcuse, Frankfurt 1968);
cf. also Paul Piccone: ‘The forced synthesis of the two mechanically juxtaposed
frameworks is bound to fail from the very' beginning’ (‘Phenomenological
Marxism’ in Telos, 9, p. 11); Pier Aldo Rovatti writes: ‘This is no doubt a
non-systematic phase of inquiry.’ (‘Critical Theory and Phenomenology’ in Telos,
15, p. 36).
16. Marcuse, ‘Contributions to a Phenomenology of Historical Materialism’ p.
22/370 (following our English/Gcrman convention). Several of Marcuse’s early
essays appeared in the Philosophische Hefte, a rather spirited but avowedly
non-partisan philosophy journal edited by his friend Maximilien Beck. Beck was
a student of Alexander Pfander, a prominent member of the Husserl school who
sought to gain access to the essence of the human soul and its values through a
phenomenological analysis of the structure of the psyche. PPander’s influence is
evident in Beck’s one systematic work, IVesen und Wert, Berlin 1925. After fleeing
first to Prague, Beck emigrated to the United States under the sponsorship of the
exiled Institut fur Sozialforschung, of which Marcuse was by then a member.
 Heidegger and Concrete Philosophy (1 9 2 8 -1 9 3 2 ) 65

von Aschenbach; now, driven more, perhaps, by the internal

demands of that rudimentary aesthetic theory than by any external
exigencies of the later years of the Weimar Republic, Marcuse
prepared to return with his wife and infant son Peter to the
birthplace of that project, where it would be reformulated with the
rigour of philosophy.
As a post-doctoral student at Freiburg University, Marcuse was
able to follow several major currents of contemporary German
thought. It may well have been his Hegelian focus on structured
‘totalities’ that continued to attract him to Gestalt psychology,
particularly the work of Max Wertheimer, its leading exponent.17
He also followed the later writings of Husserl, as well as the work of
Max Scheler, the first of Husserl’s two phenomenological ‘anti­
podes’. 18 The other ‘antipode’ was, of course, Heidegger, still very
much in favour when Marcuse became one of about a dozen of his
advanced students in the transitional year in which the former
assumed Husserl’s chair in the philosophy faculty.
Most contemporary accounts portray Heidegger as having been a
brilliant and exceptionally dedicated teacher, determined ‘to bring
philosophy home to the students as their own concern qua
students’. 19 Marcuse and his student colleagues were not exceptions
to this general appraisal, learning from him the boundless depth of
reading and thinking that can be brought to the study of a text: ‘he
really could take one sentence in Aristotle or even in a pre-Socratic’,
he recalled, ‘and analyse it not only for an hour or two hours, but
half a semester’.20
17. The psychological perspective for which ‘a whole is more than or different from
the sum of its parts’ (Rudolf Arnheim), and which expounded a fully dialectical
conception of the interaction of a field of objects with the subject of perception
was also taken up at this time by Marcuse’s later colleagues T. W. Adorno (noted
in Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics, p. 9) and Max Horkheimer,
who discussed it in his important essay, ‘Matcrialismus und Metaphysik’
(Zeitschriflfur Sozialforschung, II, 1, 1933). On Wertheimer, cf. Ringer, pp. 374-9.
18. Husserl’s own term, in a letter to Roman Ingarden of 19 April 1931, quoted by
Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, The Hague 1969, vol. 1, p.
230.
19. ‘From Husserl to Heidegger. Excerpts from a Freiburg Diary by W. R. Boyce
Gibson*, Herbert Spiegelberg, cd., in Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology,
vol. 2, no. 1 (1971), p. 74.
20. Olafson, p. 37. Marcuse added: ‘I must say frankly that during this time, let’s say
from 1928 to 1932, there were relatively few reservations and relatively few
criticisms on my part.’ (p. 27) I his seems overly self-effacing, for his initial
approach to Heidegger was as a Marxist, and his writings of the period document
areas of substantial dissension.
66

Such attempts as were made to advance the phenomenological

inquiry in the explicitly political directions envisaged by Marcuse
were confined to discussions within his circle of friends, however (his
radical student colleagues at this time included the Marxists
Seideinann and Siegfried Landshut). The hostility of Husserl - still
very much a presence at Freiburg - to dialectical thought was well
known,2* and while he was a man of deep humanity, he regarded
political, moral, and aesthetic judgements as matters of private
belief and practice: true philosophy must be founded as objective,
‘rigorous science’ and could not be attained through the unstable
truths of a ‘historicist’ or ‘wcltanschauungliche’ approach.2122 Of greater
ultimate significance was Heidegger’s indifference to the philosophi­
cal analysis of political and social reality. Marcuse recalled no
occasions during his four years in Freiburg on which he entered into
discussions of a seriously political nature with his teacher, and
Heidegger never responded to his attempts to extend the range of
phenomenological analysis.23
Marcuse’s attempts to penetrate beyond the abstractness of the
existential framework constructed by Heidegger were sketched out
in a series of about a dozen essays and reviews written during this
period.24 These pieces covered a range of contemporary theoretical
issues, and, viewing them together, it is possible to identify two
thematic concerns. The first entailed the dialectical ‘mapping’ of the
ontological terrain first surveyed by Heidegger, and upon which
Marxism would be reconstructed; the second feature of his early
essays was an aggressive, and perhaps self-conscious, meta-
thcoretical defence of the theoretical component of praxis. This

21. Cf., for example, Gibson, pp. 69, 73; also Maurice Natanson, Husserl: Philosopher of
Infinite Tusks, Evanston 1973, pp. xiv-xv.
22. This philosophical conception, which guided Husserl’s personal conduct, is
formulated with rigorous clarity in ‘Philosophy as Rigorous Science’ (1911) - cf.
Husserl, Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, trans. Quentin Laucr, New York
1965, esp. pp. 122-47.
23. Olafson, p. 29 (confirmed in conversation with HM).
24. Most were published in Beck’s Philosophische Hefte, in the mainstream Archiv fur
Sozialwissenschafi und Sozialpohtik, and in Die Gesellschaft. The latter is significant as
it was the theoretical organ of the German SPD, nominally under the direction of
Rudolf Hilferding, but in fact edited by Albert Saloman. Marcuse’s sympathies
were definitely to the left of the establishment socialism of the SPD. and while he
recognized the importance of Hilferding’s classic Finanzkapital (1910), he felt he
had little in common with the politics of the later Hilferding (now Finance
Minister in the coalition government). The Gesellschaft had commissioned his
work, and, as he recalled, ‘they paid well’.
 Heidegger and Concrete Philosophy ( 19 2 8 - 1 9 3 2 ) 67

phenomenological penetration to the underlying structures of

human existence, together with the dialectical grasp of material,
historical conditions, would be called ‘Concrete Philosophy’. Its
elaboration followed a course that began with Heidegger and ended
with Hegel.

There is surely no place in this analysis for an independent

presentation of Heidegger - an attempt that would in any case be
futile. Nevertheless, in order to disclose the progression of Marcuse’s
thought across this phase of his life, and to indicate some of the
otherwise unlikely reasons for the attraction of a young, left-wing
Berlin intellectual to the philosopher whose work was to become
equally attractive to activists of the extreme right, it really is
essential to examine certain of Heidegger’s categories. Heidegger’s
thought (and his conception of thinking) weighed heavily upon
Marcuse, but only because his ‘appropriation’ of it was critical and
selective.25

In Being and Time Heidegger had undertaken to analyse the

structure of Being - not the nature of some class of entities that
might ‘be’, but of the very be-ing of entities as such.26 The analysis of
the Seinsfrage, the question of what it means for something ‘to be’,
moves into the range of vital human concerns once Heidegger
justifies his methodological decision to use ‘human being’ - the
being of that peculiar entity which alone is able to grasp the
meaning of being - as the vehicle of his analysis: ‘We are ourselves
the entities to be analysed. The Being of any such entity is [the kind
of Being that is] in each case mine’.27 A phenomenology thus
appears to be possible only as an ontology of human existence: the

25. In the brief discussion which follows, I have tried to sustain a reasonable
vocabulary that will stand on its own, without presupposing a prior familiarity
with the relevant works of Martin Heidegger’s early period. I hope thus to have
freed the main text, as far as possible, from ‘the jargon of authenticity’ (Adorno),
reserving the footnotes for more detailed explication and citation, where
necessary.
26. The ‘ontic’ investigation of entities themselves is the task of the special sciences
(anthropology, psychology, biology, etc.): ‘Ontological inquiry is indeed more
primordial as over against the ontical inquiry of the positive sciences’. Martin
Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 31/11 (the first figure will refer to the Macquarric
and Robinson translation, New York 1962; the second, to the seventh German
edition, Tubingen 1953).
27. Ibid., p. 67/42.
68

transcendental essence of (human) Being can be disclosed through a

phenomenological analysis of the structure of existence.28
The phenomenological method, as adapted by Heidegger,
demands that the object of analysis be allowed to reveal itself to
investigation ‘as it shows itself, that is, in a way that includes both
the subject and the object of perception in the analysis.29 Starting
not from any external, logical, material, or metaphysical premiss,
but from the object of analysis itself, phenomenology characteristi­
cally asks, ‘How is it possible, what must be presupposed, in order
for a thing to be?’ For Heidegger, the results of this preliminary
inquiry disclose that to be means to be a self in a world, with objects
and with others (hence his term for human being is Dasein,
‘being-there’).
In this interrelatedness, it is possible for the self to become
entirely submerged in the immediate cares and concerns of the
everyday world into which - in Heidegger’s characteristic jargon -
we are ‘thrown’.30 While part of our existence is clearly claimed by
the immediate and the actual, part of our being is the possible ways
of being that have not yet been closed off by reality. There is, in
Heidegger’s ontology, a definite priority given to this latter mode of
the possible;31 thus, where our bcing-towards our own possible, free
existence is overshadowed by our being-in our actual, determined
existence, we may lose sight of the fullness of our being, of what it
means for a human being to be. This condition of ‘fallcnness’, of
acquiescence in ‘the real dictatorship of the “they” ’ in which the
possibilities open to one’s own self arc ‘covered up’ in the submission
to the actual facts, Heidegger calls the ‘inauthentic’ mode of
being; its positive existential complement is the mode of ‘authenti­

28. Thus ‘Existential ontology’, by which Heidegger simply means the analysis of the
Being of human being: ‘The “essence” of Dasein lies in its existence', so the
investigation of this essence (ontology) is necessarily existential. (Ibid., emphasis
original).
29. Heidegger’s formal, somewhat more technical definition is ‘to let that which
shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself.
(Ibid., p. 58/34).
30. ‘The expression “ thrownness” is meant to suggest the facticitv of its being
delivered over’. (Ibid., p. 174/135, emphasis original).
31. ‘. . . possibility as an existentiale [an a prion mode of being of Daseinj is the most
primordial and ultimate possible way in which Dasein is characterized ontologi-
cally.’ (Ibid., p. 183/143-144, and all of sections 31 and 32, for a development of
this central doctrine.)
 Heidegger and Concrete Philosophy (1928- / 932) 69

city , being with the full awareness of the significance of what it

means to be.32
Heidegger s ontology thus has a ‘spatial’ axis that extends to such
trans-historical constants of human existence as a caring self,
being-in-the-world, and being-with-others. Superimposed upon
these ontological constants are the dimensions of authentic and
inauthentic existence. The concept of authenticity, however, tied as
it is to one’s potentialities and thus to possible future ways of being,
makes manifest the temporal axis of the existential ontology.33 We are
in the present, indebted to the past, and oriented toward the future,
and this temporal structure of human being opens up the compon­
ent of Heidegger’s ontology which was to be central for Marcuse:
the concept of historicality.34
Heidegger’s ontological-phenomenological analysis of Being
revealed that to be is to be in time. From the disclosure of the
temporal structure of every possible way of being, Heidegger
prepares to conclude his analysis by linking time to history. But we
are not permitted to return from ontology to more familiar (‘ontic’)
ground: ‘The proposition, “Dasein is historical”, is confirmed as a
fundamental existential ontological assertion. This assertion is far
removed from the mere ontic establishment of the fact that Dasein
occurs in a “world-history”.’35 We are pressed behind the common-
sense conception to a deeper level, from history (the domain of
things and events) to historicality (the very being of things and events
in time).
The method of existential phenomenology stipulates that the

32. Ibid., p. 104/120. Heidegger’s terms are Eigenllichkeil and Uneigentlichkeit; Magda
King, in her study of Heidegger’s Fhilosophy, New York 1974, pp. 50-9, proposes
the English ‘owned’ and ‘disowned’ existence. Less familiar and more awkward,
these terms nonetheless grasp the root eigen = ‘own’ and thus transmit the
individualized meaning of one’s awareness of one’s own self.
33. Temporality (Zeitlichkeit or ‘timc-liness’) is the ground of Being, i.e. it is that
which makes Being possible: ‘Temporality temporalizes itself as a future which
makes present in the process of having been.’ (Ibid., p. 401/350); also ‘ I he
primary phenomenon of primordial and authentic temporality is the future.’ (p.
378/329)
34. Most writers have adopted the convention of rendering Geuhichthchkeit as
‘historicity’ which is bound to cause difficulties for readers familiar with the only
existing English translation of Sein und Zeit, where quite separate meanings are
assigned to ‘historicity’ (Historizildl) and ‘historicality’ (Ceschuhthchkeit); cf.
Heidegger, p. 41/20-21.
35. Ibid., p. 381/332.
70

analysis of history begin not with abstract laws or impersonal forces,

but with the being of that entity for whom history is a problem:
human being-in-a-world becomes the ground of history, that which
makes history possible. The existential grasp of history, then, does
not take hold of such conceptual processes as ‘the class struggle’,
‘disenchantment of the world’, or ‘the decline of the West’, nor even
of a bare sequence of past events. Rather, the inherited possibilities
open to the presently existing individual (one’s ‘heritage’), and the
authentic choices and decisions one makes in the light of them (one’s
‘fate’) become ‘the locus of the problem of history’,36 and the
reference point from which the historical ‘worlds’ of such subjects
become significant.37 ‘Historicality’, then, the pivotal concept in
Heidegger’s ontology, refers to the way in which individuals proceed
to a self-awareness of the way they live in history; it comprehends
the way in which individuals relate to their own past and
appropriate (‘to makes one’s own’) the tradition of which they are a
part.
Heidegger’s ontology, then, as sketched in these broadest of
strokes, postulates the essential aspects of human being: as indivi­
duals we are thrown into a world populated with others and with
objects; we exist in time, lost in the factual limitations of our present
circumstances or conscious of our own future potentialities. This
structure of being and of the awareness of it, as disclosed by the
phenomenological analysis of human being, is the immutable essence
of human existence: it remains fixed, unaffected by the manifold
variety of its existence.

But of what value could such an interpretation be to a Marxist,

especially since the philosopher Heidegger was very explicit as to the
function of this analytical framework, which seems no less resistant
to serving as an ‘arm of criticism’ than to being used to mount a
‘criticism of arms’ (Marx)? Notably, since it is our very essence to
have both limitations and possibilities (they are ‘equiprimordial’),
Heidegger docs not wish to advance any sort of value-laden claim as
to the superiority of authentic self-awareness over inauthentic
fallenness in the world. Thus he warns that his existential ontology is
36. Ibid., p. 427/375.
37. The study or science of history is not concerned with the actual facts, for this is
the foreclosed ground of inauthenticity; rather, authentic ‘historiology will
disclose the quiet force of the possible’. (Ibid., p. 446/394).
 Heidegger and Concrete Philosophy (1 9 2 8 -1 9 3 2 ) 71

not to be mistaken for a description of an ideal realm or mode of

existence: ‘So neither must we take the fallenness of Dasein as a
“fall” from a purer and higher “primal” status.’38 Rather, pheno­
menology simply takes as ontologically given the dualism of
authenticity/inauthenticity, the immersion in the factical world of
the present and the awareness of one’s future possibilities, and
applies it to the ontological analysis of the being (Dasein) which
exists in these modes. He adds: ‘it may not be superfluous to remark
that our own interpretation is purely ontological in its aims, and is
far removed from any moralizing critique of everyday Dasein and
from the aspirations of a “philosophy of culture”.’39
Despite his repeated disclaimers, however, the extrapolation of
the analysis into the domain of ethical or sociological critique docs
not necessarily violate the fundamental tenets of Heidegger’s work,
even if it departs radically from his own intentions. Indeed, it was
Marcuse’s claim that the elaboration of the results of Heidegger’s
investigations in the direction of political criticism was a step
mandated by the internal logic of the fundamental ontology itself.
With certain important adjustments, the theory of being could
reveal the link between ‘the possibilities of authentic being and its
fulfilment in authentic action’.40
The first of Marcuse’s dialectical correctives to Heidegger’s
ontology was stated with welcome simplicity: ‘The individual is not
the historical existential unit’.41 It is true that in a very few years he
would finally acquire - from the writings of the young Marx - the
completed conceptual framework that would reveal that the
opposite is in fact the case: that the goal of the historical process is

38. Ibid., p. 220/176.

39. Ibid., p. 211/167. Cf. also pp. 264-5/222: ‘If we are to use (the expression
“falling”) in existential analysis, we must avoid giving it any ontically negative
“evaluation”.’ (emphasis added)
40. Marcuse, ‘Contributions to a Phenomenology of Historical Materialism’, p.
17/363. Heidegger would himself make the fatal transition from the ontological
(historicality) to the ontic (history) in a brief but momentous phase of his career:
1933-34.
41. Ibid., p. 27/376. Lucien Goldmann rightly makes much of this as one of the
central points of contention between Being and Time (1927) and History and Class
Consciousness (1923). On substantive grounds, his attempt to link the most
influential representatives of contemporary Marxist and existentialist thought is
insightful and often profound. His ancillary argument, however, that Heidegger
explicitly designed Being and Time as a philosophical rejoinder to Lukacs’s work is
not supported by more than circumstantial evidence, and is in any case
unnecessary to his thesis (Goldmann, pp. 27-39).
72

precisely the universal, social individual (Gattungswesen, or ‘species­

being’) of post-capitalist society. At this point, however, he was able
to point out only that the full realization of human potentialities is
not an existential task of individual self-awareness, but the result of
a historical struggle which is collective (political) in nature. The
subject of the historical process implicit in Being and Time, to the
contrary, could be identified in its central concept of authenticity
which Heidegger virtually defined as the being-aware of the
possibilities open to one's own self. Marcuse acknowledged the
significance of the restoration of individual existence to the centre ol
philosophy, but as a Marxist it was impossible for him to have
considered the achievement of an authentic existence as a solitary
act o f ‘anticipatory resoluteness’, of which few would in any case be
capable. Heidegger had recognized the existential constant of
Miteinandersein (Being-with-others), but had failed to make the
necessary extrapolation to the social collectivity that is the condition
(‘ground’) of the possible (authentic) realization of the individual.
In the manner of Marx’s critique of Hegel, Marcuse claimed that
in its individual bias, Heidegger’s philosophy had in effect misun­
derstood itself: where the individual is constrained by a network of
reified social relationships, a true philosophy of individualism will
address a socio-economic totality and will bring the individual in
only at the end. He alludes to the continuity of Heidegger’s work
with the false individualism characteristic of the tradition of
bourgeois thought, which focuses prematurely on the atomized
individual of capitalist society: ‘Thus it is precisely when philosophy
wishes to take seriously its concern with the individual that it has no
right to neglect the world in which the existence of the individual is
fulfilled . . . In this case, the individual is no longer the point of
departure, but rather the objective [Ziel] of philosophy.’42 Having
assessed the ‘fallen’ state of modern capitalist society in terms of class
differentiation and the social division of labour, he proposes a
mediation which advances the existential analytic from the level of
the historical individual to historical society, and back again: the
call to abolish inauthenticity, to paraphrase Marx, is the call to
abolish the conditions that give rise to inauthenticity! The existen­

42. Marcuse, ‘Ul>cr konkrete Philosophic’, in Archiv fur StcialwissenschaJ) imd Soziatpoli-
tik, vol. 62, pp. 111-28, reprinted in Schnfttn 1, pp. 404-5. In the manner of
Heidegger himself, we might illustrate the critique with the word-play ‘Dascin’
= ‘das Ein\
 Heidegger and Concrete Philosophy (1 9 2 8 -1 9 3 2 ) 73

tial ontology thus provided for him an explosive, revolutionary

category which presupposes the radical transformation of society.
This directly implies the second of Marcuse’s major objections to
Heidegger’s system, namely its abstractness from concrete condi­
tions: human Being (Dasein) remains remote from human beings
(Daseiende), historicality nowhere intersects with history. Once again,
Heidegger’s philosophical breakthrough - in this case the interpreta­
tion of being through the existential given of time - is not
challenged, but only his failure to press his discovery to its immanent
and radical conclusions. In identifying the essential historicality of
human existence, Heidegger had retreated from history, and from the
material conditions within which an authentic existence might be
achieved: ‘phenomenology cannot restrict itself to the demonstra­
tion of the historicality of its object, and subsequently fall back into
abstractions . . .The analysis of an historical object must be
grounded in historicality, must always take into consideration the
concrete historical situation and its concrete “material condition”.’43
Making a charge that would recur throughout his later work,
Marcuse insisted that the value of abstraction is to provide not a
point of departure, but a point of return.

Having thus collectivized Heidegger’s individual, authentic sub­

ject, and concretized his abstract concept of historicality, Marcuse
had outlined a ‘dialectical phenomenology’. With Heidegger, he
accepted the notion of an ontological Grundstruktur, a ‘fundamental
structure’ of human existence ‘which, although not ahistorical,
endures through all historicality’;44 but with Marx, he insisted that
analysis cannot leave these existential categories formal and ab­
stract: ‘There is no uniform world of meaning related to a uniform
existence. The ontological relationship between Dasein and the
world is not a disconnected abstraction, but is constituted in
concrete historical events.’45 In his writings in the last years of the
Weimar Republic, Marcuse referred to this bivalent analysis,
together with the practical political imperatives arising out of it, as
‘Concrete Philosophy’.
So-called Concrete Philosophy utilizes an ontology of social life

43. Marcuse, ‘Contributions to a Phenomenology of Historical Materialism’, p.

21/368-9.
44. Ibid., p. 22/370.
45. Ibid., p. 26/374.
74

in order ‘to confront the threatened existence with its truth’.46

Though he clung to a conception of Marxism as a theory of
revolution, this phenomenological revisionism suggests that M ar­
cuse had not found in any of its prevailing forms an adequate
philosophical interpretation of the repressed human potentialities to
be liberated by the overthrow of the prevailing conditions. The
attempt to derive a transcendent standard of truth based upon an
existential ontology finds little support in the known writings of
Marx at that time, and was surely not a project that could be
rendered compatible either with the immediate questions of strategy
and organization that dominated official Communism in the 1920s,
or with the philosophically inadequate investigations of the founda­
tions of a socialist society undertaken by Soviet Marxist theorists
after Lenin.
But Marcuse’s framework was hardly more congenial to other
contemporary revisionist attempts to restructure Marxian theory on
a philosophical basis. He appears to have been surveying the
intellectual landscape of Marxism at this stage in his life, establish­
ing his own position - as he always would - through a series of
philosophical confrontations. Among these was the neo-Kantian
attempt to secure the ethical and epistemological foundations of
Marxism, which had been prominent earlier in the decade through
the work of Karl Vorlandcr and the Austro-Marxist Max Adler. For
Marcuse their work represented an abuse of the possibilities of
transcendental criticism, and threatened to weaken Marxism politi­
cally under the guise of purifying it philosophically. He attacked its
characteristic removal from concrete existence in the (objective)
social world, but not the notion of transcendental criticism per se, for
he held the revolutionary possibilities of such a critique to be
enormous: ‘The concept of “possibility” as the central concept of the
transcendental method can certainly, in the last analysis, put reality
into question. Concretely, it can lead to the dissolution of the
ossified categories of reality, and violently shake this existing reality
itself.’47 The neo-Kantian Marxists did not and could not follow this
direction, however, for their work aimed at a transcendental
46. Marcuse, ‘Uber konkretc Philosophic’, p. 395. Although this critical function of
social analysis is evidently a Marxian inheritance, the concept of truth as the
‘dis-closurc’ (Erschlossenheit) of inherent existential possibilities which have been
covered up (‘foreclosed’) is thoroughly Heideggerian; cf. the important discussion
of the meaning of truth in Being and Time, pp. 256-73/212-30.
47. Marcuse, ‘Transzendentaler Marxismus?’ in Die Gesellschaft, Berlin 1930, vol. vii,
 Heidegger and Concrete Philosophy ( 1 9 2 8 -1 9 3 2 ) 75

epistemological basis for the social sciences that deliberately exclud­

ed the social reality manifest in time and space. Marcuse continued:
‘The division between phenomenon and thing-in-itsclf does not
create two essentially different objective domains, but rather posits
one and the same domain of being [Seinsgebiet]: reality as the
correlate of experience.’*48 Far from challenging the neo-Kantians’
creation of a transcendent philosophical (ontological) basis for social
criticism, he charged them with the failure to do so.
If the nco-Kantian Marxists had reduced reality to the (a-
historical) conditions of possible knowledge of it, Karl Mannheim’s
Ideology and Utopia, which appeared in 1929, committed the inverse
error: knowledge was stripped of its possible autonomy and reduced
to a mere reflection of reified social processes. Marcuse did not slight
the accomplishment of Mannheim’s important work, for the
historicization of knowledge restored to social theory the practical,
material dimension that had been closed off by Adler and
Vorlander. Still, by relativizing knowledge, Mannheim had denied
himself access to the ‘external’ plane of criticism revealed by
phenomenological ontology. Following Heidegger, Marcuse main­
tained the conception of a trans-historical ‘fundamental structure’ of
human being, to which corresponds a transcendent dimension of
truth: ‘As factical realizations, all historical situations are only
historical transformations of such fundamental structures \Grund~
strukturen], which are realized in different ways in any order of life
. . . Truth and falsehood would in that case lie in the relation of the
factical realization to such fundamental structures.’49 Concrete
Philosophy was defined in terms of this ‘linkage’.
If Concrete Philosophy was not to have a strangely metaphysical
cast, then, it would be necessary to address the substance of these

part 2, pp. 304-326, reprinted in Schriflen, 1, p. 449. 'I'his essay was a lengthy
critique of Adler’s Kant und der Marxtsinus (1904) and other writings. Marcuse had
confronted Vorlander’s work in the previous year: cf. his ‘Besprechung von Karl
Vorlander: Karl Marx, sem Leben und sem Wtrk\ in Die Geseltscha/l, vol. vi, part 2
(1929), pp. 186-9.
48. Ibid., p. 452. Although the Kantian doctrine of moral autonomy rendered
neo-Kantianism ‘useless for the purposes of fascism’ (the standard is Benjamin’s),
the latter-day collaboration of Marx and Kant does not appear to have produced
lasting theoretical - not to say practical - results. Cf. Tom Bottomore and Patrick
Goode, eds., Austro-Marxism, Oxford 1978, esp. p. I5f; Willey; for an appraisal of
Adler, cf. William Johnston, The Austrian Mind, Berkeley and Los Angeles 1972,
pp. 109-11.
49. Marcuse, ‘Zur Wahrhcitsproblematik der soziologischcn Methode’, in Die
essential ontological ‘structures’ that are held to underlie a ‘trans­
cendent dimension of truth’. In this task Marcuse was to be
immeasurably assisted by the researches of his fellow student
Siegfried Landshut. In 1932, Landshut and J. P. Mayer published
Marx’s recently discovered Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of
1844, an event which has proved to be decisive for subsequent
Marxist studies.50 In Marcuse’s interpretation, the Manuscripts
provided conclusive proof that philosophy discloses the true basis for
a theory of revolution, and even more startling, they revealed that
Marx had constructed the critique of political economy upon
foundations that had been laid by ontological investigations. Almost
with a tone of disbelief, Marcuse wrote: ‘Marx’s positive definitions
of labour are almost all given as counter-concepts to the definition
of alienated labour, and yet the ontological nature of this concept is
clearly expressed in them.’51 Labour was not simply one human
activity among others for Marx - it was ‘grasped as the real
expression and realization of the human essence’.52
Marcuse’s argument followed the lead provided by Marx in his
transformation of Hegel’s concept of labour (Arbeit). In the Phenomen­
ology of Mind Hegel had expounded an ontological conception
according to which labour, broadly conceived as man’s historical
self-objectification, defined the essence and the existence of human
being-in-the-world. For Marcuse, Marx’s decisive achievement in
the Paris Manuscripts was to have identified the political content of
Hegel’s pivotal philosophical categories (alienation, objectification)

Gesellschaft, vol. vi, part 2 (1929), p. 369. Cf. also Martin Jay: ‘there is - and here
Marcuse the Heideggerian was speaking - a transcendent dimension to truth.
Historical facticity was part of a deeper structured reality which had to serve as
the final court of appeal for the validity of a theory in the long run.’ (‘The
Frankfurt School’s Critique of Karl Mannheim and the Sociology of Knowledge’,
Telos, 20, summer 1974, p. 80.)
50. Mark Poster transmits the claim that Heidegger had a hand in editing the
Manuscripts (Existential Marxism in Post-war France, Princeton 1975, p. 222, n. 25).
51. Marcuse responded almost instantaneously to the publication of the Manuscripts,
which he immediately recognized as ‘a crucial event in the history of Marxist
studies’. His review, ‘Neue Qucllen zur Grundlegung des historischen Materialise
mus’, appeared in Die Gesellschaft, vol. ix, part 2, pp. 136-74, reprinted in Schriften,
I, trails. “The Foundations of Historical Materialism’, by Joris dc Bres in
Marcuse, Studies in Critical Philosophy, Boston 1972; this passage appears on p.
13/519. It might be noted that Marcuse continued to hold to this ‘ontological’
interpretation of Marx; cf., for example, his comments to Olafson (p. 31) and
Habermas (pp. 10-11).
52. Marcuse, ‘The Foundations of Historical Materialism’, p. 12/518.
 Heidegger and Concrete Philosophy (1 9 2 8 -1 9 3 2 ) 77

while preserving the philosophical (ontological) conception of

labour in his critique. Labour is not simply or even primarily an
economic activity, which might be contrasted with other activities
(play, for example, or intellectual work) as in the manner of
bourgeois political economy; it is rather the fundamental event in
human existence, the condition of genuine individuation, ‘that in
which every single activity is founded and to which [it] again
return[s]\53 It follows that the emancipation of human beings as such
demands, as a prelude to total revolution, the overthrow of capitalist
economic relations.
The revolutionary critique of political economy is thus founded
upon a philosophical interpretation of human existence and its
potentialities, and a political analysis of their negation under the
historical conditions of alienated labour. With this achievement, the
demands made upon a dialectical phenomenology appeared to have
been met: the linking of the human essence with the material
conditions of its existence: ‘For Marx, essence and facticity, the
situation of essential history, are no longer separate regions or levels
independent of each other: the historical appearance of man is taken
up into the definition of his essence . . . which can be defined in history,
and only in history.’54 Not surprisingly, it is precisely at this point in
Marcuse’s work that the influence of Heidegger begins to recede;
Heideggerian categories would recur over the years - the existential
theory' of the meaning of death, and the analysis of the structure of
aesthetic perception - but from this point on his philosophical
function was supplanted by the insight of the young Marx.
Marcuse found in Karl Marx the radical ontology he had sought
in Martin Heidegger. The 1844 Manuscripts gave him a way to look
(ontologically) at the whole human being, to allow his critical gaze
to sec through and beyond the fragmentation of life in class society
and the false individuation of the labour process; on the other side
of capitalism - and of bourgeois political economy - lay a vision
of what Marx himself repeatedly called ‘the human essence’,
man’s ‘essential being’. Only when the still-abstract ‘species-being’
53. Marcuse, ‘Uber die philosophischen Grundlagcn dcs wirtschaftswissenschaftli-
chcn Arbcitsbegrifs’, in Archiv fur Sozialwisstnschaft und Sozialpohtik (Tubingen
1933), vol. 69, no. 3, pp. 257-92; reprinted in Schriftrn, I, trans. ‘On the
Philosophical Foundation of the Concept of Labour in Economics’, Trios, >6
(summer 1973), p. 13/562.
54. Marcuse, ‘The Foundations of Historical Materialism’, p. 2H/535 (emphasis
original).
78

(Gattungswesen) of the individual is portrayed against the real

alienation of the labour process of capitalist society could Marcuse’s
Concrete Philosophy become truly concrete.55
Marcuse attempted to press beyond even the radical standpoint
of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, however. Departing once
and for all from the terrain of any possible Marxist orthodoxy, he
extended the conception of the ontological centrality of labour into
a standard against which all Tactical’ historical configurations
might be judged and condemned: ‘Being human is always “more”
than its present existence. It goes beyond ever)' possible historical
situation and precisely because of this there is always an inelimina-
ble discrepancy between the two: a discrepancy that demands
constant labour for its overcoming, even though human existence
can never rest in possession of itself and of its world.’56 The
perpetual need for labour, and thus its ontological centrality, is
based upon the conception of an ‘essential excess of Being over
existence’,57 of an essential dimension of human being which can
never attain fulfilment in the historical world. As such, it provides the
ontological foundations for a transcendent political critique, for a
‘permanent revolution’ in a sense much nearer to Goethe’s Faust
than to the European proletariat:

Werd ich zum Augenblick sagen:

Verweilc doch! Du bist so schon!
Dann magst du mir in Fesseln schlagen,
Dann will ich gern Zugrunde gehn.58

Like Faust, Marcuse’s philosophical standpoint builds in a funda­

mental irreconcilability with the prevailing reality principle, with
the established society (as two of his later formulations would have
it); he has laid the ontological foundations for a truly great refusal.

55. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, esp. the section on ‘estranged
labour’ at the end of the first manuscript, passim.
5G. Marcuse, ‘On the Philosophical Foundations of the Concept of Labour in
Economics’, p. 22/575.
57. ‘Dieser wesentliche Uberschuss des Seins iibcr das Dasein . . .’, ibid.
58. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust I, II. 1699-1702; (my translation: ‘Should I
to any moment say: Linger on! Thou art so sweet! Then must you fasten me in
chains, Then my end I gladly meet.’) Goethe remained one of Marcuse’s great
reference points throughout his life.
 Hetdegger and Concrete Ph ilosophy (1 9 2 8 -1 9 3 2 ) 79

The immediate historical situation did in fact call attention to

the European proletariat, however, and systematic reflection upon
his own political obligations as a Marxist philosopher comprised a
second theme which ran through Marcuse’s writings of the late
twenties and early thirties, alongside the ontological investigation.
By that time the powerful German Communist Party had long since
submitted to the doctrinal hegemony of the Soviet Union where the
drive towards ‘permanent revolution’ had been supplanted by the
consolidation of ‘socialism in one country’, the unprecedented
regimentation of labour contrasted sharply with its professed
emancipation, and, in Germany, the denunciation of the ‘social
fascism’ of the S p d had replaced the dream of a United Front. The
Social Democrats, on the other hand, continued to cling to the
prestige of their parliamentary successes of 1928, restricting their
demands to modest questions of political and economic reform.59
Against this background, Marcuse understood that Marx’s
insight into the ontological realm of freedom beyond the mere legal
suppression of private property or the extension of electoral
representation was no mere ‘spinning of intellectual webs’: ‘Indeed,
the generally insufficient gravity and lack of seriousness of vulgar
Marxism in its attitude towards philosophy signifies very much
more than merely a theoretical error: namely, it tears asunder the
unity of theory and practice that is decisive for the (theoretical and
practical) class struggle. This rupture is not only arbitrary and
erroneous, but rather is grounded in its turn in the changed
situation of the socialist parties within the changed social situation
generally.’60* The exclusion of the philosophical underpinning,
which the 1844 Manuscripts had revealed as Marx’s route to the
theory of revolutionary socialism, was being expressed in concrete
political decisions that would prove disastrous equally in their
failure (Germany) and in their success (the Soviet Union).
At this critical juncture in European history, when the Great

59. On German Communism and ihc programme of the Comintern, now firmly
under the control of Stalin, cf. the relevant sections of Gustav Hilger and Alfred
G. Meyer, The Incompatible Allies, New York 1953, Kcrmit McKenzie, Comintern
and World Revolution. 1928-1943, New York 19(54, and Louis Fischer, Russia’s Road
from Peace to War, New York 19(59. On the parliamentary program of the SPD
between 1928 and the end, cf. Erich Eyck, vol. 2, and S. William Halpering.
60. Marcuse, ‘Das Problem der geschichtlichen Wirklichkeit’, in Die Gesellschafl,
Berlin 1931, part, 1, pp. 350-67, reprinted in Schnflen, I, p. 469; this in the
context of remarks on Karl Korsch’s Marxismus und Phtlosophie.
80

Depression had destroyed the ‘unshakable foundations of the

Republic’ which had so recently been celebrated, it had become
clear to Marcuse and many other leftist intellectuals that fascism
was now in the ascendant, and that the force in German society
most likely to be able to disarm it was a unified socialist movement;
the elaboration of a theoretical basis for socialist unity, founded
upon philosophy rather than strategy, had, in such circumstances,
become a difficult priority to defend. Marcuse began by declaring
his debt to the Greeks, who were the first in the Western world to
define theory as the highest mode of praxis: ‘We are inclined’, he
wrote, ‘(although no longer with such a good conscience!) to
maintain this hierarchical order.’61
The parenthetical ambivalence expressed in this remark reflects
one of the few points in his life at which the defence faltered.
Marcuse had consistently maintained an aggressive stance on the
importance of theoretical reflection, for spontaneous or even
‘tactical’ political activism was bound to be co-opted, whereas ‘the
truths of philosophy are not grounded in facticity, even if it is
factical Dasein that must carry them out’.62 The conception of a
Concrete Philosophy, however, carried with it special obligations: it
is not permitted to remain abstract, but has for its task ‘the scrutiny
of every moment of existence: to favour those which represent a
movement toward the truth, and to hinder those which lead toward
fallen modes of existence’.63 Nor does advocacy alone entirely fulfil
the mandate of Concrete Philosophy, for the existential conditions
that engage philosophy are also political conditions. Recognizing
this, the philosopher ‘who deserves the name’ must be prepared to
throw the full weight of his life into the struggle in the public
domain for the transformation of existence: in the manner of
Socrates, Plato, and Kierkegaard.64
Herbert Marcuse, however, was somewhat less immersed in the
61. Marcuse, ‘On ihc Philosophical Foundations of the Concept of Labour in
Economics’, p. 31/587.
62. Marcuse, ‘Ubcr konkretc Philosophic’, p. 397. Though the conceptions expressed
are continuous, the Heideggerian language of this passage (written in 1929)
contrasts sharply with that of his essays written under the influence of Marx’s
1844 Aianuscripls.
63. Ibid.
64 'Ih V " iconoclaslic mission o f Kierkegaard described by Marcuse (ibid
pp. 400-J) sounds very much like that of the outcast figure of the artist of the
m PcrPctual struggle against 'the life-forms of the surrounding
 Heidegger and Concrete Philosophy (1 9 2 8 -1 9 3 2 ) 81

public sphere. Although the German universities had been strong­

holds of conservative-nationalist sentiment throughout the nine­
teenth century and well into the ‘liberal’ Weimar period, and the
National-sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (founded in 1926 behind
the slogan, ‘With the State Against the Professors’) had gained
control of the national student movement and of many universities
as early as the semester of 1930-31,65 Freiburg was subject to the
moderating influence of the Catholic student Kartelluerband (allied to
the Centre Party) and remained relatively quiet. Where the issue of
academic freedom appeared to be involved, Marcuse would attend
such political demonstrations as did take place at the university, but
most of his final years in Germany were taken up with the
preparation of his major interpretation of Hegel, which he had once
hoped would qualify him for an academic career.

Hegel's Ontology and the Foundations of a Theory of Historicality is

clearly not in the spirit of Marx’s critique of Hegel - it is, of course,
indebted to the teaching of Heidegger, and conveys this indebted­
ness explicitly, as also in its language and philosophical categories.66
Further, the texts which it analyses - Hegel’s early theological
writings, the Phenomenology of Mind, and the Science of Logic - are those
which at first approach seem most distantly removed from political
concerns. Even so, it may well be excessive to state that in Hegel's
Ontology Marcuse ‘interrogates Hegel from a perspective scarcely
reconcilable’ with that of his later work,67 for although it is cast in

65. Cf. Wolfgang Zorn, ‘Student Politics in the Weimar Republic’, in the Journal of
Contemporary History, vol. v, no. 1 (1970), pp. 128-43; also Hans Peter Bleuel and
Ernst KJinnert, Deutsche Studenten auf dem Weg ms Dntte Reich, Giitersloh 1967.
66. Herbert Marcuse, Hegels Onlologie und die Grundlegung ewer Theorie der Geschichtlich-
keit, Frankfurt 1932; my translations are from the third edition of 1976. The book
was to have been Marcuse’s Habilitationsschnft, the scholarly publication prerequi­
site to an academic position. Interest in Hegels Onlologie has, unfortunately, been
confined to specialists, but there is a summary discussion of it by Jcan-Michel
Palmier in his enormous tome, Herbert Marcuse el la nouvelle gauche, Paris 1973, pp.
42-54 and 90-5. Palmier considers it less in its own intellectual-historical context
than in contrast with Marcuse’s later Reason and Revolution (1941): ‘En I’interro-
gcant ici, nous n’avons aucunement 1’intention de discutcr en detail I’interpreta-
tion que donne Marcuse du systeme hegelien, mais plutot dc souligner ce qui
oppose ces deux interpretations dc Hegel’, the one ‘Hcideggerian’ and the latter
‘Marxist’ (p. 42). Paul Robinson mentions it very briefly in The Freudian Left, New
York 1969, pp. 154-5.
67. Palmier, p. 91. Palmier maintains that a ‘decisive rupture’ separates Hegels
Onlologie from the rest of Marcuse’s work.
82

the expository form mandated by the academic conventions of the

H abilitationsschrijl , it in fact contains virtually all the concepts that
powered the revolutionary Concrete Philosophy.
To recognize its political implications, one need only recall the
prominence of academic and Marxist neo-Kantianism in the
preceding decades: the duality of subject and object, which lay at
the heart of the Kantian system, had appeared to Marcuse to
promote a philosophical impasse with direct political overtones, and
Hegel’s resolution of this state of alienation in the concept of the
verlebendigte Welt, an objective world penetrated by subjectivity,
pressed him toward a critique of the divided world within which
Kantianism survived. The critical transformation of Kantian
metaphysics indeed proves to be one of the principal themes of
Marcuse’s analysis, which demonstrates the way in which Hegel
raised the hitherto epistemological schism of subject and object, self
and other, finitude and infinitude to fully ontological status: the
unification of these ‘moments of Being’ is shown to lie in the concept
of life - practical human activity - and ‘not in some sort of pure
apperception’; its ground is always history ^
Throughout his analysis of the evolution of Hegel’s early
thought, Marcuse stressed this grounding in and commitment to the
concrete historical world and its modes of material life. ‘Das Wesen,
he writes, ‘muss erscheinen’69 - the concern of the Hegelian ontology
ultimately rests neither with abstract human ‘essence’ nor with the
transitory forms in which it ‘appears’, but precisely in the historical
modes of their interdependence. Despite his Heideggerian propensi­
ty to permit the analysis to drift to an abstract dimension of pure
Being, the fact that Marcuse always renders this interrelation as a
dynamic process - Bewegtheit, the ‘being-in-motion’ of life which
partakes of both ontological essence and historical existence -
already presses at the limits of static existential ontology.
More broadly significant, however, is Marcuse’s abiding interest
in the overall conception of Hegelian philosophy: ‘the task of
philosophy, as Hegel conceives it, arises from a necessity, a need of
human life in a determinate historical situation: the situation of
division’.70 The ‘situation of division’ - so clearly reminiscent of the
‘problematic civilization’ he had seized upon ten years earlier in his
68. Marcuse, Hegtls Onlologie, p. 303.
69. Ibid., p. 91 (quoting Hegel).
70. Ibid., p. 18.
 Heidegger and Concrete Philosophy ( 19 2 8 -1 9 3 2 ) 83

reading of the early Lukacs - is for Hegel an ontological principle of

human existence. The unifying power of philosophy, in conjunction
with creative human praxis, confronts the objective (objectified)
world, and the Being-in-motion (Bewegtheit) towards the resolution of
this alienation constitutes the dialectic of history. The ‘end’ of this
process - expressed in the central ontological concept of Sich-
selbstgleichheit-im-Andersein (selfsameness-in-otherness)71 - is the over­
coming of the division between subjectivity and objectivity, actuali­
ty and potentiality, abstract (ontological) essence and concrete
(historical) existence. The pursuit of this ‘Reich der Freiheit\ in its
various guises from Hegel’s earliest theological writings throughout
the Phenomenology of Mind and the Logic, is really the structural theme
of HegeVs Ontology, and this overarching concern with human
freedom links it with the larger contours of Marcuse’s thought.
M arcuse’s interpretation does in fact permit the anti-
metaphysical possibilities of Hegel’s thought to survive, even if the
radicalization of the idealist synthesis would not be completed for
another decade (by which time the existential ontology of Heidegger
would have long been supplanted by that of the young Marx). In
focusing upon the ‘two-dimensionality’ (Zweidimensionalitat) of
Hegel’s ontology, he stresses that ontological essence and historical
fact ‘are not two independent “worlds”, for-themselves and posited
in isolation, which will ultimately be brought into a relation with
one another, but rather, dimensions of Being’ which only have
existence in their unity.72 His demonstration of the actual and
potential ‘dimensions of Being’ has a fundamental philosophical
meaning that is also a political meaning: ‘the opposition thus
presupposes for its part a prior signification which is its ground, an
originary synthesis (!) which is the “measure” of all comparison and
of all opposition.’73 This notion of a permanent, transcendent
standard of criticism, a trans-historical ‘measure of all comparison
and of all opposition’, has already been identified as a distinctive
feature of Marcuse’s thought.

71. This is the language of Hegel’s Science of Logic (1812-16); this pivotal concept is
illuminated with great lucidity by Albert Hofstadter, 'Ownness and Identity:
Rethinking Hegel’, in The Review of Metaphysics, vol. xxviii, no. 4 (June 1975), pp.
681-97.
72. Marcuse, Hegels Ontologie, pp. 84-5. There is evidently much more than a
terminological continuity with his famous analysis of the fractured totality of
‘one-dimensional’ society (1963).
73. Ibid., p. 236 (punctuation original).
84

But there is discontinuity as well. In his later years of internation­

al recognition, Marcuse always tried to deflect attention away from
his own intellectual accomplishment (usually by disparaging the
opposition, for, as Marx had once quipped, on the level plain even
anthills look like mountains). As an ambitious young scholar,
however, he submitted to no such restraint: when his family visited
Freiburg to celebrate the publication of Hegel's Ontology, he climbed
onto the base of a statue and announced to his incredulous visitors,
‘I ch bin B e d e u t e n d !’ - ‘Now I’m somebody!’
It is the scepticism engendered by the book itself, of course, that is
more significant. The manifestly expository format and Hcidegger-
ian categories of Hegel's Ontology caused leftist reviewers to wonder
about the politics of the young scholar whose writings had thus far
appeared in the official Social Democratic press and other even
more mainstream philosophical journals.74 From Frankfurt, Theo­
dor Adorno chided Marcuse, ‘who usually holds onto Heidegger’s
public dogma with the rigour of a disciple’, but acknowledged that
a decisive and promising revision had begun to take place.75
Marcuse now ‘inclined from the “meaning of Being” to the
disclosure of beings; from fundamental ontology to philosophy of
history; from historicality to history’.76 Although Adorno did not
suppress the wish that the link with the philosophical dimension of
ontology might have been severed altogether (rather than simply
grounded in concrete history and historical praxis), he and his
colleagues of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research were
interested.
This was fortunate, because Marcuse’s academic career was
about to end before it had begun. Hegel's Ontology had been accepted
by Heidegger’s publisher, Klostermann, but he never formally
submitted it to Heidegger himself, and the latter probably never
read it. By 1932 the academic Habilitationsschrifl seemed a useless
formality to Marcuse: he was Jewish and a Marxist, and the Nazis,
with 230 deputies in the Reichstag, thousands of SA-men in the
streets, and millions of unemployed supporters throughout the
74. Such reservations were recalled by Leo Lbwenthal in conversation. The Archivjur
SozialwissenschaJi und Sazialpolitik, for example, was founded by Max Weber and
Werner Sombart.
75. Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno, ‘Besprechung von Herbert Marcuse’s Hrgtis
Ontologie\ in Ztilschrifl fur Sozialforschunt’ (Frankfurt-am-Main 1932), Band 1, p
409. ‘
76. Ibid., pp. 409- 10.
 Heidegger and Concrete Philosophy (1 9 2 8 -1 9 3 2 ,) 85

country, were preparing to take over the fate of Germany.

Heidegger, at this time, appears to have revealed nothing of his
political sensibilities: no anti-semitism or pro-Nazi sympathies have
been reported in his personal life or in the execution of his academic
duties, and his conduct remained entirely unpolitical. Relations
between the professor and his radical Privatdozent never broke down,
and toward the very end of the Republican era, Marcuse was even
entrusted with a delicate mission: Heidegger was to be offered the
historic Fichte-Hegel-Schclling Chair at the University of Berlin,
and Marcuse was asked by a friend in the Prussian Ministry of
Education to act as intermediary! Heidegger, of course, declined this
and subsequent calls, but whether this was because his celebrated
Nalurgefuhl rooted him in his Black Forest environment, or because
he too anticipated that the government that had made him the offer
would fall, cannot now be known. Heidegger’s notorious entry into
the Nazi Party as Rector of Freiburg University took place during
the Revolution-Semester (spring 1933), by which time Marcuse and his
family had already been safely out of the country for several
months. The news came as a complete shock.77
Marcuse’s cordial relations with Husserl, however, were never
rendered uncertain. Their acquaintance extended as far back as
Marcuse’s outstanding defence of his Kunstlerroman dissertation
before Husserl and other members of the Freiburg faculty in 1922,
and he would periodically visit the Husserls in their apartment on
the Lorettestrasse while he was working on the Hegel book. They
evidently regarded one another with mutual esteem, and it is very
likely that it was Husserl who interceded on his behalf, recommend­
ing Marcuse to his friend Kurt Riezler, a prominent Weimar

77. Most of the preceding details emerged in conversation with HM. 1 have omitted
details of ‘der Pall Heidegger’ and discussion of the difficult problem of the
relation between his philosophical ideas and his political disgrace, for I am
satisfied that all of the events in question took place following Marcuse’s
emigration and did not directly affect him. Further, it was only later that he
began to reflect on the vulnerability of Heidegger’s thought: ‘Now, from personal
experience I can tell you that neither in his lectures, nor in his seminars, nor
personally was there any hint of his sympathies toward Nazism . . . So his openly
declared Nazism came as a complete surprise to us.’ (Olafson, p. 32). I hough I
cannot entirely follow the somewhat apologetic tone of his conclusions, the most
comprehensive single source on the Heidegger case is undoubtedly Karl August
Moehling, ‘Heidegger and the Nazis’, unpublished dissertation (De Kalb 1972).
The fullest primary documentation is to be found in Guido Schnceberger,
Nachtese zu Heidegger: Dokumenle zu seiner/i Leben und Denken, Berne 1962.
86

political figure and educator, then Kurator of the University of

Frankfurt.78 Marcuse was already known to Riezlcr, and to Max
Horkhcimer, director of the neo-Marxist Institute for Social
Research affiliated with the university, and so, out of this network of
interconnections, Leo Lowenthal was sent to Freiburg to interview
Marcuse. Their discussions initiated a life-long friendship, and a
confirmation from Horkheimer and Friedrich Pollock resulted in an
invitation for the Freiburg philosopher to enter the Frankfurt
Institute.
At the time of the onset of the Great Depression in Germany, the
Institute had undertaken an empirical survey of skilled and
unskilled workers in the Rhineland and Westphalia, and its
researchers had been shocked to find, underneath the ‘overt’
attitudes of good democrats, the ‘covert’ psychological profile of the
passive authoritarian character. They conjectured that this would
mean that little resistance could be expected, fears that were
heightened by the Nazi victories in the elections of the first
depression year, in September 1930. Since 1931, then, ‘when the
clouds had already begun to gather',79 they had begun preparing
their evacuation, gradually shifting the Institute’s activities to its
Swiss branch.
The imminent danger had already touched Marcuse personally
as well: in Berlin, the family chauffeur had just left the service of his
father, joined the SS, and become Gocbbels’s private driver.
Although Marcuse had never been a particularly astute forecaster of
political developments, the signs of the coming catastrophe were
clear enough, and he immediately accepted his new assignment to
the Geneva office. He left Germany with his family several weeks
before Hitler was named Chancellor.

78. Some interesting remarks about Riezler’s relations with Horkheimer, Heidegger,
and others arc to be found in Riezler’s published diaries; cf. Kurt Riczler,
Tagebucher-Aufsatze-Dokumente, Eingeleitet u. hrsg. von. Karl Dietrich Erdmann,
Gottingen 1972, esp. pp. 143-53.
79. International Institute for Social Research: 7 en Years on Morningside Heights. A
Report on the Institute's History 1934 to 1944 (n.p., n.d.), p. 2. The summary of the
Institute’s 1929-30 survey was provided by Leo Lowenthal.
 87

3
H orkheim er and
C ritical T heory
(1933-1941)

From Freiburg, Marcuse and his family went first to Zurich; by the
time they resettled in Geneva, six months later, the consolidation of
the one-party state and the ‘coordination’ (Gleichschallung) of social
and political life in Germany was practically complete. While still in
Switzerland, Marcuse wrote the last of his pieces to be published in
Germany for decades, a brief study of the fate of Karl Jaspers’s
‘philosophy of foundering’: ‘All talk of historicality remains abstract
and detached as long as the wholly concrete, “material” situation is
not stressed . . . From the very outset, this Existenzphilosophie has the
potential to sanction as “historical” any situation of Being [Dasein\7l
Against the unnamed backdrop of German fascism, which survived
behind ‘the transcendence that transcends all determinate beings’,12
Marcuse initiated a sober reappraisal of his search for an Archime­
dean standpoint.
Of necessity, his philosophical criticism was to become increas­
ingly allied to a pragmatic political criticism directed towards the
existing situation in Europe. Like many of his new colleagues in the
exiled Institute of Social Research, Marcuse had no illusions that
National Socialism would prove to be a transitory ‘stage’ or that
after an initial outburst of violence and bellicosity it would spend its
fury. A few days before the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ consolidated
Hitler’s total dictatorship, Marcuse finally left Europe. He arrived
in New York on Independence Day 1934, and - speaking 'em bisschen
En^liscE - immediately took out American naturalization papers.

1. HJcrbcrt] M[arcuscj, ‘Philosophic des Scheiterns. Karl Jaspers Wcrk’, Unterhal-

lungsblatl da Vossnchen Zeilung, Number 339, 14 December, 1933, p. 6. Three
months later this historic liberal newspaper - founded in 1704 and owned by the
Jewish House of Ullslcin - was forced out of business, one of the first victims of
the Reich Press Law of October 1933.
2. Ibid.
88

It has been said that ‘the history of National Socialism is the

history of its underestimation’,3 a charge that applied to political
parties and trade unions in Germany, as much as to foreign
diplomats and journalists. The newly renamed International Insti­
tute of Social Research, to the contrary, regarded the processes of
authoritarian rule and obedience as the central phenomena of
modern times. From 1931, once the directorship of the Institute had
passed to the Frankfurt social philosopher Max Horkheimer,
virtually all its intellectual resources were channelled into the study
of the sources of authoritarianism. Following the terminology
proposed by Horkheimer in a seminal essay of 1937, the set of
theoretical assumptions that guided their collective researches
became known as Critical Theory, and its elaboration as an
alternative to the currents of thought underlying the authoritarian
state was Marcuse’s main contribution to their work.
In Germany, the Institute had been affiliated with the University
of Frankfurt-am-Main, and in the purge of spring 1933, which saw
the dismissal of nearly one-third of the latter’s faculty, it was finally
closed by the Nazis ‘for tendencies hostile to the state’. It had come
to function by this time on a distinctively collaborative basis, and
this legacy was preserved when its membership largely reassembled
in New York - via Geneva, Paris, and London - as guests of
Columbia University.4 One of their public relations statements
reported: ‘It has been a standard practice of the Institute, since the
Frankfurt days, to meet regularly for discussion of the various
problems arising out of separate branches of investigation. Every
contribution by any member of the staff has, prior to publication,
had the advantage of frequent discussion and criticism by members
representing different disciplines. Thus the Institute has constantly
been a collective entity and not merely a more-or-less artificial and

3. Karl Dietrich Bracher, The German Dictatorship, New York 1970, p. 199.
4. For the origins of the Institut fur Sozialforschung, and details of its subsequent
history in New York (as the International Institute of Social Research) I have
drawn upon three of its own reports: ‘IISR. A Short Description of its History
and Aims’, New York 1935; ‘IISR. A Report on its History, Aims, and Activities,
1933-1938’, New York 1938; ‘IISR. Ten Years on Morningside Heights. A
Report on the Institute’s History, 1934-1944’, (unpub., 1944, in U. C. Berkeley
collection). Indispensable is Martin Jay’s The Dialectical Imagination. A History of
the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950, New York 1973; cf.
also Phil Slater’s Origin and Significance of the Frankfurt School. A Marxist Perspective,
London 1977; for an ‘institutional’ perspective, cf. Helmut Dubicl, Wissenschafts-
organisation undpolitische Erfahrung, Frankfurt 1978.
 Horkheimer and Critical Theory ( / 9 3 3 -1 9 4 1 ) 89

haphazard gathering of scientists working in related fields.’5 Indeed,

when the Institute’s finances fell on hard times after the start of the
war, and it was forced to request outside grants to maintain the
§4,200 salaries of Marcuse and Franz Neumann, applications were
based on the claim that should either of the two permanent
associates have to seek outside employment, his departure ‘would
greatly disrupt the cooperative work of the Institute which requires
the full activity of each of its staff members’.6
Consequently, Marcuse’s work during this period cannot be
considered in isolation. To be sure, the progressive development of
his thought continued in its course, but just as it had adopted
Heideggerian categories in Freiburg, it was now shaped by the
priorities of the exiled Frankfurt Institute under the leadership of
Horkheimer. It is possible to follow the ‘inner’ movement of
Marcuse’s thought only by first accounting for his contribution to
their collective projects.

The primary activity of the Institute was the publication of its

German-language journal, the Zeitschrifl fur Sozialforschung, in which
a comprehensive analysis of the dominant trends in social thought
and practice was undertaken.7 As the ‘resident philosopher’ in this
period, Marcuse was assigned the task of reviewing current literature
in the various fields of European philosophy. This otherwise
unexceptional duty is worth mentioning both because it frequently
constituted his major activity - he often treated dozens of books in a
volume - and because the course of his reviews vividly documents
the disintegration of intellectual life in Nazi Germany.
Professors in the German universities had historically been
regarded as public officials, and the basic ‘Act for the Reform of the
Civil Service’, promulgated on 7 April 1933, led to the dismissal of
over 1,600 Jewish, leftist, and republican scholars in the first year of

5. ‘1SSR. Ten Years on Morningsidc Heights’, p. 10.

6. Letter from Asst. Director Friedrich Pollock to Stephen Duggan, Chairman of
the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars, 7 June 1941;
files in Archives of N. Y. Public Library.
7. Paris, vols. I-VIII, 2 (1932-39) hereafter ZJS; continued in English as Studies in
Philosophy and Social Science, vols. VIII, 3-IX , 3 (1939-41), hereafter SPSS.
yu

its operation. In the resulting ‘intellectual migration’ from Central

Europe, unprecedented in modern times, the German universities
were decimated - a price acknowledged by Hitler, who nonetheless
declared his willingness to pay it - and the philosophical work that
survived was frequently a disgrace to an almost legendary heritage
of scholarly intelligence and imagination.® The range of options left
to those who remained was reflected in the very tones in which
Marcuse reviewed a decade of philosophical writing under National
Socialism.
Those scholars who undertook an ‘internal migration’ were often
accorded a generous measure of sympathetic respect, as in his
collective consideration of a dozen seemingly unrelated studies in
the history of philosophy which, he wrote, ‘is perhaps justified today
by the fact that in these works the interpretation is not determined
by an accommodation to the ideology of the authoritarian state, but
rather by the attempt at an objective treatment of their topics’.89
Passive resistance easily merged into acquiescence, however, as
Marcuse intimated in his review of a new edition of Aquinas and
related modern texts: ‘The three Catholic publications appear as a
grossly apologetic literature: the present attack against Christianity
is answered with the secure and self-confident demonstration of
what the Christian culture of the West has been.’10 And outright
intellectual capitulation could be met with bitter sarcasm: ‘The
following works serve as representative publications of German
psychology in the present time. This fact, and not the scientific

8. To the protests of Max Planck, President of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society for the
Advancement of Science, Hitler is reported to have replied, ‘If the dismissal of
Jewish scientists [read ‘scholars’) means the annihilation of contemporary
German science, we shall do without science for a few years.’ Cited in E. Y.
Hartshorne, The German Universities and National Socialism, Cambridge 1937, pp.
111-2. Cf. also Bracher, pp. 266-72. Some relevant studies of the emigration:
Norman Bentwich, The Rescue and Achievement of the Refugee Scholars, The Hague
1953; Robert Boyers, cd., The Legacy of the German Refugee Intellectuals, New York
1972; Stephen Duggan and Betty Drury, The Rescue of Science and Learning, New
York 1952; Laura Fermi, Illustrious Immigrants, Chicago 1968; D. Fleming and B.
Bailyn, The Intellectual Migration, Cambridge 1969; Kurt Grossman, Emigration: Die
Geschichte der IIitler-Fluchthnge, Frankfurt a.M. 1969; H. Stuart Hughes, The Sea
Change, New York 1975; Franz Neumann el al., The Cultural Migration, Philadel­
phia 1953; Helge Pross, Deutsche akademische Emigration, Berlin 1955; Joachim
Kadkau, Die deutsche Emigration in den USA, Diisseldorf 1971.
9. Herbert Marcuse, ‘Besprechungen’, Zeitschriftfur Sozialforschung, Jahrgang V, Heft
3 (1936), p. 411.
10. ZfsSl, 1 (1936), pp. 109-10.
 Horkheimer and Critical Theory (1 9 3 3 -1 9 4 1 ) 91

value of the two publications, justifies a detailed examination.’11

Marcuse always recognized ‘the superhuman courage and loyal­
ty’ demanded of those intellectuals ‘who carry on their fight for
freedom in the authoritarian states’, 12 and as the violence in
Germany escalated, resignation before the apparatus of censorship,
intimidation, and dismissal was accordingly treated with generosity.
He reserved his most uncompromising condemnations for those
German thinkers whom he believed to have betrayed the intellectual
calling itself by their attempt ‘to make use of philosophy for the
current ideology of German fascism’:13 Carl Schmitt, whom he
attacked with particular severity, the right-wing nationalist Hans
Frcyer, and such outright Nazi propagandists as Erich Rothacker,
Ernst Krieck, and Franz Bohm.
In these polemical reviews for the Zeitschrift, Marcuse participat­
ed in the Institute’s ongoing confrontation with National Socialism
as it was expressed (or resisted) in works of logic, metaphysics, and
the history of philosophy. His more systematic argumentation took
place in his own essays for the journal; while juristic and socio­
economic aspects of the authoritarian state were analysed by Franz
Neumann, Otto Kirchhcimcr, and Friedrich Pollock, and its
cultural and psychological aspects by Adorno, Fromm, and
Lowenthal, Marcuse dealt primarily with its ideological underpin­
nings.
The collective nature of this undertaking is evident in Marcuse’s
work, which reflects the Institute’s characteristic analysis of fascism
as fundamentally continuous with its liberal past.14 The attack of
the new ‘heroic-folkish’ world-view on liberalism, he argued, is
understandably conducted on the ideological plane: analysis of the
deeper social and political realities reveals ‘the reason why the
total-authoritarian state diverts its struggle against liberalism into a
struggle of “Weltanschauungen”, why it bypasses the social structure
basic to liberalism: it is itself largely in accord with this basic
structure. The latter was characterized as the organization of society
through private enterprise on the basis of the recognition of private
property and the private initiative of the entrepreneur. And this

U. ZJ SV, 1 (1936), p. 121.

12. SPSS IX, 1 (1941), p. 147.
13. ZJS VII, 3 (1938), p. 406.
14. 'flic evolution of the views of the different members of the Institute on this
problem is traced in Jay, ch. 5.
92

very organization remains fundamental to the total-authoritarian

state.’15 The difference is that at the authoritarian (monopolistic)
stage of capitalism, the total mobilization of individual and
economy is required. In such conditions, the formal and indetermin­
ate character of even the most progressive ideas of the bourgeois era
renders them serviceable to the fascist state, or they are proven to
have been ideological masks for their opposites.
This analysis of the fate of the bourgeois heritage o f ‘progressive’
liberalism reflects the profound influence exerted upon Marcuse’s
thought by Max Horkheimer, his closest collaborator and the
member of the group to whom he acknowledged his greatest
intellectual debt. Above all, it was Horkheimer’s attempt to
construct a modern theory of rationality situated in ‘the unbridgea­
ble gulf between reality and reason’16 that constituted their
common ground. Horkheimer’s guiding conception - which would
recur throughout Marcuse’s own career - was that the battle against
forms of irrationalism conducted by the philosophical representa­
tives of the militant bourgeoisie was transformed in the course of the
consolidation of that class into a new irrationality, that is to say,
into a new rationalization of the existing order of social domination.
The ideological (and political) consequences of this process,
which would later be summarized as ‘the dialectic of enlighten­
ment’, were elaborated in the 1930s in Horkheimer’s philosophical
and historical studies in the Ztitschrift. Taken together with those of
Marcuse, they exemplify the distinctive brand of dialectical criti­
cism developed by the members of the ‘Frankfurt School’ in those
years: the dominant concepts of modern thought and ideology were
dismantled, traced back to the material circumstances in which they
originated (characteristically as the progressive requirements of an
ascending middle class), and then systematically reconstructed so as
to reveal their changed political functions in new circumstances.
The truth as well as the falsehood of the concepts that guide
philosophy, science, and social praxis is thus exposed, and their
ideological hold is loosened.
This philosophical analysis, which sought to substantiate the

15. Marcuse, ‘Der Kampf gegen den Liberalismus in der totalitarer Staatsauffas-
sung\ ZJS III, 1 (1934), trans. Jeremy Shapiro, ‘The Struggle Against Liberalism
in the Totalitarian View of the State’, in Marcuse, Negations, Boston 1968, p. 10.
16. Max Horkheimer, ‘Materialismus und Metaphysik’, ZJS II, 1 (1933), trans.
Matthew O ’ Connell et al., in Horkheimer, Critical Theory, New York 1972, p. 12.
 Horkheimer and Critical Theory (1 9 3 3 -1 9 4 1 ) 93

characteristic position of the Frankfurt School that ‘the turn from

the liberalist to the total-authoritarian state occurs within the
framework of a single social order’, 11 had its direct correlate in the
work of the second of the major influences on Marcuse in this
period, namely that of the Institute’s economist Friedrich Pollock,
who had proposed the concept o f ‘State capitalism’ in his contribu­
tion to the Frankfurt School’s analysis of fascism.1718 In brief outline,
Marcuse credited Pollock with the demonstration that what the
1930s witnessed was not the breakdown of the capitalist system, but
its consolidation at a higher level of organized planning, state
intervention, and authoritarian control of private economic initia­
tive: fascism did not signify the collapse of capitalism, but only of its
‘liberalist’ phase.1920It is clear that in their analyses of the transfer of
individual autonomy to ‘large-scale units’ and ultimately to the
state, Pollock and Marcuse were offering economic and philosophi­
cal descriptions of the same historical process.
In addition to his writings for the Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung,
Marcuse’s participation in two other collaborative undertakings
may be mentioned. In 1936, the Institute had been invited to offer
an annual course for the Extension Division of Columbia University
on ‘Authoritarian Doctrines and Institutions in Europe’. Here he
had the opportunity to present his findings in a more concrete
manner (his lectures included ‘The Individual and Modern Society’
and ‘State and Individual under National Socialism’) as part of a
collaborative presentation dealing with ‘the genesis of the authori­
tarian state in the history of modern society, analysed from
economic, psychological, sociological, juristic, and philosophical
viewpoints’.28 The most substantial of the Institute’s projects in this
period, however, in which the findings of philosophy were regarded
as integral, was the Studien uber Autorit'at und Familie, published in
1936. This was a massive multi-disciplinary project that sought to

17. Marcuse, ‘The Struggle Against Liberalism . . p. 19.

18. For a valuable survey of the largely neglected positions of the Institute’s
economists Henryk Grossman and Friedrich Pollock in the Frankfurt School’s
‘discussion of the collapse of the capitalist system’, cf. Giacomo Marramao,
‘Political Economy and Critical Theory’ Telos, 24 (summer 1975), pp. 56-80; also
Jay, csp. pp. 152-5.
19. Cf. especially Pollock’s essays, ‘Die gegenwartige Lagc des Kapitalismus und die
Aussichten eincr planwirtschaftlichen Neuordnung’, ZfS I, 1/2 (1938), and ‘State
Capitalism: Its Possibilities and Limitations’, SPSS IX, 2 (1941).
20. ‘IISR. A Report on its History, Aims, and Activities, 1933-1938’, p. 16; also
94

demonstrate the centrality of the institution of the family in

rendering the individual receptive to the influence of authority, and
assuring its renewal. To the sociological and psychoanalytical
frameworks, supplied by Horkheimer and Erich Fromm respective­
ly, Marcuse contributed a ‘History of Ideas’ section situating the
whole problematic within the evolution of the religious and
philosophical systems in which modern structures of authority have
their sources.21

A high degree of methodological self-consciousness informed

every stage of this undertaking, as was the case with most of the
Institute’s work. Indeed, Marcuse’s contribution to the elaboration
of a theoretical framework of dialectical social analysis - the ‘critical
theory’ of society - is perhaps the most enduring legacy of his
collective work with the Institute of Social Research. As a philo­
sopher grounded in the tradition of Hegel and Marx, Marcuse had
been recruited to the avowedly scientific research institute out of the
conviction that the empirical researches of the social sciences must
be guided by correct theoretical and methodological principles:
‘The Institute considers, therefore, the European philosophies of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as important for the theory of
society as are political economy and statistics.’22 In the cautious
language of emigres, ‘the philosophies of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries’ referred specifically to the incorporation of the
rationalist epistemology of the Enlightenment into Hegel’s system,
and the subsequent transformation of philosophical idealism into
the critical social theory of Marx. Indeed, in their commitment to
recovering the allegedly ‘external’ conditions of scientific knowledge,
mentioned is a seminar - undoubtedly led by Marcuse - on ‘selected chapters of
Hegel’s Logic in connection with the discussion of the basic concepts necessary in
the social and cultural sciences’. The two lectures are listed in ‘IISR. Ten Years
on Morningside Heights’, pp. 23-36; also noted arc several unpublished
manuscripts: 'The Impact of Rationality on Modern Culture’, ‘Private Morale in
Germany’ (with Adorno), and ‘German Re-education’ (with Adorno). The latter
appear to have been contributions to a projected study of post-war German
reconstruction, one of several projects which the Institute planned but never
completed.
21. Marcuse, ‘Idccngeschichtlicher Teil’, in Studien uber Aulont'at utxd Familie, Paris
1936, trans. Joris de Brcs in Marcuse, Studies in Critical Philosophy (London 1972),
pp. 49-155; also his survey o f ‘Autoritat und Familie in der deutschen Soziologie
bis 1933’ in the last section of the Studien (pp. 737-52). On the background,
structure, and reception of the Studien, cf. Jay, pp. 117-33.
22. ‘IISR. A Short Description of its History and Aims’, p. 3.
 Horkheimer and Critical Theory (1 9 3 3 -1 9 4 1 ) 95

and to incorporating these into the theoretical concepts themselves,

the ‘scientists’ of the Institute echoed Hegel: ‘Let the other sciences
try to get somewhere by doing without philosophy as much as they
please; without it they cannot contain life, spirit, or truth.’23
With Critical Theory, Marcuse, Horkheimer, and their collea­
gues had sought to build a bridge between the concern of empirical
social science with the material conditions of life, and the transcen­
dent truths embedded in the abstractions of idealist philosophy.
This implied a thoroughgoing critique of both traditional Cartesian
theory and idealist metaphysics, each of which failed to grasp the
material conditions of its existence, and thus ultimately betrayed its
avowed pursuit of objectivity and rationality.
The refusal or inability of the positivist social sciences to
transcend the empirical givens of the social reality of which they are
a part not only contradicts their own condition of objectivity, but
renders their concepts and findings plainly ideological, ‘a factor in
the continuous renewal of the existing state of affairs’.24 In fact,
Marcuse and Horkheimer held that the empiricist programme
remained at that primitive stage of cognition described by Hegel
where ‘the worship of “observable facts” 1 precludes a critical
understanding of the essentially contradictory character of exis­
tence: ‘The real field of knowledge’, however, ‘is not the given fact
about things as they are, but the critical evaluation of them as a
prelude to passing beyond their given form.’25
Philosophical idealism, by contrast, had indeed grasped potentiali­
ty as an integral moment of actuality, preserving in its structure the
tension between reason and reality. By constructing an autonomous
dimension of abstract rationality, where the images of freedom and
happiness might find a refuge from the ‘false materialism’ of the
present, the progressive currents of the idealist philosophy of the
bourgeois era had contained a protest against this order. But this
protest could have no material consequence: truth - in the sense of
the full realization of human potentialities - is secured, but
transferred to the realm of pure subjectivity, and freedom ‘rather

23. G. W. F. Hegel, ‘Preface’ to the Phenomenology of Mind, trans. Walter Kaufmann,

New York 1966, p. t02.
24. Max Horkheimer (and Herbert Marcuse], ‘Traditionelle und kritischc Theoric’
in ZJS VI, 2 (1937), in Horkheimer, Critical Theory, p. 196.
25. Marcuse, Reason and Revolution. Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (1941), revised
edition, Boston 1960, p. 145.
96

modestly sets up house within necessity’.26

The result in both cases - idealist metaphysics and positivist
social science - is the surrender to the power of the given. Against
this capitulation, Marcuse and Horkheimcr attempted to construct
a theoretical framework that would confront the antagonistic
character of the existing society and point beyond it. In the 1930s
this effort took the form of studies of society as an integrated (but
still contradictory) historical totality whose ruling ideas had their
origins in a defunct liberal past, but which preserved in them a
demand whose realization points into the future. The ‘regulative
ideas’, which engaged the inherent partisanship of the theory, were
those whose authentic realization would explode the framework of
the established reality, and which could exist within it only in a
truncated and ideological form: mind, happiness, individualism,
beauty, morality, and above all, Reason.
It has appeared to some later critics that the positing of abstract
concepts as political goals, rather than rallying the social forces that
could realize them, is evidence of a journey from Hegel to Marx that
was arrested at the stage of Young Hegelianism.27 This ahistorical
assessment must be weighed against the realities of the mid thirties,
however, when the structure of the theory was being elaborated:
Germany was manifestly preparing for war, the European proletar­
iat - the potential agent of social change - had been crushed in
Central Europe and was on the defensive in Spain, and in Moscow
Stalin’s trials had significantly discredited the socialist ideal. The
Marxian injunction of the ultimate unity of theory and practice
retained its force, but the miserable fates of more practically minded
groups testified to the fact that this unity was not to be immediate,
but must be transferred to the future. In fact, Horkheimcr

26. Marcuse [and Max Horkheimer], ‘Philosophic und kritische Theorie’, ZfS VI, 3
(1937), trans. ‘Philosophy and Critical Theory’, in Negations, p. 138. This theme is
fully developed in two complementary essays: Horkheimer, ‘Egoismus und
Freiheitsbewcgung’, ZfS V, 2 (1936), where it is described as the ‘affirmative
Charakter der Kultur’ (p. 219), and Marcuse’s essay by that title, ZfS VI, 1
(1937).
27. Alastair MacIntyre, Marcuse, London 1970, and - more substantially - Lcszek
Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, vol. 3 (Oxford 1978) both direct this charge
against Marcuse in particular. From the very different perspective of ‘scientific’
Marxism, Goran Therborn accuses Marcuse of a ‘self-destructive intellectual
hyper-radicalism’, a charge which he extends to the Frankfurt School enterprise
of Ideologiekntik generally. Cf. his detailed critical analysis of ‘The Frankfurt
School’ in New Left Review 63 (Sept - Oct 1970), pp. 65-96.
 Horkheimer and Critical Theory (1 9 3 3 -1 9 4 1 ) 97

anticipated this challenge when he inveighed against those leftist

intellectuals who ‘cannot bear the thought that the kind of thinking
which is most topical, which has the deepest grasp of the historical
situation, and is most pregnant with the future, must at times isolate
its subject and throw him back on himself.*2®Just as the Institute
insisted upon maintaining the ,Zeilschrift as a refuge for the German
language in exile, they acknowledged the depth of the crisis and
sought to safeguard as well as transcend the progressive heritage of
liberalism in *eine durftige Zeit\ It has also been argued that the
Institute’s theoretical programme remained imprecise, purely nega­
tive, or that ‘Critical Theory had a basically insubstantial concept of
reason and truth’.2829 This can, perhaps, be acknowledged, but with
the caveat that Marcuse ventured further than any of his colleagues
in attempting to ‘arm’ the critical concept of reason. In this he
pursued a course that was distinctively his own.

II

The concept of reason, and of a rational society, undoubtedly

constitutes the major leitmotif of Marcuse’s work within the
Institute of Social Research; at the same time, however, his writings
for the Zeitschrift carry the weight of previous stages of his thought.
From the university years at Freiburg, Marcuse’s treatment of the
aesthetic dimension of the Kunstlerroman and his ontological investi­
gations under Heidegger demonstrate that he had already been
groping for a transcendent standard of criticism, immune to the
restrictions imposed by the factual world while nonetheless preserv­
ing its basis in - and power over - it. Now, confronted in his daily
review work with the fascist transformation of categories that he had
himself applied without dialectical sophistication in his earlier
writings - nature, community, spirit, being - and under the
influence of Horkhcimer’s militant mistrust of metaphysics, he

28. Max Horkheimer, ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’, p. 214; cf. also Lewis D.
Edinger’s depressing account of German Exile Politics (Berkeley and Los Angeles
1956). It should be noted that although its effective organizations had been
destroyed and its leadership murdered, exiled, or imprisoned, there is little
evidence that the German working class was ever significantly anti-semitic or
sympathetic to fascism.
29. Jay, p. 63.
98

became acutely sensitive to the power of irrationalism and the

vulnerability of reason itself.150
The autonomy and authority of reason appeared to Marcuse to
be threatened from two apparently opposing forces. On the one side,
the positivist conception of rationality came to look increasingly like
the narrowly instrumental ‘rationalization’ to which Max Weber
had attributed the progressive ‘disenchantment of the world’. For
Marcuse, the functional rationality maintained in the positivist
tradition of thought was the philosophical correlate of larger social
and economic processes, and as Weber himself had demonstrated,
the expansion of the formal-legal rationality of means tended to
deliver society over to irrational ends.3031 If the autonomy of reason was
undermined by rationalist thought itself, its authority was under
attack from less subtle constellations of irrationalism: claiming an
ancestry in German Lebensphilosophie, the theoreticians of National
Socialism proffered a range of concepts designed to justify the
authoritarian state on a plane to which critical reason is denied
access: ‘Decisive here is that irrational givens (“nature”, “blood and
soil”, “folkhood”, “existential facts”, “totality”, and so forth) are
placed prior to the autonomy of reason as its limit in principle (not
merely in fact), and reason is and remains causally, functionally, or
organically dependent on them.’32*Confronted with a world situa­
tion in which ‘existential’ political realities had become the standard
of what is rational, Marcuse undertook to restore to reason its
authority as the independent standard of what is real - it was to

30. The attack on metaphysics, as a complement to the attack on positivism (‘These

divergences do not signify a structural difference in ways of thinking.’), was a
persistent theme for Horkheimcr throughout the 1930s; cf. esp. his essays
‘Materialismus und Metaphysik’, ZJS II, 1 (1933); ‘Zum Rationalismusstreit in
der gegenwartigen Philosophic’, ZJS III, 1 (1934); ‘Der neueste Angriff auf die
Metaphysik’, ZJS IV, I (1937). 'Post-war metaphysics’, he wrote, ‘paved the way
intellectually for the authoritarian state’, (Critical Theory, p. 139).
31. Marcuse never made the simplistic claim that positivism was or could be an
authoritarian ideology, both because of the scientific criterion of freedom of
inquiry, and because ‘Positivism is of its very nature ex post'. (‘Review of John
Dewey’, SPSS IX, 1, 1941, p. 145). Rather, the relation between positivism and
authoritarianism is one of detached compliance with the ‘objective’ world order.
Cf. also his ‘Besprechung von der International Encyclopedia of Unified Science', ZJS
VIII, 1/2 (1939), pp. 228-32, and his analysis of the historical shift from ‘critical’
to ‘technological rationality’ in ‘Some Social Implications of Modern Techno­
logy’, SPSS IX, 3 (1941), pp. 414-39.
32. Marcuse, ‘The Struggle against Liberalism in the Totalitarian View of the State’
p. 15.
 Horkheimer and Critical Theory ( 19 3 3 -1 9 4 1 ) 99

become the ultimate ‘critical tribunal’.

Marcuse’s long-standing effort to find a vantage point from
which to evaluate society and history was not displaced by his entry
into the Institute of Social Research; rather, as the rationalized
irrationalism that was ‘the fate of the West’ (Weber) closed over
Europe, Reason itself acquired thef status of a transcendent value.
Transcendent ideas had traditionally served the progressive function
of setting reality against its potentiality and what exists against
what could be’,33 but they had also coexisted alongside that reality
and acquiesced in it from an ontological realm of security. Marcuse
now sought to recover the dialectical connection between reason and
revolution: the tension between actuality and potentiality was not to
be frozen into an immutable ontological difference but grasped as ‘a
historical relationship which can be transformed in this life by real
men’.34 The claims of later critics notwithstanding, Marcuse did
indeed follow the course of Reason from Hegel all the way to Marx,
but with some characteristic detours.
From the structure of the materialist dialectic, Marcuse knew
that transcendence of the given social reality must be ‘in the
direction of another historical structure which is present as a
tendency in the given reality’.35 The more the realization of human
potentialities is stifled, however - by the extension of the (alienated)
labour process and the integration of ever larger spheres of social
and personal life - the further these potentialities retreat from the
primary concerns of life, and the more utopian becomes the search
for ‘the counter-image of what occurs in social reality’.36 The truths
embodied in the intellectual and aesthetic culture of the bourgeois
era have not been realized in the ascent of their middle-class
carriers, and thus their demands upon the present survive. In a
programmatic passage, Marcuse wrote: ‘More and more the culture
that was to have been abolished [aufzuhebende Kultur] recedes into the
past. Overlaid by an actuality in which the complete sacrifice of the
individual has become a pervasive and almost unquestioned fact,
that culture has vanished to the point where studying and

33. Marcuse, ‘Zum BcgrifT des Wcsens’, ZJS V, 1 (1936), trans. ‘The Concept of
Essence’ in Negations, p. 60.
34. Ibid., p. 69.

36. Marcuse, ‘Ubcr den afTirmativen Charakter der Kultur’, ZJS VI, I (1937), trans.
‘The Affirmative Character of Culture’ in Negations, p. 102.
100

comprehending it is no longer a matter of spiteful pride, but of

sorrow. Critical theory must concern itself to a hitherto unknown
extent with the past - precisely insofar as it is concerned with the
future.’3738Critical thought turns not to the misery of the industrial
worker for its image of liberation, but to the past ideals that remain
true because the moment of their realization has been suspended,
and to those few spheres of the present in which bourgeois society
has been willing to tolerate these ideals: the individuating principle
of sexual love,33 the bourgeois conception of the personality which
‘exempts a concrete region of private life from domination’,39
phantasy, whose capacity ‘to create something new out of the given
material of cognition’ is bounded only by technical limits,40 and
above all, the ideal forms of classical bourgeois art, whose materiali­
zation would demand ‘a leap into a totally other world’.41
Herein lies the philosophical basis of much of the ‘elitism’ which
is so frequently attributed to the person and the politics of Marcuse
- a charge which he all too defiantly accepted. His adolescent
disdain for the zeitgemasse popular novels of the Wandervogel and his
perfunctory treatment (in 1922) of the militant Zeitromane of Young
Germany now find a theoretical justification, for it is in the
enduring triumphs of the European cultural inheritance that the
deepest human drives have been expressed, not in the propaganda
or partisan Tendenzliteratur of day-to-day struggles.
Emphatically, Marcuse’s gesture towards art as the concrete
embodiment of an ideal dimension of truth and beauty is not for its
momentary fulfilment of suppressed pleasures and forgotten truths.
Like sports and popular culture, art possesses an ‘affirmative’
character that has in fact been a powerful ideological force
sustaining the deprivations of material life, for ‘unlike the truth of
theory, the beauty of art is compatible with the bad present, despite
and within which it can afford true happiness’.42 Rather, the beauty

37. Marcuse, ‘Philosophy and Critical Theory*, p. 158. Also Hegel: *It is, then, the
memory alone that still preserves the dead form of the spirit’s previous state as a
vanished history, vanished men know not how.’ (Phenomrnology of Mind, trans.
Baillic, pp. 564-5).
38. Marcuse, ‘The Affirmative Character of Culture’, p. 111.
39. Ibid., p. 124.
40. Marcuse, ‘Philosophy and Critical Theory’, p. 154.
4 1. Marcuse, ‘The Affirmative Character of Culture’, p. 99.
42. Ibid., p. 118.
 Horkheimer and Critical Theory (1933-194 1) 101

of art is to be grasped as ‘the presage of possible truth’,43 the

material embodiment ( Verk'orperung) of life beyond the rule of
commodity production, of arduous labour, of material and sensual
renunciation.
‘A foretaste of such potentialities’, he wrote, ‘can be had in
experiencing the unassuming display of Greek statues or the music
of Mozart or late Beethoven’;44 but it can also be detected in the
need for the social and economic management of sexuality, whose
‘unpurified, unrationalized release’ would subvert the consciousness
of individuals and shatter the social system of the bourgeois world.45
As little as Marcuse turned to art merely to enrich the soul within
the poverty of class society, was he supplanting politics with a
snobbish aestheticism. The dialectical pursuit o f‘what is present as a
tendency in the given reality’ points to oppositional social forces
other than great art; in one of his most significant passages, Marcuse
again struck a programmatic note: ‘Those social strata . . . which arc
kept back in semi-medieval forms, pushed to the lowest margin of
society, and thoroughly demoralized, provide, even in these circum­
stances, an anticipatory memory [vordeulende Errinerung]. When the
body has completely become an object, a beautiful thing, it can
foreshadow a new happiness. In suffering the most extreme reifica­
tion, man triumphs over reification. The artistry of the beautiful
body, its effortless agility and relaxation, which can be displayed
today only in the circus, vaudeville, and burlesque, herald the joy to
which people will attain in being liberated from the ideal, once
humanity, having become a true subject, succeeds in the mastery of
nature.’46 Like the medieval mimes, minstrels, and itinerant scholars
who had prefigured the estranged artist of the K'unsllerroman, the
outcast types of modern society - the prostitute, the clown, the

43. Ibid., p. 117.

44. Ibid., p. 131.
45. Marcuse, ‘Zur Krilik des Hedonismus’, ZJS VII, 1/2 (1938), trans. ‘On
Hedonism’, in Negations, p. 187. Nietzsche, as much as Freud, had recognized the
‘hunger for wholeness’ expressed in sexual relations: ‘At the very climax of joy
there sounds a cry of horror or a yearning lamentation for an irrevocable loss’.
( The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Kaufmann, New York 1967, p. 40).
46. Marcuse, ‘The Affirmative Character of Culture*, p. 116 (trans. slightly altered).
Freud, whose works Marcuse had begun to read ten years earlier, had a profound
sensitivity to the wisdom exiled from the mundane world: ‘In all ages those who
have had something to say and have been unable to say it without danger to
themselves have gladly donned the cap and bells.’ - Interpretation of Dreams, trans.
Brill, New York 1938, p. 422.
102

acrobat, play a very different role here from that of Marx s

lumpenproletariat. They offer ‘a presage of possible truth’, a
‘foretaste of potentialities’, ‘une promesse de bonheur, in short, the
‘anticipatory memory’ that projects into future society the genera­
lized satisfaction of the progressive demands and ideals of the past.1*7

Despite the centrality of art and beauty in the evolution of his

own critical theory, an independent aesthetic does not appear to be
struggling to emerge from beneath the surface of Marcuse’s writings
of this period. Nor has he left evidence of having entered directly
into the aesthetic controversies that animated relations between his
colleagues Adorno and Walter Benjamin, and to which so many
Marxists had retreated in the thirties. A further indication that he
was not yet ready to follow the implications of his ideas on art and
beauty to their conclusions at this point is his striking failure to
confront the substance of Absolute Spirit in his final work within the
Institute, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory. One
of the great enigmas of the book is Marcuse’s unanswered question,
‘Does the rule of the state extend over art, religion, and philosophy,
or is it rather limited by them?’4748
The second Hegel book - which stands to Hegels Ontologie as a
Kampfschrift to a Habilitationsschrift - was a defence of Hegel against
statist distortions current both in Nazi Germany and among hostile
Anglo-American philosophers, and it also served as a defence of
Hegel against himself. More specifically, Marcuse sought to show
that although Hegel’s avowedly universal concepts of reason and
freedom ultimately express the social content of a particular order of
society, ‘the method . . . that operated in this system reached further
than the concepts that brought it to a conclusion’.49 The truth of
Hegel’s ‘political philosophy’ is actually contained less in his
doctrine of the state than in the Science of Logic, an ontology whose
purpose is to demonstrate the negative and dynamic structure of all
existence. Dialectic, in contrast to formal logic and common-sense

47. Only in the 1960s did Marcuse begin to search for the outcasts specific to
industrialism as an active social force (as distinct from an ‘image’), so producing
some of his most characteristic and controversial contributions to radical social
theory.
48. Marcuse, Reason and Revolution. Hegel and The Rise of Social Theory, Oxford 1941;
revised edn Boston 1960, p. 87.
49. Ibid., p. 257.
 Horkheimer and C ritical Theory ( 19 3 3 - 1 9 4 1) 103

thinking, ‘shows latent in common sense the dangerous implication

that the form in which the world is given and organized may
contradict its true content, that is to say, that the potentialities
inherent in men and things may require the dissolution of the given
forms.’50 The true heir to the negative dialectic, then, is Marx, in
whose hands it transcends its philosophical basis in ontology, and
becomes a social theory inextricably linked to history: the task of
rendering the world the proper dwelling-place of reason is not an
ideal (cognitive) but a material (political) one.51
By demonstrating the transformation of philosophy into social
theory, Marcuse also reformulated the history and structure of
critical theory. The Marxian dialectic shares with the Hegelian -
mutatis mutandis - a conception of the negative character of reality, of
the gap between appearance and essence, of actuality and potentia­
lity. By projecting the resolution of this contradiction into ‘the
future’, he in effect assigned to dialectical reason the status of an
autonomous and transcendent critical ideal. With (another?) silent
bow towards Mephistopheles, der Geist, der stets verneint, Marcuse
describes the dialectical method itself as the ‘uncompromising
“spirit of contradiction”.’52

It is possible, on the basis of the foregoing analysis, to assemble a

summary characterization of the central concept of ‘autonomous
reason’ that guided Marcuse’s thought through a decade of
irrationalism. In essence, reason pertains to the processes of thought
and action oriented toward the conditions within which the human
potentialities of a free mind and a free body can be realized.
The earliest and most ‘formal’ conception he expressed implied -
not at all tautologically - that the goal of reason is a society that is

50. Ibid., p. 131.

51. A second great enigma of Reason and Revolution: by 1940, Marcuse had secured
American citizenship and cautious, Aesopian references to ‘the materialist
dialectic as social theory’ finally yielded to a direct and thoroughgoing analysis of
Marxism (pp. 273-322). Although the early writings of 1843-46 arc analysed in
depth, he ignored Marx’s important essay, ‘Zur Judenfrage’ even though this
work would have contributed decisively to a refutation of the Nazi appropriation
of Hegel’s Slaatslehre. Hegel’s Rechtsiaat was to have been the universalization of
the particular interests of civil society; the National Socialist Machtstaal was the
premature, forced reconciliation of contradictory forces in which they were
preserved, not aufgehoben.
52. Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, p. 400, where he surreptitiously quotes Goethe’s
Faust I, 1. 1338.
104

safe for reason, understood as ‘the human faculty of comprehending,

through conceptual thought, the true, the good, and the right.
Within society, every action and ever)' determination of goals as
well as the social organization as a whole has to legitimate itself
before the decisive judgement of reason and everything, in order to
subsist as a fact or a goal, stands in need of rational justification.’53
Where the free exercise of autonomous, critical rationality is
constrained by the totalitarian administration of politics and
knowledge, its truths must take refuge in heretical doctrines and
oppositional forces. They are disclosed by critical (dialectical) social
theory which sustains them as goals of and against the present.
The conditions presupposed by Marcuse are the possibilities of
adapting human existence to human needs at a given level of
development of society’s productive forces. Neither the needs nor the
technical possibilities for their satisfaction are fixed, however.
Following Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts, he denied that authentic
happiness could simply be designated as the subjective gratification
of present drives and needs, ‘for as such they are beyond neither
good and evil nor true and false . . . They are the drives and needs of
individuals who were raised in an antagonistic society.’54 And just as
Marx had premissed the emergence of ‘true’ needs on the full
liberation of human sensuality, Marcuse conjectured that ‘under the
system of scarcity, men developed their senses and organs chiefly as
implements of labour and competitive orientation’.55
If the senses, organs, and appetites of individuals have actually
become factors of the apparatus of commodity production, cons­
ciousness itself has been subjected to the same violation. A pervasive
‘technological rationality’, corresponding to the requirements of
industrialism, has transformed freedom into submissiveness and
rendered protest harmless or irrational; even at the level of thought,
feeling, and conscience, ‘there is no escape from the apparatus which
has mechanized and standardized the world’.56

53. Marcuse, ‘The Affirmative Character of Culture’, p. 14. Jurgen Habermas’s

theory of a rational society as one characterized by ‘communication free of
distortion’ carries this thought into the ‘second generation’ of the Frankfurt
School; see his Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. Jeremy Shapiro, London
1971.
54. Marcuse, ‘On Hedonism’, pp. 189-90.
55. Marcuse, ‘Some Social Implications of Modern Technology’, SPSS IX, 3 (1941)
p. 437. '
56. Ibid., p. 419.
 Horkheimer and Critical Theory ( 1933-1941) 105

Under conditions of nearly total mobilization - and here

Marcuse is speaking not only of the fascist countries, but of the
advanced, industrialized world generally - only the liberation of
technology, its redirection toward the objective human interest in
general freedom, could produce qualitatively new needs and new
wants. ‘Modern technology’, he. wrote, referring always to the whole
technical, institutional, and social apparatus of production, ‘con­
tains all the means necessary to extract from things and bodies their
mobility, beauty, and softness in order to bring them closer and
make them available . . . The development of sensuality is only one
part of the development of the productive forces; the need to fetter
them is rooted in the antagonistic social system within which this
development has taken place.’5? The liberation of individuals, then,
of the fullest potentialities of their minds and their bodies, is a social
process, conditional upon the total liberation of society as an
integrated totality, an ‘inherently multi-dimensional (vieldimensional),
organized structure.50 In the present era, the technological means
are available which could abolish the material basis of competitive­
ness, compliance, and complicity; the phantastic, utopian potentia­
lities they could release became the standard of Marcuse’s condem­
nation of the given realities.

Ill

These given realities had by this time lost their merely threatening
aspect and degenerated into total war. In 1939, Marcuse’s parents
and brother finally made their belated flight to London, where they
joined Else and her husband. Throughout the 1930s, while Herbert
worked in America (reassuring them - as late as 1939! - that at least
there would be no war), his family in Germany had been suffering
increasing privations and intimidation. His grandparents, utterly
disillusioned, had abandoned their religious practices after 1933,
and Carl Marcuse was now retired, ill, a ‘good German’ bewildered
by the violent turn of events.
Herbert’s brother Erich, the student radical who had been the578

57. Marcuse, ‘On Hedonism’, p. 184.

58. Marcuse, ‘The Concept of Essence’, p. 70. Again, the recurrent image of the
‘multi-dimensional’ character of liberation anticipates the later thesis of ‘one-
dimensional society’, most of whose elements were by this time present.
106

last Jew to receive the PhD from Berlin University (in 1933), was
running the family business as best he could, picking up odd
consulting jobs wherever such opportunities remained, and gradual­
ly assuming full responsibility for the maintenance of the family.
Frightening anti-semitic demonstrations were taking place with
increasing frequency in front of their house - a number of
high-ranking Nazi officials had their residences in Dahlem - and as
the grip tightened around the European Jews, he managed to
manoeuvre his wife and parents (and some of their money) out of
Germany; this was in March 1939, at the last possible moment.
Although he had been trained in Germany as an economist, in
London Erich Marcuse was obliged to open a small business (it was
later to become a fashionable ladies’ boutique) in order to support
the family. The rest of their relatives died in Theresienstadt.
The situation in New York was also a precarious one, for the
Institute’s financial autonomy had been imperilled by the war, and
the small salaries of Marcuse and Neumann could only be
maintained in 1941-42 by virtue of an outside grant from the
Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars.59
Horkheimer had, on medical advice, already left the New York
office for the Santa Monica area, which had become an important
centre of refugee culture during the war - the community of emigre
Weimar luminaries included Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Lion
Feuchtwanger, and Bertolt Brecht (with whom the ‘Tui-
Intellektucllen1got on quite well on a personal level).60 He was soon
joined by Adorno, who had formally become a member of the
Institute in 1938, and, upon the completion and publication of
Reason and Revolution, by Marcuse; Friedrich Pollock followed shortly
thereafter.
Financial pressures had disrupted plans for several projected
studies that the Institute had begun or outlined in New York, and

59. 1 his information is from the files of the Emergency Committee (in the archives of
the New York Public Library). The published account of the Committee by its
Director (Stephen Duggan) and Executive Secretary (Betty Drury) conveys a
sense of the privileged situation of the independently endowed Institute
compared with other refugee scholars in the 1930s: The Rescue of Science and
Learning, New York 1952.
60. C f, for example, Klaus Volker, Brecht-Chronik, Munchcn 1971. In a famous
project, inspired by the philosophers of the Frankfurt School, Brecht mercilessly
lampooned those intellectuals ‘who always get everything backwards* (hence
7ellekt-wellen-in).
 Horkheimer and Critical Theory (1933-1941) 107

throughout much of 1941 and 1942 the group in California held

discussions about a new collaborative undertaking:61 Marcuse’s
contribution to a large-scale study of materialist dialectics was to
have been a historical survey of doctrines and movements of
opposition, conceived in terms of the interrelation of heresy, revolt,
and materialism in history, an analysis that would have permitted
him to systematize the themes of his separate studies of the fate of
rationality in the totalitarian era. In fact, the projected work
appeared in a much abbreviated form a few years later as the
now-classic Dialectic of Enlightenment, co-authored by Horkheimer
and Adorno, with help from Lowenthal.
There were, of course, differences of intellectual temperament
and theoretical perspective among the Mitarbeiter of the Institute.
Marcuse’s closest personal friendship was with Neumann, whereas
his analysis of the transformation of critical into technological
rationality allied him more closely with the philosophical perspec­
tives of Horkheimer, Adorno, and Pollock.62 But there is no
evidence that intellectual or personal incompatibility was a serious
issue in the last years of the Institute. It was rather the case that in
the emergency situation of the early 1940s, even Horkheimer’s
considerable administrative skills could not be counted upon to
ensure the continued funding and institutional cohesivencss of the
group. In addition, it was gradually being recognized in other
quarters that the European emigre scholars possessed skills that were
urgently required elsewhere. These were the circumstances in which
Marcuse accepted a more pressing engagement and joined Neu­
mann in Washington - where his friend had just left the Board of
Economic Warfare to join the newly formed Office of Strategic
Services.

61. A number of these projects arc described in the pamphlet ‘IISR. A Report on its
History, Aims, and Activities, 1933-1938’, pp. 19-25. For the changed intellec­
tual and financial circumstances of the Institute by the late 1930s and early
1940s, cf. Jay, esp. pp. 167-72.
62. A few further details may be culled from the pages of H. Stuart Hughes, The Sea
Change, pp. 171, 174-5, and Buck-Morss, p. 289, n. 6.
IN T E R R E G N U M

ART AND
POLITICS
IN T H E
TO TA LITA R IA N
ERA
(19424951)
For about a decade, ‘between the reigns’ of pre-war and post-war
liberalism, Herbert Marcuse lived in Washington, DC, where he
served as an intelligence analyst in three agencies of the US
government. Although commentators and critics have variously
characterized these years as a period of intellectual ‘latency’1 or as
the first stage o f ‘G-Man Marcuse’s’ allegedly unbroken government
involvement,'^ the period was one of active political engagement and
the development of advanced theoretical formulations.

In July 1941, some six months before the United States entered the
war, Roosevelt had issued an Executive Order creating the office of
‘Coordinator of Information’ (Coi); it was to be headed by William
J. Donovan, a conservative Wall Street lawyer with close ties to the
President, whose task it would be ‘to collect and analyse all
information and data which may bear upon national security’, and
make it available to the White House, the armed forces, and other
government agencies, and ‘to carry out . . . such supplementary
activities as may facilitate the securing of information important for
national security’.123 With the entry of the United States into the war,
the need for a centralized and comprehensive intelligence network

1. H. Stuart Hughes, The Sea Change, New York, 1975, p. 174.

2. ‘Marcuse: Cop-out or Cop?*, Progressive Labor, 6:6 (February 1969), p. 61. 'I his
article has accurately been designated as marking the lowest point in the fortunes
of the New I^cfl; cf. Paul Brcincs, cd., Critical Interruptions, New York 1970,
‘Introduction’. It will be dealt with later, not as an argument but as a
phenomenon.
became apparent, a need that was acknowledged in a major
reorganization on 13 June 1942: the overt or ‘white’ propaganda
functions of Donovan’s office were severed and autonomously
constituted as the Office of War Information (Owi) under the
playwright Robert Sherwood, while a special ‘operational branch
was added to intelligence gathering and analysis in a new Office of
Strategic Services (Oss). It was to be headed by Donovan, who was
authorized to hire ‘such personnel as may be required’, and was
responsible only to the President and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Field agents could be given fairly rapid training for specific
missions of espionage, subversion, liaison, or sabotage, but it is in the
nature of the analysis of intelligence data that extensive technical or
regional knowledge, linguistic competence, research skills, and other
specialized abilities are required. Such trained experts had long been
part of most of the European intelligence agencies, but the only
immediate reservoir of this level of professional expertise in the
United States was the scholarly community, and it was Donovan’s
great innovation to draw upon this ready-made field of intellectual
talent and experience. Accordingly, James Phinney Baxter, Presi­
dent of Williams College, and the eminent Harvard historian
William L. Langer were summoned to Washington in August 1941,
to build a Research and Analysis Branch (R&A). Working with
Archibald MacLcish (then Librarian of Congress), representatives of
the National Archives, the American Council of Learned Societies,
and the Social Science Research Council, and tapping the time-
honoured academic grapevine, they assembled a staff of distin­
guished scholars unprecedented in American political or intellectual
history.34
Herbert Marcuse had been in contact with Oss officials from the
latter half of 1942, and had expressed an interest in coordinating his
work with theirs. In July, while still in Santa Monica, he had sent to
the Chief of the Psychology Division manuscripts he had written on
‘Private Morale in Germany’ and ‘The New German Mentality’,
followed several months later by the preliminary findings of an

3. The Presidential Order of 11 July 1941, creating America’s first centralized

intelligence service is reproduced in the internal history of the OSS written in
1947, declassified 17 July 1975, as the War Report of the OSS, New York 1976, p. 8.
Although it sufTcrs from the predictable limitations of an internal history, this is
the most valuable source of documentary material on the OSS.
4. Among the members of Langer’s R&A staff who were or would become major
 A rt and P olitics in the T otalitarian E ra ( 1 9 4 2 - 1 9 5 1 ) 113

Institute study on ‘The Elimination of German Chauvinism’.^ From

the outset, the attempt to develop a comprehensive conception of
the psychology culminating in the Nazi regime, and to make a
psychoanalytical evaluation of conditions in Germany, had been
part of the US intelligence strategy, and appeared to be a common
concern.56
In the general conception and in the methodologies they had
devised, the Oss psychologists’ plans had affinities with the work
that had already been undertaken by the Institute at Columbia, and
Marcuse’s inquiries were intended to explore the grounds of possible
cooperation. The initial response from Psychology Division Chief
Robert C. Tryon was favourable but non-committal, however, and
no concrete arrangements resulted. Nonetheless, with the effective
suspension of the Institute’s activities, Marcuse left California and
on the advice of Neumann and Kirchheimcr, made himself
available to the burgeoning intelligence community then taking
shape in the capital. Before long, Neumann was able to recommend
him to the political scientist Gabriel Almond, then a recent PhD
from the University of Chicago who had been brought to Washing­
ton to set up an ‘Enemy Section’ within the newly-formed Office of
War Information.7 In the latter part of 1942 Marcuse went to work
in the Bureau of Intelligence of the Owi, the internal and external
propaganda arm of the wartime government.
Ideological differences tended to be suppressed within the agency
academic figures were Paul Baran, Norman O. Brown, John K. Fairbank,
Franklin Ford, Felix Gilbert, Hajo Holborn, H. Stuart Hughes, Leonard Kricgcr,
Barrington Moore, Jr, Arthur Schlesingcr, and Carl E. Schorske. Donovan had
‘assembled the best academic and analytical brains he could beg, borrow, or steal
from the universities, libraries, and museums’ of America: Allen Dulles to the
Erie County Bar Association, 4 May 1959, quoted in R. Harris Smith, OSS, New
York 1972, p. 13. Former OSS operatives Stewart Alsop and Thomas Braden
wrote that ‘in the peculiarly amateur atmosphere of OSS, friends chose friends,
had them security-checked, and installed them in a Washington office or sent
them overseas.' (Sub-Rosa, New York 1946, p. 23.)
5. Correspondence of 7 July 1942; 11 July 1942; and 7 December 1942 in the files of
the Research & Analysis Branch, OSS (in the National Archives).
6. As early as 1941 a Field Psychoanalytical Unit had been established in the office
of the Coordinator of Information (ffar Report of the OSS, p. 31). Working with
published sources, refugees, and psychoanalysts in neutral countries, the FPU
was to undertake psychoanalytical studies of: 1. conditions in pre-Nazi Germany,
2. Nazi writings and early speeches, and 3. patients in this country with strong
Nazi or Fascist tendencies. Among other uses, it was hoped that the results would
contribute to the Allied propaganda campaign.
7. I am grateful to Professor Almond for sharing his recollections with me.
IN

during this period, and although Marcuse seems never to have

missed an opportunity to epater les bourgeois. his colleagues appreciat­
ed his ironical, and even cynical, attitude. This was expressed also in
his official duties, which, in the estimation of his Bureau Chief, he
often did not take seriously. He received German newspapers,
transcripts of radio broadcasts monitored by a branch of the Fee,
and the text of every speech made by Hitler and Goebbels, with the
assignment of keeping Owi policy-makers informed about the
relation between private morale and public policy in Nazi Ger­
many, but he did not see in this activity a major threat to the
stability of the fascist regimes. In the aftermath of the campaigns of the
winter of 1942-43 (the Battle of Stalingrad, the Allied invasions of
El Alamein and French North Africa), Goebbels delivered a major
address on the ‘Conduct and Morale’ to be expected of the German
people, and Marcuse was asked to prepare an interpretation of the
German term ‘Stimmung’ (morale, mood). His satirical ‘class analysis’
of the Stimmung to be found from the petty-bourgeois beer halls to
the fashionable Berlin hotels contributed to the morale of his
colleagues, but it may well have been with mutual relief that his
career in the Office of War Information ended shortly thereafter, as
he accepted an invitation to join the Europeanists in the Research &
Analysis Branch of the Office of Strategic Services.
In contrast to the experience of many European refugees,
Marcuse’s leftward movement continued unabated into the 1940s,
and indeed outstripped that of Horkheimer and Adorno, whose
writings of those years were beginning to reveal traces of what has
been called 'metaphysischer Pessimismus’. Still, it is not at all surprising
that he should have entered into the service of the US government,
for in the crisis years of the Second World War, it was widely
recognized that the collapse of European fascism would come about
through external military defeat, at best aided by internal opposi­
tional forces. Just as Donovan - a registered Republican - had
vigorously defended the recruitment of Communist agents and
Marxist analysts by referring conservative Congressional critics to
their common enemy, Marcuse and dozens of other leftist intellec­
tuals understood that the tolerant, and even ad hoc nature of the Oss
might provide them with an opportunity to contribute effectively to
an anti-fascist alliance.
It is also the case that certain ‘structural’ affinities between the
Research & Analysis Branch of Oss and the Institute of Social
 A rt and P olitics in the Totalitarian Era ( 1 9 4 2 - 1 9 5 1 ) 115

Research may have eased the transition - quite apart from the
overlap of personnel.89 R&A was a high-level interdisciplinary
community of scholars who, like the members of the Institute, had
assembled around an explicitly partisan common purpose. And like
the Institute, the R&A Branch protected the independence of its
partisan scholarship by avoiding any binding affiliations that might
prejudice this factional neutrality: ‘R&A was primarily a service so
conceived that it could be of value to many agencies but subject to
none . . . It was in an organization free of policy-making
responsibilities and therefore separate from any particular point of
view advocated in any other quarter or agency.’^
The scale of operations, however, was vastly greater than that of
the Institute, and the coordination of the work of some 800
Washington-based analysts was achieved through a flexible division
of intellectual labour: four regional Divisions constituted the
Branch, each containing functional sub-divisions (Economic, Politi­
cal, and Geographical) which were themselves composed of sections
designed to handle special subjects.10*These four Divisions formed
the core of the R&A Branch, which in turn ‘was the very core of the
agency’.1*
Until the end of 1944, when the advance of the Allied armies
finally made the defeat of Germany a realistic prospect, the highest
priority of American military - and, consequently, intelligence -
activity had been on the European continent and on the intentions
and capabilities of Germany in particular. The analysts in the

8. Besides Marcuse, both Neumann and Kirchhcimcr had come to work in the
Europc-Africa Division of R&A, and Neumann’s wife Inge was on the staff of the
Biographical Records Section which produced informational profiles of thou­
sands of key political figures in German and occupied territories; Leo Lowenthal
had been serving as a part-time consultant to the German Section of the
neighbouring OWI (he later became Section Chief), and Friedrich Pollock had
served - with Neumann - as a confidential consultant to the Board of Economic
Warfare; Sophie Marcuse had a position as a statistician for Naval Intelligence
(G-2).
9. War Report of the OSS, pp. xii-xiii.
10. This structure, which lasted until the end of the war, was created by the major
reorganization of OSS in January, 1943, after it had been given a formal charter
by the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the basis of its success in ‘softening up’ North
Africa in preparation for the Allied invasion (see the appendix to this chapter).
It. Corey Ford, Donovan of OSS, Boston 1970, p. 148. After the war Donovan quipped.
‘We did not rely on the “seductive blonde” or the “phony moustache”. The
major part of our intelligence was the result of good old-fashioned intellectual
sweat.’
116

German unit of R&A’s Central European Section, then, engaged in

the continuing study of changing political conditions within the
Reich, were in a potentially important position within American
intelligence operations.12
During this two-year period Marcuse’s group worked on the
analysis of political tendencies in Germany, and he was specifically
assigned to the identification of Nazi and anti-Nazi groups and
individuals; the former were td be held accountable in the war
crimes adjudication then being negotiated between the four Great
Powers, and the latter were to be called upon for cooperation in
post-war reconstruction. For his source materials he drew upon
official and military intelligence reports, extensive Oss interviews
with refugees, and special Oss agents and contacts in occupied
Europe; it was his duty to evaluate the reliability of each of the
items of intelligence that reached him, and assemble them all into a
coherent analysis of points of strength and weakness in the Reich.
While the war was in progress, Marcuse’s political reports (which
were almost all written as team projects) were sent up to Section
Chief Neumann, and then on to the Current Intelligence Staff
where they were further analysed, edited, and disseminated to the
appropriate military or civilian authorities (or Oss field operatives).
Their work thus figured significantly in the attempt to mount a
programme of psychological warfare against Germany, as well as in
evaluating possible sources of resistance within Germany that might
be susceptible to propaganda or even contacts.
After the reversal of the German counter-offensive in the
Ardennes by the end of January 1945, and the advancing encircle­
ment of the Reich by the Allied military forces, the Oss shifted its
principal ‘operational’ activities to problems in the Far East. The
German Section of the Europe/Africa Division, however, remained
one of the most active units, both in assisting the penetration of
German territory by some 200 agents prior to the final military
invasion,13 and - of greater importance - in preparing for the
post-war military regulation and military governance of Germany.
This latter project was the second of Marcuse’s major assign-

12. ‘Prior to VE-Day, and to some extent thereafter by reason of the many post-war
problems which came within the purview of R&A, highest priority was on
Europe.’ War Report of the OSS, p. 172.
13. Joseph E. Persico’s Piercing the Reich, New York 1978, recounts some of the OSS
operations within Germany in the last year of the war.
 A rt and P olitics in the Totalitarian Era ( 1 9 4 2 - 1 9 5 1 ) 117

merits as a senior intelligence analyst. America’s post-war position in

Europe with respect to Germany had been an issue in government
and intelligence circles almost from the beginning of the war, and
the Central European Section of R&A bore the responsibility for
much of the preparation. Late in 1944, a series of political and
administrative ‘Civil Affairs Handbooks’ were prepared under the
nominal direction of the young historian Carl E. Schorske (responsi­
ble to Hajo Holborn) to provide social, political, economic, and
geographical background information for the use of military
government authorities in occupied Germany.14 Marcuse’s group -
which at this time effectively meant Neumann, Kirchhcimer, and
himself - prepared an extensive Denazification Guide within the
framework of this overall effort, probably the most important
project in which he was involved as part of Oss: specific names were
given, instances of wartime criminality and complicity cited, and
concrete recommendations made, such as the prohibition of German
rearmament.15 The Guide was primarily concerned to discourage
cooperation with former Nazi officials in the post-war reconstruc­
tion of Germany, and the return of many of these people to
commanding positions in German industry and politics may serve as
an accurate measure of the real influence exerted by this tiny group
of leftist scholars over US policy.
With the conclusion of hostilities in Europe, and the Allied
occupation of Germany, Oss responsibilities increased further, and
on 3 May 1945, within days of Hitler’s suicide in Berlin, Central
European Section Chief Franz Neumann circulated a plan for the
reorganization of the German and Austrian Unit to meet the new
intelligence requirements of the post-war situation.16 The focus was
to be on the reaction of local populations to the establishment of
military government over Germany and Austria, which the staff
would study from a regional and functional point of view. Marcuse
was to be assigned the US Zone (with Kirchhcimer and Barrington
Moore J r responsible for the French and Soviet zones respectively),
as well as the analysis of the impact of denazification policies
generally. He was additionally instructed to coordinate the investi­
gation of the surviving Nazi and nationalist underground, and the

14. R. Harris Smith, OSS, New York 1972, p. 222; War Report, p. 178.
15. Conversations with HM; correspondence with Professor Carl Schorske.
16. Neumann memorandum of 3 May 1945 to members of the Central European
Section, R&A (file of the OSS, National Archives).
118

European ramifications of Nazism, as well as the prospects of

political parties of non-Nazi strata of the population.
This overall research and analysis programme passed largely into
the hands of Marcuse when Neumann left for occupied Europe in
the summer of 1945 to begin the investigation of Nazi war criminals
(he was to be the first chief of research of the International War
Crimes Tribunal at Nuremberg). Intelligence reports reached
Marcuse in Washington from the Oss staff who had moved into
Germany from neutral Switzerland, where Allen Dulles had been
coordinating secret intelligence activities during the last two years of
the war. The Chief of German R&A in particular was Lt-Col H.
Stuart Hughes, and Marcuse’s memos to the young Harvard-trained
historian served as a reminder of the distance that remained
between the Frankfurt School and the empirical research techniques
of American social science: ‘We have recently received three reports
which were an oasis in the desert . . . May we reiterate our humble
request that instead of indulging in personal interviews of isolated
personalities you concentrate your efforts on such reports . . .
covering one decisive, larger area, integrating political and econo­
mic developments?’17 At the foot of this mildly sarcastic (and
thoroughly Marcusean) request for current intelligence, written at
the end of August, Marcuse added some intelligence of his own: ‘As
far as the future of this agency is concerned, nothing has so far been
decided. There are only rumours, some of which to the effect that
R&A may be continued in one form or another in a new central
intelligence agency.’ One month later the Oss, ‘half cops-
and-robbers and half faculty meeting’,18 was formally dissolved and
dismembered, but Marcuse’s information was ultimately to prove
correct.

By the autumn of 1944, Roosevelt had begun to anticipate the

post-war configuration of international politics, and instructed
Donovan ‘to submit his views on the organization of an intelligence
service for the post-war period’.19 Donovan responded on 18

17. Marcuse memorandum to Lt. Col. Stuart Hughes, Germany, 17 August 1945
(OSS Hies, National Archives).
18. McGeorge Bundy, ‘The Battlefields of Power and the Searchlights of the
Academy’, in E. A. J. Johnson, ed., The Dimensions of Diplomacy, Baltimore 1964,
p. 3.
19. War Report of the OSS, p. 115.
 A rt and P olitics in the T otalitarian Era ( 1 9 4 2 - 1 9 5 1 ) 119

November with a draft memorandum in which he proposed the

liquidation of the existing organization but insisted upon the need
to preserve its intelligence functions during peacetime in a perman­
ent, centralized authority. He added his opinion, referring specifical­
ly to the scholarly staff of R&A, that immediate preparations be
made: ‘We have now in the Government the trained and specialized
personnel needed for the task. This talent should not be dispersed.’20
The unexpected prolongation of the hostilities deferred such
plans, but in August of the following year, Donovan once again took
up his case for a centralized intelligence agency that would be
adequate to the new responsibilities the United States had assumed
in the post-war world. As Donovan himself had recognized,
however, ‘it is not easy to set up a modern intelligence system. It is
more difficult to do so in time of peace than in time of war.’21 He
was indeed proven correct, for by this time the favourably-disposed
Roosevelt had been dead for several months, and proposals for some
sort o f ‘Super-Spy System for Post-war New Deal’, an ‘all-powerful
intelligence service to spy on the post-war world and pry into the
lives of citizens at home’, were beginning to be fiercely attacked by
the right-wing, isolationist press.22
In addition, the Oss had had no shortage of enemies to contend
with in the government. The petulant J. Edgar Hoover, outspoken
in his jealousy of the F b i ’s jurisdiction over the Western hemisphere,
had ostentatiously boycotted all planning sessions of Coi/Oss,23 and
similar jurisdictional claims over intelligence functions were made in
other politically conservative quarters: the Coordinator of Inter-
American Affairs (C ia a ), Nelson Rockefeller, created frequent
obstacles to Oss intelligence needs in Mexico and Latin America,
and both Army and Navy intelligence (G-2) repeatedly opposed
any diminution of their own authority.24
The most sustained and damaging attacks against Oss, however
- from Hoover, from H u a c , and from the public and the press -
were grounded not in threats to institutional hegemony but in

20. Exhibit W-43 in ibid., p. 116.

21. Donovan to the Director of the Bureau of the Budget, 25 August 1945, Exhibit
W-44, War Report of the OSS, p. 117.
22. Chicago Tribune, New York Daily News, and Washington Times-Herald, 9 February
1945; discussed in Ford, p. 302f.
23. Stewart Alsop and Thomas Braden, p. 15.
24. Cf. War Report of the OSS, p. 22; Ford, pp. 109, 130.
120

alleged questions of security. The agency’s staff did indeed include

avowed Communists and Marxist scholars, which contributed to the
ascending temper of paranoia: in the Labour Branch of Oss, in
Morale Operations, and in the R&A Branch in particular, ‘the
political tenor . . . began at predominant New Deal liberalism and
then travelled left on the political spectrum’.25 This conspicuous
feature of America’s first intelligence agency - plus the simple fact
that Oss had, in the words of one astute journalist, ‘too many
professors’ - was not calculated to enhance its status in the crucial
months when United States foreign policy was shifting its attention
from German fascism to Soviet communism, and on 20 September
1945, President Truman’s Executive Order 9620 recorded the
nation’s appreciation of its wartime accomplishments and terminat­
ed the Office of Strategic Services as of 1 October; Marcuse’s R&A
Branch was transferred more or less intact to the Department of
State, and Secret Intelligence (SI) and Counter-espionage (X-2)
became the Strategic Services Unit of the War Department.26

II

In September 1945, with the chill of autumn and the Cold War
already perceptible in the Washington air, Herbert Marcuse took
stock of the period just closed. The false objectivity of conventional
historiography had already revealed to him its inherent bias in
favour of the status quo, and an alternative philosophy of history,
one that measured the factical world by aesthetic norms and
technological potentialities, was coming tentatively into focus. In a
somewhat chaotic burst of intellectual creativity, repressed during
three years of urgent political work in the Oss, Marcuse compressed
his thoughts into an extraordinary treatise on the avant-garde
writers of the French Resistance, subtitled ‘Art and Politics in the
Totalitarian Era’.27

25. Smith, p. 14. In a privately printed autobiographical memoir, R&A Chief

Langcr recalled the German Section and Herbert Marcuse in particular, ‘whose
later revolutionary role was then indiscernible’. Up From the Ranks, New York
1975, p. 183 (obtained through Mr. Ray Cline, National Intelligence Study
Centre).
26. For more ‘inside’ information, cf. Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation, New York
1969, pp. 161-2.
27. (Herbert Marcuse], ‘Some Remarks on Aragon: Art and Politics in the
 A rt and P olitics in the T otalitarian Era ( 1 9 4 2 - 1 9 5 1 ) 121

Above all, the fascist period represented to Marcuse the massive

intensification of the processes of domination and coordination that
were already characteristic of industrial capitalism, even in its
pre-monopolistic, ‘liberal’ phase. Thus the central problem of
modernity had become the winning of a critical standpoint not
subject to the total administration of physical and psychical .life.
Marcuse’s aesthetic theorizing was still very much contained within
this critical framework, but the background against which it was
elaborated in 1945 was the disclosure of the extent of the totalitarian
violence.
To Marcuse, the violent suppression of oppositional doctrines
and actions was ultimately less terrifying than their ‘being assimilat­
ed to the all-embracing system of monopolistic controls’.*28 Against
this seamless totality, the indictments of revolutionary theory
remain helplessly academic, and revolutionary art, once antagonis­
tic and transcendent to the prevailing order, becomes fashionable
and classical: ‘The intellectual opposition is thus faced with the
apparent impossibility of formulating its task and goal in such a
manner that the formulation breaks the spell of total assimilation
and standardization and reaches the brute foundations of present-
day existence.’ As the revolutionary content of theory or art came
increasingly to be adjusted to the prevailing order, the alienation
from this order, which transmits the critical force of the oeuvre, was
transferred to the aesthetic form itself.29 The second stage of the
‘solution’ to the problem of the work of art, and its unique capacity
to liberate suppressed needs, faculties, and desires, thus lay in the
creation of aesthetic forms discontinuous with the realities of
repressive existence. Where no ‘subject’ is left that is really
revolutionary, no ‘theme’ so hostile that it cannot be accommodat­

Totalitarian Era’ ((Washington, DC) September 1945); unpublished manuscript

in personal possession of HM (cited with permission of the author). A few minor
editorial changes have been made.
28. Ibid. Unless otherwise indicated, all passages quoted in this section are from the
original typescript, pagination irregular.
29. Marcuse pencilled in a passage from Whitehead: ‘The truth that some
proposition respecting an actual occasion is untrue may express the vital truth as
to its aesthetic achievement. It expresses the “great refusal” which is its primary
characteristic.’ Science and the Modem World (New York, 1967), p. 158. The original
source of this oft-repeated phrase, which may be considered to represent the
Frankfurt School’s most concise reading of the dialectic, is Canto III of Dante’s
Inferno.
122

ed, a new aesthetic imperative arises: ‘Free the form from the hostile
content, or rather, make the form the only content by making it the
instrument of destruction. Use the word, the colour, the tone, the
line in the brute nakedness, as the very contradiction and negation
of all content.*
But when this reality became more of a shock than Dadaism,
abstract expressionism, epic theatre, or atonality, when, in the fascist
period, ‘the surrealistic terror was surpassed by the real terror’, the
avant-garde negation proved to be not negative enough: ‘The
formless form was kept intact, aloof from universal contamination.
The form itself was stabilized as a new content.’ The betrayal of
reason by the once-progressive bourgeoisie called forth the latest
stage to the solution of the problem of art and politics, represented
by the return to the severely classical metrics of the ascendant
bourgeoisie itself: where language could not talk without talking the
language of the enemy, the surrealist writers of the Resistance made
it sing.
In their attempt to reveal the system of totalitarian domination
in its totality and negativity, the Resistance poets returned, with
French philosophy, to the free individual, the one ultimate deno­
minator, the sole absolute negation: ‘The work of art must, at its
breaking point, expose the ultimate nakedness of man’s (and
nature’s) existence, stripped of all the paraphernalia of monopolistic
mass culture, completely and utterly alone . . . The most esoteric, the
most anti-collectivistic one, for the goal of the revolution is the free
individual.’ But again, this is no serviceable, bourgeois aestheticism:
the liberated individual is, after all, ‘the ultimate principle of
socialist theory’, and the abolition of the capitalist mode of
production is only the means to this goal. In the field of reality,
access to liberation lies through political action; in art it is
approached through aesthetic form, ‘the artistic a priori which
shapes the content*.
The form or style that is ‘the artistic a priori’ of which Marcuse
writes is conceived not as a technical category but as that dimension
of the work of art that actually sets the content and governs the
interrelations (interactions) between its components (members).
Style transmits the sensuality of the oeuvre, and sensuality expressed
‘the individual protest against the law and order of repression’. Only
because of its manifestly unpolitical character does it preserve the
political goal of liberation. Marcuse quotes Baudelaire’s Invitation au
 A rt and P olitics in the Totalitarian Era ( 1 9 4 2 - 1 9 5 1 ) 123

voyage to illuminate the esoteric and anti-political forms to which art

is driven in order to free itself from all contents controlled by the
monopolistic reality: ‘C’est une grande dcstincc que celle de la
poesie! Joyeuse ou lamentable, elle porte toujours cn soi le divin
charactere utopique. Elle contradit sans cessc le fait, a peine de ne
plus etre.’ The paradox that the political content demands a
manifestly unpolitical form was revived in the bitter discussions
among the founders of French surrealism at the beginning of the
fascist period.30 Accordingly, the language of the Resistance poets
became increasingly remote from the language of the oppositional
avant-garde during the occupation. It was their use of the classical
vocabulary, paraphernalia, and rituals of love that Marcuse saw as
the artistic-political a priori of their work: ‘as an element of the
aprioric artistic form of this poetry, the language of love emerges as
the instrument of estrangement; its artificial, unnatural, “inade­
quate” character is to produce the shock which may lay bare the
true relationship between the two worlds and languages - the one
being the positive negation of the other.’ La patrie, la resistance, la
liberation are only the carriers of the revolutionary goal which is the
true content, and in this artistic negation of the manifestly political,
art and politics find their common denominator. Nowhere was this
more plainly evident than in Aurelien, the fourth novel in Louis
Aragon’s series, ‘Le monde reel’.31
The theme that Marcuse drew from the novel is that of a sensual
love that embodies the revolutionary promise of transcendence, and
the Aujhebung of that love - its fulfilment and destruction - when
confronted with the revolutionary demands of politics. After many

30. A few years later, Marcuse took issue with the essays in Lukacs’s Goethe und seine
Zeil (1947): ‘his method fails in so far as it connects literary works more or less
externally with the social reality instead of tracing these societal indices in the
very style and content of these works.’ Journal of Philosophy and Phenomenological
Research, XI (1949), p. 14.
31. In his draft, Marcuse mistakenly identifies it as the third. Aragon’s career to that
point - turning largely on an attempt to honour his loyalties to Surrealistic
poetics and Communist politics - made him a well-suited subject for Marcuse’s
analysis; for a characteristically thorough treatment of the polemics of the 1920s
and 1930s, cf. Maurice Nadeau, llislory of Surrealism, London 1965. A further
attraction was that Aragon never doubted the place - indeed, the priority - of
poetry as a combative weapon: he once delivered a severe tongue-lashing to a
promising young writer who had briefly abandoned his literary work to take up
arms with a Maquis unit. For details of his literary-political work as a Resistance
leader, cf. the essays by Malcolm Cowley and Peter Rhodes in H. Josephson and
M. Cowley, eds., Aragon. Poet of the French Resistance, New York 1945.
124

years of estrangement, Aragon’s lovers find themselves reunited by

events amid the fall of France in 1940 and the emergence of a
national resistance. But once they are finally alone, ‘politics stands
between them. They no longer speak the same language, or, the
language of politics silences the language of their dead love which
they still try to speak . . . Nothing apparently can be more hostile to
the promesse du bonheur than this language and the activity which it
denotes.’ Political action demands for its efficacy an immediate
confrontation with the unfree world, but the adjustment of the
transcendent boundaries of love to that tainted reality is its
destruction.
Marcuse’s literary criticism, however, remained dialectical criti­
cism. It does not rest with the mere demonstration of the tension
between the two realities, but presses toward their final identity:
‘The beloved is “enfant craintif’, “soeur”, and Geliebur; her free
weakness, laxity, and compliance evoke the image of the victim as
well as the conqueror of the fascist order, of the sacrificed utopia
which is to emerge as the historical reality.’32 Political action is
shown to have as its goal the winning of the ground upon which the
-revolutionary promesse can be fulfilled. A historical coincidence had
transformed the struggle for absolute liberation into a struggle for
national liberation, the fight against the mundane life-forms of the
surrounding world in general into the fight against Vichy and the
Gestapo. The poetical form has negated the political content in
Aragon’s novel, but in doing so it reveals their identity, the common
requirements of Resistance action and Resistance art.
The philosophical analysis of Aurelien corroborates the thesis that
Marcuse’s intellectual career - perhaps as early as his adolescent
fascination with the poetry and prose of the French avant-garde -
has been regulated by the search for an external, critical standpoint
that could cancel the totality of existence without being cancelled by
it. The radicalism of the artistic effect of estrangement, however,
‘cannot cancel the reconciliatory element involved in this nega­
tion’.33 The very freedom of the artistic oeuvre from the prevailing
32. The sources of Marcuse’s later feminism should be noted in this passage.
33. The affinity of this conception to Brecht’s central principle of the V[erfrcm-
dungs]-EfTekt should neither be overlooked nor overstated. For Brecht, the
estrangement effect was a dramatic device created consciously and purposively;
inherent in the aesthetic form itself. Cf. Brecht’s contemporaneous notes on ‘a
new technique of acting’ in Brecht on Theater, trans. John Willett, New York 1969,
pp. 143-45.
 A rt and P olitics in the T otalitarian E ra ( 1 9 4 2 - 1 9 5 1 ) 125

reality also ensures its accommodation to that reality: ‘In the

medium of the artistic form, things are liberated to their own life -
without being liberated in reality. Art creates a reification of its own.
The artistic form, however destructive it may be, stays and brings to
rest. In the artistic form, all content becomes the object of aesthetic
contemplation, the source of aesthetic gratification.’ The artistic
presentation of the total fascist terror - Aragon’s ‘Monde reel’, Paul
Eluard’s ‘Sept poemes d’amour en guerre’, Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ -
remains a work of art.
Marcuse’s search for transcendence in a separate, immediately
sensual 'ordre de la beanie’ thus retains its dialectical character, against
any romanticist overestimation or cheap escapism. Art is insepara­
bly linked to the historical totality of which it is a part (and from
which it is apart), and only thus is it allied to political processes by
which that totality may be transformed. The conception of the
‘vordeutende Errinerung’, the ‘anticipatory memory’ of forgotten
truths that may yet be realized in the future, reappeal's here ten
years after it was initially outlined: the political function of art is the
‘awakening of memory, remembrance of things past’.34 The incom­
patibility of the artistic form with the real form of life ‘may promote
the alienation, the total estrangement of man from his world. And
this alienation may provide the art-ificial (sic) basis for the
remembrance of freedom in the totality of oppression’.

These frequently reiterated characterizations of fascism as ‘the

totality of oppression’ are much more than a rhetorical flourish, for
they illuminate Marcuse’s appreciation of the radical individualism
of the Resistance writers. The individual, ‘completely and utterly
alone, in the abyss of destruction, despair, and freedom’, had
appeared to be the last impenetrable refuge against the system of
monopolistic controls that integrated and coordinated every sphere
of social life; he often referred to the ‘monopolistic culture’ of
fascism, and to the intrinsically free individual as ‘the sole absolute
negation’ of that culture.
In the poetical evocation of the individual as the political a prion,
the literary underground had been accompanied during the war by
French existentialism - the most distinct philosophical resonance of

34. Marcuse had begun work on a Proust manuscript several years earlier, but it
remained unfinished and unpublished.
126

the literary image of the individual as the substratum of liberation

was the '‘pour-sot of Sartre’s L ’Elrc el le N'eant, which came out in
1943, during the German occupation. With the defeat of fascist
totalitarianism, however, philosophical individualism seemed to
Marcuse to lose much of its urgency, and when he came to grips
with the existential ‘reconstruction of thought on the ground of
absurdity’ in the immediate post-war era, he retreated rather
considerably from his earlier sympathies.35
The lrealite humaine upon which the new existential ontology was
built served as a powerful bulwark against the unreality and
inhumanity of the fascist terror. Confronted with the omnipresent
threat of enslavement or annihilation, the art and philosophy of the
Resistance had sought a ‘transcendental stabilization’ of the free
subject, a sphere in which freedom could be preserved as an intrinsic
attribute of humanity. With the partial redress of the overwhelming
odds, however, and the passing of the crisis in which Sartre’s
ontology had its origins, existentialism came to look increasingly like
a helpless idealism, another ‘Philosophic des Scheitems\ Marcuse’s
argumentation against Sartre revived the recurrent theme of so
much of his pre-war philosophical criticism: ‘In so far as Existentia­
lism is a philosophical doctrine, it remains an idealistic doctrine: it
hypostatizes specific historical conditions of human existence into
ontological and metahistorical characteristics.’36 Viewed against the
conditions of its own existence, the radicalism of existential thought
proves as illusory as its dialectical pretensions. Worse than its
metaphysical and meta-historical errors, however, Marcuse found
that Sartre had not merely posited an ontological essence, but had
identified it with historical existence. The demonstration that
absolute freedom is operative in actuality, that there are always
grounds for the exercise of individual choice, may be ontologically
correct and may carry some moral force when the totalitarian
organization of life offers the ‘choice’ of complicity, enslavement, or
death. But clearly, it reflects at this stage a historical world in which
‘freedom has shrunk to a point where it is wholly irrelevant and thus

35. Herbert Marcuse, ‘Existentialism: Remarks on Jean-Paul Sartre’s L ’Etre et le

Neant\ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, vol. VIII, no. 3 (March 1948), p.
309. A slightly abridged version appears in Marcuse, Studies in Critical Philosophy,
London 1972, with his brief 1965 postscript. The essay was originally written in
1947 or the latter half of 1946.
36. Ibid., p. 311.
 A rt and P olitics in the T otalitarian Era ( 1 9 4 2 - 1 9 5 1 ) 127

cancels i t s e l f . I n this light, existentialism ceases to be merely

another quiescent idealism, and becomes plainly ideological: reality
has the last word.
Marcuse’s characteristic dialectics of liberation always direct him
to the most unlikely reserves of resistance to the prevailing order,
and he Finds, in Sartre’s favour, a point at which this order negates
itself: his existential ontology has disclosed the ‘attitude desirante’
which permeates human relations as a transcendent ldesir d’un corps',
and had thus indubitably penetrated to a dimension of sensual and
sexual concreteness to which traditional ontologies (Heidegger)
could only aspire. Once again, it is at the unlikely point o {greatest
reification, when the body is lived as mere flesh, that a new image of
freedom and happiness is suggested.3 738 Referring back to the
language of his work on Hegel, Marcuse calls this ‘the negation of
the negation’; referring programmatically forward, he speaks of the
supersession of ‘an incessant moral and practical performance' by a
principle that ‘makes the reality of freedom a pleasure'.39

In his polemic against the ‘hidden positivism’ in Sartre’s work,40

Marcuse went beyond a critique of the content of L'Etre et le Neant:
with the aesthetic problematic of Resistance poetry fresh in his
mind, he also took up certain far-reaching questions of philosophical
form. The limits of both the theoretical and the artistic critique of the
established reality had been a central issue for him at least since his
contribution to the aesthetic theory of the Frankfurt School, and the
stylistic experiments of the French writers whom he had been
studying during the war - Sartre, Camus, Simone de Beauvoir -
provided him with the opportunity to refine his own thinking on
these issues.

37. Ibid., p. 322.

38. Thirty years later, during which time his estimation of Sartre had been revised
dramatically upwards, Marcuse praised the concreteness of Sartre’s existential
ontology over that of Heidegger: ‘In L'Etre et le Neant gibt cs z. B. cine wirkliche
charmantc Phanomenologie des Popos. Das hat mir gcfallen.’ Cf. Habermas et
al., Cesprache mil Herbert Alarcuse, Frankfurt 1978, p. 21.
39. Marcuse, ‘Existentialism . . pp. 332-3 (emphasis added).
40. To avoid misplaced objections, it might be noted that ‘positivism’ for Marcuse
always denotes an ultimate accommodation to the posited facts of objective
reality. It is thus to be contrasted with the ‘negativism’ (dialectical critical
theory) attributed to Hegel in Reason and Revolution, rather than identified with a
particular philosophical movement. This ‘highly personal’ interpretation, as
Kolakowski has called it, was in fact shared by his Institute colleagues.
128

In developing the theory of ‘affirmative culture’ in the 1930s,

Marcuse had insisted that while the work of art contains a sensuous
dimension which alone can penetrate to the deepest structures of
human existence, it is also inescapably bound to the material
structures of that existence: ‘1 he beauty of art’, he had written,
‘unlike the truth of theory, is compatible with the bad present’.41
The power of criticism, as the editors of Das Dreieck had intimated
twenty-five years earlier, was liberated neither by collapsing artistic
protest into philosophical explanation, nor by suspending thought
‘between the “sentiment of absurdity” and its comprehension,
between art and philosophy’.42 Sartre had attempted to banish the
‘esprit de serieux from philosophy in order to reflect the assertion of
the ‘free play’ of the existentialist ‘pour-soi\ the jouer a I'etre’ of the
creative subject: ‘Existentialism plays with ever)' affirmation until it
shows forth as negation, qualifies every statement until it turns into
its opposite, extends every position to absurdity, makes liberty into
compulsion and compulsion into liberty, choice into necessity and
necessity into choice, passes from philosophy into Belles Letlres and
vice versa, mixes ontology and sexology, etc. The heavy seriousness
of Hegel and Heidegger is translated into artistic play. The
ontological analysis includes a series of “scenes amourcuses”, and the
novel sets forth philosophical theses in italics.’43 For Marcuse, this is
not an avant-gardist contribution but a retrograde confusion, the
disintegration of philosophical style and the corruption of artistic
expression. More decisively, it reflects not the ‘free play of the
creative subject’, but the inability of existentialism to grasp the
concrete conditions of human existence.
This clarification of the limits of philosophical criticism has its
roots in Marcuse’s earlier intellectual history of ‘the rise of social
theory’ out of Hegelian philosophy. The transition from abstract
universal to the critique of the concrete structures of existence
(Sartre’s ‘realite humaine’) took place not within philosophy, but in
theology and religion (Kierkegaard), the critique of political
economy and the theory of socialist revolution (Marx), and artistic
creation which refuses to ‘raisonner te concrel' (Camus). For a true
‘existentialist philosophy’ in this sense it would be necessary to turn
not to Sartre, but to Hegel and Heidegger in whose thought
41. Marcuse, ‘Uber den afTirmativen Charaktcr der Kultur’, ZfS VI, 1 (1937), p. 79.
42. Marcuse, ‘Existentialism . . .’, p. 310.
43. Ibid., p. 333.
 A rt and P olitics in the T otalitarian Era ( 1 9 4 2 - 19 5 / ) 129

ontological essence and historical existence are never confused. Just

as Hegel had remained self-consciously within the terms of philoso­
phical abstraction, Heidegger’s existential ontology eschewed all
ethics and politics. More perceptively than Sartre, he had recog­
nized that since Hegel, ‘the gap between the terms of philosophy
and those of existence has widened’ - a perception confirmed by ‘the
experience of the totalitarian organization of human existence’.4445

Ill

But Heidegger, of course, had had other problems, and these lent a
bitter irony to Marcuse’s exploitation of him as a corrective to the
militantly anti-fascist Sartre. In 1946 and 1947, while the writers of
Les Temps Modernes were debating "Le cas Heidegger ,45 Marcuse made
an official trip to Germany of several months’ duration. Travelling
with another former Oss officer, the mission was to collect evidence
pertaining to the strength of Nazi sentiments under the controlled
conditions of the occupation, to determine the state of the socialist
organizations, and generally to assess the stability of the highly
artificial equilibrium in post-war western Germany against actual
social and political forces. A confrontation with his former mentor
had been on the agenda since the shock of 1933, and Marcuse’s
post-war duties as Research Analyst within the State Department
gave him the opportunity to make the arduous side-trip to
Todtnauberg, the tiny village in the Black Forest where Heidegger
had his mountain cottage.46
The reunion must have been something of an anti-climax. The
two men discussed the activities and understandings of the Rector-
ate, and according to Marcuse, Heidegger admitted his misjudge­
ment while maintaining a dignified refusal to join the post-war
chorus of supposed ‘anti-Nazis’ among his academic colleagues. If
Marcuse’s subsequent recollections of a ‘friendly encounter’, some­

44. Ibid., p. 335.

45. Cf. Karl Lowith, ‘Les implications politiques de la philosophic de I’cxistcncc chcz
Heidegger’ (November 1946), pp. 343-60; Alphonse dc Wachlcns, ‘La philoso­
phic de Heidegger et le Nazismc’ (July 1947), pp. 115-27; Eric Weil, ‘Le cas
Heidegger’ (July 1947), pp. 128-38.
46. Interested readers should compare the following episode with the one described
by Gunter Grass in his novel llundejahre, translated by Ralph Manheim as Dog
Years, New York 1965, pp. 401-3.
130

what stiff and generally unproductive, do indeed sum up the

meeting, it is possible that Heidegger at this time seemed a sorry
figure, a victim of his own misjudgement, and genuinely mystified
by his harsh treatment at the hands of the French military
government in Baden.47
Upon his return to Washington Marcuse sent his former mentor
a ‘care package’ (supplies were short everywhere, and the military
authorities had commandeered Heidegger’s house in Freiburg), and
then a letter bluntly putting the question as to why Heidegger had
joined the N s d a p . In his response, Heidegger once again acknow­
ledged his ‘political error’ in supposing Hitler and the Nazis to have
heralded the ‘Aujbruch’ (awakening) and the ‘Emeuerung’ (renewal) he
had proclaimed in his Rectoral Address of 1933, but added an
astonishing comparison of the fate of the East Germans after the
war to that of the Jews under Nazism. This response was politically
and philosophically unacceptable to Marcuse, and there was no
subsequent communication of any sort.48

For about two years after the conclusion of the war, Marcuse
continued his work for the American denazification programme,
collecting documentary materials and assessing evidence. He occu­
pied a somewhat anomalous position within the State Department’s
Office of Intelligence Research during this period, along with

47. In November 1945, Heidegger submitted lengthy statements to the Rector of

Freiburg University and to the Beremigungsausschuss, the University’s denazifica­
tion committee. Although the latter cleared him of any involvement with the
Nazis after his ‘political error’ (a very common phrase in Germany even today) of
1933-34, his (caching rights were suspended; he was not, however, dismissed
from the university (the prohibition was lifted in September 1949). The relevant
documents are included as appendices to Karl August Moehling’s unpublished
PhD dissertation, ‘Martin Heidegger and the Nazi Party’ (Northern Illinois
University 1972).
48. Conversations with HM. Heidegger died in May 1976; his final testament -
which contains nothing not previously made public - was printed posthumously
in Dcr Spiegel (31 May 1976) under the title, ‘Xur noth tin Got! kann uns retlen'.
Recalling Heidegger’s ‘politischc Fchler’ in conversation, Marcuse snapped, ‘You
can make a mistake adding figures!’ Cf. also his interview with Frederick Olafson
in May 1974, reprinted in the Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, vol. 6, no. 1
(Winter 1977): ‘|A philosopher) certainly can and does commit many, many
mistakes, but this is not an error and this is not a mistake; this is actually the
betrayal of philosophy as such, and of everything philosophy stands for.’ (pp.
33-4) That Marcuse never ceased to hold Heidegger accountable is evident in his
memorial statement: ‘Enttiiuschung’, in Gunther Ncskc, cd., Ennnerung an Martin
Heidegger, Pfullingen 1977, pp. 161-2.
 A rt and P olitics in the Totalitarian Era ( 1 9 4 2 - / 9 5 1 ) 13!

Neumann, Kirchheimer, and about 900 other men and women who
had been transferred from the R&A Branch of Oss at the end of
1945. An Interim Research and Intelligence Branch had been
created under the direction of Army Intelligence expert Alfred
McCormack, but it enjoyed neither the budget, the influence, nor
the political immunity it had under the wartime Oss organization.
When McCormack resigned in April 1946, Colonel William Eddy
succeeded him with the explicit task of dismantling the former R&A
group as a unit. Each of the four geographical divisions was assigned
to regular State Department desks where, in the words of the
director of Marcuse’s Division of Research for Europe, they ‘floated
in limbo, distrusted by the State Department professionals and
seldom listened to’.49
Within this new structure, Marcuse’s work naturally began to
take on a new significance. Studies of the Socialist and Communist
parties in Germany had been a central focus of Oss research into
points of possible resistance, and were also relevant to the post-war
concern that was occasionally voiced that a destabilizing alliance
might be struck between Soviet-oriented Communists and conserva­
tive industrialists around the issue of German reunification.50 By the
latter half of 1947, however, the rhetorical warnings that ‘an iron
curtain has descended across the Continent’, and that ‘we are in the
midst of a cold war’, signalled the policies and attitudes that were
ascendant in the State Department under the Truman administra­
tion.
The shift of American foreign policy from anti-fascist to anti­

49. H. Stuart Hughes, ‘The Second Year of the Cold War’, Commentary, vol. 48, no. 2
(August 1969), p. 27. Hughes left the State Department early in 1948, ‘after two
years of bureaucratic frustration’. His impression is that anti-Cold War
sentiments could no longer gain a serious hearing after the middle of 1947.
Despite the obvious seniority of many of the emigre intellectuals, Hughes -
Marcuse’s ‘supervisor’ - recalled that ‘only the native-born . . . could head the
new research divisions that had been inherited from the OSS’ (San Diego Daily
Guardian, 5 November 1974).
50. In a symposium held at the University of Chicago in May 1950, Marcuse stressed
the ‘negative prospects’ for such a development, but observed that German
history provides noteworthy instances o f ‘this famous alliance between right and
left, between Communists and conservative militaristic forces’. Published as
‘Anti-Democratic Popular Movements’ in H. J. Morganlhau, ed., Germany and the
Future of Europe, Chicago 1951, p. 111. For a particularly relevant study of
post-war conditions in Germany, see the two essays in Hoyt Price and Carl
Schorske, The Ihroblem of Germany, New York 1947; Schorske had been Chief of the
Central European Section of the OSS.
132

communist priorities was not particularly abrupt, of course - one of

the regional sections of R&A had been solely concerned to monitor
the Soviet Union, especially to assist in the regulation of Lend Lease
arms transfers by strict wartime requirements. With the end of the
war, however, and the incipient stabilization of the new internation­
al system, the intentions and capabilities of the U ssr and dependent
Communist parties moved squarely into the foreground of the State
Department’s concerns (as well as those of the fledgling Central
Intelligence Agency, which had been created in 1947).
To be sure, Marcuse’s own analysis of the Soviet Union at this
time was not a particularly friendly one, although there is no trace
of any sort of anti-communism in his official or private work during
this period. No more convincing evidence could be produced than a
major research project for the O ir Interdivisional Committee on
World Communism in which he subjected the assets, liabilities, and
prospects of representative European Communist parties to a
detailed analysis.
On 1 August 1949, as senior member of a research team that also
included Bernard Morris of the neighbouring Division of Interna­
tional and Functional Intelligence and an assortment of regional
specialists, Marcuse submitted a 532-page confidential intelligence
report on ‘The Potentials of World Communism’.51 His opening
‘Summary Report’ first reviewed the theoretical and historical
background to the postwar situation: ‘The major appeal of Com­
munism stems from the paradoxical situation of the coexistence of
immense social wealth, technological mastery of the productive
forces, and widespread want, toil, and injustice . . . According to the
original Marxian concepts, the locus of the Socialist revolution was
to be in the highly industrialized countries of the Western world . . .
This concept postulated the full development of all material and
intellectual forces basic to a higher culture as the pre-requisite for
Socialism.’52 The isolated victory and consolidation of the first stage
of the socialist revolution in the relatively backward Soviet Union

51. [Herbert Marcuse, Bernard Morris, et a!.], ‘The Potentials of World Commun­
ism’, OIR Report, §4909 (4909.1 - 4909.6), 1 August 1949 (declassified 5.23.78).
Although R&A reports were generally team efforts and not individually
authored or signed, and despite obvious efforts to suppress theoretical elabora­
tion, the sections for which Marcuse himself was responsible are simply
unmistakable. I am grateful to Professor Morris for his assistance in identifying
this report, and for further confirming Marcuse’s seniority in its preparation.
52. Ibid., ‘Summary Report’, §4909, pp. 3-4, 12.
 A rt and Politics in the Totalitarian Era (1 9 4 2 -1 9 5 1 ) 133

thus mandated an accelerated drive toward competitive industriali­

zation, which entailed the coercion of the ‘immediate producers’ and
the subordination of traditional working-class demands to the
foreign and domestic requirements of the Soviet state.
Although the Western Communist parties were not discredited
by the sacrifice of the immediate interests of the proletariat, and in
general retained an important measure of autonomy from Soviet
leadership, their base was eroded by other circumstances: the
Marshall Plan for European recovery, the American policy of
containment, coexistence and the early development of East-West
trade all contributed to the economic and political stabilization of
the post-war situation. Throughout Western Europe, including
France and Italy where the size, strength, and prestige of the
Communist parties had risen so dramatically immediately after the
war, ‘the success of the efforts of the West to promote substantial
and lasting recovery has gone far to dissipate the effects of
Communist propaganda and weaken the support that Communists
have found outside the ranks of their own militants.’53
In case after case, the report (accurately) predicted the limits of
the growth of the Communist parties, and their integration into the
mainstream of established Western European politics:54 ‘Short of an
economic collapse which would make it impossible to satisfy
minimum social demands, or belief on the part of labour that their
socialist leaders have failed them, Communism has no future in
Britain.’ (4909.2, Part I, p. 4) ‘The Communists’ chances of
increasing their strength and prestige by non-violent methods are
being checked by the basic economic improvements now taking
place in France.’ (4909.2, Part II, p. 25) ‘The Austrian Communists
have no prospect of achieving power either by legal or illegal
means.’ (4909.2, Part III, p. 14) ‘As an indigenous political force,
Communism in the Western Zone of occupied Germany has
declined to such a degree that its real popular strength and support
are at present not significant . . . it seems likely that in a new
economic crisis, the pauperized and declassed strata of the popula­
tion would again join a neo-fascist rather than the Communist

53. Ibid., §4909, p. 22.

54. ‘The Potentials of World Communism’ also contains fascinating (and substan­
tially accurate) analyses of the prospects of Communist movements in the
Middle East, Latin America, and such Asian countries as Vietnam. These did
not, however, fall under Marcuse’s purview.
134

movement.’ (4909.2, Part IV, pp. 3, 19)

Although this report may well be the most ‘objective’ piece that
Marcuse ever wrote (in the academic sense he was later to
denounce), it should be recognized that these conclusions imply a
very definite and dissident policy recommendation: they under­
mined and directly contradicted the assumptions upon which the
policies of the administration were predicated, namely that world
communism represented an imminent and overwhelming danger
that could be counteracted only with expanded military, political,
and ideological mobilization.55 Marcuse and his few remaining
friends in the Office of Intelligence Research were attempting to
offset the steady drift into the policies and politics of the Cold War.
There is little reason to believe that their work was seriously
discussed at higher levels in the government.
As former R&A scholar-analysts with leftist sympathies (Senator
McCarthy’s ubiquitous ‘Communist infiltrators in the State Depart­
ment’) sought to return to private, academic or professional life,
Marcuse was pushed upward into vacancies of increasing seniority -
by April 1948, he had been made acting Chief of the Central
European Branch of the department’s Division of Research for
Europe. He had, however, become intellectually and politically
isolated: with the departures of Neumann, Schorske, Hughes, and
many others, he found himself increasingly surrounded by indivi­
duals whose political perceptions were narrowly fixed on ‘the
Communist threat to Europe’ and whose concept of intellectual
work entailed the projection of possibilities with cybernetics rather
than dialectics. His own reasons for remaining several years into the
Truman administration had nothing to do with any residual
loyalties, or with the ever more dubious hope that US foreign policy
could be moderated: Sophie Marcuse had cancer, and they could
not think of moving. With her death in 1951, he left.56

55. Much later, in a work that could not be further from the needs of the State
Department, Marcuse maintained this position unchanged: i n important
aspects, this coexistence has contributed to the stabilization of capitalism; “world
communism” [sic) has been the Enemy who would have to be invented if he did
not exist - the Enemy whose strength justified the “defence economy” and the
mobilization of the people in the national interest.’ Essay on Liberation, Boston
1969, pp. 84-5.
56. Conversations with HM; he has briefly commented on this unhappy period in
Revolution oder Reform, Munich 1971, p. 6, and Jurgen Habermas, et al., Gesprdche
mil Herbert Marcuse, pp. 20-1.
 A rt and Politics in the Totalitarian Era ( 1 9 4 2 - 1 9 5 /) 135

One of the unexpected by-products of the original R&A Branch

of the Oss came to fruition not in the government, but in the
academic world to which many of the intelligence analysts were now
returning. This was the concept of interdisciplinary ‘area studies’
programmes, such as the Russian Institute at Columbia University,
headed by former Oss Sovietologist Geroid T. Robinson, and the
Russian Research Centre, under Langer at Harvard.57 To be sure, if
university scholars had brought academic skills into the govern­
ment, it was equally the case that many analysts returned to the
universities with newly acquired strategic interests. Even so, the
eastern academic establishment was clearly preferable to the defence
establishment, and in lieu of a decent job offer - a situation also
experienced by Kirchheimer and numerous other German emigre
scholars - Marcuse divided the next four years between New York
and Cambridge, refining his ideas on art, sexuality, and dialectics.

57. McGeorge Bundy: ‘it is a curious fact of academic history that the first great
centre of area studies in the United States was not located in any university, but
in Washington, during the Second World War, in the Office of Strategic
Services. In very large measure, the area studies programmes developed in
American universities in the years after the war were manned, directed, or
stimulated by graduates of OSS.' (in E. A. J. Johnson, pp. 149-52). Both the
Columbia and Harvard institutes were initially endowed by the Carnegie
Foundation in 1945.
 A ppendix A: T he Structure of the A m erican Intelligence
A g e n cie s, O ffice of Strategic S e rvice s (Decem ber 26,1944)

Assistant Oireclo'

Source: War Report of the O.S.S.. p.126

 A rt and Politics in the Totalitarian Era ( 19 4 2 -1 9 5 1 ) 137

i • t l • i i ■

Otto Kirchheimer Herbert Marcuse

Ud

Appendix C: O ffice of Intelligence Research

(Department of State), D ecem ber 1,1946

ORGANIZATION OF THE DEPARTMENT

Division of Research for Europe (DRE)
Is responsible for assuring that the policy* Committee on Intelligence and the Office of
making officials of the Department (and offi­ Intelligence Coordination and Liaison in the
cials of the National Intelligence Authority/ formulation of a Departmental program for
Central Intelligence Group) are provided with basic research; (d) collaborates with the Office
sufficient positive intelligence reports, studies, of Intelligence Collection and Dissemination
and estimates pertaining to all of Continental in planning and implementing the Depart­
Europe (except European Turkey and Greece); ment's program for the procurement of intelli­
the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics; Great gence materials from all sources, and evalu­
Britain, Ireland, Australia, Canada, New ating. as an integral part of the research
Zealand, and the Union of South Africa; process, incoming materials with a view to
Algeria; and European dependencies in South improving the relevance, accuracy and timeli­
America and the Caribbean to enable them to ness of the reporting services; (e) prepares
carry out their policy objectives; and performs intelligence reports, studies, and estimates
the following functions: (a) plans and imple­ for, and supplies spot information to the
ments a program of research and analysis, geographic divisions of the Office of European
pursuant to standards established by the Affairs, and other authorized recipients in the
Advisory Committee on Intelligence and Department, the Central Intelligence Group,
maintained by the Office of Intelligence Co­ and other Government agencies; and (f) co­
ordination and Liaison; (b) provides evaluated operates with the Special Assistant for
positive intelligence on the European coun­ Research and Intelligence in providing assis­
tries to meet the Department’s requirements tance to Departmental and interdepartmental
for the formulation of the foreign policy of the intelligence and research groups, including
United States Government towards those the Central Intelligence Group.
countries; (c) collaborates with the Advisory

H. Stuart Hughes, Acting Chief

Richard P. Stebbins, Reviewing Officer

Isabel G. Blackstock Marian C. Conroy MaryF. Hembry

Alice A. Coffman May I. Ferrari

CENTRAL EUROPEAN BRANCH

H. Stuart Hughes, Chief
W. Russell Bowie. Jr.

German Section
Franz L. Neumann, Chief
Beatrice Braude Coburn B. Kidd Herbert H. Marcuse
Robert Eisenberg Otto Kirchheimer Arnold H. Price
John H. Herz

Austria/Czechoslovakia Section
Hans Meyerhoff Paul Zinner

Economic Section
Fred Sanderson, Chief
Albert G. Capet Arthur L. Horniker Murray Ryss
Claire P. Doblin Miriam E. Oatman Erwin Strauss
 A rt/in d Politics in the Totalitarian Era ( 1 9 4 2 -1 9 5 1) 139

A ppendix D: O ffice of Intelligence Research

(Departm ent of State) .A p ril 1,1948

REGISTER OF THE DEPARTMENT OF STATE 1948

Division of Research for Europe (DRE)
Is responsible for planning and implementing sibility, to meet the intelligence requirements
a program of positive-intelligence research of the Department in the formulation and
pertaining to all of continental Europe (except execution of foreign policy and the intelligence
European Turkey and Greece), Union of requirements of the Central Intelligence
Soviet Socialist Republics, Great Britain, Agency and other authorized agencies. It
Ireland, Australia, Canada. New Zealand, maintains continuous, close, and informal
Union of South Africa, Iceland, Greenland, relationships with officials of the Office of
Algeria, European dependencies in South European Affairs and of other offices in the
America and the Caribbean, and secondary Department, to encourage the exchange of
interests, in collaboration with the appropriate information and provide them with immediate
research divisions, in countries which are and timely intelligence for their operations.
closely related to the area of primary respon­

Philip J. Conley, Acting Chief

Marian C. Conroy, Administrative Officer
Isabel G. Blackstock May I. Ferrari Mary F. Hembry

CENTRAL EUROPEAN BRANCH

Herbert M arcuse. Acting Chief

German Section
Otto Kirchheimer, Acting Chief
Robert Eisenberg John H. Herz
Manfred Halpern Arnold H. Price

Austria/Czechoslovakia Section
Hans Meyerhoff Paul E. Zinner

Economic Section
Fred H. Sanderson, Chief
M. June Boeckman Arthur L. Horniker Murray Ryss
Albert G. Capet William N. Parker Erwin Strauss

EASTERN EUROPEAN BRANCH

William B. Ballis, Chief
Vladimir Kalmykow

Political Section
-------------------- Chief
Rudolf O. Altroggen Pearl Joseph Vladimir Prokofieff
John C. Guthrie Boris H. Klosson Stanley Wilcox

Economic Section
Herbert Block, Acting Chief
William Gffoane Elizabeth N. Landeau George J. Rothwell
Stanley Graze Paul A. Lifantieff-Lee M. Gordon Tiger
Vladimir B. Grinioff Helen J. A. Lincoln Leon S. Wellstone
Samuel Hassman Eugene Rapaport Howard M. Wiedemann
Jacob Horak Ruth T. Reitman
PART T H R E E

DEPARTURES
 4
M atters of
L ife and D eath
(1950-1958)
By the time Herbert Marcuse finally left the government, the
military struggle against German fascism had been entirely sup­
planted by the political struggle against Soviet Communism. The
stability of the capitalist countries in the period of reconstruction
suggested that with the redirection of the technological apparatus to
the post-war economy, a level of material affluence could be
promised that was the reward of compliance; in the socialist world,
progress remained bound to terror to such a degree as to provoke
deep examination of the dimension that had been lost to revolution­
ary theory and practice.
Still, Marcuse refused to consider that Stalinism (or fascism) had
‘eradicated the roots of a different kind of communism in industrial
society*.1 Honouring his intellectual debts to Horkheimer and the
Frankfurt School, he regarded the Soviet Union less as an alterna­
tive to the Western democracies than as a competitor within a
common framework whose features included ‘the triumph of
technological rationality, of large industry over the individual;
universal coordination; the spread of administration into all spheres
of life; and the assimilation of private into public existence.*'^ In his
view, the Marxian theory of the revolutionary subject had fared
badly in the confrontation with Nazism and Stalinism and their
post-war survivors. ‘Perhaps no other theory,’ he reflected later in
the decade, ‘has so accurately anticipated the basic tendencies of late
industrial society - and apparently drawn such incorrect conclusions
from its analysis.*123
1. Herbert Marcuse, ‘Recent Literature on Communism’, in World Politics (July
1954), p. 521.
2. Ibid., p. 517.
3. Herbert Marcuse, Preface to Raya Dunaycvskaya, Marxism and Freedom, New
York 1958, p. 7.

143
144

The fugitive ideas he had been harbouring while working in the

US Department of State, and which were finally expounded in his
writings of the 1950s, have often been characterized as ‘utopian’.
Although this appraisal - whether friendly or hostile in intent - is
seriously misleading, the misunderstanding upon which it rests
points toward the most fundamental structures of his thought.
Marcuse’s intentions were in fact the very opposite, for he sought to
rescue a sub-tradition of intellectual culture from defamation as
‘mere utopia’ and return it to the centre of a critical social theory.
Concluding a major cycle of lectures delivered in Germany on the
centenary of Freud’s birth, he defended his highly speculative
manner of reasoning: ‘It may be less irresponsible today to depict a
utopia that has a real basis than to defame as utopia conditions and
potentials that have long become realizable possibilities.'4 Radical
ideas cease to be ‘utopian’ once the means to realize them exist, and
at that point they become subversive of the social order that denies
their political content.
Accordingly, Marcuse’s philosophical investigations in the post­
war decade took the form of a historical assessment: he proposed
that we are living at the historical moment in which it is for the first
time possible to envisage the global conquest of scarcity, and thus of
the political and psychological repression it has demanded. The
theoretical anticipations of this qualitatively different mental and
material existence that lies within reach, and the political analysis of
why the transition to it is not taking place, are tasks that are
eminently concrete.
The technological forces mobilized during the world war suggest­
ed the triumph over the restraints of nature and of culture - if in its
negative, inconceivably destructive form - and it was to the newly
stabilized industrial superpowers that had emerged from the war
that Marcuse turned to disclose the emancipatory possibilities of
that conquest.

4. Herbert Marcuse, ‘Die Idee dcs Fortschritts im Licht der Psychoanalyse’, lecture
delivered 10 July 1956 in Frankfurt a. M., published in ‘Freud und der
Gegenwart’, Frankfurter Beitrage cur Sociology, vol. 6 (Frankfurt 1957), trans.
Jeremy Shapiro and Shierry Weber, in Marcuse, Five Lectures, Boston 1970, p. 45.
Cf. also his remarks in the I960 Preface to his Sonet Marxism. ‘Critical analysis has
the task of keeping |historical| alternatives in mind, no matter how utopian they
may appear in the status quo’ (p. xvi).
 Matters o f Life and Death (1 9 5 0 -1 9 5 8 ) 145

T he coexistence of the developed capitalist and socialist superpowers

that shaped the international situation in the 1950s also created the
problems that determined the shape of Marcuse’s research during
that decade. His final severance from the State Department, and the
pragmatic, policy-oriented research his position had entailed, did
not, however, entirely mitigate his restlessness. This was partly due
to his new academic surroundings which, despite the company of
close former colleagues such as Neumann and Barrington Moore,
offered neither a common set of theoretical assumptions such as had
characterized the Institute of Social Research, nor the shared sense
of purpose that had permeated the community of scholarly analysts
in the Oss. In addition, the somewhat mundane empirical research
into the ideological foundations and consequences of the Cold War
was not the only claim on his attention.
In 1950, while still in the capital, Marcuse had been invited by
Dr Edith Weigert to deliver a series of lectures at the Washington
School of Psychiatry, elaborating for the first time the contours of
his long-standing consideration of Freud.5 The small group that
made up his audience included the psychologist Karen Horney and
Marcuse’s friend, the international lawyer, Joseph Borkin, who
encouraged him to develop his strikingly original reading of Freud
into a book. The next four years, when he was not honouring the
terms of his Rockefeller Foundation grant by conducting research
into Soviet Marxism at Columbia (1952-53) and Harvard
(1954-55) were spent writing Eros and Civilization, the work that was
to assure him of a place in the intellectual history of the radical left.
It was published in 1955, by which time the 57-year-old Marcuse -
now remarried and already a grandfather - had taken up his first
academic appointment as professor of politics and philosophy at
Brandeis University. He must have looked forward to a productive
but tranquil conclusion to his scholarly career when he and Inge
Marcuse, the widow of his recently deceased colleague, moved to
suburban Newton, Massachusetts.6
Marcuse’s ‘Philosophical Inquiry into Freud’ is indebted, as its
original preface acknowledges, to the theoretical position of Hork-

5. The School sponsors an annual distinguished visiting lecturer in the humanities,

a programme which is ongoing.
6. Franz Neumann died in a car crash in Switzerland in 1954. For three relevant
146

heimer and the Institute.7 Once again, however, he is too diffident,

for the theories he expounds and the images upon which he draws
here had served as prominent leitmotifs in the development of his
thought long before he had encountered Horkheimer (or, for that
matter, either Marx or Freud).
The Frankfurt School had been drawn to the body of psychoan­
alytic writings for reasons that were substantially pragmatic, namely
to supplement neo-Marxian theory by providing it with an access to
the depth dimension of the individual psyche. The pressing task had
been to interpret the events of the 1930s: why had the ‘revolutionary
class’ been largely reduced to acquiescence or even complicity? How
could the potency of mass propaganda and crude ideologies be
explained? What further trends may be anticipated?8 Apart from
several important studies contributed by Fromm to the Institute’s
Zeitschriflt psychoanalytic theory did not itself become the object of
critical investigation.9 Marcuse’s interpretation of Freud now sup­
plied this neo-Marxian framework (though Marx remained a silent
partner throughout), but it also served to assemble the major themes
that had surfaced and resurfaced in his work over the previous thirty
years into the theoretical position that was to become associated
with his name.
Marcuse’s overall purpose was not so much to criticize the errors
or shortcomings of Freud’s thought as to establish its place within
the development of Western rationality and to indicate those of its
possibilities which Freud had either neglected or denied. The

appreciations of Neumann’s intellectual accomplishment, cf. Herbert Marcuse,

‘Preface’ to Neumann, The Democratic and the Authoritarian State, New York 1957,
pp. vii-ix; Otto Kirchheimer, ‘Franz Neumann: An Appreciation’, in Dissent, IV,
Autumn 1957, pp. 382-6; H. Stuart Hughes, ‘Franz Neumann between Marxism
and Liberal Democracy’, D. Fleming and B. Bailyn, eds., The Intellectual
Migration, Cambridge 1969, pp. 446-62.
7. For the Institute’s relationship to psychoanalysis, sec Jay, ch. 3.
8. Cf. Jay, ch. 3 for a survey of the general concerns and particular positions taken
up by the Institute in the 1930s.
9. Fromm’s early essays, which Marcuse continued to endorse as ‘admirable’ even at
the height of their polemic (cf. pp. 9-11 below) included ‘Ubcr Methode und
Aufgabe einer analytischen Sozialpsychologie’, ZjS I, 1/2 (1932), ‘Die sozialpsy-
chologische Bedeutung der Muttcrrechtstheoric’, ZJS III, 2 (1934), and ‘Die
gcsellschaftliche Bedingthcit der psychoanalytischen Therapie’, ZJS IV, 3 (1935),
as well as Fromm’s contribution to the Institute’s Studien uber Autoritdi und Familie.
A selection of Fromm’s early papers may be found in The Crisis ojPsychoanalysis,
Greenwich, Conn., 1970.
 Matters o f Life and Death ( 1 9 5 0 -1 9 5 8 ) 147

premiss of this historical contextualization of psychoanalysis was

essentially that Freud’s thought is subject to ‘the dialectic of
enlightenment’, the historico-philosophical process described by
Horkheimer and Adorno by which the liberation from irrationality
becomes a new form of domination - domination that reproduces
itself, but, in the late phase of industrial civilization, also under­
mines itself. 10 In its mission of enlightenment, the rationality
disclosed by Freud seemingly accommodated itself to the actuality
of repressive civilization. At the same time, however, it released
forces that cannot be contained within the framework of existing
ideas and institutions.
The pattern of this interpretation runs parallel to that laid out in
the study of Hegel published fifteen years earlier. This formal
congruence, however, is not, as has been frequently remarked, due
primarily to a common attempt to ‘vindicate’ Hegel and Freud, but
because substantively their work participates in the same history
and shares the same fate. For Marcuse, both Hegel and Freud were
epochal figures in the history of thought because they had amplified
the concept of Reason beyond traditional religion and metaphysics
on the one hand, or a narrowly technical-empirical rationality on
the other. In Reason and Revolution Marcuse had demonstrated the
manner in which Hegel elaborated the concept of reason to embrace
subjectivity as well as objectivity, sensuousness as well as intellect,
nature as well as history. Marcuse suggested that the resolution of
this alienation ‘animates the history of Western metaphysics’, and in
Eros and Civilization he brought the same logical and ontological
priorities to the interrogation of Freud: ‘In its most advanced
positions, Freud’s theory partakes of this philosophical dynamic. His
metapsychology, attempting to define the essence of being, defines it
as Eros - in contrast to its traditional definition as Logos.’11 Freud’s
thought, like Hegel’s, penetrated to the deepest levels of human
existence and returned with an image of irreducible gratification
and fulfilment, frustrated though they might be within the prevail­
ing order of political, psychological, and epistemological repression.
But unlike psychoanalysis and idealist philosophy, Marcuse’s
thought maintained a vital link with concrete historical conditions10

10. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialektik der AuJkldrung (1944), trans.
John Cumming, London 1972, csp. ‘The Concept of Enlightenment’, pp. 3-42.
11. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, Boston
1955, pp. 124-5.
148

and with the radical praxis prescribed by Marx, and thus remained
alert to the collapse of rationality into actuality (the ‘reality
principle’, the ‘world of positivity’) that had ultimately undermined
both systems.

Along with this interpretation of the philosophical context of

psychoanalysis went an attempt to uncover its historical and
political content. In this undertaking Marcuse was drawn not to
Freud’s personal statements on current social issues, nor even to his
theoretical investigations into the origins of society and civilization.
Rather, it was that branch of Freud’s thought seemingly furthest
removed from social and political life, the so-called ‘metapsycho­
logy’, that suggested to him the most far-reaching social and
political critique.12 The instincts, whatever their historical ‘vicissi­
tudes’, are the incorruptible governors of a realm in which the laws
of gratification are rigidly enforced.
The vicissitudes or modifications of the instincts - ultimately
those of Life and Death - to which Freud had directed his attention
were, by definition, rooted in individual mental processes: reversal,
reversion, sublimation, and out-and-out repression are purely and
narrowly psychological categories, alterations visited upon an
immutable instinctual structure in the course of its own internal
development.13 It was precisely on this ‘basal’ substratum that
Marcuse took his stand. Against revisionist currents which he loosely
characterized as left (Wilhelm Reich), right (Jung), and ‘centre’
(Erich Fromm), Marcuse insisted that the theory of the instinctual
infrastructure remain intact, but be expanded to embrace the
historical as well as biological character of the influences to which its
content is subject: ‘The reality which shapes the instincts as well as
their need and satisfaction is a socio-historical world.’14
The ‘cultural’ revisionism of Erich Fromm, Marcuse’s former
colleague, was singled out for an especially harsh attack along these
lines, and a somewhat acrimonious public debate ensued, whose first

12. For a survey of the evolution of Freud’s theories of the instincts and of the
dynamic, ‘topographical’ description of mental processes, cf. Ernest Jones, The
Life and Work of Sigmund Freud New York 1957, vol. Ill, pp. 165-286, and Richard
Wollhcim, Freud, London 1971, pp. 157-218. Most of the relevant essays of Freud
himself are collected in a volume entitled General Psychological Theory, New York
1963.
13. Cf. ‘Instincts and Their Vicissitudes’ (1915) in Freud, csp. pp. 91-103.
14. Eros and Civilization, p. 12.
 M atters o f Life and Death (1 9 5 0 -1 9 5 8 ) 149

stage dragged on for several months. In their otherwise laudable

determination to provide psychoanalysis with a sociological founda­
tion, Marcuse charged that Fromm and the neo-Freudians had
postulated secondary, environmental factors as primary, and thus
displaced the explosive role given to the instincts. They had taken
the ‘total personality' as given, and concerned themselves with its
happiness and fulfilment without regard to the instinctual constitu­
tion of the personality: ‘Whereas Freud, focusing on the vicissitudes
of the primary instincts, discovered society in the most concealed
layer of the genus and individual man, the revisionists, aiming at
the reified, ready-made form rather than at the origin of the societal
institutions and relations, fail to comprehend what these institutions
and relations have done to the personality that they are supposed to
fulfil.’15 A radical, critical theory is thus not only weakened, but
rendered ideological - serviceable to the status quo. Fromm shot
back with numerous instances of Freud’s personal accommodation
to contemporary society - an argument constructed on the ad
hominem grounds that Marcuse explicitly rejected in Eros and
Civilization (unbeknownst to Fromm, who had not yet seen it) - and
mounted his own counter-offensive against Marcuse’s ‘human
nihilism disguised as radicalism’.16 Rebuttal was followed by
counter-rebuttal - none of them very satisfying - and relations
between the two ‘Freudian leftists’, which were never very close,
even in the period of their collaboration, steadily deteriorated; to
the end, they referred to one another with unconcealed disdain.
The central point in Marcuse’s general position was that Freud
had revealed the inherent conflicts of the instincts - with one
another and with the constraints of the external world - but by
failing adequately to distinguish between the biological and the
historical, he had defused an explosive theory. This was the defect
that Marcuse had identified in the ontologies of Hegel, Heidegger,
and Sartre, and his conclusion followed the same lines, namely that
the radical politicization of the theory did not require the disman­

15. Marcuse, ‘The Social Implications of Freudian “Revisionism” Dissent (summer

1955), reprinted in slightly revised form as an ‘Epilogue’ to Eros and Civilization,
pp. 240-1.
16. Erich Fromm, ‘The Human Implications of Inslinctivistic “ Radicalism” ’, Dissent
(fall 1955), p. 320. It might be noted that Marcuse regards the early work of the
‘left-revisionist’ Wilhelm Reich, especially the explorations of sexual politics in
‘What is Class Consciousness?’ (1934), with great admiration.
150

tling of its basic concepts, but rather presupposed them, in fact

pressing them to their limits.
Chief among the environmental variables that condition the
prevailing repressive organization of the instincts is the brute fact of
material need, Anankc: the condition of scarcity that has dominated
the whole history of civilized society has dictated that a considerable
part of the instinctual (libidinal) endowment of the population be
diverted from enjoyment into productive labour. In the present era,
however, both theory and practice provide evidence suggesting that
the historical limits of a reality principle dominated by scarcity have
been reached. In practical terms, the unprecedented productivity of
the industrial civilizations of both the West and the East, and the
lessening of the time and toil that must be expended on it, permits a
corresponding lessening of social demands upon instinctual energy
(which has not been forthcoming); in theory, Hegel’s thought -
which Marcuse always took as ‘the representative philosophy of
Western civilization’ - has mirrored the progress of history as
necessary domination but points toward its negation.
Where the rationality of ‘repression’ ceases to be bound up with
the collective survival of the species, its psychological significance
becomes political: restrictions imposed upon instinctual gratifica­
tion in excess of what is objectively required ensure only the survival
of an obsolete system of social domination. Drawing his terminology
from Marx’s critique of political economy (which he felt to be the
proper basis of any ‘Marxist humanism’) Marcuse proposed that the
increment of renunciation demanded by the interest in social
domination be conceived of as ‘surplus-repression’. Referring to
Marx’s theory of exploitation, he added that from a political point of
view, ‘the only pertinent question is whether a state of civilization
can reasonably be envisaged in which human needs are fulfilled in
such a manner and to such an extent that surplus-repression can be
eliminated.’17
The Promethean world of Marx was soon left behind, however,
for psychoanalysis had opened to Marcuse a theoretical perspective
which pointed beyond the critique of capitalist political economy.
The (political) transformation of the ‘environmental’ demands
made upon instinctual energy suggested the possible transformation
17. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. 151; also p. 35f. This explanation was offered in
conversation. A central concept in Marx’s Capital is, of course, ‘surplus-value’, the
portion of a worker’s productive labour appropriated by the capitalist.
 M atters o f Life and Death (1 9 5 0 -1 9 5 8 ) 151

of the instincts themselves, or rather, of the instinctual value

historically assigned to the alleged ‘facts’ of life (and death):
alienated work could be reduced to a point where it becomes
continuous with the free play of essential human faculties; sexuality
could be restored to its primary, pregenital fullness; the instinctual
balance of life and death could itself be radically shifted ‘the closer
life approximates the state of gratification’ (Nirvana) stipulated by
Freud as the goal of the death instinct.18 Not only is the capitalist
ruling class to be deposed, but even the powers allegorized in the
mythologies of ancient Greece could lose their hostile and alien
character: Eros, Thanatos, Kronos could themselves be ‘liberated’
by the redirected accomplishments of mature civilization.
Although he has stretched them to their outermost limits,
Marcuse has thus far remained within the framework of the basic
psychoanalytic concepts; above all, his concern has been to demon­
strate that the theory is capable of intersecting actively with history
and politics, and is not immune to radicalization. Ultimately, Eros
and Civilization (which Marcuse himself felt to be his most important
book) must stand or fall on the basis of its own intentions and the
strength of its argument in realizing them.19 In the wider view,
however, it clearly marks a stage in the evolution of the critical
social theory that he had been constructing in Europe and America,
and through which he was trying to salvage the critical, revolution­
ary possibilities of Marxism.

Throughout the fascist period, Marcuse had been haunted by the

paradox that the greater the potentialities for a hitherto unimagined
degree of emancipation, the more total the mobilization of the forces
of political and psychological repression arrayed against them.
Consequently, he had allowed his thinking to be pressed to the
margins of the established society in his search for a refuge of future

18. Ibid., p. 235. Cf. also his distinction between the 'ontological’ and ‘biological’
significations of death, which is the subject of his essay on ‘The Ideology of
Death’ in Herman Feifel, ed., The Meaning of Death, New York 1959, pp. 64-76.
19. As noted earlier, the present study docs not aim at detailed analyses of individual
texts For other approaches to Eros and Civilization, cf. Jean-Michcl Palmier,
Herbert Marcuse et la nouvelle gauche, Paris 1973, pp. 335-412; Paul Robinson, The
Freudian Left, New York 1969, pp. 147-244; Morton Schoolman, ‘Marcuse’s
Second Dimension’, Telos (spring 1975), pp. 89-115; Gad Horowitz, Repression:
Basic and Surplus Repression in Psychoanalytic Theory, Toronto 1977, passim; Sidney
Lipshires, Herbert Marcuse: From Marx to Freud and Beyond, New York 1974, passim.
152

liberation, for a political base from which to resist the totalitarian

controls. The distinctive insight of the post-war decade, however,
was that with the conclusion of peace, these controls had not
substantively been lifted and the problem of the 1930s and 1940s -
the discovery of an autonomous principle of political functioning -
remained acute. In Freud’s metapsychology he now found a
correlative principle of mental functioning that appeared to retain an
important measure of freedom from the prevailing reality.
The specific historical content of the prevailing reality-principle
is linked with the total administration of inner and outer life, and
the analysis of this process which Marcuse had begun with the
Frankfurt Institute of Social Research now began to acquire a depth
dimension. Under such conditions, critical thought must draw its
concepts from outside the system of totalitarian controls, and it now
seemed that Freud had indicated the starting-point for all such
investigations: in the course of the supersession of the pleasure-
principle by the reality-principle, he had written, ‘one mode of
thought-activity was split off; it was kept free from reality-testing
and remained subordinated to the pleasure-principle alone. This is
the act of phantasy-making, which begins already in the games of
children and later, continued as day-dreaming, abandons its depen­
dence on real objects.’20 The illicit rationality of fantasy, dreams,
the imagination, and even the sexual perversions - thoseJleurs du mal
which ‘seem to reject the entire enslavement of the pleasure ego by
the reality ego’21 - argues for the existence of ‘a fundamental,
independent mental process’ with ‘a truth value of its own which
corresponds to an experience of its own’.22
The idea that the ‘strange truths’ kept alive in the imagination
are not merely escapist ‘affirmations’ but also correspond to a
conceivable reality had preoccupied Marcuse since his earliest
probings into the suppressed human potentialities of the present.
Psychoanalytic theory now gave him the scientific basis for conjec­
turing that they correspond to an experienced reality as well. Fantasy
and the imagination provide immediate access to the reservoir of the
unconscious, and to the archaic, onto- and phylogenetic memory of

20. ‘Formulations Regarding Two Principles of Mental Functioning’ (1911) in

Freud, General Psychological Theory, p. 24 (emphasis in original). This key passage
was also cited in Eros and Civilisation, p. 140.
21. Eros and Civilization, p. 50.
22. Ibid., p. 143.
 M atters o f Life and Death (1 9 5 0 -1 9 5 8 ) 153

the whole individual, prior to the ‘civilized’ alienation of psychic

and social functions. As such, the instinctual striving ‘for a
gratification which culture cannot grant’ takes over the function he
once attributed to existential ontology. And again, as in the early
critique of Heidegger, there is no question of a mystical juxtaposi­
tion of two hostile ‘worlds’, but-of the raising of a transcendental
standard of criticism whose terms are immune to cooptation into
existing structures of intellectual and institutional life.
Repression thus revealed its deep structure, but so, then, did
rebellion. Marcuse had long been working under the basic dialecti­
cal principle that the foreshadowing of liberation is to be sought not
through utopian exercises in futurological forecasting, but in
tendencies existent - if suppressed or distorted - in the given world.
In the present theoretical context, this required the interpretation of
manifestations of deep instinctual demands on the surface of
modern life, and psychoanalysis confirmed his earlier inclinations to
allow the faculty of memory - ‘as a decisive mode of cognition’ - to
guide the analysis.
It is the unconscious, he wrote, that ‘preserves the memory of past
stages of individual development at which integral gratification is
obtained. And the past continues to claim the future: it generates
the wish that the paradise be recreated on the basis of the
achievements of civilization.’23 This is clearly a psychological
reformulation of the concept of the ‘anticipatory memory’ which, as
he had proposed it in 1937, projects into the future images of
liberation drawn from the past. But now a content and a context is
provided: what is to be re-membered, re-collected, is the archaic
infancy of the individual and the genus under the unchallenged
dominion of Eros. And there is no mystical sentimentality in this

23. Ibid., p. 18. The priority of memory in Marcuse’s work may also be seen as one of
many posthumous tributes to Walter Benjamin, for whom it was the decisive
vehicle of emancipation; cf. especially Embahnstrasse and Berliner Chronik: ‘and
now remembrance advances from small to smallest details, from the smallest to
the infinitesimal, while that which it encounters in these microcosms grows ever
mightier. Such is the deadly game that Proust began so dilettantishly.’ One-Way
Street, London 1979, p. 296. Also Freud, in The Ego and the Id (1923), where the
decisive movement of ideas from the unconscious to the light of consciousness is
entirely a function of memory: ‘it dawns upon us like a new discovery that only
something that has once been a Cs. perception can become conscious . . . : this
becomes possible by means of memory-traces.’ (New York I960, p. 10.) I or an
original study of the primacy of memory for Marxism, cf. Christian Lenhardt,
‘Anamnestic Solidarity’, / elos, 25 (fall 1975), pp. 133-54.
154

evocation of the primal unity of pregenilal prehistory, for the

rediscovered past yields critical standards which are tabooed by the
present . . . The recherche du temps perdu becomes the vehicle of future
liberation.’24
The recognition of the primal stage of polymorphous gratifica­
tion offends against the prevailing rationality of toil, renunciation,
and forbearance which sustains the reality principle of the present
epoch - the ‘performance principle’ in Marcuse’s adaptation.
Accordingly, it has suffered the fate of the truly revolutionary
opposition: imprisonment (in this case ‘repression’) or exile to the
sheltered redoubts of art, mythology, and fairy tale, where an unreal
‘aesthetic’ rationality is admitted to pertain.
This conception of a ‘total’ rationality is perhaps the principal
leitmotif of Marcuse’s ongoing philosophical work to have survived
into the 1950s. Indeed, the centrality of Eros, which he derived from
psychoanalytic theory, and the consequent grounding of being in
the logic of gratification, allowed him to situate Freud as an heir to
the underground current of metaphysical protest which had chal­
lenged the ideologies and institutions of repression from at least the
time of Plato’s philosophy. Their shadowy status in the (orthodox)
history of philosophy - to which Marcuse had referred throughout
his work - only reflects the advancing hegemony of the narrow
system of Western rationalism which finally surfaced after Hegel as
positivism and empiricism, and which has exercised a repressive
tyranny over the logic and order of sensuousness and gratification.
For the rest, ‘the insights contained in the metaphysical notion of
Eros were driven underground. They survived, in eschatological
distortion, in many heretic movements, in the hedonistic philo­
sophy’,25 were relegated to the margins of respectable thought, as in
the ‘irrational’ philosophies of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, or
managed to secure refuge in the theory of art. For Marcuse, it was
precisely this philosophical counter-trend that had sustained the
vision of a liberating rationality and the order of freedom corre­
sponding to it. ‘Their history’, he added, ‘has still to be written’, and
at that time Marcuse still planned to write it: with the philologist
Jacob Taubcs (who was his editor at the Beacon Press) he had again
begun to formulate plans for an epic Corpus Hereticorum which, if
24. Eros and Civilization, p. 19.
25. Ibid.,- p. 126. Cf. also his Soviet Marxism, pp. 183-4, where he suggests that
‘Marxism is an integral part of the same tradition’.
 M atters o f Life and Death (1 9 5 0 -1 9 5 8 ) 155

their discussions had come to anything, would have surely offered a

unique challenge to the conventional account of the history of
philosophy.

In the only other contemporary work to explore the uncharted

landscape of a non-repressive reality principle, Norman O. Brown
clearly implicated Marcuse’s work in his sweeping assessment of
Freud’s: ‘It is one of the great romantic visions, clearly formulated
by Schiller and Herder as early as 1793, and still vital in the systems
of Hegel and Marx, that the history of mankind consists in a
departure from a condition of undifferentiated primal unity with
himself and with nature, an intermediate period in which man’s
powers are developed through differentiation and antagonism
(alienation) with himself and with nature, and a final return to a
unity on a higher level or harmony.’20 Marcuse and Brown, like
Freud and Nietzsche, Marx and Hegel, Herder and Schiller before
them, took seriously the dimensions of the eternal return of the
repressed.
In the pursuit of the repressed into ‘the tabooed and subterran­
ean history of civilization’, Schiller was in fact to prove an
indispensable guide - no longer the Schiller of the antiquarian
bookseller in Berlin, but the theorist of an aesthetic rationality
‘conceived as a principle governing the entire human existence’, and
of the goal o f ‘a remaking of civilization by virtue of the liberating
force of the aesthetic function’.2627 At the height of the later
eighteenth-century ascendancy of rationalism in European philo­
sophy and liberalism in politics, Schiller had undertaken to redress
the imbalances of modernity. Following Kant in the idealist
tradition, he had sought to restore the ‘instinct’ of sensuousness (der
sinnliche Trieb) to its existential and epistemological rights within an
enriched structure of rationality; the free play of the imagination
was assigned this task of anticipating the reconciliation (remem­
brance) of the severed unity of nature and freedom, sense and
intellect; and resonating with the last of the themes of Marcuse’s
thought over the past three decades, a standard of critical judge-

26. Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death, Middletown 1969, p. 86, and his remark
that Eros and Civilization is ‘the first book, after Wilhelm Reich’s ill-fated
adventures, to reopen the possibility of the abolition of repression’, (p. xii). Cf.
also M. H. Abrams, Natural Suprrnaturahsm, New York 1971, passim.
27. Eros and Civilization, ch. 9, passim.
156

merit was to be raised, transcending the fractured conditions of

psychic and social existence in the present and immune to its
integrative forces. For Schiller this standard was beauty, and its
science aesthetics.
‘By means of beauty’, Schiller had written, ‘sensuous man is led
to form and thought: by means of beauty spiritual man is brought
back to matter and restored to the world of sense.’2829Once he had
reformulated it in light of the material and intellectual history of the
succeeding century-and-a-half, Marcuse would be fully in accord
with this pivotal conception. Schiller had proposed the aesthetic as
the faculty that comprehends ‘the whole complex of our sensual and
spiritual powers in the greatest possible harmony’, and had
formulated his recognition of the political potential of beauty in his
idea of the ‘aesthetic state’ (Staal);20 with Eros and Civilization
aesthetics - in its modern form as the theory of art and beauty - first
began to emerge from latent to manifest centrality in his thought.
The work of art, more than any other embodiment of the
unconscious, anticipatory memory ‘of the liberation that failed, of
the promise that was betrayed’,3031carries into the material plane the
eternal protest that Freudian metapsychology had implicitly as­
signed to fantasy. Embodied in style, rhythm, metre, shape - in the
ordered permanence of aesthetic form - the ‘alienation’ linked with
the content of aesthetic ideas fortifies itself as freedom. ‘Outside the
language of art’, however, these images ‘change their meaning and
merge with the connotations they received under the repressive
reality principle’.3* The opposition to social reality ends in reconci­
liation, the indictment in acquittal, and there may be no escape
from the prosaic world of labour into the poetic world of beauty.

Here again is the dialectical theory of the ‘affirmative character

of culture’: aesthetic form preserves the political content of the

28. Friedrich Schiller, Briefe uber die Asthetische Erziehung des Menschen (1794-95),
edited and translated by Elizabeth Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby, On the
Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, Oxford 1967, Letter XVIII, pp
122-3.
29. Ibid., fn. to Letter XX, fl4, pp. 142-3, Although Marcuse awarded Schiller’s
theoretical writings his highest plaudit - ‘These ideas represent one of the most
advanced positions of thought’ (p. 188) - he always maintained a somewhat
reserved attitude toward Schiller’s (sentimental) poetry.
30. Eros and Civilization, p. 144.
31. Ibid., p. 165.
 M atters o f Life and Death ( 19 5 0 -1 9 5 8 ) 157

Great Refusal, but confines it to the aesthetic dimension. In the

1930s, Marcuse had been concerned to refute the practices and
philosophies of renunciation; adapting his earliest writings on
Kunstlertum to the requirements of a critical social theory, he tended
to view aesthetic culture - precisely because of its ‘alienation’ from
social reality - as the possible preserve of the image (memory) of
gratification. Against the political backdrop of that decade, namely
the violent cooptation of cultural production and its enslavement to
the broader purposes of the authoritarian stale, the problem of
aesthetics became acute.
In the post-war decade of unprecedented affluence and - to
borrow Marcuse’s impressionistic language - ‘advancing techno­
logy’, effective resistance to the administration of existence could no
longer find shelter in the consciousness of the proletariat; rather, it
was the aesthetic imagination in which there was retained an image
of the whole individual unhindered by the reality principle of a
repressive society whose gods were work and power, productivity
and performance: not the labour of Prometheus and Hermes, but
the enjoyment of Orpheus and Narcissus provide the archetypes of
rebellion against socially steered modes of fulfilment. ‘The culture of
the performance principle makes its bow before the strange truths
which imagination keeps alive in folklore and fairy tale, in literature
and art’:32 guiltless pleasure, sustained happiness, the harmony of
sensuousness and reason, subjective fantasy and objective reality,
nature and civilization are preserved within and against the
antagonistic world of work and power in the ‘aesthetic dimension’.

II

Eros and Civilization, which brought international recognition to its

author,33 was concerned with the potentialities of human existence
in advanced industrial society, with the present indicators of the
direction authentic progress might take, and with the social forces of
repression arrayed against them. I he range of its concerns thus

32. Ibid., p. 160.

33. A measure of the immediate impact made by Eros and Civilization is that the other
participants in the cycle of lectures in Frankfurt and Heidelberg (1956), in which
Marcuse delivered the concluding addresses, included analysts of the internation­
al stature of Franz Alexander, Ludwig Binswanger, and Erik Erikson.
158

transcends conventional political categories, but also links it with his

contemporaneous study of Soviet Marxism published a few years
later. As one friendly critic perceived at the time, a common
‘universe of discourse’ enveloped Marcuse’s very different studies:
‘In each case, Professor Marcuse has taken for his subject an entity
no less grand than “Western culture” or “late industrial civiliza­
tion”. Despite the immense erudition which he has brought to his
studies of Hegel, Freud, and the U ssr , respectively, his real interests
have been in problems transcending them in generality.’3435This is
indeed the case. While Marcuse explicitly repudiated the familiar
‘convergence’ thesis, he did undertake to situate the distinctive
features of Soviet development within the broader political and
ideological processes of mature industrial society.
This bivalent (political/industrial) approach was indicated by
the presuppositions of Soviet Marxism itself, according to which ‘the
transition from socialism to communism’ was to take place on a
technical-industrial base that had been brought to maturity during
the ‘first phase’ of socialist revolution. Following this theoretical
stipulation, and confronted with the ‘long-range international
integration of the Western world’, the early Bolshevik leadership
had embarked upon a drive toward full industrialization to which
socialist theory and practice were subordinated. Despite the funda­
mentally different (‘eschatological’) goals of Soviet and Western
society - which in fact fix the limits to their possible ‘convergence’ -
the process of ‘total industrialization seemed to exact patterns of
attitude and organization which cut across the essential political
and ideological differences’.33 It is on this broad level of a common
technological denominator, rather than in his detailed, ‘empirical’
analyses of the vagaries of official Soviet self-interpretation, that
Soviet Marxism falls within the long-range evolution of Marcuse’s
thought.
In this context, the pivotal issue of private ownership or
nationalization no longer appears as decisive, for the process of
rapid, competitive industrialization follows its own ‘suprapartisan’
logic: ‘Both systems show the common features of late industrial
civilization - centralization and regimentation supersede individual
34. Richard De Haan, review of Soviet Marxism in Ethics, vol. 69 (October 1958), p.
63. •
35. Herbert Marcuse, Soviet Marxism: A Critical Analysis, New York 1958, reissued with
a new Preface by the author, New York 1961, p. 179.
 M atters o f Life and Death (1 9 5 0 -1 9 5 8 ) 159

enterprise and autonomy; competition is organized and “rationa­

lized”; there is joint rule of economic and political bureaucracies;
the people are coordinated through the “mass media” of communi­
cation, entertainment industry, education.’3^ js the ‘supranational
and even supracontincntal’ instrumental logic dictated by the
integrated technological apparatus.
Nor does the exercise of political terror fundamentally distin­
guish the Soviet Union from the industrialized West, when seen in
relation to broader, shared social requirements. If the struggle for
freedom is in fact rooted in deep structures of the psyche, as Marcuse
had argued in his psychoanalytic writings, the social forces of
repression arrayed against it will be fully mobilized. Beneath the
democratic forms of the United States and Europe lie the painless
and comfortable techniques of mass manipulation, of an entertain­
ment industry that effectively regulates leisure time, of a productive
apparatus that stabilizes the existing order by delivering the goods.
‘The democratic form’, he told his Frankfurt audience in 1956,
‘rejects terror because it is strong enough and rich enough to
preserve and reproduce itself without terror.’3637 In the Soviet case,
where the binding of the underlying population to the existing order
was no less immediate a goal, the trend toward the relaxation of the
obsolete terroristic controls which followed the death of Stalin
marked not so much the creation of a new policy orientation as the
consummation of the old one.
Unlike the Western cultures, where two centuries of enlightened
absolutism and liberalism had enshrined the ethics of humanism
and individualism at least on the plane of ideology, Soviet Marxism
virtually acknowledged the totalitarian structure in its claim that
the October Revolution had created a ‘conformity’ between base
and superstructure, the expanding productive apparatus and the
social relations of production. The contradiction between individual
and social interest, private and public existence was prematurely
resolved by fiat, and thus the antagonism that had historically
guaranteed to bourgeois society a protected, critical vantage-point
within its borders was being systematically reduced.

36. Ibid., p. 66.

37. Marcuse, ‘Trieblehrc und Freiheit’, p. 4. For further reflections on Soviet terror
and the Marxian theory of history, cf. his review of Popper’s The Poverty of
Historicism: ‘Notes on the Problem of Historical Laws’, in Partisan Review, vol. 36,
no. 1 (winter 1959), pp. 117-29, reprinted in Studies in Critical Philosophy.
 Matters o f Life and Death (1 9 5 0 -1 9 5 8 ) 159

enterprise and autonomy; competition is organized and “rationa­

lized”; there is joint rule of economic and political bureaucracies;
the people are coordinated through the “mass media” of communi­
cation, entertainment industry, education.’3^ ]t is the ‘supranational
and even supracontinental’ instrumental logic dictated by the
integrated technological apparatus.
Nor does the exercise of political terror fundamentally distin­
guish the Soviet Union from the industrialized West, when seen in
relation to broader, shared social requirements. If the struggle for
freedom is in fact rooted in deep structures of the psyche, as Marcuse
had argued in his psychoanalytic writings, the social forces of
repression arrayed against it will be fully mobilized. Beneath the
democratic forms of the United States and Europe lie the painless
and comfortable techniques of mass manipulation, of an entertain­
ment industry that effectively regulates leisure time, of a productive
apparatus that stabilizes the existing order by delivering the goods.
‘The democratic form’, he told his Frankfurt audience in 1956,
‘rejects terror because it is strong enough and rich enough to
preserve and reproduce itself without terror.’3637 In the Soviet case,
where the binding of the underlying population to the existing order
was no less immediate a goal, the trend toward the relaxation of the
obsolete terroristic controls which followed the death of Stalin
marked not so much the creation of a new policy orientation as the
consummation of the old one.
Unlike the Western cultures, where two centuries of enlightened
absolutism and liberalism had enshrined the ethics of humanism
and individualism at least on the plane of ideology, Soviet Marxism
virtually acknowledged the totalitarian structure in its claim that
the October Revolution had created a ‘conformity’ between base
and superstructure, the expanding productive apparatus and the
social relations of production. The contradiction between individual
and social interest, private and public existence was prematurely
resolved by fiat, and thus the antagonism that had historically
guaranteed to bourgeois society a protected, critical vantage-point
within its borders was being systematically reduced.

36. Ibid., p. 66.

37. Marcuse, ‘Trieblchrc und Freiheit’, p. 4. For further reflections on Soviet terror
and the Marxian theory of history, cf. his review of Popper’s The Poverty of
Hislortcism: ‘Notes on the Problem of Historical Laws’, in Partisan Review, vol. 36,
no. 1 (winter 1959), pp. 117-29, reprinted in Studies in Critical Philosophy.
160

A conception of this long-range historical tendency, equally

visible in the U ssr and beneath the pluralist surface of the
democratic West, formed the very core of Marcuse’s thought - his
contribution to the philosophy of history expounded in the Dialectic
of Enlightenment. For Horkheimer and Adorno, however, the ‘thera­
peutic’ impulse had begun to recede before the ‘diagnostic’,
accompanied by a settling temper of philosophical resignation and
political withdrawal. Marcuse, on the other side, never relaxed his
search for alternatives and escapes, and in this the Soviet case only
confirmed his earlier search for political transcendence.
The substance of Marcuse’s study suggested that the develop­
ment of the U ssr (and of Soviet Marxism) had been largely
regulated by the requirements of competitive industrialization. In
strict Marxist language, ‘the functional differences between base
and superstructure therefore tended to be obliterated’38 as the
ideological superstructure was systematically assimilated to the
patterns imposed by the total productive apparatus: ‘The more the
base encroaches upon the ideology, manipulating and coordinating
it with the established order, the more the ideological sphere which
is remotest from the reality (art, philosophy) precisely because of its
remoteness, becomes the last refuge for the opposition to this
order.’39 The notion of an intrinsic cultural protest, however, denied
the most fundamental tenets of Soviet Marxism as well as the
official claim that the new Soviet society embodied the objective
interests of the population: ‘The fight against ideological transcen­
dence thus becomes a life-and-dcath struggle for the regime.’40 The
political requirement of substantively and stylistically ‘accepting the
established social reality as the final framework for the artistic
content’41 which passes under the name of ‘Realism’ seemed
especially critical for, as Marcuse had maintained throughout his
life, it is the very principle of the work of art to embody a protest on
behalf o f ‘a sphere of fulfilment’. Prior to the ultimate reconciliation
of Reason and History, reality and ideology, ‘art retains its critical
cognitive function: to represent the still transcendental truth, to
sustain the image of freedom against a denying reality’.42 When
38. Soviet Marxism, p. 104. The technical base is always understood broadly as ‘the
machine process as ensemble of institutions, functions, and attitudes’, (p. xi).
39. Ibid., p. 110.
40. Ibid., p. 114.
41. Ibid., p. 112.
42. Ibid., p. 115.
 Matters o f Life and Death ( 1 9 5 0 -1 9 5 8 ) 161

Soviet aesthetics attacked ‘Formalism’ and ‘Romanticism’, as well as

the even more abstract forms of atonality and surrealism, it attacked
‘the ideological reflex of freedom’ in a repressive society. This was
surely disastrous for humanity, but was also disastrous for art:
‘through the reinstatement of harmony by administrative decree,
the banning of dissonance, discord, and atonality, the cognitive
function of art is “brought in line’’, and conformity is enforced in
the per se non-conformistic artistic imagination.’43 Soviet aesthetics
wants art that is not art, he concludes, ‘and it gets what it asks for’.4445

In the modern, industrial world, then, the Actual was being

forcibly brought into line with the Rational against the background
of an all-embracing technical apparatus that left ever-narrower
regions of life free of control. All sectors of cultural and political life
were geared to the productive apparatus, to such an extent that even
opposition tended to take place on the terms of this technological
totality.
A striking ambiguity ran through Marcuse’s interpretation,
however, and he himself declared his dissatisfaction with his
formulation. While seeking to avoid the pitfalls of the simplistic
‘convergence’ theory of capitalist and socialist economies, he had
nonetheless been driven to recognize that technological rationaliza­
tion was a factor in some ways transcending political institutions:
the autonomy of ‘technological rationality’, ‘industrial civilization’,
‘the requirements of competitive total industrialization’, and other
such manifestly unpolitical constructs is implicitly recognized,
though explicitly their political neutrality is maintained.43
Marcuse recognized the ambiguous status of capitalism and
industrialism in his analysis, and the significance of the problematic
upon which this ambiguity rested. He confronted it directly in the
coming decade, concentrating his work on the analysis of politics
and technology in a fully integrated, ‘one-dimensional society’, and
on the embattled theoretical and practical escape routes from it.

43. Ibid., p. 119.

44. Ibid., p. 116.
45. Ibid., for example p. 169, but cf. also hints of the inherent political tendencies of
a large-scale industrial apparatus on pp. 69, 236, 239-40, 244.
5
Y ears of C heerful
P essimism
(1959-1969)

In the late phase of his career, that of the thesis of ‘one-

dimensionality’, Herbert Marcuse withstood attacks from the Krem­
lin and the Vatican, the Minutemen and the Weathermen, the
American Legion and the Progressive Labor Party, and parents,
pundits, and professors of every shade. Reviewing his controversial
work in the midst of the uprisings of 1968, the French Marxist Henri
Lefebvre concluded: ‘The debate is open.’1 In fact, in this period of
unsolicited international attention, Marcuse added almost nothing
to the theoretical framework he had already constructed. His
influence and notoriety came rather from his strategy of returning
his abstract formulations to the concrete ground and underground
of everyday life in the 1960s: speech, television, and sex, the
shopping centre, the home, and the workplace, the rcstiveness of
students, women, and minorities. If the achievement of Eros and
Civilization had been to anticipate the libertarian impulses of the
1960s, the achievement of One-Dimensional Man was to resonate
perfectly with them.

During the preceding two decades, Marcuse had pursued a

scholarly career that ran parallel to but outside of the academic
establishment. Aside from incidental lectures delivered at Columbia,
Harvard, and the American University in Washington, he had done
virtually no teaching, and he had had no sustained contact with
university students since his own studies in Freiburg. He rose to his
new calling, however, and soon after accepting his appointment in
Philosophy and Politics at Brandeis, he became one of the

h Henri Lefebvre, review of One-Dimensional Man in Le Monde, 16-17 juin 1968.

162
 Years o f Cheerful Pessimism (1 9 5 9 -1 9 6 9 ) 163

commanding figures in the university community, drawing unprece­

dented audiences to his lecture courses on ‘European Political
Thought’, ‘Greek Philosophy’, ‘Marxian Theory and Communism’,
and above all, his special course on ‘The Welfare and Warfare
State’. One of his students, not prone to hero-worship, recalls his
effect: ‘When Marcuse walked onto the platform . . . his presence
dominated everything. There was something imposing about him
that evoked total silence and attention when he appeared, without
his having to pronounce a single word. The students had a rare
respect for him. Their concentration was not only total during the
entire hour as he paced back and forth while he lectured, but if at
the sound of the bell Marcuse had not finished, the rattling of
papers would not begin until he had formally closed the lecture.’?
With his frequent denunciations of the trivial or fashionable
products of a sterile climate of ‘academic boredom’ and his
insistence that genuine thought is normative, negative, and ‘trans­
cendent’, students found him a uniquely provocative teacher; and in
his outspoken positions on the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Civil Rights
drive in the South, US support of the Brazilian military coup of
1964, and the growing intervention in South-east Asia, the emerging
political movement of the early 1960s found him an ally and - let it
be said - an inspiration.23
Several distinctive themes ran through the courses Marcuse
taught at Brandeis, among which the compatibility of liberalism
and totalitarianism is central: ‘The most urgent concern of today’,
he said in introducing his undergraduate lectures in political theory,
‘is the redefinition of totalitarianism. It is currently restricted to a
type of society quite obviously totalitarian. We have failed to discuss
democratic totalitarianism.’ The historical examination of represen­
tative ideologies and institutions which followed revealed that ‘there

2. Angela Davis, An Autobiography, New York 1974, pp. 133-4. As Chairman of the
Graduate Programme in the History of Ideas, Marcuse also taught advanced
seminars on Plato, Kant, Hegel, and Husserl.
3. Several statements from Marcuse’s students may be compared: ‘Marcuse as
Teacher’, by William Leiss, John David Ober, and Erica Shcrovcr in K. WolfT
and B, Moore, eds., The Critical Spirit, Boston 1968, pp. 421-5, and ‘Dear Herbert’
by Ronald Aronson in G. Fischer, ed., The Revival of American Socialism, New York
1971, pp. 257-80. It has occasionally been noted - by Irving Howe (Harpers, July
1969, p. 84) and the rightist pseudo-philosopher Eric Hoffer (Los Angeles Times, 6
July 1969) - that Marcuse did not unequivocally support the Hungarian uprising
of 1956; both imply that he therefore endorsed the Soviet invasion, which is not
only untrue but dishonest.
164

is no intrinsic contradiction between liberalism and dictatorship,

provided that the dictatorship meets the preconditions of liberalism,
namely space for the expression of individual needs and aspirations*.
In the present period, however, ‘it is manifestly clear that men may
be manipulated. Individual needs and needs imposed by society are
indistinguishable.*4
The first real development of the heretical notion of a comforta­
ble, smoothly functioning ‘democratic totalitarianism’ had actually
taken place before a European audience, however. In 1958 Marcuse
had accepted an invitation to become director of studies in the
influential ‘sixth section* of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in
Paris - an invitation sponsored by Lucien Goldmann and others -
where he lectured in French on ‘Les tendances de la societe
industrielle’.5 The theme of his lectures was the integration of all
spheres of life under the technological imperative of advanced
industrial society: ‘A new monism has appeared, but a monism
without substance. The tension between subject and object, the
dualistic and antagonistic character of reality tends to disappear,
and with it the “two-dimensionality” of human existence, the
capacity to envisage another mode of existence in the reality . . . In
the technological world, the capacity to understand and to live this
historical transcendence is dangerously atrophied; man is no longer
able to live according to two dimensions; he has become a
one-dimensional being.’6 By the time he returned to his position in
Paris two years later, the (as yet unnamed) thesis of one-
dimensionality had been expanded to include the adaptation of
language to the operational needs of the pervasive technological
apparatus, and the neutralization of critical reason by a ‘technologi­
cal rationality (that] renders the transcendental dimension unreal or
unrealistic*. The analysis of the social and political integration of
advanced industrial society was gradually being supplemented by
4. I am grateful to Professor Victoria Bonnell, University of California at Berkeley,
for allowing me the extended use of her undergraduate lecture notes from
Marcuse’s courses or fall 1962 through winter 1964. The passages quoted are from
his lectures of 25 September and 2 October 1962.
5. The ideas developed in the course were summarized in his essay, ‘Dc I’ontologic a
la technologie: les tcndenccs de la societe industriclle’, Arguments IV 18, 1960
(unless otherwise noted, all translations from the hrench and German in this
chapter are my own). Marcuse’s colleagues that year also included Andre Gorz
and Raymond Aron.
6. Ibid., p. 55. It may be recalled that the language of ‘two-dimensionality’ had
appeared in Marcuse’s writing at least since Hegets Onlologie (1932).
 Years o f Cheerful Pessimism (1 9 5 9 -1 9 6 9 ) 165

the identification of tendencies toward integration in the realms of

thought and culture.7
At Brandeis Marcuse had now begun to offer a regular course on
‘The Welfare State and the Warfare State’, in which the historical
roots and dominant tendencies of the new industrial society were
examined. The analysis of economic, political, and social trends
revealed that since around 1910, the extension of the productive
apparatus had begun the process of integrating all spheres of society
within a repressive and increasingly destructive whole. He neverthe­
less concluded his lectures in the spring of 1964 with ‘an admittedly
utopian and romantic projection of the new society which would
appear with the passing of the welfare/warfare state’. The tone of
his lectures thus contrasted sharply with the tone of the book that
had appeared at the beginning of the term.
In fact, the categories o f‘optimism’ and ‘pessimism’ are irrelevant
to Marcuse’s now classic One-Dimensional Man - he once dismissed an
interviewer’s question with his characteristic good-natured impa­
tience: ‘Alright, so I’m a cheerful pessimist!’ A more substantial (but
equally unsuccessful) attempt to deflect such questions introduces
the book: ‘One-Dimensional Man will vacillate throughout between
two contradictory hypotheses: (1) that advanced industrial society is
capable of containing qualitative change for the foreseeable future;
(2) that forces and tendencies exist which may break this contain­
ment and explode the society. I do not think that a clear answer can
be given. Both tendencies are there, side by side - and even the one
in the other.’8 The first tendency, however, is dominant, and this
political imbalance is reflected in the oppressive weight of the
analysis.
Manifestly, One-Dimensional Man studies the assimilation of public
and private, inner and outer, through the extension of the realm of
necessity (work, economic productivity) into the realm traditionally
reserved by the ideologies of the bourgeois era for the free
development of the self. Not only is the free time of the individual
now invaded by total mass mobilization for consumption and
7. Marcuse, ‘The Problem of Social Change in the Technological Society’, lecture
presented to UNESCO symposium on lLe developpemenl sociaC, Paris, 28 April
1961; printed for limited distribution under the auspices of Raymond Aron and
Bert Hoselitz (Paris 1965, p. 157).
8. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society,
Boston 1964, p. xv. This characteristic bivalencc (which is not ambivalence) is for
Marcuse an essential component of dialectical, two-dimensional thought.
defence, but the radical opposition historically preserved in art,
science, and philosophy has been effectively neutralized. Previously,
they had represented the inherently critical ‘consciousness of the
discrepancy between the real and the possible, between the apparent
and the authentic truth, and the effort to comprehend and master
this discrepancy’.9 In the present, late, phase of industrial civiliza­
tion, however, under the dual imperatives of capitalist profitability
and competitive international coexistence, even these outposts of
transcendence have been absorbed by the totalitarian organization
of the technological base.
Science, once an acknowledged weapon in the fight against
irrationality, has in modern times developed within an ‘instrumen­
talist horizon’ by which it is assimilated to the overarching historical
‘project’ of the existing society. The very process through which
science emancipated itself from external determinations (theologi­
cal, metaphysical) and achieved an objective value freedom, has
delivered it over to the ends prevailing in the society as a whole. In
an argument that draws its elements from Husserl, Sartre, and
Horkhcimer and Adorno, Marcuse linked theoretical and practical
reason, the abstract and functional character of scientific concepts
with their technological ‘application’. But since politics and culture,
business and the military are fused within this technological
apparatus, a new concreteness is smuggled into the supposedly
abstract formulations of scientific theory - the very concrete social
forms of domination.10
Philosophy has likewise succumbed to the one-dimensional techno­
logical rationality, relinquishing its historical commitment to the
hidden dimension of unexperienced reality (potentiality) in favour
of the language, truth, and logic of the establishment. In its
prevailing, neo-positivist forms, contemporary philosophy repu­
diates all transgression beyond empirical facts and rejects as
‘metaphysical’ those modes of thought which negate and transcend
the established universe of discourse: ‘Philosophical thought turns
into affirmative thought; the philosophic critique criticizes within
9. One-Dimensional Man, p. 229.
10. The major sources of Marcuse’s argument arc Dialektik der Aujkldrung, Sartre’s
L'Elre el le Neant, and Husserl’s Die Knsis der Europdischen Wissenschaflen und die
transzendentale Phanomenologie; the critique of the hidden substance of formal logic
and the de facto partisanship of supposedly ‘objective’ modes of thought is also the
main theme of Horkhcimcr’s lectures delivered at Columbia University in 1946,
and published as Eclipse of Reason (reissued New York 1974).
 Years of Cheerful Pessimism (1959-1969) 167

the societal framework and stigmatizes non-positive notions as mere

speculation, dreams, or fantasies.’11 Again, the avowed ‘purity’ of
thought reveals itself to be illusory, for even the abstract formula­
tions of formal logic and linguistic analysis absorb both the
historical process by which relationships are constituted, and the
reified social totality within which phrases are uttered. The logical
only reflects the ontological, and philosophy is social theory whether
it wants to be or not.
Even arty which Marcuse had from the beginning valued as the
final refuge of irreconcilable opposition and indictment, is losing its
defining quality of being alien to the alienated existence: ‘Today’s
novel feature is the flattening out of the antagonism between culture
and social reality through the obliteration of the oppositional, alien,
and transcendent elements in the higher culture by virtue of which
it constituted another dimension of reality.’1112 The coordination (Gleich-
schaltung?) of culture with politics and society which had been
carried out by totalitarian terror in the 1930s was now being
accomplished - democratically and efficiently - by the totalitarian
organization of technology. Industrial civilization, with its immense
capacity to integrate art into the business and pleasure of daily life,
to desublimate the ideals expressed in the content and embodied in
the form of the oeuvre within a still-repressive whole, has invalidated
the higher truth value of art, which depended precisely upon its
estrangement from the established society. The power of art to evoke
‘an uncomprehended and unconquered dimension of man and
nature’ resisting integration has been annulled as this dimension has
yielded to technological mastery, and the critical contradiction
between art and life has been resolved - prematurely.
This mobilization against conceptual and aesthetic transcen­
dence of one-dimensional thought is the ideological reflex of the
mobilization against political transcendence of one-dimensional
society.13 Accordingly, Marcuse turned his attention - and this is
the new development in his writings of this period - to the social and
political forces arrayed against the opposition. What he diagnosed
11. One-Dimensional Man, p. 172.
12. Ibid., p. 57 (emphasis in original).
13. It might be noted that the analysis of the critical functions of science, philosophy,
and art, Marcuse builds upon ideas developed in his earlier essays, but does not
advance theoretically beyond them: ‘Some Social Implications of Modern
Technology’, (SPSS, 1941), ‘Philosophic und kritische Theorie’, (ZjS, 1937), and
‘Ubcr den affirmativen Charakter der Kultur’ (ZJS, 1937).
168

was a society of unimaginable productive capacities which, driven

by the imperatives of capitalist profitability, spread waste, destruc­
tion, and misery across the globe while controlling the thoughts,
needs, and actions of its own members in accord with the rationality
of the productive apparatus. At the same time, the very real
accomplishments of the system seemed to render protest irrational,
for most of its members, the affluent society ‘delivers the goods , and
opposition to the irrationality of the whole must seek higher
ground.14
In this analysis, which had been evolving throughout his whole
career, Marcuse struck a resonant chord in the generation of the
1960s. Under profoundly different political and economic condi­
tions, Marx had written that theory, the first weapon in the fight
against the existing organization of power, ‘is capable of gripping
the masses when it demonstrates ad hominem, and it demonstrates ad
hominem as soon as it becomes radical*.151 6 One-Dimensional Man ,
whether despite or because of the severity of its analysis, met this
requirement: it contained an analysis of the objective transforma­
tion of the capitalist mode of production in the era of high
technology, but also identified the subjective feeling of poverty that
prevailed within the affluent society. Within five years, Marcuse’s
‘Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society’ had sold
over 100,000 copies in the United States, and had been translated
into sixteen languages.
As he is often criticized for having cultivated a haughty
philosophical disdain for analysis of ‘the facts’, it is interesting to
note that Marcuse included far more empirical and historical
material in his course on ‘The Warfare State and the Welfare State’
than is reflected in One-Dimensional Man. 16 He surveyed ninctecnth-
and twentieth-century trends, and had his students conduct investi­

14. In one of the most revealing moments in the reception of One-Dimensional Man, a
conservative reviewer felt that he must point out to the readers of Fortune
Magazine that Marcuse’s portrayal of the material saturation of life in the
affluent society was meant to be critical: Irving Kristol, ‘Improbable Guru of
Surrealistic Politics’, Fortune, July 1969, p. 191. Several notable critiques of the
book will be encountered further on.
15. Karl Marx, ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction’, in Early
Writings, p. 251.
16. Apart from the familiar charge that he is ‘too abstract’, cf. the critiques of Peter
Clecak, Radical Paradoxes, New York 1974, pp. 175-229, and ‘Karl Miller’
(pseud.), The Point is Still to Change It’, Monthly Review, June 1967, pp. 49-57
(but also Marcuse’s reply, October 1967, pp. 42-8).
 Years of Cheerful Pessimism ( 1959-1969) 169

gations into particular cases of the interpenetration of business,

government, and the university within the modern defence econ­
omy. His sources often included Business Week, the Wall Street Journal,
and the New York Times, which on 12-13 April 1964, carried a
front-page report on the military basis of the economy of metropoli­
tan San Diego to which he called his students’ attention: fully 81.8%
of total manufacturing employment was reported to be in the
missile and aircraft industries. More could have been said: these
plants produce over $640 million in military products annually; the
Naval and Marine payroll injects Si.2 million into the San Diego
economy every day; $12 thousand million in military ships and
planes and 130,000 people are based in the twenty-one airfields,
harbours, and military bases spread throughout the country; and
ultra-conservative interests are supported by an unholy alliance
ranging from newspaper magnates, business leaders, and the highest
concentration of retired admirals in the country, to the John Birch
Society, the Minutcmen, and an array of heavily armed right-wing
paramilitary groups.17 It is surely a choice irony, then, that when,
shortly thereafter, Marcuse learned of the administration’s decision
to allow his teaching contract at Brandeis to lapse, out of many
offers he accepted a position in the Philosophy Department of the
University of California at San Diego.18 He was able to keep a
rather low profile in the community for about two years, which he
devoted to his teaching and to the clarification of his theoretical
position before an international audience of scholars and activists;
his strategy rested upon a series of calculated intellectual counter­
offensives against the establishment.

Most immediately conspicuous among these was a frontal attack

against the majority of his colleagues in philosophy and the social
(and natural) sciences. Against the avowed methodological insulari­
ty of the disciplines, he had argued that even the most rigorous
particular judgements can be corrupted by the irrationality of the
whole: formal logic absorbs the substance of the status quo, value

17. C f, for example, The New York Times, 12-13 April 1964; The Nation, 20 October
1968; the Los Angeles Times, 27 July 1969; the New York Times, 6 October 1968.
18. Although he was given no explanation for his termination, in view of his
eminence and scholarly record there can be little doubt that his age (67) was not
the determining factor and that political considerations were involved. The
UCSD appointment was arranged by his friend, the philosopher Richard Popkin.
170

freedom actually serves the values of the prevailing (unfree) society,

and objective science - in the very structure of its concepts -
surreptitiously takes up a partisan stance toward the objectively
posited order. As Husserl had demonstrated in his critique of
post-Galilean science (applicable also to contemporary schools of
scientific philosophy), the concrete qualities of empirical reality
remain operative in the scientific abstraction from them (the
‘lebmswellliche a priori’); in this way, ‘the pre-scicntific, pre-given
empirical reality enters the scientific enterprise and makes it a
project within the pre-established general project of the empirical
reality’. 19 The characteristic modern liberation of science from
superimposed norms and values (whether humanistic or inhumane)
has reduced it to an instrument of the totalitarian technological
apparatus. No more appropriate forum for a critique of the false
objectivity of the empiricist programme could have been offered to
Marcuse than the 1964 Heidelberg conference marking the centen­
ary of Max Weber’s birth, where he flatly stated, ‘neutrality is real
only where it has the power to resist interference’.20
The epistemological critique of the existing internal organization
of science and the humanities (‘a treacherous designation: as if the
sciences did not partake of humanity!’)21 carried with it a political
challenge as well. For if reason is intrinsically historical reason, then
the only true ‘objectivity’ would be actively partisan on the side of a
rational society; it would include responsibility for the social context
within which knowledge is produced, as well as for its impact upon
19. Marcuse, ‘On Science and Phenomenology’, paper delivered to the Boston
Colloquium on the Philosophy of Science, 13 February 1964, published in Boston
Studies in the Philosophy of Science, II, R.S. Cohen and Marx VVartofsky, eds., New
York 1965, p. 286. To a less specialized audience at UCLA in July, 1966: ‘to put
it another way, whereas the idea of pure science once had a progressive function,
it now serves, against the intention of the scientist, the repressive powers that
dominate society’; ‘The Responsibility of Science’, in L. Krieger and F. Stern,
eds., The Responsibility of Power, New York 1967, p. 440: the dialectic of
enlightenment.
20. Marcuse, ‘Industrialisierung und Kapitalismus’, address to the Deutsche Gesell-
schaft fur Soziologie, April 1964, published in O. Stammer, ed., Max Weber und die
Soziologie Heuie, Tubingen 1964; lecture and discussion trans. Kathleen Morris,
Max Weber and Sociology Today, New York 1971, also by J. Shapiro in Negations, p.
215. It may be compared with Goethe’s remark: ‘As in the moral sphere, so we
need a categorical imperative in the natural sciences’.
21. Marcuse, I he Individual in the Great Society’, Alternatives, vol. I, nos. 1, 2
(March-April, summer 1966), also in Bertram Gross, ed., A Great Society?, New
York 1966, p. 74. The New Left journal Alternatives was founded by members of
Marcuse’s graduate philosophy seminar at San Diego.
 Years o f Cheerful Pessimism ( 1 9 5 9 - 1 9 6 9 ) 171

society and human life. One-Dimensional Man had already proffered a

concise formulation of the critical theory of knowledge: ‘Epistemo­
logy is in itself ethics, and ethics is epistemology.’22
For this, Marcuse was accused of attempting to politicize the
university, although, consistent with the line of his reasoning for
many years, he insisted that the opposite was the case. ‘The
university is already a political institution’, he told a student
audience at the Free University of Berlin, and what is at stake is ‘an
attempt at the anti-politicization of the university.’23 Knowledge of
the facts must provide for the critique of them in so far as they are
factors of a repressive whole, and this theoretical critique commands
a political practice. For Marcuse this meant exposing academic
complicity in the expanding Indochina war, endorsement of alterna­
tive educational projects, proposals, and publications, revision of
existing academic curricula to include serious treatment of dissident
currents of theory and practice (the ‘body’ of the unwritten Corpus
Hereticorum), and an ongoing polemical attempt to clarify the tasks
of philosophy and the responsibilities of the intellectual.
In this attempt, Marcuse was consistent with the dialectical
programme implied or expressed in his writings over decades:
philosophy must look beyond ideal concepts to the actual conditions
of their possible materialization, and ‘it is the task and duty of the
intellectual to recall and preserve historical possibilities which seem
to have become utopian p ossibilities’.2** The complementary themes
of ‘anticipation’ and ‘memory’ which had guided so much of his
previous work thus survived into this period, and were plainly
operative in the notorious 1965 essay on ‘Repressive Tolerance’ from
which this passage is drawn.
Marcuse had argued that tolerance is not an abstract notion but
a weapon in the fight for a practical and rationally discernible goal
- the creation of a society that would permit the fullest realization of
the objective, historical possibilities of freedom and happiness.
Detached from its moorings in the concrete facts of social life, what
passes for tolerance may in fact be intolerance toward ideas and234

22. One-Dimensional Man, p. 125.

23. Marcuse, ‘Das Problem der Gewalt in der Opposition’, lecture at the Free
University of Berlin, July 1967, published in Das Ende da Utopie, Berlin 1967,
trans. J. Shapiro and S. Weber, Five Lectures, Boston 1970, p. 88.
24. Marcuse, ‘Repressive Tolerance’, in Robert Paul Wolff, Barrington Moore, Jr.,
and Marcuse, A Critique of Pure Tolerance, Boston 1965, p. 82.
172

actions that fall outside the status quo.25 Recalling, as he often did,
the self-destruction of the liberal and tolerant Weimar Republic,
which he had himself witnessed, Marcuse proposed rational criteria
for the determination of tolerance and concluded that where a
society promoted violence, destruction, and misery, ‘the realization
of the objective of tolerance would call for intolerance toward
prevailing policies, attitudes, and opinions which are outlawed and
suppressed’.26 Fully aware of the danger involved in his position,
Marcuse ventured an ‘affirmative action’ theory of tolerance,
weighted on the side of those heretical groups and individuals to
whom it has historically been denied, and in the service of a future
society in which tolerance may regain its liberating and humanizing
function. ‘I believe that we have discriminating tolerance here
already’, he told a B bc audience, ‘and what I want to do is redress
the balance.’27
The essay ‘Repressive Tolerance’ had been Marcuse’s contribu­
tion to a collective attempt to analyse the nature and limits of
tolerance ‘in the prevailing political climate’, and although it
contained little that had not appeared elsewhere in his work, the
response to it suggested that the political climate itself was
changing: as his students - to whom the essay was dedicated - were
beginning to shift their energies from the tactics of black voter
registration in the south to the larger mobilization of an anti-war
resistance, the question of the limits of tolerance had become
immediate.
Even before the challenges from the ghettoes, the streets, and the
occupied universities, members of the liberal intelligentsia had
already been put on the defensive by the impieties of One-Dimensional
Man, which had contested the identity of progress with technological
development, challenging modern society precisely at the level of its
most celebrated accomplishments: not poverty, but wasteful af­
fluence, not the weakness of its institutions, but rather their

25. In a related essay on ‘Ethics and Revolution’, Marcuse developed the notion of
‘rational standards and criteria for judging the given possibilities of human
freedom and happiness’, in R. DeGeorge, ed., Ethics and Society, New York 1966,
pp. 133-47. The theme of the historical objectivity of reason and ethics is taken
up again in his ‘Thoughts on the Defence of Gracchus BabeuP, in J. A. Scott, ed.,
The Defence of Gracchus Babeuf Amherst 1967, pp. 96-105.
26. ‘Repressive Tolerance’, p. 82.
27. Marcuse, interview with Robert McKenzie, published in The Listener, 17 October
1968, p. 499.
 Years o f Cheerful Pessimism ( 1 9 5 9 - 1 9 6 9 ) 173

overwhelming power; not the repudiation of the ideals of the

Enlightenment, but their transformation into vacuous or repressive
ideologies in the course of their realization. Now ‘academic freedom’
itself seemed to be at stake, and the notion of ‘discriminating
tolerance’ became a rallying point for its righteous defenders.28

Rightist defenders also were put on the alert. The consternation

caused by this and related positions drifted from the scholarly
journals to the mass media and into the public focus during the
latter half of the decade, with inevitable distortion. It was claimed
that Marcuse’s work served ‘as an action manifesto for street
brawlers’, or was ‘a neo-Sorelian exhortation to violence’; he
allegedly advocated tyrannical rule by ‘a small elite of individuals
who have learned to think rationally’, and who would then
withdraw toleration from all who ‘oppose what the new ruling class
regards as progressive’. From St Paul’s, Pope Paul VI struck a
different note, denouncing ‘the theory that opens the way to licence
cloaked as liberty, and the aberration of instinct called liberation’,
while Pravda was no less ardent in defending its faith against the
‘false prophet’.2829
Already by the beginning of 1967, Marcuse’s star had begun to
rise, and his name began to acquire the mystical aura of familiarity
that the media have the power to create through mass circulation

28. Another crusader: A few years later, Marcuse challenged - on academic, not
political grounds - the qualifications of a certain Fred Schwarz, leader of a
‘Christian Anti-Communism Crusade’, to offer an accredited course on ‘Conser­
vative and Traditional Views of Contemporary Issues’ in the university
Extension; Marcuse submitted dissenting materials to the administration calling
the proposed lectures ‘a mockery of genuine education and a mockery of
conservative thought’. A public outcry followed Marcuse’s statement, in which
irresponsible charges were made that ‘intolerance is consistent with his political
philosophy . . . His essay on “Repressive Tolerance” makes this clear’. Cf. the
intellectually lopsided exchange between Marcuse and William Banowsky, then
Chancellor of Pepperdine College, Malibu, in the Los Angeles Times of 5 April
(Banowsky) and 12 (Marcuse), 1970. Among serious defenders of universal
tolerance, cf. Maurice Cranston, ‘Herbert Marcuse’ in Cranston, ed., The New
Left, New York 1971, pp. 85-116; George Kateb, ‘The Political Thought of
Herbert Marcuse’, Commentary (January 1970) and Walter Kaufmann, ‘Black and
White’ in Survey, 73 (Autumn 1969).
29. Passages in this section arc drawn from Kurt Glaser, ‘Marcuse and the German
New Left’, National Review, 2 July 1968; Ernest Conine, ‘Right, Left, and Scared
Silly’, Los Angeles Times, 14 July 1968; Vatican Bulletin, I October 1969 (reported
in New York Times of 2 October 1969), Yuri Zhukov in Pravda, 30 May 1968
(trans. Atlas, September 1968); Elisco Vivas, Contra Marcuse, New Rochelle 1971.
174

and compulsive repetition: ‘I’m very much worried about this’, he

said. ‘At the same time it is a beautiful verification of my
philosophy, which is that in this society everything can be coopted,
everything can be digested.’^0 A neatly packaged and readily
digested image was conferred upon him, that of the ‘white-maned,
craggy-faced, cigar-puffing septuagenarian’ (Time magazine, of
course), usually depicted in genteel surroundings and speaking
through a thick German accent, and it was this contrived image,
rather than his books, that drew public attention.^ Accordingly, the
attacks against him became more numerous, but also more ignorant
and more dangerous: he was the new ‘apostle of chaos’, ‘a splenetic
old man sputtering hatred’, who ‘comes close to preaching anarchy
and urging destruction of our form of democracy’. And although
one might have dared to hope that certain accusations would have
by now lost their power to indict any but their unfortunate authors,
he was charged with corrupting the minds of the young.
The new Meletus was one Harry L. Foster, judge-advocate of the
San Diego county organization of the American Legion; from
among many contenders, the roles of Anytus and Lycon may be
assigned to California State Senator Jack Schrade and Assembly
Representative John Stull, in whose (Republican) district U c sd is
located. Legionnaire Foster, who had never heard of Herbert
Marcuse before May 1968, demanded ‘a full-scale investigation of
Dr Marcuse’; a campaign was launched, and Legion Post 6 was soon
able to make a much-publicized offer of S20,000 to buy up
Marcuse’s contract from the University. ‘The Marcuse matter’,
Foster said ominously, ‘was brought to my attention by certain
members of the community here whom I’m not privileged to name,
who hoped that the Legion would move because otherwise there
might be considerable trouble on the campus here.’ At a more
official level, Governor Ronald Reagan told the Regents of the
University of California that Marcuse was not qualified to teach,
while the two right-wing legislators demanded that the university
cancel the contract of the rabble-rousing communist. It may not
prejudice the defence to note that Mr Foster’s interpretation of
Marcuse’s theoretical position was based upon one hostile and301
30. ‘Varieties of Humanism. Herbert Marcuse talks with Harvey Wheeler’, The
Center Magazine, vol. 1, no. 5 (July 1968), p. 19.
31. For Marcuse’s own analysis of the functional and manipulative language of the
‘hyphenated abridgement’ cf. One-Dimensional Man, pp. 92-4.
 Years o f Cheerful Pessimism ( 1 9 5 9 - 1 9 6 9 ) 175

inaccurate editorial in the San Diego Union, Senator Schradc’s

critical analysis was derived from ‘opinions I have received’, and
Assemblyman Stull’s studies of Marcuse’s work extended no further
than reports o f‘his public statements’.32
For the most part, Marcuse remained aloof from the growing
controversy surrounding his name, leaving Chancellor William
McGill to reassure the public that its safety was not imperilled. In
interviews, Marcuse repeated that he had never endorsed violence or
the destruction of universities, nor advocated any specific tactics in
his role as a teacher (‘But neither is it the role of the educator to
prevent action’). He could not believe that his rightist critics had
read his books, attended his lectures, or acquainted themselves with
the context of his public statements; since they were without serious
foundations, he said, ‘I shall do with these charges what they
deserve: nothing’.33
Marcuse’s complacency turned to irritation only when the tactics
of the right were escalated. In July 1968, he returned to California
from several tumultuous months in Europe. Awaiting him was a
hand-printed letter, dated 1July, which spoke of the necessary unity
of theory and practice: ‘Marcuse you are a very dirty Communist
dog. You have 72 hours to live [jiV] the United States, 72 hours,
Marcuse, and then we will kill you.’ Three weeks later, by which
time he had reluctantly yielded to his wife’s gathering alarm and
gone into ‘hiding’ at Leo Lowenthal’s summer house near Carmel,
his stepson Michael Neumann began to receive telephone calls from
an unidentified woman, telling him, ‘The first time he [Marcuse]
gets back [for the fall semester] there will be a bombing at the
philosophy department and also at his home’. By this time Marcuse
was back in Europe, telling three interviewers in the south of France
that he was ‘certainly not in favour of authorizing free expression to
racist, anti-scmitic, or neo-Nazi movements, because the distance
between the word and the deed is too brief today, too short’.34
Returning to La Jolla in September, after a further series of lectures
and conferences across Europe and a brief visit to Venice, he found
a letter from Florence (Kentucky) deferentially addressed to: ‘Filthy
Communist Anti-American Professor Herbert Marcuse / c/o

32. Foster, quoted in the New York Times, 6 October 1968, and The Nation, 28
October 1968; Schradc and Stull, quoted in the Los Angeles Times, 19 July 1968.
33. Herbert Marcuse to Roger Rapoport of the Los Angeles Times, 27 July 1969.
34. ‘Entretien avec Herbert Marcuse’, L'Express, 23-29 September 1968, p. 56.
176

Department of Philosophy / University of California at San Diego.

Marcuse did not answer his correspondence from the Ku Klux Klan
(1 July) or the Minutemen (10 September), or return the calling
cards left by the local ‘Phantom Cells’, only commenting, ‘If
somebody really believes that my opinions can seriously endanger
society then he and society must be very badly off indeed’. His
family, friends, and students were less philosophical: Michael
Neumann notified the Fm, Inge Marcuse forced the interviewer
from the Saturday Evening Post to empty his pockets lx*fore entering
the house, and his graduate teaching assistants look on the serious
added duty of standing guard over his house through the night.35
Marcuse rarely responded to his academic critics who generally
dismissed him as a marginal figure in contemporary philosophy, for
he tended to dismiss most contemporary philosophy as a marginal
phenomenon in the larger history of Western thought; correspond­
ingly, he was not deeply distressed by the massive critical publicity
that began to envelop him from about 1967, when the New York
Times first characterized him as ‘the idol of American leftists’. To a
third audience, however, he was inordinately sensitive and respon­
sive: the New Left, especially the student movement as it had begun
to take shape in the United States, France, and West Germany.
During precisely the five years in which Marcuse had been
writing about ‘the closing of the political universe’ characteristic of
one-dimensional society, an unprecedented confluence of political
forces was maturing that would enable him to move the analysis to
a higher stage. He had already been well aware of the numbers of
his students who had been making the hazardous journey from
Waltham to the southern states to join in the struggle for
desegregation and civil rights; the first political confrontations at
Berkeley had taken place in 1964, and the S d s had called the first
national protest march against the Vietnam war at the end of his
last semester of teaching at Brandeis. Marcuse began to take a
serious theoretical and practical interest in these emergent, still
35. Sources for these reports include discussions with Marcuse and his students, also
the Los Angeles Times, 12 July and 26 July 1968, the New York Times, 29
September 1968. Did the FBI have to be informed? At least one paid FBI
informant was a member of the Phantom Cells, a right-wing ‘survival . . . and
guerrilla group associated with the Minutemen’ which operated in the San Diego
area in this period, and had targeted Marcuse, Angela Davis, and other radical
leftists: ‘Terror From the Right: An FBI Informant Talks’, Chicago Sun-Times, 7
March 1976.
 Years o f Cheerful Pessimism ( 19 5 9 - 19 6 9 ) 177

marginal forces, and they in him.36

It is a disagreeable but demonstrable fact that Marcuse’s
theoretical work suffered in the period of his most active political
enSagerncnt - he himself often admitted that ‘grandiose ideas about
the unity of theory and practice do injustice to the feeble beginnings
of such a union’.37 No real breakthroughs followed One-Dimensional
Man, but far from dismissing his subsequent work on that account,
the obligation is to readjust the framework within which it is to be
interpreted - a framework outlined by the war, the resistance, and
his abiding conception of the responsibilities of intellectuals. At a
stage in his life when any scholar might deservedly have retired to
his study and a valedictory opus, Marcuse, nearly seventy, threw his
energies to an astonishing degree behind the tasks the movement
had set for itself.

Marcuse’s interpretation of the Marxian theory of the ‘revolu­

tionary subject’ had undergone a significant evolution in his
attempt to preserve its organic connection to the events of the
twentieth century. At the end of the First World War, he had
seemingly accepted the ‘orthodox’ designation of the proletariat of
the industrialized nations as the agent of socialist revolution, in an
unspecified alliance with radical members of the middle-class
intelligentsia. The failure of the German revolution dealt the first
blow to this conception, and with the advent of Nazism in Germany,
he concluded that the revolutionary role of the working class in the
industrialized West had been (forcibly) suspended for the foreseea­
ble future. Revolutionary conditions, he wrote of the Marxian
theory, imply acute class struggle and ‘a self-conscious and organ­
ized working class on an international scale’,38 conditions that did
not obtain in the capitalist world.
After 1945, the question of the agent of socialist revolution lay
dormant in his work - except for his critique of the official Soviet
position - until the revival of American socialism in the New Left.
During this period he re-examined Marx’s analysis and concluded

36. On Marcuse and the New Left in ‘the 1964-65 juncture’ cf. especially Paul
Brcincs’s excellent analysis in Habermas, ed., Aniworlen auf Herbert Alarcuse,
Frankfurt 1969, pp. 133-51; for the French perspective, Jean-Michel Palmier’s
Herbert Marcuse et la nouvelle gauche, Paris 1973, pp. 476-618.
37. Marcuse, ‘Political Preface, 1966’ to Eros and Civilization, p. xvi.
38. Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, p. 318.
178

that loyalty to Marxian dialectics meant abandoning the ‘classical’

Marxist theory of the revolutionary proletariat. Although Marcuse’s
link - both theoretical and practical - to ‘the contemporary
successor of the proletariat’ had always been tenuous (‘our Salonkom-
munist\ his sister called him), he now took this last step.39
Marx had departed from earlier forms of socialist theory by
starting not from a romanticization of the working class but from an
analysis of its structural role in capitalist society; ‘the proletariat’, in
Marcuse’s rendering of the original conception, ‘constituting the
majority of the population, is revolutionary by virtue of its needs,
the satisfaction of which is beyond the reaches of capitalist
capabilities.’40 Although he had not yet formally rejected Marx’s
stipulation that the blue-collar labour force, by virtue of its strategic
position, remained the only class capable of arresting the process of
production, he denied both its preponderant numerical weight and
that it still represented the ‘determinate negation’ of capitalist
oppression, ‘a sphere which has a universal character because of its
universal suffering, and which lays claim to no particular right
because the wrong it suffers is not a particular wrong but wrong in
general\ 414
2The analysis of the absorption of the American working
class into the economic, cultural, and instinctual life of one­
dimensional capitalist society indicated that this final but decisive
condition had not been met.
Far from deviating along a ‘third way’ between socialist and
bourgeois theory,42 Marcuse was therefore following the Marxian
conception rather closely when he told an audience at the first
international socialist ‘Summer School’ in Korcula in 1964, ‘What
we have in the highly developed industrialized countries is a class
society: there is no doubt that all idle talk about “popular
capitalism’’ or an equalization of classes is pure ideology - but it
is a class society in which the working class no longer represents
the negation of the established order.’ The allegedly ‘pessimistic’
conclusions of his analysis of the suspended class struggle characteri­
stic of one-dimensional society enabled him to emancipate the
Marxian critique from nineteenth-century conditions, and to

39. Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt, pp. 38-9.

40. Ibid., p. 38.
41. Karl Marx, ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction’, Early Writings,
p. 256.
42. This is the charge of R. Steigcrwald, Herbert Marcuses Driller Weg, Berlin 1969.
 Years o f Cheerful Pessim ism ( 1 9 5 9 - 1 9 6 9 ) / 79

reorient it toward actual points of negation.43 Since this impulse

would have to come - as Marx had insisted - from a force that had
developed outside of the administered system of needs, Marcuse was
clearly looking not for an alternative, but for a catalyst to the
long-range formation of a socialist working class, however little this
would resemble the traditional 'proletariat of Marxist theory; this
seemed to him to be the promise and the significance of the New
Left.
The most conspicuously ‘new’ feature of the New Left was its
composition. It was, of course, not an organization but a radical
‘movement’ of politics and culture centred among anti-war universi­
ty students, but which also addressed dissident religious groups,
cultural types, and the specifically radical constituencies of women
and underprivileged minorities - groups who were, as Marx had
stipulated, in civil society but not of it. From its origins in the Civil
Rights movements and rebellious cultural phenomena of the late
1950s, the New Left grew in proportion to deepening US involve­
ment in Vietnam, and in its evolution tended to politicize the
conditions - psychological, cultural, educational, sexual - of its own
existence.4344
The multi-dimensional character the New Left had begun to
acquire in the mid 1960s - in its demands, its tactics, and its
symbolism - suggested to Marcuse the ‘juncture between the erotic
and political dimension’ which had been thematic for him perhaps
as early as Eisner’s ill-fated Bavarian Socialist Republic of 1918-19,
and which had been rising to the surface of his writings in the

43. Marcuse, ‘Pcrspcktivcn dcs Sozialismus in der cntwickelten Industriegcscll-

schaft’, lecture, Korcula, August 1964, published in Praxis: Reive Philosophique,
1965, p. 261. The highly regarded Koriula Summer School was an annual
conference organized by a group of Yugoslav Marxists associated with the
journal Praxis. In 1966 Marcuse became a member of the Advisory Council of the
embattled journal, and he returned to KorCula in the eventful summer of 1968.
For a full analysis of the Praxis group and its fate, cf. Gerson S. Sher, Praxis,
Bloomington 1977; also the report by Rudi Supek, ‘Dix ans dc I’ccole de Kortula
(1963-1973)’, in Praxis, 1-2, 1974, pp. 3-15. Returning to Boston he claimed to
his friend Marx Wartofsky that Yugoslavia proves the possibility of a peaceful
transition from socialism to capitalism.
44. For a sensitive study of the ideals and the reality of New Left theory and practice,
cf. Greg Calvert and Carol Nciman, A Disrupted History: The New Left and the New
Capitalism, New York 1971, an analysis with which Marcuse identified strongly.
Two studies of the cultural radicalism of the 1960s which arc relevant to Marcuse
arc Theodor Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture, New York 1969, esp. pp.
84-120, and Morris Dickstcin, Gates of Eden, New York 1977, pp. 51-88.
180

decades prior to its explicit formulation in Eros and Civilization. One

of the first indications of Marcuse’s positively charged reappraisal of
the prospects for liberation appeared early in 1967, in the context of
a review of the current book by his old friend Norman O. Brown:
the author of Eros and Civilization, who had become the author of
One-Dimensional Man, took on the author of Life Against Death, who
had become the author of Love's Body, in a battle of world-views that
must be regarded as one of the outstanding documents of the
period.45 In essence, Marcuse wondered if Brown was not ascending
toward heaven just at the historical moment which called most
urgently for a return to earth.
The polemical and poetic precision of their exchange has
obscured the fact that although their gazes were fixed in opposite
directions, the two were standing on much the same ground
(underground?). To be sure, it was impossible for Marcuse to accept
the strains of Christian mysticism that sounded throughout Love's
Body, and, more severely, Brown’s militant metaphysics - his refusal
to return from imagery to reality, from symbolism to what is
symbolized. But only more profoundly, then, do the affinities show
through: both philosophers sought to restore ‘the right of the
imagination as cognitive power’, and both saw that the reified world
of liberalism and literalism is a false and repressive one, and must
not be permitted to have the last word.
Norman Brown said in his reply, ‘This is no joke’, but Marcuse
had not joined in the chorus of denunciations of Brown’s attempt to
put an end to politics (‘literature’, ‘prophecy’, ‘nonsense’), and did
not have to be told. He surely saw that Love's Body was in itself a
‘Corpus Hereticorum’ and he knew well many of the landmarks of
the strange country through which Brown was then travelling
almost unaccompanied: Platonic eros, officially proscribed currents
of heretical, mystical, and utopian thought, Romanticism, Marxism,
and psychoanalysis, the art of surrealism and the theatre of the
absurd. For fifty years Marcuse had been rehabilitating such
movements precisely because of their transcendental function - as
the embattled (and often terroristic) guardians of an integrated,
pre-technological rationality in which ethics and aesthetics were

45. Herbert Marcuse, ‘Love Mystified: A Critique of Norman O. Brown’, Commentary,

February 1967, and Norman O. Brown, ‘A Reply to Herbert Marcuse’,
Commentary, March 1967. The entire exchange has been conveniently reprinted in
Marcuse’s collection Negations, pp. 227-47.
 Years o f Cheerful Pessimism ( 19 5 9 - / 9 6 9 ) 181

more than mere reflexes of the domination of nature.

By the latter half of the 1960s, however, this critical, transcendent
dimension seemed to have been rendered suspect, for there were
signs that an immanent agent was finally emerging from the
margins of the affluent society and taking shape as a political force.
More conclusively than any of his contemporaries, Brown had
achieved the conceptual demolition of the reified universe of
thought and action - but his break with 7a prose du monde’ had been
irrevocable. He had indeed found a ‘way out’, but now, when
conditions seemed to permit it, could find no ‘way back’ to the
ground of possible political action. To Marcuse, on the other hand,
the war and the emergence of a radical opposition that seemed to
embody the Great Refusal called for a descent from the transcendent
dimension which had resisted the integrative powers of an oppres­
sive and overwhelming reality. The ‘recapture of reality and reason’
formed the larger context of Marcuse’s philosophical and political
work throughout the remainder of the decade, and may explain
much of the enthusiastic reception of it.46

The war - Marcuse’s fourth - had entered a decisive phase

early in 1965 when Lyndon Johnson finally ordered the long-
contemplated bombing of North Vietnamese targets; by the end of
that year the relatively small number of American ‘advisers’ in
Vietnam (23,000) had increased to a military force of nearly 200,000
ground troops, a figure which had doubled by the end of 1966. In
that year Marcuse developed an analysis based on insights into
American foreign policy acquired during his years in the State
Department coupled with the theoretical position he had construct­
ed. His analysis of the situation, which he began to present in
lectures, teach-ins, and articles, always included an evolving com­
mentary on academic complicity in the war, and student opposition
to it.
Dispensing with the official histories, pronouncements, and
ideologies, Marcuse argued that in fact the United States was not
fighting ‘Communism’/w se, but a very specific form of communism
in very specific areas, namely the underdeveloped countries in which
46. More literal interpretations of this important episode may be found in Roszak,
pp. 84-120; Paul Robinson, The Freudian Leji, New York 1969, pp. 223-33,
Richard King, The Parly of Eros, New York 1972, pp. 116-56, and Dickstein, pp.
51-88.
182

no independent bourgeoisie existed to organize the processes of

political and agrarian reform, industrialization, and modernization
that were necessary prerequisites of liberation: ‘Under these circum­
stances, the indigenous reform movement must from the beginning
take on a radical and undemocratic form. One cannot build a
democracy out of thin air; if the social basis for it is not present, it
simply cannot come about. Evidently, there is only the choice
between a communist dictatorship and a military dictatorship of the
ruling classes in these countries, and when only these two choices
exist, it is clear on which side American policy falls.’47
American foreign policy is not built upon abstract or moralistic
preferences, however, but upon realistic assessments of threats to
specific American interests. At one of the early teach-ins on the war,
held at U cla in spring 1966, Marcuse went into detail.48 First,
considered not as an isolated phenomenon but in global terms, the
defeat of the Saigon government and expropriation of foreign
capital by a successful revolutionary movement in Vietnam could
undermine ‘friendly* neo-colonial regimes throughout the world,
substantially contracting the international capitalist economy.
Second, a reduction of the massive US defence establishment would
necessitate sweeping political and economic changes at home. And
third, ‘the affluent society is in need of an Enemy against whom its
people can be kept in a state of constant psycho-social mobilization’
- the potential for the conquest of necessity and ‘the pacification of
the struggle for existence’ were now too great and too threatening to
guarantee the protection and reproduction of social institutions
built upon the necessity of labour, discipline, and renunciation.
Just as the theory of one-dimensional society had contributed to
advancing the Western Marxist critique beyond the limitations of a
purely economic analysis, Marcuse now opened up the analysis of
the war to its social and psychological dimensions. It was not, in this
view, an unfortunate but isolated quagmire in South-east Asia, but
the consequence of a global policy dictated by the innermost
dynamic of advanced industrial society. Accordingly, the one-
47. Marcuse, ‘Die Analyse cines Exempels’, lecture, published in Neue Kritik, 36-37,
June-August 1966, p. 32.
48. Marcuse, ‘The Inner Logic of American Policy in Vietnam’, statement delivered
at UCLA Teach-In, 25 March 1966, published in L. Menashc, ed., Teach-Ins:
USA, New York 1967, pp. 64-7. Cf. also his ‘Comment’ on the ‘Statement on
Vietnam and the Dominican Republic’ by the editors of Partisan Review, fall 1965,
32, §4,pp. 647-9.
 Years o f Cheerful Pessimism ( 1 9 5 9 - 1 9 6 9 ) 183

dimensional society moved to suppress domestic resistance with the

same determination that it battled ‘Communist aggression’ abroad;
both signified the potentially catalytic threat that ‘an elemental
rebellion of human beings can be successful against the most
powerful technological apparatus of repression
t
of all time’.49501
As in the 1930s, the prospects for such a victory were ‘clouded
with uncertainty’: the actions and antics of the New Left may very
well have anticipated (or recalled) ‘the realm of freedom within the
realm of necessity’, but the Movement nevertheless was a small and
heterogeneous force, cut off from any serious working-class base and
lacking the vital synchronization with liberation movements
abroad. As the overwhelming imbalance of forces showed its first
signs of shifting, however, philosophy retained its right to guide
tactics. As late as autumn 1966, Marcuse declined a central role at
the politically oriented Socialist Scholars Conference in New York
to attend the annual Hegel Congress in Prague, where the analysis
was pressed to a deeper level: ‘The present period*, he said, ‘seems to
be characterized by a stalemate in the dialectic of negativity . . .
Today [the) development of negativity within the antagonistic
whole is barely demonstrable.’30 This suggested that the negation
could develop only outside of the tightly integrated, one-dimensional
system of needs and satisfactions, and it was the existence of such an
opposition, however embattled and disorganized, that was now
giving him that ultimate hope ‘for the sake of the hopeless ones’
which had sustained Benjamin during the fascist period. This
hopeful sentiment was now clearly ascendant in his writing and
lecturing, and from the summer of 1967, when his influence really
became manifest within the left, his positive appraisal became a
factor in its own fulfilment.
Marcuse spent the month of July in Europe, conferring with
groups of leftist students and intellectuals in a variety of contexts,
the most significant of which occurred during his widely publicized
‘return to Berlin’.31 His concern here, as in the address which he
delivered shortly thereafter at the London Congress on the Dialcc-

49. Herbert Marcuse, ‘Die Analyse eines Exempels’, p. 33. Cf. also ‘The Problem of
Violence and the Radical Opposition’ in Five Lectures, Boston 1970, pp. 86-7.
50. Herbert Marcuse, ‘Zum Begriff der Negation in der Dialektik’, address, Prague,
September 1966, first published in Filosoficky Casopis (Prague), no. 3, 1967, pp.
375-80, trans. Karl Bogcr in Tetos, 8 (summer 1971), pp. 130-2.
51. He later told a colleague that his meetings with militantly anti-fascist students in
184

tics of Liberation, was to encourage the New Left in precisely those

of its tendencies which seemed most suspect from the point of
view of Marxian orthodoxy.52 In its unorthodox composition, its
spokespersons (‘such suspect figures as poets, writers, and intellec­
tuals’), its spontaneous and anarchic forms, and in the aesthetic,
erotic, and ‘utopian’ dimensions that permeated its politics and its
culture, the radical opposition represented the only embodiment of
‘the scandal of the qualitative difference’, without which the vital
break with the repressive continuum of needs would be unimagina­
ble.
The lectures at the Free University of Berlin, more than the
star-studded spectacle in London, were a political forum and the
discussions that followed were topical and tactical. Only once does
Marcuse appear really to have faltered, in response to a question
about whether the transformation of needs is the condition of the
transformation of society, or presupposes it. Marcuse’s response:
‘You have defined what is unfortunately the greatest difficulty in
the matter. Your objection is that, for new, revolutionary needs to
develop, the mechanisms that reproduce the old needs must be
abolished. In order for the mechanisms to be abolished, there must
first be a need to abolish them. That is the circle in which we are
placed, and I do not know how to get out of it.’53 He did not evade
the dilemma of liberation, however; upon his return he began work
on a major essay - provisionally entitled ‘Beyond One-Dimensional
Man’ - in which he assembled the reciprocal influences of these
intense exchanges.
The Essay on Liberation, as it was finally published, offered the
radical hypothesis that the moral, political, and aesthetic privations
of the affluent society have generated what is literally a biological
need for liberation. In a minority of its members (and in its victims
Berlin ‘meant some sort of a reconciliation with Germany’ for him. Rcinhard
Lcttau, ‘Herbert Marcuse and the Vulgarity of Death’, in New German Critique, 18
(fall 1979), p. 19.
52. Herbert Marcuse, ‘Das Ende der Utopic’ and ‘Das Problem der Gewalt in der
Opposition’, lectures and discussions at the Free University of Berlin, July 1967,
published in Das Ende der Utopie, Berlin 1967, also in Psychoanalyse und Politik,
Frankfurt 1968; trans. J. Shapiro and S. Weber, Five Lectures, Boston 1970, pp.
62-108. ‘Liberation From the Affluent Society’, address at the London Round­
house, July 1967, published in David Cooper, ed., The Dialectics of Liberation,
Harmondsworth 1968, pp. 175-92.
53. Marcuse, ‘The End of Utopia, discussion’, p. 80; also ‘Liberation from the
Affluent Society’, pp. 178-9.
 Years o f Cheerful Pessim ism ( 1 9 5 9 - 1 9 6 9 ) 185

in the Third World), the contradiction between the immense

productive resources of the technological society and their destruc­
tive and repressive application has liberated the instinctual basis of
revolt (though not the social basis of revolution); the technological
transformation of the work process itself has suggested the unima­
gined alliance of industrial productivity (the realm of necessity) with
creative receptivity (the realm of freedom); and Marcuse ventured
to suggest that on the margins of the ‘apparently impregnable
fortress of corporate capitalisin’, subverting forces were at work,
driven by the vital needs for peace, quiet, happiness, and bcauty.54
He was still working on this most unrestrained of his writings when
the Essay on Liberation was overtaken by events.
These were to become known as ‘the May events’. Marcuse had
been invited to Paris to participate in a U nesco symposium on ‘The
Role of Karl Marx in the Development of Contemporary Scientific
Thought’ on the 150th anniversary of his birth,55 and was present
when the wave of student strikes and factory struggles began which
were to paralyse the country for much of the summer. He was again
pressed into action, as he had been exactly fifty years earlier in
revolutionary Berlin - and as in the German revolution, it was the
confluence of the political and the aesthetic dimensions that seemed
to him to represent the most progressive tendencies of the May
rebellion.56
That month saw his participation in innumerable highly charged
political debates, extemporaneous speeches delivered to packed
54. Elsewhere: ‘And even I, I don’t have any choice. Because I literally couldn’t
stand it any longer if nothing would change. Even I am suffocating.’ The Essay is
not Marcuse’s attempt to work his way out of the theoretical impasse supposedly
created by One-Dimensional Man, as a common, linear and hermetic interpretation
states. In a broader and more historical perspective, the Essay on Liberation is not a
hasty retreat from a dogmatic position but a stage in an ongoing attempt to
render theory accountable to history - and vice versa.
55. Marcuse’s address, ‘Re-examination of the Concept of Revolution’, has been
published in the proceedings of the symposium, Marx and Contemporary Scientific
Thought, The Hague 1969, pp. 476-82.
56. A few sources on Marcuse and the May-June events in France: Serge Mallet,
‘L’idole des eludiants rebclles: Herbert Marcuse’ in Le Nouvel Observateur, 8-14
May 1968, pp. 5-11; interview with Pierre Viansson-Ponte in Le Monde, 11 May
1968; Christian Descamps, ‘Le mouvement de mai’ in Le Nef, no. 36, January -
March 1969, pp. 175-81; for a photograph, well worth the proverbial thousand
words, cf. Paris-Match, 30 March 1974 (centrefold, n.p.). It may be noted that
L ’homme unidimenstonnel did not appear in Paris bookstores until mid May, from
which time, however, it was reported to have been widely discussed on the
barricades.
186

auditoriums at the Sorbonne and the Ecole des Beaux Arts, and the
organization of a journee marcusienne at occupied Nanterrc. The
immediate situation usually determined the direction of his state­
ments, but three stipulations consistently recurred:
1. students and militant intellectuals should not provoke confronta­
tions in situations where the odds are hopeless: active, ongoing
political work cannot be sustained from jail or the hospital;
2. abstention from all acts of violence directed against individuals
must be observed, even against ‘representatives’ of the system, both
for reasons of revolutionary politics (they do not contribute to the
weakening of capitalism) and revolutionary morality (‘our goals,
our values, our own and new morality . . . must be visible already in
our actions.’);
3. the educational means of the universities must at all costs be
preserved (though certainly not in their present form), for to cut off
the branch upon which the revolutionary intelligentsia is sitting,
Vrs/ commettre un suicideV
The months of May and June also included a meeting with
Nguyen Than Le, chief of the North Vietnamese delegation to the
Paris peace talks, a widely publicized visit to the hospital bed of the
wounded S d s leader Rudi Dutschke in Berlin, and some stormy
sessions with audiences of militants at the Free University where,
speaking on the basis of his recent experiences in France, he
delivered an analysis of the obsolescence of the traditional model of
a centralized, mass-based revolutionary movement: ‘I don’t like it
and you don’t like it but it is a fact.’ In August and September there
were further lectures in Oslo, Amsterdam, Salzburg, and Korcula,
while in that summer the first placards had begun to appear in the
streets of Rome carrying the extraordinary slogan, ‘M a r x M a o
M a r c u s e ’.
Marcuse sustained his theoretical and practical energy at almost
the same level throughout this period, for the conditions which had
previously imparted to his thought its ‘utopian’, ‘transcendental’, or
‘idealist’ cast were now calling for its materialization. It was in this
sense that the coincidence of the Essay on Liberation with the explosive
events that continued in Europe and America throughout 1968
appeared to signify the convergence of the dimension which had
survived throughout his whole intellectual career with concrete
political forces, the liberation of the ‘counter-trends’ that had been
sheltered in the ideals of philosophy and the forms of art. The
 Years o f Cheerful Pessim ism ( 1 9 5 9 - 1 9 6 9 ) 187

heretical, ‘utopian’ Marxist Ernst Bloch perceived this when he said,

in his emotional reception of Marcuse’s paper in Korcula, iEr ist
wirklich rechtzeitiggekommen - he has truly arrived on time.57
At the end of the year Marcuse made a strong speech in New
York at a fund-raising rally for the independent Marxist newspaper
The Guardian, in which his frank discussion of the possible strategy of
a disunited and vastly outnumbered opposition brought a renewed
public outcry (in San Diego the Legion offered the Regents an
additional S5,000 for his contract and redoubled its pressure on the
administration to get rid of him).5**The following summer, lecturing
in Italy, he again drew international attention for his role in a
tumultuous evening in the Teatro Eliseo in Rome where his lecture
on the student movement was disrupted by the theatricals of
Cohn-Bendit and assorted ultra-leftists;5960and in the autumn, the
‘ideological leader of the New Left’ began to acquire the additional
title of ‘mentor of Angela Davis’, whom he actively supported
despite his unhappiness over her affiliation with the Communist
Party, throughout the two years of her most serious battles with the
University of California, the Fb i , and the Justice Department.**0
57. Ernst Bloch, ‘Diskussion mit Herbert Marcuse’, Korcula, August 1968, lecture
and discussion published in Praxis, 12, 1969, pp. 20-5 and pp. 323-9; cf. also
Michael Landmann, ‘Talking with Ernst Bloch: Korcula, 1968’, trans. David
Parent in Telos, 25, fall 1975, pp. 170-3.
58. Marcuse, ‘On the New Left’, talk at the twentieth anniversary programme of The
Guardian, New York, 4 December 1968; transcription of tape published in Mass­
imo Tcodori, ed., The New Left: A Documentary History, New' York 1969, pp. 468-73.
59. In the course of the lecture he shouted back, ‘I like the interruptions here. It
reminds me of 1918 and 1919 and 1930. It makes me feel more alive’, but
afterwards he admitted (perhaps with some exaggeration), ‘Es war die stur-
mischstc Nacht mcines Lebcns’. The spectacle was widely publicized; cf. Der
Spiegel, 27 (1969), pp. 108-9, and the Los Angeles Times, 29 June 1969. Also his
fierce protest against the claim that he would now retreat from public life: Neues
Forum (Wien), XVII, 196,1 (April 1970), p. 353.
60. Angela Davis, William Leiss, and Erica Sherover were among the former
Brandcis students who joined Marcuse in California. Although he said that ‘the
Communist Party has become and is becoming a party of order’, his support for
his embattled student was not merely verbal: he contributed a substantial
amount to her bail in 1969, challenged her dismissal from UCLA in correspon­
dence and public statements at demonstrations, and after her arrest (December
1970) in connection with the ‘Soledad Brothers’ shoot-out at the Marin County
courthouse that August, he and Inge visited her several times in jail in San
Rafael and he submitted legal affidavits on her behalf. Cf. Angela Davis, p. 307;
New York Times, 21 March 1971; Los Angeles Times, 27 January 1971; letter to
Francois Perroux, 22 September 1969, published in Francois Perroux intenoge Herbert
Marcuse . . . qui repond, Paris 1969, p. 200, and an open letter to Angela Davis in
prison, published in Ramparts, 9, 7, (February 1971), p. 22.
188

The reaction of the right to Marcuse’s massive influence among

students of the New Left has already been described, but from the
summer of 1968 the ‘Old Left’ mounted an intellectually feeble
counter-offensive of its own: he was denounced by Yuri Zhukov in
Pravda (May), the Italian Communist Giorgio Amendola (June),
Gus Hall of the American Communist Party (July), anc* “ most
scurrilous of all - the iron-clad Progressive Labor faction of S d s .61
There is no paradox here, for Marcuse had appreciated that
where the mouvement de mat broke with the authoritarian structures of
the established society, it broke also with those of the established
opposition whose leadership had withheld its official sanction until
it was swept up in the current of protest. The insurgents’ ‘faith in the
rationality of the imagination’ now seemed to Marcuse to symbolize
the vital rupture with the repressive continuum of needs which had
become the central obstacle to radical change in the era of
one-dimensional affluence. He drew upon insights derived in equal
measure from his long-term theoretical work and recent practical
experience when he wrote: ‘The graffiti of the “jeunesse en col'ere”
joined Karl Marx and Andre Breton; the slogan “ ^imagination au
pouvoir” went well with “/« comiles (soviets) p a r t o u t the piano with
the jazz player stood well between the barricades; the red flag well
fitted the statue of the author of Les Miserables; and striking students

61. The quasi-official Soviet statement is translated in Atlas, September 1968, pp.
33-5 as ‘Taking Marcuse to the Woodshed’ (it was widely excerpted in the
established press); for fuller documentation of Soviet criticism of Marcuse, cf.
Klaus Mehnert, Moscnv and the New Left, trans. Helmut Fischer, Berkeley and Los
Angeles, 1975, ch. 6. The 1968 statements of Amendola and Hall are reported in
the New York Times, 7 June, p. 11, and 5 July, p. 14 respectively. The PLP’s
notorious and contemptible articles are by Jared Israel and William Russel,
‘Herbert Marcuse and his Philosophy of Cop-Out’, Progressive Labor, October
1968, pp. 59-72, and anon, (prudently) ‘Marcuse: Cop-out or Cop?’ Feb. 1969,
pp. 61-6. Shortly after the latter article appeared,the PLP was expelled from
SDS for positions which were ‘objectively racist, anti-communist, and reaction­
ary’. Although the substance of their accusation - resting upon an unbelievable
confusion of the anti-fascist work of the OSS and the anti-communist work of the
CIA - does not merit serious consideration, the phenomenon is significant as a
stage in the self-immolation of the New Left in America: cf. Paul Breines, ‘From
Guru to Spectre’, in Breines, cd., Critical Interruptions, New York 1972, pp. 1-21;
Ronald Aronson, ‘Dear Herbert’, in Fischer, ed., The Revival of American Socialism,
pp. 257-80; also the statement of support by sixteen prominent West German
leftists in response to the comparably groundless charges of one L. L. Matthias, in
Der Spiegel 31, July 28, 1969, pp. 13-4. Marcuse himself said acidly: ‘It’s the exact
pattern of the Stalinist purge, mixing facts with lies so it’s impossible to separate
them’. (Quoted in Los Angeles Times, 27 July 1969).
 Years o f Cheerful Pessimism ( 1 9 5 9 - 1 9 6 9 ) 189

in Toulouse demanded the revival of the language of the Trouba­

dours, the Albigensians. The new sensibility has become a political
force.’62
To be sure, Marcuse did not allow the concrete meaning of the
events of 1968 to be submerged in their post-utopian symbolism,
and his frequent criticisms of the Movement indicate that he was
well enough aware of its limitations as well as its promises. Still, the
May revolt revealed the extent to which the tensions in the
established society ‘can loosen the grip of capitalist trade union
integration and promote the alliance between working-class groups
and the militant intelligentsia’,63 and, in the larger view, the
extravagant demands of the New Left in Europe and America
appeared to herald the collective subject of a ‘new sensibility’ that
must be the condition and goal of a genuinely transformative
praxis.646
5
The New Sensibility is an aesthetic sensibility that has become a
political sensibility. ‘Aesthetics’, it will be recalled, always carried
with it a double connotation for Marcuse, referring to the founda­
tions of art as well as to the domain of the senses, and invokes both
rationality and sensuality, the Reality Principle and the Pleasure
Principle.63 In this crucial, bivalent sense, the gratification of
aesthetic needs and goals would not be a private affair taking place
within the museum, the concert hall, or the theatre, but would
imply the existence of an aesthetically ordered social world, or a
society in which the creative imagination has taken its place as a
productive force alongside technical reason in shaping the mental
and material conditions of human life. This distant revolution is
being prepared in the minds and bodies of those who have thrown
themselves into the fight against violence and exploitation, but also
against the control of sensuous gratification. From this perspective,
such modest, ‘aesthetic’ proposals as the prohibition of transistor
radios in public places or of billboards in the countryside are
directly linked to the need for the total reconstruction of cities and

62. Essay on Liberation, p. 22.

63. Marcuse, ‘Rc-examination of the Concept of Revolution', p. 23.
64. It may be worth noting that the ‘new sensibility’ bears no serious relation to
Charles Reich's unpolitical impressions in The Greening of America, which Marcuse
ridiculed as ‘sentimental sublimation . . . the Establishment version of the great
rebellion’. He reviewed it in the New York Times, 6 November 1970.
65. Cf., for example, Eros and Civilization, pp. 180-3; Essay on Liberation, p. 24.
190

the restoration of commercialized nature, and thus to large-scale

political change.
In his radical conception of the common denominator of the
aesthetic and the political, of the practical and the poetical
transformation of the given reality, Marcuse placed himself at the
end of a tradition which had for nearly two centuries remained a
romantic curiosity of German letters (as the German Kunstlerroman)
or been dismissed as irresponsible utopia when it was paraded as
social theory (Schiller, Fourier) - and with reason. But he had also
argued for decades that the very concept of utopia was on the verge
of obsolescence, because ideas lose their utopian character when the
means to realize them are at hand. His assessment of the technologi­
cal capabilities of advanced industrial society - starting with the
present trend towards the automated transformation of the work
process and of work itself66 - therefore enabled him to incorporate
the concept of the ‘aesthetic ethos’ into his critical theory, and to
issue the romantic vision of an aesthetically ordered universe as a
concrete political demand.67
The new sensibility was thus operative in many of the demands
of the radical opposition which could not be realized within the
existing patterns of social and psychological life. And if it is the task
of philosophy to recall and project the fullest possibilities of
liberation, it is the nature of art to embody them as a form of reality.
The emancipatory function of art was seen by Marcuse to lie above
all in its capacity to represent the image of a transcendent,
antagonistic reality, to provide ‘an Archimedean point from which
to view it in a different light, comprehend it in different concepts,
discover tabooed images and possibilities’.68 Genuine art, like
66. This is ihe theme of his important lecture at Korcula, August 1968, ‘The Realm
of Freedom and the Realm of Necessity: A Reconsideration’, published in Praxis
1, 2, 1969, pp. 20-5.
67. In one of the most curious of the New Left appraisals of Marcuse’s work, Peter
Clecak believes that he has detected the ‘conflation of aesthetic and historical/
political categories’ as the worst of the ‘radical paradoxes’ that run through his
work. Since the synthesis of the aesthetic and political dimensions was manifestly
the central point of Marcuse’s work during the last sixty or so years of his life,
Clecak’s discovery may not be so striking; cf. his Radical Paradoxes pp. 175-229.
More importantly, Clecak’s interpretation does raise the spectre of the ‘acstheti-
cization of politics’ by which Benjamin had characterized the fascist period.
Marcuse’s theory, however, permits no such premature resolution of the tension
between the aesthetic and the political dimensions for their reconciliation is
permanently - and this is crucial - transferred to theJiiture.
68. ‘Remarks on a Redefinition of Culture’, Daedalus, winter 1965, IV, 1, p. 195.
 Years o f Cheerful Pessimism ( 1 9 5 9 - 1 9 6 9 ) 191

genuine philosophy, is inherently critical of the repressive status

quo: it projects the harmonious union of sensuousness, reason, and
the imagination, and as such ‘the aesthetic dimension can serve as a
sort of gauge for a free society’.69
The analysis of one-dimensional society, however, had exposed its
enormous capacity to neutralize the opposition, to integrate the
values of intellectual and aesthetic culture into the life-forms of
industrial society, thus cancelling their alienation from that society -
the ‘technological corrosion’ of their transcendent substance. It thus
appeared to Marcuse that the traditional forms of art and literature
were actually losing that element of estrangement which he had
viewed as their defining quality: as art was increasingly reduced to
mere entertainment or ornament, its images overtaken by the
technological apparatus, it forfeited its intrinsic capacity to evoke a
qualitatively different cognitive order. The aesthetic dimension, the
most reliable contradiction of the contradictory reality, was losing
its semblance of independence; the union of the aesthetic and the
political, of art and technique, the Beautiful and the (empirically)
True was taking place on the terms of the establishment.
Accordingly, the artistic imperative in one-dimensional society
must be to restore the alienation of aesthetic culture from established
patterns of industrial civilization, to discover new forms, a new
‘meta-language of total negation’70 capable of communicating the
experience and projecting the possibilities of people and things
under the changed historical conditions of the present. The centre of
Marcuse’s attention shifted now to that art which is most estranged
not just from the established social reality (for that tension appeared
increasingly to have been cancelled, ‘suppressed by the systematic,
organized incorporation of culture into daily life and work’,),71 but
from the established limits of art itself.
Marcuse thus began in this period to elaborate the theoretical
significance of the truly avant-garde works of art and literature -
dadaism, surrealism, epic theatre, atonality - which have since the
thirties expressed the intensified search for a poetic language as a
political language: ‘I believe that the authentic avant-garde of

69. Essay on Liberation, p. 27.

70. Marcuse, ‘Art in One-Dimensional Society’, lecture given at the School of Visual
Arts, New York, 8 March 1967, published in /1r/j Magazine, 41, 7, p. 28 (May
1967).
71. ‘Remarks on a Redefinition of Culture’, p. 192.
192

today are not those who try desperately to produce the absence of
Form and the union with real life, but rather those who do not recoil
from the exigencies of Form, who find the new word, image, and
sound which are capable of “comprehending” reality as only Art
can comprehend - and negate it.’72 But this revolutionary break
with the existing order implies that the artistic commitment to
aesthetic form is maintained; for it is in its autonomous Form that
art most uncompromisingly negates and transcends the given
reality, no matter how ‘realistic’ its content: ‘the novel is not a
newspaper story, the still life is not alive, and even in pop art the
real tin can is not in the supermarket. The very Form of art
contradicts the effort to do away with the segregation of art to a
“second reality”, to translate the truth of the productive imagina­
tion into the first reality.’73 ‘Living Art’, guerrilla theatre, or the
political ‘happenings’ of the 1960s betrayed rather than served the
revolutionary goals of art (though not necessarily of politics), for
Marcuse was adamant in his insistence that art survives only where
it preserves its autonomy, and that the radical autonomy of art
(including the new art) is a function of aesthetic form itself: ‘In other
words, art can fulfil its inner revolutionary function only if it does
not itself become part of any Establishment, even the revolutionary
Establishment.’74 To collapse art into politics - even avant-garde art
and vanguard politics - would be to identify them prematurely
(precisely the historical achievement of one-dimensional society)
and thus to destroy the critical, revolutionary power of art to
liberate the power of the negative, to guide praxis as a regulative
idea. The call for revolutionary art is thus supplanted by a far more
radical demand for artistic revolution. The aesthetic dimension
could supply the impulse, the perception, and the sensibility for the
radical transformation of society envisioned in Eros and Civilization,
but emphatically, ‘the rest is not up to the artist!’75

72. Marcuse, ‘Art as a Form of Reality’, lecture sponsored by Guggenheim Museum,

New York 1969, published in Arnold Toynbee, et at., On the Future of Art, New
York 1970, p. 132.
73. An Essay on Liberation, p. 42.
74. ‘Art in One-Dimensional Society’, p. 28.
75. Ibid., p. 28.
 6
T he P ermanence of A rt
. (1970-1979)

The final turn - or return - to the ‘aesthetic dimension’, the

transcendental domain of beauty, form, and sensuousness, guided
Marcuse’s thought to its conclusion. Although the aesthetic theory
had gained immeasurably in clarity, consistency, and historical
concreteness since its first articulation in his analysis of the
Kunstlerroman, it was to remain somewhat fragmentary even in its
final presentation - an extended essay of 1977, rather than the sort
of comprehensive ‘aesthetic synthesis’ undertaken at the close of the
long careers of Adorno or Lukacs.1 From the larger perspective,
however, which views the evolution of his thought in its totality,
Marcuse’s writing, teaching, and lecturing in the last years of his life
may indeed be interpreted as a final settling of intellectual accounts.
This is the proper way to analyse his accomplishment.
Compared to his meteoric ascent during the sixties, Marcuse’s
last decade in La Jolla had to be more sedate. Nobody has improved
upon the ‘hermeneutic’ description offered by his former colleague
Fredric Jameson, the latter pleased by the contemplation of ‘the
philosopher in the exile of that immense housing development
which is the state of California, remembering, reawakening, rein­
venting - from the rows of products in the supermarkets, from the
roar of the freeways and the ominous shape of the helmets of traffic
policemen, from the incessant overhead traffic of the fleets of
military transport planes, and, as it were from beyond them, in the
future - the almost extinct form of the Utopian idea.’12

1. Marcuse, Die Permanenz der Kunst. Wider erne bestimmte marxistische Asthetik, Munich
1977; trans. Herbert Marcuse and Erica Sherover, The Aesthetic Dimension, Boston
1978; the latter is in fact a substantially Americanized version. The book has
received little critical attention, most of it unfavourable.
2. Marxism and Form, Princeton 1971, p. 116.
194

I
At the end of the 1960s, the unrestrained projections of the Essay on
Liberation were still dominant in Marcuse’s thought. Already by the
opening of the next decade, however, the deeply rooted scepticism
that had occasionally surfaced in his criticisms of the ‘extra-
parliamentary opposition’ had regained the ascendancy. That it was
not Marcuse, but the representatives of the radical movement who
had retreated before the image of liberation is confirmed by the
lectures he delivered throughout the 1970s: while issuing a stern
rebuke to the excesses as well as the shortcomings of the New Left,
he reiterated with undiminished force the most far-reaching of his
political ideas.
There were, to be sure, shifts in Marcuse’s positions in the last
decade of his life; far from indicating a retreat from the Marxian
critique, however, they corresponded to his distinctive contribution
to the attempt to prevent Marxism from petrifying into a closed
system of verbal rituals long since overtaken by events. An ongoing
elaboration of dialectical materialism characterized both his own
method and his critique of the failure of the radical opposition to
engage in a similar self-appraisal. ‘The petrification of Marxian
theory’, he wrote, recalling Marx’s own theoretical resiliency before
the evolving realities of capitalism, ‘violates the very principle which
the New Left proclaims: the unity of theory and practice. A theory which
has not caught up with the practice of capitalism cannot possibly
guide the practice aiming at the abolition of capitalism.’3 Marcuse’s
political statements in the 1970s reflected his analysis of changes
within the capitalist infrastructure, as well as the enhanced capabili­
ty of the state to disarm the opposition. Corresponding to ‘the
neo-imperialist global reorganization of capitalism’ is a ‘preventive
counter-revolution’, and against such odds, ‘the heroic period of
beautiful spontaneity, of personal anti-authoritarianism, of hippie
rock and shock, is over’.4

3. Marcuse, Counter-rewlution and Revolt, Boston 1972, p. 34 (emphasis in original).

T he chapter on the left and the counter-revolution’, from which this passage is
drawn, is based on lectures delivered in 1970 at Princeton University and the
New School for Social Research in New York City.
4. Marcuse, The Movement in a New Era of Repression: An Assessment’, speech
delivered at the University of California, Berkeley, on 3 February 1971, published
in the Berkeley Journal of Sociology, XVI (1971 -72), p. 11.
 The Permanence o f A rt ( 1 9 7 0 - 1 9 7 9 ) 195

For Marcuse, the structural changes in industrial society that

have taken place since the Second World War produced two major
consequences for revolutionary theory and practice, which could
now be specified with a concreteness he had not thus far attempted.
The first of the tendencies Marcuse identified ominously recalls the
analytical framework he had taken over from Pollock at the opening
of the fascist period: the economy has become increasingly depen­
dent upon the intervention of the state - the political and military
power structure - for its smooth functioning, and thus, ‘what we
witness is that monopoly capitalism tends toward state capitalism’.5
The correlate of this trend is that ever larger sectors of society are
brought into a situation of dependence upon the coordinated system
of ‘capitalism as a whole’, creating a new, vastly expanded
‘technostructure of exploitation’. The philosophical interpretation of
this process, which Marcuse had already achieved in One-Dimensional
Man, was now given a firmer sociological foundation, but this
entailed substantial theoretical modifications as well. By including
in the ‘new working class* strata of the formerly independent middle
class, salaried employees of the service industries, and the educated
professionals and members of the functional intelligentsia necessary
to maintain the increasingly scientific and technological production
apparatus, he displaced the ‘classical’ Marxist theory of proletarian
revolution. The fact that the industrial, blue-collar labour force has
not come to constitute the majority of the population does not mean
that the ‘working class’ has shrunk, but rather that it has expanded.
The working population may be divided, internally hierarchical,
and comparatively affluent, but its members share the objective
condition of separation from society’s means of production, that is,
of exploitation within the system of state-supported monopoly
capitalism.6
From these observations Marcuse drew important conclusions for
the radical movement in the 1970s, which he presented over the
years to student and activist audiences across the country. Principal­
ly, the changed composition of the working class meant to him that
any doctrinaire identification of the blue-collar labour force as the
exclusive revolutionary subject was hopelessly antiquated, an irre­

5. Ibid., p. 3.
6. Statistical support for this position was provided in his lecture, ‘Theorie und
Praxis’ (Frankfurt, 28 June 1974), published in Marcuse, Zeit-Messungen, Frank­
furt 1975, p. 36, n. 3.
196

sponsible ‘romantic nostalgia’ for a defunct stage of capitalist

development: ‘as if the working class of the second half of the
twentieth century were still that of the middle nineteenth century, as
if the 1920s and 1930s were still our own eras’.7 Accordingly, the left
must not expend its energies seeking to identify with a revolutionary
subject at some pre-designated position in the class structure, but
must recognize itself as one component of that potential agent.
The second, related conclusion derived from the familiar fact
that except at the margins of industrial society, needs well beyond
those of bare subsistence were being satisfied. The ‘impoverishment’
of the working class that Marx had depicted in the pages of Capital
had changed in nature no less than the class and capitalism itself,
and must now be interpreted in terms of the actual and potential
material wealth of industrial society. It followed that the modern
revolutionary impulse would derive from non-material motives:
‘The revolution involves a radical transformation of the needs and
aspirations themselves, cultural as well as material . . . Moral and
aesthetic needs become basic, vital needs, and drive toward new
relationships between the sexes, between the generations, between
men and women and nature. Freedom is understood as rooted in
these needs, which are sensuous, ethical, and rational in one.’8 The
demands of the radical movement itself were only the most
articulate expression of the ‘deep malaise prevalent among the
population at large’, a malaise rooted in the fact that at the present
stage of development, ‘the satisfaction of basic needs creates needs
which transcend the state capitalist and state socialist society’.9
Where the inner dynamic of the consumer society itself demanded
the perpetual augmentation of goods and services beyond the
satisfaction of vital material needs, the attendant images of a life of
peace, leisure, enjoyment, and beauty acquire the status of revolu­
tionary demands, for their fulfilment lies qualitatively beyond this
society and its capabilities. The dialectic of the present era revealed
that ‘capitalism has opened up a new dimension, which is at one
and the same time the living space of capitalism and its negation’.10
Although his analysis was now finding more solid, socio­

7. Marcuse, [‘Letters on Surrealism’), unpublished (October 1972), second letter; in

the private collection of Herbert Marcuse, cited with permission of the author.
8. Counter-revolution and Revolt, p. 17.
9. Ibid., p. 18.
10. Ibid., p. 19.
 The Permanence o f A rt ( 1 9 7 0 - 1 9 7 9 ) 197

economic ground than that which had supported the imprecise

speculations of the Essay on Liberation, Marcuse clung to the most
radical positions he had achieved by the end of the sixties. He had
often stressed the ‘total’ character that revolution must assume at
the stage at which capitalism is integrated and stabilized on a global
scale, but he did not mean this as a merely geographical extension of
the socialist vision. Rather, he sought to generalize the latent
tendency of the radical opposition to draw its force ‘from its roots in
the whole individual and his need for a way of life in association with
other free individuals, and in a new relation with nature - his own
as well as external nature’.11 Here, in its final formulation, is Marx’s
early conception of the essential human ‘species-being’, an ontology
from which Marcuse never departed.

Throughout his writings, Marcuse had held to the central idea of

the fragmentation of human life in modern (industrial capitalist)
society: in this light the idealization of the artistic existence in his
1922 doctoral dissertation can be seen as only his first attempt to
recover that dimension of a possible human existence that had been
lost, while the ontological underpinnings of the thought of Heideg­
ger, though they would prove inadequate, provided him with the
first systematic basis for this quest. His writings as an architect of the
Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory, informed by his interpretation
of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, remained fully within
the scope of his search for the total, social individual - no longer
prior to the accomplishments of industrialism, but rather presuppos­
ing them, and the debased Nazi theories of a new ‘human type’ did
not deter him from the great project - in Eros and Civilization - of
harnessing the biologically based theory of the instincts to a radical
social theory and political critique. In a sense, an implicit concept of
‘nature’ had always served him as a reference point that exposed the
dismemberment of human faculties, and the promise of ‘re­
membrance’. But only in the 1970s did he really confront the idea of
‘the liberation of nature as a vehicle of the liberation of man’.1112
‘Liberated nature’, in Marcuse’s usage, refers to human nature as
well as to the natural environment, but in a sense very different
from the naturalism of romanticist thought (he nonetheless found it

11. Ibid., p. 48; also Zeit-Messungen, pp. 38, 44, 45.

12. Marcuse, ‘Nature and Revolution’, in Counter-revolution and Revolt, p. 59.
198

significant that in capitalist society such ideas are banished to the

fringes of the poetic imagination). As Marx had written in the first
of his Theses on Feuerbach, the reality we encounter is already the
product of ‘sensuous human activity’, a notion reflected in Mar­
cuse’s view that both the subject and object of perception are
historical entities, transformed and to be transformed: ‘Nature is a
part of history, an object of history; therefore “liberation of nature”
cannot mean returning to a pre-technological stage, but advancing
to the use of the achievements of technological civilization for
freeing man and nature from the destructive abuse of science and
technology in the service of exploitation.’13 But even with this
necessary qualification, the radical conception of ‘nature as a
dimension of social change’ survives: ‘History is also grounded in
nature’, he wrote in his last book, ‘and Marxist theory has the least
justification to ignore the metabolism between the human being and
nature and to denounce the insistence on this natural soil of society
as a regressive ideological conception’.14 Above and beyond Marx’s
‘mature’ concern with transformed social institutions, Marcuse
returned once again to the fundamental instinctual and physiologi­
cal level of existence, ‘where individuals most directly and profound­
ly experience their world and themselves: in their sensibility’.15 A
‘radical sensibility’, he conjectured, that draws its images and
experiences from ‘the life-enhancing, sensuous, aesthetic qualities
inherent in nature’, would necessarily partake of the qualitative
break with the repressive continuum of needs that is the condition
but also the substance of the next revolution. This conception was
already operative in the most advanced demands of the radical
opposition; movements for ecological harmony, cultural revolution,
and the liberation of women envisioned not merely a social and
political upheaval, but an end to the exploitative domination of
(human and external) nature, the restoration of the fractured
totality of existence.
This notion of a new sensibility - ‘this outrageously unscientific,
metaphysical notion’, as he himself acknowledged - was an aesthetic

13. Ibid., p. 60. An outstanding study of this problem is found in Alfred Schmidt,
The Concept of Nature in Marx, London 1971; cf. also Trent Schroyer, The Critique of
Domination, New York 1973, esp. ch. 3, and William Leiss, The Domination of
Nature, New York 1972, part 2.
14. The Aesthetic Dimension, p. 16.
15. Counter-revolution and Revolt, p. 62.
 The Permanence o f Art (1 9 7 0 -1 9 7 9 ) 199

conception, for, as has been seen, he followed the German idealist

tradition in his understanding of the aesthetic as pertaining not only
to art and beauty, but to the senses themselves. Although the term
appears for the first time only in Eros and Civilization, the concept of
an ‘aesthetic dimension’ as the ground of a free and integral
humanity can be detected as far back as Marcuse’s studies in
Freiburg: in the concept of Kiinstlertum, to be sure, but also perhaps,
in his work with Heidegger in the period of the latter’s demonstra­
tion o f ‘the central role of the aesthetic function in Kant’s system’.16
At every stage, although with varying degrees of rigour, Marcuse
had interpreted the domain of the aesthetic as the non-repressive
meeting-ground of reason and sensuousness, creativity and receptivi­
ty, subjective (human) freedom and objective (natural) necessity.

II

Marcuse had argued that only through a fundamental break with

the reified universe of needs, of consciousness, and of the perceiving
senses themselves could life be '’opened to a new dimension of history' 17 -
thus his long-standing quest for a higher ground from which to stage
the revolt against the alienated society. Unquestionably, the most
profound expression of this requisite negation resided in the work of
art: the beauty of aesthetic form embodied for Marcuse, as it had for
Schiller, ‘the sensuous appearance of the idea of freedom’. 1819
The ‘aesthetic dimension’, the transcendent realm of art and
sensuousness in which are enforced none but the non-repressive ‘laws
of beauty’ (Marx), represented to Marcuse the only medium in
which a critique of the prevailing reality could find concrete
sensuous embodiment in the image of a qualitatively different and
better one. It is the inherently subversive capacity of the authentic
art-work ‘to break the monopoly of the established reality (i.e. of
those who established it) to define what is real',19 by presenting
another dimension, subject to a different causality and answerable

16. Eros and Civilization, p. 176, n. 3, referring to Heidegger’s Kant und das Problem der
Metaphysik (1929), trans. James Churchill, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics,
Bloomington 1962, pp. 391Tand 14Iff.
17. Counter-revolution and Revolt, p. 72 (emphasis in original).
18. Ibid., p. 116.
19. The Aesthetic Dimension, p. 9.
200

to different laws. The transfigurative repose of the great oeuvre, its

embodiment of the perfect harmony of sensibility, imagination, and
reason, is in itself an expression of the divorce between the laws
governing the repressive order, on the one hand, and the law and
order of the repressive reality on the other. 1 his intrinsically
antagonistic quality of the aesthetic form is ultimately more
subversive than any particular artistic content or style (realism, for
instance, or partisan Tendenzliteralur), for what could be more
disturbing than the discovery that ‘we live under the law of another
repressed causality: metaphysical, spiritual, but altogether of this
world . . . a different order of things which interferes with the
established one without abolishing it?’20
This critical capacity pertains to the aesthetic dimension only
because (and in so far as) it preserves a fundamental estrangement
from the given reality, and here Marcuse’s theory meets what is
perhaps the most distinctive theme running through his intellectual
career: the search for a transcendent, Archimedean standpoint,
removed from the practice as well as the truncated, instrumental
rationality of the material world, capable of grasping it without
being grasped by it. Against the social and political alienation of the
repressive Establishment, the ‘illusory universe of art’ commands a
‘second alienation’:21 negation of the negation.
In so far as the content of aesthetic culture is at a permanent
remove from that of material culture, the work of art preserves its
negative character even where it affirms, decorates, or advertises the
status quo. This concept of the simultaneously negative and
‘affirmative character of culture’ had first appeared in 1937, in
Marcuse’s essay by that title, but there is a new development at the
present stage, one which links it historically with the wide-ranging
essays of the 1930s, the unpublished post-war study of surrealism,
and the systematic theoretical analyses in Eros and Civilization and
One-Dimensional Man. In each of these phases he had clung to the
central idea of the necessary autonomy of art, but his evaluation of
the potency and the possibility of this autonomy was a direct reflex
of the magnitude of the apparent threat to it - emblematic of his
sensitivity to the shifting balance of historical forces, but also, it
seems, of a measure of theoretical uncertainty.
By the time of the 1964 thesis o f ‘one-dimensionality’, the happy
20. [‘Letters on Surrealism’], first letter.
21. The Aesthetic Dimension, pp. 72, 79.
 The Permanence o f Art (1 9 7 0 -1 9 7 9 ) 201

and erotic anticipation of the ‘aesthetic dimension’ which had given

Eros and Civilization its utopian cast seemed to have been darkened by
the closure of the system and its apparent capacity to absorb every
alternative: the vision of the reconciliation of sensuousness and
reason within an aesthetic ordre de la beanie (the aestheticization of
politics) had faded into the spectre of a one-dimensional totalitarian
order, capable of subjugating even the artistic imagination (the
politicization of art). In cither case, aesthetic culture and material
civilization could be conceived as merging within a single, ‘unalien­
ated’ totality. Whether or not the ultimate identity - liberating or
repressive - of the aesthetic and the political dimensions had been
fully intended in his earlier works, in his writings of the 1970s
Marcuse explicitly denied any such possibility.
On the contrary, the contradiction between aesthetics and
politics was now moved to the centre of his theory. The realization
of art in life, he argued, the reconstruction of social reality on the
ground of beauty and sensuousness, remains in the telos of both art
and politics, ‘but the goal is a permanent one; that is to say, no
matter in what form, art can never eliminate the tension between art
and reality. Elimination of this tension would be the impossible
final unity of subject and object: the materialist version of absolute
idealism.’22 It is in the essential nature of art, he finally claimed, to
activate a ‘depth dimension’ of human subjectivity that is in a
permanent state of rupture with the reality principle (any reality
principle).23 It exposes conflicts that cannot conceivably be resolved
or dissolved by altering social institutions or expanding the mastery
over nature - the misery of love and the inexorability of death, the
conflict between freedom and necessity, the rivalries of the genera­
tions, the ultimate recalcitrance of nature: ‘Art remains committed
to the Idea . . . and since the tension between idea and reality,
between the universal and the particular, is likely to persist until the
millennium which will never be, art remains alienation.’24 With its
22. Counter-revolution and Revolt, p. 108. Cf. also The Aesthetic Dimension: ‘In all its
ideality, art bears witness to the truth of dialectical materialism - the permanent
non-identity between subject and object, individual and individual’, (p. 29).
23. In a severe but profoundly insightful judgement on Marcuse, Lucio Colletti calls
this Hegelian inheritance ‘a fight against objects and things . . . The old
spiritualist contempt for the finite and terrestrial world . . From Rousseau to
Lenin, London 1972, p. 130. On this subject, cf. also Herbert Schneidau, Sacred
Discontent, Baton Rouge 1976, ch. I.
24. Counter-rewlution and Revolt, p. 103.
202

built-in ‘Verfremdungs-EJfekt\ its intrinsic estrangement from reality,

art will always preserve in sensuous representation the supra-
historical themes of life, the image of unactualized potentialities, the
‘natural’ limits of liberation: ‘The very permanence of art indicates
these limits. Art is essentially tragic. Not everything is the fault of
class society, exploitation, the exchange economy; and the proletar­
iat is no Saviour.’25
But if the unique qualities of aesthetic form indicate the limits of
possible liberation from the prevailing reality, they also determine
the limits of integration into it. With this optimistic note Marcuse’s
final challenge begins, in the form of a critique of a determinist
(bestimmte) Marxist aesthetics, and of the engaged artistic practice
that would seem to correspond to it: ‘I shall submit the following
thesis: the radical qualities of art, that is to say, its indictment of the
established reality and its invocation of the “beautiful image” of
liberation are grounded precisely in the dimensions where art
transcends its social determination and emancipates itself from the
given universe of discourse and behaviour while preserving its
overwhelming presence.’26 This radical reformulation of the notion
of the autonomy of art (and, as a corollary, of the artist) has
profound consequences for Marxian aesthetics, that is to say, for the
aesthetic theory that might logically be derived from the fragmen­
tary opinions of Marx and Engels on questions of literature and
art.27
The most fundamental consequence to be drawn from Marcuse’s
thesis is that any crude attempt to reduce art to an ideological reflex
of socio-economic forces misunderstands both the nature of art and
of politics, and is doomed to failure. Although the content of an
art-work may indeed tell the story, depict the image, or convey the
perceptions of a particular historical class, the aesthetic form - the
totality of qualities that make the work a self-contained whole set off

25. (‘Letiers on Surrealism’].

26. The Aesthetic Dimension, p. 6.
27. An attempt to collect the primary sources of a ‘Marxist Aesthetics’, which reveals
the difficulties of such an undertaking is Marx and Engels on Literature and Art, ed.
Lee Baxandall and Stefan Morowski, St Louis 1973. Several useful anthologies
exist, esp. Maynard Soloman, ed., Marxism and Art, New York 1973 and Fritz J.
Raddatz (hrsg.), Marxismus und Lileratur, Hamburg 1969, 3 Bd. For an excellent
discussion of the controversies of the 1920s and 1930s, central to Marcuse’s ideas,
cf. Helga Gallas, Marxistische Lileraturlheone, Neuwied u. Berlin 1971.
 The Permanence o f A rt (1 9 7 0 -1 9 7 9 ) 203

from the external reality - universalizes and thereby transforms and

transcends this content: ‘The universality of art cannot be grounded
in the world and world outlook of a particular class, for art envisions
a concrete, universal humanity which no particular class can
incorporate . . . The inexorable entanglement of joy and sorrow,
celebration and despair, Eros and'Thanatos cannot be dissolved into
problems of class struggle.’28 If the notion of a ‘class art’ has in fact
been rendered meaningless, then Marcuse has accomplished, with a
stroke of the pen, what Stalin’s promulgations and police could not:
the abolition o f ‘bourgeois’ art!
But a final severing of the link between an art form and the
interests of the class which produced it (or is represented in it) also
subverts the determinist conception of revolutionary art as that
which expresses the consciousness and interests of the ascending
social class - in capitalism, the proletariat. Having seen, in the
successive phases of his life, the Western proletariat misled, terror­
ized, or bribed into complicity, Marcuse was by this time fully
prepared to denounce the impossible claim that a proletarian
world-view exists which represents a qualitative break with the
prevailing order, and to which a revolutionary art would have to
respond and correspond. A truly revolutionary art is so only inasmuch
as it expresses goals that are universal and transcendent, and it docs
this through the transfiguration of any specific class content
according to the internal laws of aesthetic form.
Only indirectly, then, is art to be considered a revolutionary
force: as implicit critique of the given Reality Principle, as
contribution to the liberation of subjectivity, as sensuous embodi­
ment of a transcendent order of beauty and harmony - the form of
freedom in the realm of appearance. If it is to preserve its essential
quality of negation, o f ‘uncompromising estrangement’ (Adorno), in
short, of autonomy, the tension between the aesthetic and the
political must not be abolished but actively cultivated, for it is
precisely in this tension that art has its truth. Thus Marcuse goes to
war against all those attempts to make art a direct expression of life:
socialist realism, living theatre, people’s art, and the various
contemporary movements of ‘anti-art’, all of which strive for a
premature - and thereby one-dimensional - reconciliation of the
perfect standards of aesthetic form with those of the miserable

28. The Aesthetic Dimension, p. 16.

204

reality whose perpetual negation it is. Once again - as in the mid

1940s - he drew most heavily upon the surrealist project for his
conceptual armament, for in no other movement could the compet­
ing claims of the political and the poetical be traced with greater
precision.
Late in 1972, provoked by an activist collective in Chicago, he
began a series of ‘Letters on Surrealism’ in which he sought to
demonstrate the ‘irreconcilable contradiction between art and
politics, due to the transcendence of art beyond all political goals
(including those of the revolution!)’.29 It is hardly surprising that
Marcuse was drawn to the surrealist programme, for its founders -
Andre Breton, Louis Aragon, Paul Eluard, Benjamin Peret, Philippe
Soupault - were all his exact contemporaries in a generation with
which he had always identified strongly. As young men in their
twenties, they had emerged from the transfiguring experience of the
First World War determined to overthrow the conventional logic
and rationality (not to say the ruling classes) that had made such a
catastrophe possible, and ‘to undo the mutilation of our faculties’
that perpetuated it.30 It is more than a coincidence, then, if the
theorist of the ‘Great Refusal’ repeatedly found points of intersec­
tion with ‘the unlimited capacity for refusal’ with which Breton
launched his movement.31
More substantively, Marcuse still found in the successes and the
failures of the surrealist project the clearest corroboration of his
critique of a determinist Marxist aesthetics, for nowhere could the
insoluble contradiction between the necessary' autonomy of art and
the demands of revolutionary politics be more precisely followed
than in the history of that movement. Juxtaposing the various
manifestos and proclamations of the surrealists with their stormy
political course through the inter-war years, he found only verifica­
tion of his thesis that the condition of ‘un art revolulionnaire is 'un art
independant', that ‘authentic art is in its very substance revolutionary

29. [‘Letters on Surrealism'); some minor editorial changes have been made in
citations. Fredric Jameson’s excellent essay on ‘Marcuse and Schiller’ perceptive­
ly detected the internal link between the idealist aesthetics of the German
Enlightenment, twentieth-century French surrealism, and Marcuse’s own theore­
tical intentions; cf. his Marxism and Form, pp. 83-116.
30. [‘Letters on Surrealism’], first letter.
31. Andre Breton in 1924, quoted by Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative
Dialectics, p. 125.
 The Permanence o f A rt (1 9 7 0 -1 9 7 9 ) 205

and, precisely for this reason, free from the requirements of any
specific revolutionary praxis'.32

III

Marcuse’s response to the cultural revolutionaries of the 1970s

recalls the rebuke delivered by Horkhcimer in 1937, when he
chastened those activist intellectuals who ‘cannot bear the thought
that the kind of thinking which is most topical, which has the
deepest grasp of the historical situation, and is most pregnant with
the future, must at certain times isolate its subject and throw him
back on himself.’33 The revival of this fundamental tenet of Critical
Theory (its fundamental problem, some would say) was no more
arbitrary than Marcuse’s return to the inspiration of the surrealist
programme. Indeed, he believed that the assault on aesthetic form
that underlay the attempt to create a people's art could only turn
into the attack on art itself, just as the attack on ‘bourgeois-
capitalist’ rationality was degenerating into yet another revolt
against Reason per se. ‘Anti-art’ was the reflex in the sphere of
aesthetics of the anti-intellectualism that had come to pervade the New
Left generally.
Corresponding to the inherent qualities of the form of the
authentic art-work, which transcend the brutalized conditions of the
working class in a direction that is ‘universally human - above all
classes’, theory is likewise abstract and anticipatory in its character.
He frequently reminded leftist audiences, in his last years, that
mindless ‘action for action’s sake’ had proven to be a valuable
component of fascism, and sought to reconcile them to the
dialectical principle that ‘theory and practice never stand in an
immediate unity . . . The tension, indeed the conflict with praxis
belongs to the essence of theory, and is grounded in its very
structure’.34 If the necessarily ‘anticipatory consciousness’ of the
New Left had conferred upon the movement an ‘elitist’ character,
this fact must not promote a false and self-destructive denial, for this

32. (‘Letters on Surrealism’), second letter (referring undoubtedly to the 1928

Surrealist Manifesto, ‘Pour un art r£volulionnairc independant’).
33. Max Horkhcimer, ‘Traditionelle und kritischc Thcorie’, trans. James O ’Connell
etal. in Horkheimer, Critical Theory, New York 1972, p. 214.
34. Marcuse, ‘Theoric und Praxis’, p. 21.
206

isolation, far from being fortuitous, ‘has its roots in the social
structure of advanced monopoly capitalism, a structure that has
long since integrated large portions of the working class into the
system’.33 Vanguard politics, no less than avant-garde art, derives its
authenticity precisely from its rupture with the repressive totality
and the mutilated consciousness that corresponds to and reproduces
it.
Writing in the 1970s, in the wake of the killings of students at
Kent and Jackson State Universities, the militarization of urban
police forces, and the brutalization and continued imprisonment of
leftist militants, Marcuse did not hold the New Left overly
accountable in assessing its success or failure. The media, police, and
judicial apparatus of the preventive counter-revolution (still in its
‘democratic-constitutionalist’ phase) had grown accustomed to
dealing with demonstrations, occupations, and even the privatized
expressions of anti-bourgeois morality; but ‘something that the
Establishment is increasingly incapable of tolerating, namely inde­
pendent thinking and feeling’,3536 was being systematically under­
mined by ascendant tendencies in the radical opposition itself. This
capitulation - which he denounced as ‘a hand-out to the establish­
ment, one of the fifth columns of the establishment in the New
Left’,37 was evident in its ritualized language, its ascetic puritanism,
its propensity to engage in desperate acts of terrorism or ‘revolution­
ary suicide’, and above all, its masochistic, self-destructive anti-
intcllcctualism.
The battle to preserve the genuine accomplishments of the New
Left - its extension of the concept of revolution to embrace aspects
of sensibility traditionally displaced to the realm o f ‘aesthetics’ - and
to counteract its own disintegrative tendencies formed the boundar­
ies of Marcuse’s politics in the last years of his life. As timely and
topical as his statements appear, however, they were formulated in a
manner inextricably bound up with who he was and what he had
seen. It was less as a strategist, perhaps, than as a philosopher,
trained and cultivated in the German humanistic tradition, that he

35. Marcuse, ‘Scheitern der Neuen Linken?’, lecture, University of California, Irvine,
April 1975, enlarged version first published in Zeit-Messungen, pp. 37-48; trans.
Biddy Martin, ‘Failure of the New Left?’ in New German Critique, 18 (fall 1979),
P 5-
36. Counter-remlution and Remit, p. 129.
37. Marcuse, ‘The Movement in a New Era of Repression: An Assessment’, p. 12.
 The Permanence o f Art (1 9 7 0 -1 9 7 9 ) 2 07

diagnosed ‘the pest’ of anti-intellectualism ‘that infests the New

Left ;383940he spoke not only as a political analyst but as a refugee from
Hitler’s Germany when he cut short a critic’s repudiation of his
defence of supposedly ‘bourgeois’ civil liberties with the words: ‘You
have not yet experienced a fascist regime’;39 as a scholar and
educator, and not merely a tactician, he repeatedly defended the
importance of the university;49 and on an even more intimate plane,
the ‘revolutionary morality’ upon which so many of his personal
friends have commented balanced the ‘revolutionary pragmatism’
that informed his positions on political events.41
Indeed, perhaps even his silences were eloquent testimonies: was
it precisely as a characteristically ‘non-Jewish Jew’,42 a living vehicle
of the historical, cultural, and moral tradition of Judaism in spite of
himself, that Marcuse fixed his gaze on the liberation of what is
‘universally human’, following an earlier radical social theorist of
the German-Jewish middle class in resolving ‘the Jewish Question’
into ‘the “general question of the age” ’?43 In a debate with Rudi
Dutschke and Wolfgang Lefevre in Berlin, a few weeks after the
Six-Day War, Marcuse permitted himself an unusual digression: ‘I
feel in solidarity and identify myself with Israel for personal reasons
. . - only to qualify it immediately by returning his remarks to the
universal plane: \ . . but not solely for these reasons. I who have
always asserted the complete legitimacy of emotions, moral con­
cepts, and feelings in politics and even in science, who always
supported the impossibility of realizing science and politics without
a human component, I am compelled to see in this solidarity more

38. Ibid., cf. also ‘Theorie und Praxis’, p. 34.

39. Marcuse, lecture delivered at the Centre of the Study of Epic Theatre (Epic
West), Berkeley, 12 June 1977 (unpublished).
40. Cf., for instance, his remarks in an interview skillfully conducted by Pierre
Dommergues and Jean-Michcl Palmier, published in Le Monde (10 mai 1974), pp.
22-3.
41. This balance is finely struck in his brief statement on terrorism within the
German ‘extra-parliamentary opposition’ and the official government reaction to
it: ‘Murder is not a Political Weapon’, in Du Zeil 23 September 1977, trans.
Jeffrey Herf in New German Critique, 12 (fall 1977), pp. 7-8.
42. This is the phrase applied by Isaac Deutscher to Spinoza, Heine, Marx, Trotsky,
Luxemburg, and Freud in his beautiful essay by that title; cf. The Non-Jewish Jew
and Other Essays, New York 1968, pp. 25-41.
43. Karl Marx, ‘On the Jewish Question’ (1843), in Early Writings, p. 215. A
tendentious but scholarly analysis of this problem is carried out by Julius
Carlebach, Karl Marx and the Radical Critique of Judaism, London 1978.
208

than a mere personal prejudice.’44 He proceeded to expound on the

complexity of the issues but did not ‘personally’ re-enter the
debate.45 Nowhere in his writings does Marcuse seriously discuss
either Judaism or anti-semitism, even where such discussion might
have significantly illuminated his work.

IV

Thus, even its uncritical hostility toward Israel came within

Marcuse’s wavering verdict on ‘the failure of the New Left’ since the
1960s: along with its anti-intellectualism, its reactionary aesthetics,
the humourless esprit de serieux with which its strategists intoned the
gospels of liberation, its misplaced anarchism, its flight into the
transcendental escapism of drugs, ‘therapies’, and guru-mongcring,
and all the rest. Of the important positive legacies that survived into
the seventies, one figured of paramount importance in Marcuse’s
final reckoning: the theory and practice of the total, liberated
human being represented by ‘feminism’. In fact, he believed the
women’s liberation movement to be the most important component
of the opposition, and potentially the most radical. He was pressed
to this conclusion by considerations that were philosophical, politi­
cal, and perhaps even personal.
Philosophically, Marcuse had for decades drawn much of his
inspiration from the victims of historical progress, not so much out
of a romantic solidarity with ‘the outcast’ (though there is a
conspicuous measure of that) as out of the belief that many of the
positive human resources and potentialities that had been sacrificed
to the progress of industrial society found refuge on its fringes. This
44. Remarks made in Berlin in July 1967, in Conditions and Prospects of Peace in the
Middle East, Paris, n.d. The episode is confirmed by Marek Halter, ‘Dechirement
ct solidarite face a Israel’, Le Monde (3 aout 1979), p. 13.
45. Likewise, in bis ‘Introduction’ to the Hebrew edition of One-Dimensional Man and
the Essay on Liberation (October 1969), the defence of Israeli security was
counterbalanced with the implied critique of Israeli society: ‘one of the themes
which I proposed in my books states that the goals of liberation must be present
prior to liberation - present in the behaviour, actions, and values of men and
women struggling for liberation. They must be free from the repressive and
aggressive needs of a society based on the exploitation and domination of man by
man . . . Freedom is that of all men, all races, all civilizations - or it is in itself
repressive’, (trans. in Israel Horizons, June-July 1976, p. 17). Cf. also the account
of Herbert and Inge Marcuse’s visit (December 1971) to the ‘salon lilt'eraire et
politique'' in the West Bank city of Nablus, in Raymonda Hawa Tawil, My Home,
My Prison, New York 1979-80, p. 23If.
 The Permanence o f Art (1 9 7 0 -1 9 7 9 ) 209

sensitivity is far from a sentimental exaltation of madness, criminali­

ty, or poverty, for it was always rooted in the fully materialist notion
that a truly revolutionary break with the given society presupposed
the cultivation of elements of a qualitatively different sensibility,
and these could develop only outside of the integrated, ‘one-
dimensional’ productive apparatus. Without supposing the prevail­
ing images of woman as mother, wife, and mistress to be anything
short of repressive, he had nonetheless maintained that the isolation
of the woman from the alienated productive process in favour of
these domestic roles ‘enabled the woman to remain less brutalized
by the Performance Principle, to remain closer to her sensibility:
more human than men’.46
Marcuse was also well aware of the consolidation of the women’s
liberation movement as a political force - his attention followed
logically enough from his work with the Frankfurt School on the
breakdown of patriarchal authority within the family, although it
began to be registered concretely in his writings only from the mid
1960s.47 A Movement which adds the growing number of politically
organized women to its base of intelligentsia, militants in the
professions, minorities, and radicalized sectors of the working class
could yet become a powerful oppositional force: ‘If this is an
“elite” \ he once remarked, ‘it is a mighty big elite’.
But Herbert Marcuse may have also had a personal access to the
‘feminist dimension’ which had become an integral and formally
articulated component of his theoretical position, for he had shared
his entire adult life with three particular women whose contribu­
tions to his life and thought arc reflected in more than the simple
but moving dedications to his books.
Sophie Marcuse, his first wife, in whose company he had begun
his intellectual career and who accompanied him in the difficult
years of emigration and exile, was a competent mathematician,
whose practical sense compensated well for her husband’s lack of it.
The twenty-five years of their marriage, however, spanned the
period of his most ‘technical’ philosophical work, and one cannot

46. Counter-revolution and Revolt, p. 77; cf. also his similar but much earlier and less well
formulated remarks on the 'Emanzipation dcr Frau in der repressive!! Gcscll-
schaft’, Das Argument, 23 (October 1972), pp. 4-11.
47. Marcuse, ‘Vietnam: Analyse eines Exempcls’, in Neue Knttk, no. 36-37 (June-Au­
gust 1966), esp. p. 36, contains his first discussion of the women’s movement as an
actual political force.
210

really speak of intellectual collaboration in a strict sense, except,

perhaps, during their exceptional wartime work in the American
intelligence agencies (she had served as a statistician in Naval
Intelligence while he worked as an analyst in the Oss).
His life with Inge Marcuse, however, seems to have been as
different from his first marriage as the decades that separated them.
Indeed, there is good reason to suppose that she bears a substantial
measure of responsibility for his dramatic rise to prominence, for she
served as an indispensable critic, stimulus, and ally.48 Inge came
from a cultural background that complemented Marcuse’s: she was
born in 1914 into the wealthy upper-middlc-class Jewish society of
Magdeburg, the youngest of four daughters, but from her family she
absorbed much of the cultural richness and progressive ideas that
Marcuse had to struggle to attain. Her father was a well-connected
but radical attorney, a pacifist and inveterate anti-monarchist who
defended Social Democrats and was himself in and out of jail (and
duels!) for his outspokenly ‘unpatriotic’ ideas; her mother was active
in humanitarian causes and a great patron of the arts, and her
oldest sister, a radical law student at Heidelberg, nourished her with
the heresies of psychoanalysis, atheism, and reports from the
seminars of Jaspers and Mannheim.
Inge herself passed her Abitur in 1932, with ambitions of
becoming an interpreter at the League of Nations; shortly there­
after, a fortuitous skiing mishap kept her hospitalized in Grenoble at
the time of the Nazi seizure of power. Rather than return to
uncertain conditions in Germany, she moved to England and
enrolled in the London School of Economics, where she first met
Franz Neumann; they were married in America in 1937.
With Marcuse, a fuller intellectual rapport was established.
While pursuing studies of French literature and history, and
ultimately a teaching career of her own, Inge read and discussed
with him everything he wrote and commanded the revisions and
reformulations that would make his convoluted German style (more
or less) accessible to an American audience. Many of their friends
have testified that it was also Inge who first pressured him to
become more actively allied to the political movements taking shape
in the 1960s. She died of cancer in 1973, a year in which Marcuse

48. I am indebted, for the following, to Inge Marcuse’s sister, Ms Harriet Henze, and
to her son, Osha Neumann.
 The Permanence o f A rt (1 9 7 0 -1 9 7 9 ) 211

published nothing of substance and cancelled or declined all

speaking engagements. When he finally broke his brooding silence
in March 1974, it was to deliver an original paper entitled ‘Marxism
and Feminism’, which has been widely discussed within the women’s
movement: it is the opinion of her sister that their intellectual and
political alliance had liberated both of them.
The probing of the possible ground of reconciliation between
Marxism and feminism which occupied Marcuse in much of his
subsequent work went beyond a political endorsement of women’s
liberation and beyond the superficially Marxist notion that the
alleviation of sexual oppression would be ‘the mere by-product of
new social institutions’.49 In its positive aspects, the thesis he
developed bears evidence of Marcuse’s last critic and collaborator,
Erica Sherover-Marcuse, who had been one of a handful of
graduate students to join him in San Diego. She became his research
assistant in 1965, from which time she read and discussed with him
all of his writing, and they were married in summer 1976. In
particular, the new emphasis on the personal dimension of social
liberation which began to show up in Marcuse’s last statements, and
his concern with the concrete political conditions of the women’s
movement, reflect his contact with a younger and more immediately
engaged generation.
Nevertheless, in its final formulation Marcuse’s ideas were his
own, most evidently perhaps in his central proposition that at its
most advanced positions, ‘women’s liberation’ is all but a misnomer,
for the movement raised issues leading ‘beneath and beyond the
male-female dichotomy’ to ‘the human being whose liberation,
whose realization is still at stake’.50 Paradoxically, it is precisely by
reason of the universality of these issues that he insisted that a
separate women’s movement ‘is not only justified but necessary’.
The reasons follow from Marcuse’s whole cast of mind. Only a
change in sensibility, he had maintained, in the very structure of

49. Herbert Marcuse, ‘Marxism and Feminism’, lecture at Stanford University, 7

March 1974; published in Women’s Studies, vol. 2, no. 3 (1974), p. 281; also in
North Star, 4, 15 (1-15 April 1974), pp. 34-41, and in Zeit-Messungen, pp. 9-20. For
a response to Marcuse’s essay and an appraisal of its impact among women, cf.
Joan B. Landes, ‘Marcuse’s Feminist Dimension’, Telos, 41 (fall 1979), pp.
158-65, and csp. Nancy Veddcr-Shults, ‘Hearts Starve as Well as Bodies’, New
German Critique, 13 (winter 1978), pp. 5-17.
50. Marcuse, ‘Marxism and Feminism’, p. 289.
212

consciousness, could open the possible way to a higher stage of

personal and social life; and short of that vve do little but further
democratize the prevailing repression of our best potentialities. The
difficulty of the elusive concept of a ‘new sensibility’ may be
precisely what validates it, for only elements of it exist, and these arc
dispersed to the fringes of modern society: in the synthetic world of
art; in alienated intellectuals, students, and minorities who are
marginal to the one-dimensional productive apparatus and may for
that reason be less damaged by it; and in women.
Marcuse’s analysis indicated to him that the historical evolution
of patriarchal capitalism had in large measure removed women
from the sphere of productivity to that of the home. In the history of
civilization, the human characteristics irrelevant or antagonistic to
the domination of nature and the instrumental rationality that
sustains it have likewise been removed to the private (domestic)
sphere and thereby designated as feminine: receptivity, sensitivity,
pacification, tenderness, ‘characteristics which, in the long history of
patriarchal civilization, have been attributed to the female rather
than the male’.51 Obviously, Marcuse is not identifying these as
‘feminine’ qualities, but the opposite - arguing that their designa­
tion as such is the ideological product of a specific historical
development.
In so far as these culturally distributed needs stand opposed to
those prevailing in the male-dominated world of competitive
commodity production, they could develop into a force of negation,
the first moment of liberation: ‘What has been considered the
feminine antithesis to masculine qualities in patriarchy, in reality a
repressed social, historical alternative, would be the socialist alterna­
tive: in order to create those conditions under which people are able
to enjoy their sensuality and their intellect, and trust their
emotions.’52 Marcuse had more of an affinity with Schiller’s
‘aesthetic’ quest for the internal equilibrium of the sensuous and
rational faculties than with those who call for equal opportunity
within the institutions of either capitalist or patriarchal domination,
within the established hierarchy of needs: ‘equality’, he said, ‘which
is the absolute prerequisite of liberation . . . is not yet freedom’.53

51. Ibid., p. 283.

52. Marcuse, ‘Failure of the New Left?’, p. 11.
53. Marcuse, ‘Marxism and Feminism’, p. 285.
 The Permanence o f A rt (1 9 7 0 -1 9 7 9 ) 213

Indeed, although he had made his home in America, it was

obvious that he had never entirely emigrated from Europe -
TEurope de ma jeunesse . . , celle des grands penseurs’;54 he
returned nearly every year (usually flying first class, allegedly
because of his long legs). The passive, graceful landscape of southern
France and the Alpine resort at Pontresina were especially favoured,
but he was at least equally drawn to the public life of the cultural
capitals, where he never stopped writing, lecturing, and conferring
with an international group of friends and followers. After last-
minute consultations with his biographer, he had returned to
Europe in the spring of 1979, where he spoke out in more concrete
terms than ever on feminism, the ecology movement, and other
flourishing survivors of the allegedly moribund New Left, whose
practices still held open new dimensions of social change. But there
were no signs of one-dimensional optimism: he continued his
denunciation of terrorism on the left, of the repressive bureaucratic
regimes of Eastern Europe, and of the fascist tendencies that
coexisted with constitutional democracy - a deep and personal fear
he had harboured for decades; he referred with increasing frequency
to Auschwitz.55
Herbert Marcuse had been welcomed that spring at the Max
Planck Institute in Starnberg, near Munich, a guest of Jurgen
Habermas, its director and the most prominent successor to the
Frankfurt tradition of Critical Theory.56 He was visited there by
another member of his international network of colleagues and
comrades, the French philosopher Jean Marabini, whose recollec­
tion of their last conversation conveys a most exceptional note of
quietism. Marcuse: ‘We must resume our discussions of the new
right, and of the “new philosophes” - whom I consider to be snobs, as
comical as characters out of Moliere. Of course I would love to see
Venice again, and Padua, and to inquire into Negri and the Red
Brigades: all this violence, all this cruelty - it must be analysed,

54. Marcuse to Jean Marabini, ‘Un Pyromane a la retraitc’, Le Monde (19 novembre
1978).
55. On Marcuse’s intellectual preoccupations during this trip, cf. the remarks of his
friend Reinhard Lcttau, ‘Herbert Marcuse and the Vulgarity of Death’, New
German Critique, 18 (fall 1979), pp. 19-20, and Jeffrey Herf, ‘The Critical Spirit of
Herbert Marcuse’, ibid., pp. 24-7.
56. Habermas’s relation to Marcuse is reflected in the discussions they held in
Starnberg in July 1977, published on the occasion of the latter’s eightieth
birthday, in Jurgen Habermas, et al., Gesprdche mil Herbert Marcuse, pp. 9-62.
214

explained, exposed, and transcended. But I have, in spite of myself,

some fear that I would die in Venice of the heat, like the character
in Thomas Mann. If I must go, I would rather stay in my Germany
. . . I believe that the hour of my final rendez-vous with death has
arrived, but I am reconciled to it.’57

57. Herbert Marcuse, quoted by Jean Marabini, ‘Dcrniers desirs’, in Le Monde (3

aout 1979), p. 12.
 CONCLUSION

TH E
PHILOSOPHICAL
DIMENSION
 And if you want biographies,
do not look for those with the legend:
‘Mr So-and-So and his times’,
but for those whose title page might be inscribed,
‘A fighter against his times’.

N ie t z s c h e

The Use and Abuse of History

Consistent with every phase of his career, Herbert Marcuse spent the
summer of 1979 waging a two-dimensional ‘battle against his times’:
on the historical plane was a political struggle for the release of the
East German dissident economist Rudolf Bahro, imprisoned in the
D dr for having written the book Die Alternative, the critique of
‘realexislierende’ socialism which Marcuse called ‘the most important
contribution to Marxist theory and practice to have appeared in the
last decade’; 1 there was also a struggle on the ‘essential’ ontological
plane. He won only the first: Bahro was released in August, a few
days after Marcuse’s death, in Starnbcrg, on July 29.

To the very end of his life, Marcuse maintained that he was still a
Marxist - even an ‘orthodox’ Marxist - although he had, over a
period of more than fifty years, come to reject some of the most
central conclusions drawn by Marx and subsequent generations of
Marxists: he had asserted the non-identity of the modern blue-collar

I. Herbert Marcuse, ‘Protosozialismus und Spatkapitalismus. Vcrsuch einer revolu­

tions! hcorctischcn Synthcse von Bahros Ansatz’, Zeilschrifi fur Social Diskussion, 19
(1978), p. 5 (a translation of this essay is found in Ulf VVolter, ed., Rudolf Bahro:
Critical Responses, White Plains 1980, pp. 25-48. Bahro’s book has been translated
as The Alternative in Eastern Europe, London 1979.

217
218

labour force with the nineteenth-century proletariat and thus called

the whole theory of the revolutionary subject into question; he had
adapted the original theory of class struggle to the realities of
one-dimensional society; he had diffused the concept of revolution­
ary class-consciousness throughout representatives of all levels of
society, and had called special attention to the new role of the
intelligentsia, and much else. In addition, there had been some
major borrowings from ‘non-revolutionary’ traditions of thought:
his fundamental stance of negation derives primarily from Hegel,
ontological concepts survived in his thought even after his break
with Heidegger, psychoanalysis provided him with a theory of the
instinctual basis - and limits - of revolution to which he always
adhered, he drew freely upon the ideals of liberal humanism, on
surrealist poetics, and raised such categories as art, nature, and
feminism to positions of priority in his critical social theory. If this
ongoing reformulation can truly be interpreted as his attempt to
compensate for the inadequacies of an analysis based purely on the
writings of Marx, what sense is to be made of his claim to ‘orthodox
Marxism’?
A comprehensive answer will ultimately have to confront the
whole issue of what is Marxism and what has been its course in the
twentieth century, and then determine Marcuse’s relation to it -
hopefully, the materials that have been collected here will contri­
bute to this analysis. The main conclusion to be drawn from
Marcuse’s work is that Marxism is not a body of empirical
propositions, nor even a ‘method’, as Lukacs had proposed in his
own attempt to prevent radical thought from being overtaken by
historical developments. For Marcuse, Marxism was rather a theory
of the ‘universal individual’, but one which surpasses simple
humanism because it speaks both to the material forces which
obstruct its realization, and to the existing emancipatory forces that
may yet achieve it.2 Thus he consistently rejected the distinction
between the young, allegedly ‘humanistic’ Marx and the author of
the mature critique of political economy, for the concepts of
exploitation, surplus-value, profit, and abstract labour reveal the
fragmentation of human life in capitalist society and thus contain -
in negative form - the substance of a genuine humanism.

2. ‘Das ist orthodoxcr Marxismus: das “allgemeine Individuum” als Ziel des
Sozialismus’. (‘Protokolsozialismus und Spatkapitalismus’, p. 13).
 Conclusion: The Philosophical Dimension 219

Marcuse could reassert his claim to be a Marxist even at the end

of a lifetime during which the class that was to have ushered
humanity into its next historical stage had either sold out or bought
in to the present one, for it was Marx’s reasoning, not his zeitgebunden
conclusions, that was essential. Historical materialism required a
revolutionary subject whose needs were universal and whose inter­
ests were identical to those of all humanity, a condition which may
have been imputed to sectors of the militant proletariat of the later
nineteenth century, but which now applies to no particular class -
either within ‘socialism as it actually exists’ or in contemporary ‘late
capitalism’. Marcuse believed that Bahro’s formulation of ‘the
subject of the impending transformation’ in Eastern Europe could
be applied, mutatis mutandis, to the West as well: ‘From a purely
empirical standpoint, this subject consists of the energetic and
creative elements in all strata and areas of society, of all people in
whose individuality the emancipatory interests predominate, or at
least play a major part in influencing their behaviour.’3 There was
no one-dimensional optimism in Marcuse’s contribution to this
analysis, and his references to ‘the revolution of the twenty-first
century’ or to the vaguely cheering fact that ‘no social system has
ever lasted forever’ testify to the sobriety that was forced upon him
by history; ‘Not summer’s bloom lies ahead of us’, Max Weber had
similarly prophesied in 1918, ‘but a polar night of icy hardness and
darkness’.

In the interim, however, there was work to be done, actions to be

carried out immediately, positions to be achieved and defended with
deadly earnest. And there were some significant beacons to illumin­
ate the icy darkness: the eternal protest emanating from the
Aesthetic Dimension, the struggle of the ecology movement to
defend Nature against the violence of the establishment, the
resistance from the Feminist Dimension to the integrative powers of
the one-dimensional society, and the ongoing work of numerous
other ‘catalyst groups’, as he called them. In the last analysis,
however, Marcuse seems to have taken his own stand on the
‘Philosophical Dimension’ - which he named only once, to assign it

3. Rudolf Bahro, ‘The Alternative in Eastern Europe’, trans. David Fernbach and
Ben Fowkcs, New Left Review 106 (Novembcr-December 1977), p. 19.
220

the monumental historical task of the ‘dissolution and even

subversion of given facts’.45
‘The concrete conditions for realizing the truth may vary’,
Marcuse wrote at the outset of the Second World War, ‘but the
truth remains the same and theory remains its ultimate guardian.
Theory will preserve the truth even if revolutionary practice
deviates from its proper path. Practice follows the truth, not vice
versa.’ From this attitude, Marcuse had never wavered; no revolu­
tionary was ever more militant a defender of the intellectual life.
One of his favourite anecdotes was of the painter Victor Necp,
challenged by a student to define the alleged element of protest
in a Still Life with Apples by Cezanne: ‘ “ Gegen nachlassiges Denken",
antwortete Neep' - it is a protest ‘against sloppy thinking’.6 Likewise
Marcuse.
Exactly as Marx had concluded of the revolution in Paris 120
years earlier, in the aftermath of the challenge to the established
order of summer 1968, Marcuse observed, ‘Historically it is again a
period of Enlightenment prior to material change - a period of
education, but education which turns into praxis'. 7 The function of
theory - the political emissary of the ‘philosophical dimension’ - is
thus central in the present struggle for life, Eros, survival. Like the
epistemological function he had identified in art, the instincts, the
feminist drive toward ‘the legendary idea of androgynism’, theory
itself held for Marcuse, ‘a thinker in a time of need’, the position
once assigned by Marx to the proletariat: a force in bourgeois
society, but not (/bourgeois society. In the measure that it preserves
its ‘alienation’ from the facts of the oppressive reality, a critical
theory can become a force within it to stimulate change in the
direction of unactualized potentialities.
Marcuse cultivated this distance, in his person, in the substance
of his analysis, even in the ‘aesthetic form’ of its presentation: like
the epic theatre which he admired, Marcuse had his own
‘alienation-effect’. If his sometimes oracular, always dialectical prose
shifts the burden of understanding onto the reader, has the latter
really been cheated? It was to protect the autonomy of radical
theory that he pleaded in his last years with the New Left to purge
4. One-Dimensional Man, p. 185.
5. Reason and Revolution, p. 322.
6. Die Permanent der Kunst, p. lOn.
7. Essay on Liberation, p. 53.
 Conclusion: The Philosophical Dimension 221

its language of the encrustations of a ritualized Marxism. A brittle

fabric of slogans could be absorbed, accommodated, integrated in
the way a critical theory could not: The truth of theory, Marcuse
had written in 1937, unlike the beauty of art, is incompatible with
the bad present.8

Herbert Marcuse, 1898-1979: Der Geisl, der stets verneinl.

8. ‘Ul)cr den affirmativen Charakter der Kultur’, Zettschrifl fur Sozialforschung, Bd.
VI, I (1937), p. 79.
222

Bibliography
of the W ritings of
H erbert M arcuse

Books

Schiller = Bibliography unter Benutzune der Trornelschen Schiller = Bibhothek,

Berlin 1925.
Hegels Ontologie und die Grundlegung einer Theorie der Geschichtlichkeil,
Frankfurt-am-Main 1932.
Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory, New York 1941.
Second edition with ‘Supplementary Epilogue’, New York 1954. Paper-
bound edition with new preface,‘A Note on Dialectic’, Boston 1960.
Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, Boston 1955. Paper-
bound edition with new preface, New York 1962. 2nd ed. with ‘Political
Preface 1966’.
Soviet Marxism: A Critical Analysis, New York 1958. Paperbound edition with
new preface, New York 1962.
One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society,
Boston 1964.
Kultur und Gesellschaft, I, Frankfurt-am-Main 1965, republication of entries
18, 22, 23, 24.
Kultur und Gesellschaft, II, Frankfurt-am-Main 1965, republication of entries
15, 2 9 ,5 1 ,5 4 , 56, 67.
Das Ende der Ulopie, lectures and discussion at the Free University, Berlin,
July 1967, Berlin 1967.
Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, Boston 1968, republication in English of
entries 1 8 ,2 1 ,2 2 ,2 3 ,2 4 ,5 4 ,7 1 ,7 7 .
Psychoanalyse und Politik, Frankfurt-am-Main 1968, republication of entries
4 0 ,4 1 ,5 1 , 1967 (above). (Five Lectures, Boston 1970).
An Essay on Liberation, Boston 1969.
Revolution oder Reform? (with Karl Popper), Munchen 1971. ( Revolution or
Reform: A Confrontation, A. T . Ferguson, ed., Chicago 1976).
Counter-revolution and Revolt, Boston 1972.
Studies in Critical Philosophy, London 1972, republication of entries 14, 19,
29,43,89 .
Zeil-Messungen, Frankfurt-am-Main 1975, republication of entries 102, 103,
104.
Die Permanenz der KunsL' Wider eine bestimmte marxistische Aesthetik, Munich
1977 .{T h e Aesthetic Dimension, Boston 1978).
N ote : Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt-am-Main, is in the process of issuing a
nearly complete edition of the writings of Herbert Marcuse. At the time of
this writing, the following volumes are available:
 Bibliography o f the W ritings o f Herbert Marcuse 223

Schriflcn, 1: Der deutsche Kunstlerroman. Fruhe Aufsatze, 1978; republication of

entries 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 9, 1 1, 12, 14, 15.
Schriften, 3: Aufsatze aus der Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung, 1934-1941, 1979;
republication of entries 18, 19, 21, 22, 23, 24, 26.
Schriften 5: Tnebstruktur und Gesellschaft: Ein philosophischer Beitrag zu Sigmund
Freud, 1979; republication of Eros and Civilization, trans. Marianne von
Eckhardt-Jaffe.
0

Books Edited

Franz Neumann, The Democratic and the Authoritarian State, Glencoe, Illinois
1957.

Essays, Articles, Book Reviews, Published Lectures

1. ‘Der deutsche Kunstlerroman’, phil. diss. University of Frieburg-

im-Breisgau, 1922.
2. ‘Beitrage zu einer Phanomenologie des historischen Materialismus’, in
Philosophische Hefle, (Berlin 1928), no. 1, pp. 45-60 (translated in Telos
4, 1969).
3. ‘Uber konkrete Philosophic’, in Archivfur Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpo-
lilik (Tubingen 1929), vol. 62, pp. 111-20.
4 . ‘Besprechung von Karl Vorlander: K arl Marx, sein Leben und sein W erk\
in Die Gesellschaft (Berlin 1929), vol. VI, part II, pp. 186-9.
5. *Zur Wahrheitsproblematik der soziologischen M ethode’, in Die
Gesellschaft (Berlin 1929), vol. VI, part II, pp. 356-69.
6 . ‘Zum Problem der Dialektik I’, in Die Gesellschaft (Berlin 1930), vol.
VII, part I, pp. 15-30 (translated in Telos 27, spring 1976).
7 . ‘Transzendentaler Marxismus?’ in Die Gesellschaft (Berlin 1930), vol.
VII, part I, pp. 304-26.
8 . ‘Besprechung von H. Noack: Geschichle und Systeme der Philosophic’, in
Philosophische Hefte (Berlin 1930), vol. II, pp. 91-6.
9. ‘Das Problem der geschichtlichen Wirklichkeit: Wilhelm Dilthey’, in
Die Gesellschaft (Berlin 1931), vol. I, pp. 350-67.
10. ‘Zur Kritik der Soziologie’, in D ie Gesellschaft (Berlin 1931), vol. VII,
part II, pp. 270-80.
11. ‘Zum Problem der Dialektik II’, in D ie Gesellschaft (Berlin 1931), vol.
VII, part II, pp. 541-57 (translated in Telos 27, spring 1976).
12. ‘Zur Auseinandersetzung mit Hans Freyers Soziologie als Wirklichkeits-
wissenschafC , in Philosophische Hefte (Berlin 1931), vol. Ill, nos. 1 and 2,
pp. 83-9.
13. ‘Besprechung von Heinz Heimsoeth: Die Errungschaflen des deutschen
Idealismus\ in Deutsche Literaturzeitung (Berlin 1932), vol. 53, no. 43, pp.
2024-9.
14. ‘Neue Quellen zur Grundlegung des historischen Materialismus’, in
D ie Gesellschaft (Berlin 1932), vol. II, pp. 136-74 (translated in Studies
in Critical Philosophy).
224

15. ‘Uber die philosophischen Grundlagen des wirtschaftwissenschaftli-

chen Arbeitsbcgriff, in Archiv fur Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik
(Tubingen 1933), vol. 69, pp. 257-92. (translated in Telos 16, summer
1973).
16. ‘Philosophic des Schciterns: Karl Jaspers W eik’, in Unterhaltungsblatt
der Vossischen Zeitung, no. 339 (14 December 1933).
17. ‘Besprechung von Herbert VVacker. Das Verhaltnis des jungen Hegel zu
K a n t\ in Deutsche Lileraturzeilung (Berlin 1934), vol. 55, no. 14, pp.
629-30.
18. ‘Der Kampf gegen den Liberalismus in der totalitarcn Staatsauffas-
sung’, in Zeilschrift fur Sozialforschung, vol. Ill, no. 1 (1934), pp. 161-95
(translated in Negations).
19. ‘Theoretische Entwiirfe uber Autoritat und Familie: Idcengeschicht-
licherT eil’, in Studien uber Autoritat und Familie, Paris 1936, pp. 136-228.
(translated in Studies in Critical Philosophy).
20. Autoritat und Familie in der deutschen Soziologie bis 1933\ in Studien uber
‘

Autoritat und Familie.

2 1 . ‘Zum Begriff des Wesens’, in Zeilschrift fur Sozialforschutig, vol. V , no. 1
(1936), pp. 1-39 (translated in Negations).
2 2 . ‘Uber den affirmativen Charakter der Kultur’, in Zeilschrift fur
Sozialforschung, vol. VI, no. 1 (1937), pp. 54-94 (translated in Negations).
2 3 . ‘Philosophic und kritische Theorie’, in Zeilschrift fur Sozialforschung, vol.
VI, no. 3 (1937), pp. 631-47 (translated in Negations).
24. ‘Zur Kritik des Hedonismus’, in Zeilschrift fur Sozialforschung, vol. VII,
nos. 1/2 (1938), pp. 55-89 (translated in Negations).
2 5 . ‘An Introduction to H egel’s Philosophy’, in Studies in Philosophy and
Social Science, vol.VIII, pp. 394-412.
2 6 . ‘Some Social Implications of Modern Technology’, in Studies in
Philosophy and Social Science, vol. IX, pp. 414-39.

[note : Between 1933 and 1941, Herbert Marcuse was a regular book
reviewer for the Zeilschrift fur Sozialforschung and its American
successor, Studies in Philosophy and Social Science. His reviews are
found in the following issues:
ZfS II, 2(1933), pp. 269-73.
ZfS II, 3 (1933), pp. 424-8.
ZJS III, 1 (1934), pp. 87-9 and 102-3.
ZJS III, 2 (1934), pp. 263-5.
ZJS III, 3 (1934), pp. 416-8 and 437-40.
ZJS IV, 2 (1935), pp. 269-73.
ZJS IV, 3 (1935), pp. 437-40.
ZJS V, 1 (1936), pp. 107-11.
Z J S V , 3(1936), pp. 411-5.
ZJS VII, 1/2 (1938), pp. 219-22, 225-7, 229-30, and 233.
ZJS VII, 3 (1938), pp. 404-10.
ZJS VIII, 1/2 (1939), pp. 221-32.
SPSS IX, 1 (1941), pp. 144-8.
SPSS IX , 3 (1941), pp. 483-90, 5 0 0 -1 ,5 1 2 -4 , 531.]
 Bibliography o f the Writings o f Herbert Marcuse 225

27. ‘A Rejoinder to Karl Lowith’s review of Reason and Revolution’, in

Journal of Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (Buffalo 1941-42), vol.
II, pp. 560-3.
28. ‘Some Remarks on Aragon: Art and Politics in the Totalitarian Era’,
(unpublished, Washington DC, September 1945).
2 9 . ‘Existentialism: Remarks on Jean-Paul Sartre’s L ’Etre et le Neant\ in
Journal o f Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (Buffalo, March 1948),
vol. VIII, pp. 309-36.
30. ‘Lord Acton: Essays on Freedom and Power’, in American Historical Review
(Richm ond, Virginia, April 1949), vol. 54, no. 3, pp. 557-9.
31. ‘Review of Georg Luk£cs: Goethe und seine Z e it\ in Journal of Philosophy
and Phenomenological Research (Buffalo 1949), vol. X I, pp. 142-4.
3 2 . ‘Anti-Democratic Popular Movements’, in H. Morganthau, cd.,
Germany and the Future of Europe, Chicago 1951, pp. 108-13.
33. ‘Recent Literature on Communism’, in World Politics (New York, July
1954), vol. VI, no. 4, pp. 515-25.
34. ‘Dialectic and Logic Since the War’, in Ernest J. Simmons, ed.,
Continuity and Change in Russian and Soviet Thought, Cambridge, Mass.
1955, pp. 347-58.
35. ‘Eros and Culture’, in I.E., The Cambridge Review (Cambridge, Mass.,
spring 1955), vol. I, no. 3, pp. 107-23.
3 6 . ‘The Social Implications of Freudian “ Revisionism” ’, Dissent (New
York, summer 1955), vol. II, no. 3, pp. 221-40 (reprinted as the
epilogue to Eros and Civilization and also in Voices of Dissent, New York
1958).
3 7 . ‘A Reply to Erich Fromm’, in Dissent (New York, winter 1956), vol.
III, no. 1, pp. 79-81.
3 8 . ‘La th6orie des instincts et la socialisation’, in La Table Ronde (Paris
1956), no. 108, pp. 97-110.
3 9 . ‘Theory and Therapy in Freud’, in the Nation (New York, 28
September 1957), pp. 200-2.
40. ‘Trieblehre und Freiheit’, in Freud in der Gegenwarl: Ein Vorlragszyklus der
Universilaten Frankfurt und Heidelberg zum hundertsten Geburtstag,
Frankfurt-am-Main 1957; Frankfurter Beitr'age zur Soziologie, vol. VI, pp.
401-24 (translated in Five Lectures).
4 1 . ‘Die Idee des Fortschritts im Lichte der Psychoanalyse’, in ibid., pp.
425-41 (translated in Five Lectures).
42. ‘Preface’ to Raya Dunayevskaya, Marxism and Freedom, New York 1958,
pp. 15-20.
4 3 . ‘Notes on the Problem of Historical Laws’, in Partisan Review (New
York, winter 1959), vol. 26, pp. 117-29.
44. ‘The Ideology of D eath’, in Herman Feifel, cd., The Meaning of Death,
New York 1959, pp. 64-76.
45. ‘De I’ontologie a la technologie: les tendances de la societe indust-
ricllc’, in Arguments (Paris 1960), vol. IV, no. 18, pp. 56-9.
4 6 . ‘Language and Technological Society’, in Dissent (New York, winter
1961), vol. VIII, no. 1, pp. 66-74.
226

4 7 . ‘The Problem of Social Change in Technological Society’, lecture

presented to a U n e s c o Symposium on Social Development. Printed
for limited distribution under the auspices of Raymond Aron and Bert
Hosclitz, Paris, 28 April 1961, pp. 139-60.
48. ‘Ideologic et society industrielle avanc6e\ in Mediations, (Paris, summer
1962), no. 5, pp. 57-71.
4 9 . ‘Emanzipation der Frau in der repressiven Gesellschaft: Ein Gesprach
mit Herbert Marcuse und Peter Furth’, in D as Argument (Berlin,
October-November 1962), no. 23, pp. 2-12.
50. ‘Zur Stellung des Denkens heute’, in Festschrift: Theodor W. Adorno zum
60. Geburtstag, Frankfurt-am-Main 1963, im Auftrag des Instituts fiir
Sozialforschung, herausgegeben von Max Horkheimer, pp. 45-9.
5 1 . ‘Das Veralten der Psychoanalyse’, lecture delivered at annual meeting
of the A psa, 1963.
5 2 . ‘Dynamismes de la socidtd industrielle’, in Annales: Economies, Societes,
Civilisations {Paris 1963), vol. 18, pp. 906-32.
5 3 . ‘World Without Logos’, in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (Chicago,
January 1964), vol. 20, pp. 25-6.
5 4 . ‘Industrialisierung und Kapitalismus’, in M ax Weber und die Soziologie
Heute, Tubingen 1964, pp. 161-80 (translated in Negations).
5 5 . ‘Perspektiven des Sozialismus in der entwickelten Industriegesell-
schaft’, in Praxis I, (Zagreb 1966), nos. 2 /3 , pp. 260-70 (address
presented in Korcula, Yugoslavia, summer 1964), followed by ‘Einige
Streitfragen’, exchange with Serge Mallet, pp. 377-9. Translated as
‘Socialism in the Developed Countries’, in International Socialist Journal
(Rome, April 1965), vol. II, no. 8, pp. 139-52.
5 6 . ‘Remarks on a Redefinition of Culture’, in Daedalus (Cambridge,
Mass., winter 1965), vol. 94, no. 1, pp. 190-207, reprinted in Gerald
Holton, ed., Science and Culture, Cambridge, Mass. 1965, pp. 218-35.
5 7 . ‘A Tribute to Paul A. Baran’, in Monthly Review (New York, March
1965), vol. 16, no. 11, pp. 114-5.
5 8 . ‘Nachwort’, to Walter Benjamin, Zur Krilik der Gewalt und andere
Aufsdtze, Frankfurt-am-Main 1965, pp. 95-100.
59. ‘Repressive Tolerance’, in A Critique o f Pure Tolerance, Boston 1965, pp.
81-117.
6 0 . ‘Nachwort’, to Karl Marx, Der 18. Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte,
Frankfurt-am-Main 1965, pp. 143-50; translated in Radical America
(Cambridge 1969), 3 ,4 , pp. 55-9.
6 1 . ‘Der Einfluss der deutschen Emigration auf das amerikanische Geis-
tesleben: Philosophic und Soziologie’, in Jahrbuch fu r Amerikasludien,
Heidelberg 1965, vol. X , pp. 27-33.
6 2 . ‘Socialist Humanism?’ in Erich Fromm, ed., Socialist Humanism, New
York 1965, pp. 96-106.
6 3 . ‘Reply to M. Berman’s review of One-Dimensional Man', in Partisan
Review (New York, winter 1965), vol. 32, no. 1, pp. 159-60.
64. ‘Statement on Vietnam ’, in Partisan Review (New York, fall 1965), vol.
32, no. 4, pp. 646-9.
 Bibliography o f the Writings o f Herbert Marcuse 227

6 5 . ‘On Science and Phenomenology’, in Robert S. Cohen and Marx W.

Wartofsky, eds., Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, II, New York
1965, pp. 279-91.
66. ‘Sommes-nous ddja des hommes?’ in Partisans (Paris, April 1966), no.
28, pp. 21-9.
67. ‘Ethics and Revolution’, in R. T . dcGeorge, ed,, Ethics and Society, New
York 1966, pp. 133-47.
6 8 . ‘Vietnam : Analyse eines Exempels’, in Neue Kritik (Frankfurt-
am-M ain, June-August 1966), no. 36/37, pp. 30-40.
69. ‘Zur Geschichte der Dialektik’, in Sowjetsystem und Demokratische
Gesellschaft (Freiburg 1966), vol. I, pp. 1192-211,
7 0 . ‘The Individual in the Great Society’, part 1, Alternatives (San Diego,
March-April 1966), vol. 1, no. 1; part 2, (summer 1966), vol. I, no. 2.
(Also in Bertram M. Gross, ed., A Great Society? New York 1966, pp.
58-80.)
7 1 . ‘Love Mystified: A review of Norman O. Brown’s Love’s Body’, in
Commentary (New York, February 1967), vol. 43, no. 2, pp. 71-6.
7 2 . ‘The Inner Logic of American Policy in Vietnam ’, in Louis Menashe,
ed., Teach-Ins: USA, New York 1967, pp. 65-7.
73. ‘The Obsolescence of Marxism?’ in Nicholas Lobkowicz, ed., Marx and
the Western World, Notre Dame 1967, pp. 409-17.
7 4 . ‘Art in the One-Dimensional Society’, in Arts Magazine, (New York,
M ay 1967), vol. 41, no. 7, pp. 26-31, lecture delivered at the School of
Visual Arts, NYC, 8 March 1967; reprinted in Lee Baxandall, ed.,
Radical Perspectives in the Arts, Baltimore 1972, pp. 53-67.
7 5 . ‘Das Ende d erU topie’, lecture and discussion at the Free University of
Berlin, Ju ly 1967 (published in Five Lectures).
7 6 . ‘Thoughts on the Defence of Gracchus Babeuf, in The Defence of
Gracchus Babeuf, Boston 1967, pp. 95-105.
7 7 . ‘Aggressivitat in der gegenwartigen Industriegesellschaft’, in Neue
Rundschau, Heft 1, 1967 (translated in Negations).
78. ‘Zum Begriff der Negation in der Dialektik’, in Filosoficky Casopis
(Prague 1967), no. 3, pp. 375-80 (translated in Telos, 8, summer 1971).
7 9 . ‘O n Changing the World: A Reply to Karl M iller’, in Monthly Review
(New York, October 1967), pp. 42-8.
8 0 . ‘Die Gesellschaft als Kunstwerk', in Neues Forum (Vienna, Novem-
ber-Dccember 1967), vol. X IV , no. 167-168, pp. 863-6.
81. ‘The Responsibility of Science’, in The Responsibility of Power: Historical
Essays in Honor of Hajo Holborn, Leonard Kriegcr and Fritz Stern, eds.,
New York 1967, pp. 439-44.
8 2 . ‘1st die Idee der Revolution eine Mystifikation?’ in Kursbuch 9
(Frankfurt-am-Main 1967), pp. 1-6 (translated as ‘The Question of
Revolution’ in N ew Left Review, 45, London 1967, pp. 3-7).
8 3 . ‘Re-examination of the Concept of Revolution’, in Diogene 64 (winter
1968), pp. 17-27; also in M arx and Contemporary Scientific Thought, The
Hague 1969; and N ew Left Review, 56 (London 1969), pp. 27-34.
84. ‘Liberation from the Affluent Society’, in David Cooper, ed., The
228

Dialectics of Liberation, London 1968, pp. 175-92.

8 5 . ‘Friede als U topie’, in Neues Forum, (Vienna, November-December
1968) , vol. X V , no. 179-180, pp. 705-7.
8 6 . ‘The Realm of Freedom and the Realm of Necessity’, in Praxis,
International Edition (Zagreb 1969), nos. 1/2, pp. 20-5; followed by
discussion,‘Revolutionary Subject and Self-Government’, pp. 326-9.
8 7 . ‘On the New Left’. Talk at the Twentieth Anniversary Programme of
The Guardian, New York, 4 December 1968, published in Massimo
Teodori, cd., The N ew Left: A Documentary Study, New York 1969, pp.
468-73.
88. ‘The Relevance of R eality’, Presidential Address at the annual
meeting of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical
Association, published in Proceedings and Addresses o f the APA (College
Park, Md., 1969), pp. 39-50.
8 9 . ‘La liberte et les imperatifs de I’histoire’, in La liberie et Tordre social,
Rencontres Internationales de Geneve, Neuchatel 1969, pp. 129-43,
English (original) in Studies in Critical Philosophy, pp. 211-23.
9 0 . ‘Nicht einfach zerstoren’, in Neues Forum (Vienna, August-Septcmber
1969) , vol. X V I, no. 188/189, pp. 485-8.
9 1 . ‘Student Protest is Non-violent Next to the Society Itself, in N ew York
Times Magazine, 4 May 1969, p. 137.
92. ‘Only a Free Arab World Can Co-exist with a Free Israel’, (Introduc­
tion to the Hebrew edition of One-Dimensional Man and Essay on
Liberation), published in Israel Horizons (June-July 1970), p. 17.
93. ‘Art as Form of R eality’, Guggenheim Lecture, 1969, published in On
the Future of Art. Essays by Arnold Toynbee and Others, New York 1970, pp.
123-34; also in N ew Left Review, 74, (London, July-A ugust 1972), pp.
51-8.
94. ‘Humanismus - gibt’s den noch?’ in Neues Forum, (Vienna, April 1970),
vol. X V II, no. 196, pp. 349-53.
9 5 . ‘Marxism and the New Humanity: An Unfinished Revolution’, in
John C. Raines and Thomas Dean, eds., Marxism and Radical Religion:
Essays Toward a Revolutionary Humanism, Philadelphia 1970, pp. 3-10.
9 6 . ‘Dear Angela’, letter to Angela Davis, published in Ramparts, 9,
(Berkeley, February 1971), p. 22.
9 7 . ‘Charles Reich as Revolutionary Ostrich’, in Philip Nobile, ed., The
Con III Controversy, New York 1971, pp. 15-7.
9 8 . ‘The Movement in a New Era of Repression: An Assessment’, speech
delivered at the University of California at Berkeley, 3 February 1971,
published in the Berkeley Journal of Sociology (Berkeley 1971/72), vol.
X V I, pp. 1-14.
99. [Letters to Chicago Surrealists], October 1972, untitled and unpub­
lished, among private papers of Herbert Marcuse.
100. ‘When Law and Morality Stand in the W ay’, Society, (New Brunswick,
September-October 1973), vol. 10, no. 6, pp. 23-4.
101. ‘Some General Remarks on Lucien Goldmann’, in Lucien Goldmann et la
sociologie de la lilleralure, Brussels 1973-74, pp. 51-2.
 Bibliography o f the Writings o f Herbert Marcuse 229

102. ‘Marxism and Feminism’, lecture delivered at Stanford University, 7

March 1974, published in Women’s Studies (Old Wcstbury 1974), pp.
279-88; also in North Star (1-15 April 1974), vol. 4, no. 15, pp. 34-41;
reprinted as ‘Socialist Feminism: The Hard Core of the Dream’, in
Eccentric (Eugene, November 1974), pp. 7-47.
103. ‘Theoric und Praxis’, lecture delivered in Frankfurt, 28 June 1974,
published i n Zeit-Messungen, pp. 21-36,
104. ‘Failure of the New Left?’ lecture, University of California at Irvine,
April 1975, first published in German (‘Scheitern dcr Neucn Linkcn?’)
in Zeit-Messungen, pp. 37-48 (translated in New German Critique, 18,
Milwaukee, fall 1979, pp. 3-11).
105. ‘U n nouvel ordre’, in Le Monde Diplomatique, juillet 1976, no. 268.
106. ‘Enttauschung’, in Gunther Neske, ed., Erinnerung an Martin Heidegger,
Pfiillingen 1977, p. 162-3.
107. ‘Mord darf keine Waffen der Politik sein’, in Die Zeit, 39 (Hamburg,
23 September 1977), pp. 41-2; (translated in New German Critique, 12,
Milwaukee, fall 1977, pp. 7-8).
108. ‘Protosozialismus und Spatkapitalismus. Versuch einer revolutions-
theoretischen Synthese von Bahros Ansatz’, in Zeitschrift fur Sozialdis *

kussion 19 (1978), pp. 5-27; (‘Protosocialism and Late Capitalism:

Toward a Theoretical Synthesis Based on Bahro’s Analysis’) in U lf
Wolter, ed., Rudolf Bahro. Critical Responses, White Plains 1980, pp.
25-48.
109. ‘The Reification of the Proletariat’, in Canadian Journal of Political and
Social Theory (Winnipeg 1979), vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 20-3.

Selected Interviews and Discussions

‘Role of Conflict in Human Evolution: Discussion’, in Conflict in Society,

Anthony de Renck and Julie Knight, eds., London 1966, pp. 36-59;
participants: Marcuse, Kenneth E. Boulding, Karl W. Deutsch, Anatol
Rapoport, et al.
‘Professoren als Staat-Rcgenten? Spiegcl-Gesprach mit dem Philosophen
Herbert Marcuse’, in Der Spiegel (Hamburg, 21 August 1967), pp. 112-8.
‘Herbert Marcuse und die prophetische Tradition’, interview with Peter
Merseberger, 23 October 1967, published in Hans Eckehard Bahr, ed.,
Weltfrieden und Revolution, Hamburg 1968, pp. 291-307.
‘Le philosophe Herbert Marcuse: “ maitre a penscr” des etudiants en
colere’, interview with Pierre Viansson-Ponte, published in Le Monde, 11
mai 1968, pp. 1, 111.
‘Les Etudiants se revoltent contre un mode de vie’, interview with Michel
Bosquet, published in Le nouvel Observateur, 20 mai 1968.
‘Varieties of H um anism ’, interview with Harvey Wheeler, published in The
Center Magazine, vol. 1, no. 5 (Santa Barbara, July 1968), pp. 13-5.
‘L ’Express va plus loin avec Herbert Marcuse’, interview published in
L Express, 23 septembre 1968, pp. 54-62.
230

4 “The father of the student rebellion’? ’ Interview with Robert McKenzie

on B bc, published in The Listener, 17 October 1968, pp. 498-9.
‘Marcuse Defines His New Left Line’, interview published in the N ew York
Times Magazine, 27 October 1968, pp. 29, 109.
‘Marcuse: Turning Point in the Struggle’, interview with Robert Allen,
published in The Guardian, New York, 9, 16, and 23 November 1968.
‘Revolution 1969’, interview with Heinrich von Nussbaum, published in
Neues Forum, (Vienna, January 1969), vol. X V I, no. 181, pp. 26-9.
‘Revolution aus Ekel: Spiegel-Gesprach mit dcm Philosophen Herbert
Marcuse’, published in Der Spiegel, 31 (Hamburg, 28Juli 1969), pp. 103-6.
‘USA: Organisationsfrage und revolutionares Subject’, interview with
Hans Magnus Enzensberger, first published in Kursbuch, 22 (West Berlin
1970), pp. 45-60; reprinted in Zeit-Messungen, pp. 51-69.
‘A Conversation with Herbert Marcuse’, interview with Sam Keen and
John Raser, published in Psychology Today, 4, 9 (Del Mar, February 1971),
pp. 35-40, 60-66.
‘Remplacer le “travail aliene” par la creation: Un entretien avec Herbert
Marcuse’, interview with Pierre Dommergues and Jean-M ichel Palmier,
published in Le Monde, 10 mai 1974, pp. 22-3.
‘Heidegger’s Politics’, interview with Frederick Olafson in San Diego, 4
May 1974, published in the Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal (New York,
winter 1977), vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 28-40.
‘1st cine Welt ohne Angst moglich? Aus einem Streitgesprach zwischen
(CDU-General-Sekretar Kurt H.] Bredcnkopf, Marcuse, und [Psychoanaly-
tiker Alexander] Mitscherlich’, in Diisseldorf, published in Der Spiegel 37
(Hamburg, 6 September 1976), p. 199.
Gesprache mit Herbert Marcuse, Frankfurt-am-Main 1978; discussions with
Jurgen Habermas, Silvia Bovenschen, et a i , held between 1975 and 1977.
‘Un pyromane a la retraitc’, discussion with Jean Marabini, published in
Le Monde, 19novembrc 1978.
‘Marcuse and the Frankfurt School’, in Brian Magee, Men of Ideas: Some
Creators of Contemporary Philosophy, London 1978, pp. 60-73.

N ote : Several extremely useful compilations of secondary works exist. See

expecially the extensive bibliography in Morton Schoolman, The Imaginary
Witness: The Critical Theory of Herbert Marcuse, New York 1980; Francois H.
LaPointe, ‘Bibliographic Essay’,Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology
(Manchester), 4, 1973, pp. 191-4; and Francois and Claire LaPointe,
‘Herbert Marcuse and His Critics’, International Studies in Philosophy
(Binghamton), 7, 1975, pp. 183-96.
 I ndex

Adler, Max, 74-5 Cohn-Bcndit, Daniel, 187

Adorno, Theodor, 84,91, 102, 100-7, Contributions to a Phenomenology of Historical
114, 147, 160, 166, 193, 203 Materialism (Marcuse), 64, 71-3
Aesthetics (Hegel), 48-9
Almond, Gabriel, 113 Davis, Angela, 187
Amcndola, Giorgio, 187 Death in Venice (Mann), 50-1
American Communist Party, 187 De Beauvoir, Simone, 127
American Legion, 162 Der Deutsche Kiinstlerroman (Marcuse),
Aquinas, Thomas, 90 40-52, 54, 85
Aragon, Louis, 123-5, 204 Dcssoir, Max, 46
Aristotle, 65 Dialectic of Enlightenment (Adorno,
Art and Politics in the Totalitarian Era Horkheimer), 160
(Marcuse), 120-3 Doblin, Alfred, 55
Aure/ien (Aragon), 123-5 Donovan, William J., 111-2, 114, 118-9
Austria, 117, 133 Dreieck, 54-6, 128
Dulles, Allen, 118
Bahro, Rudolf, 217, 219 Dutschkc, Rudi, 186, 207
Baudelaire, Charles, 122
Bavarian Socialist Republic, 30, 179 Ebert, Friedrich, 56
Baxter, James Phinney, 112 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 101 (Marx), 76-9, 104, 196
Being and Time (Heidegger), 57, 61, Eddy, William, 131
67-72 EichendorfT, Joseph, Freiherr von, 45
Benjamin, Walter, 32, 37, 102, 183 Eisner, Kurt, 30-1, 179
Bernstein, Eduard, 24, 27, 62 Eluard, Paul, 125, 204
Bloch, Ernst, 187 Engels, Friedrich, 202
Bohm, Franz, 91 England, 210
Borkin, Joseph, 145 Erhardt Brigade, 33
Brecht, Bertolt, 54, 106 Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical
Brentano, Clemens, 45 Inquiry into Freud (Marcuse), 145-57,
Breton, Andre, 188, 204 162, 180, 192, 197, 200-1
Britain, 133 Essay on Liberation (Marcuse), 184-6, 194,
Brown, Norman O., 155, 180-1 197
L’Etre et te Meant (Sartre), 126
COI (Coordinator of Information),
111-2, 118-20 FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation),
Camus, Albert, 127-8 119,176
Catholic Centre Party, 32, 58, 81 Feuchtwangcr, Leon, 106
Cezanne, Paul, 220 Foster, Harry L., 174
Fourier, Charles, 190 Heinse, Wilhelm, 44
Fraenkel, S. Marlin, 56 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 44, 155
France, 24, 29, 124, 133, 186,213 Hindenburg, Paul von, 24, 56
Frankfurt Institute for Social Research History and Class Consciousness (Lukacs),
(later International Institute for S<»cial 33,62-3
Research), 33, 84, 86-9, 91-5, 97, 99, Hitler, Adolf, 53, 86-7, 90, 114, 117, 130,
102, 106-7, 112-5, 118, 127, 143, 207
145-6, 152, 197,209 Hoffman, Ernest Theodor Amadeus, 45
Freud, Sigmund, 144-9, 151-2, 154-5, Hoi born, Hajo, 117
158 Hoover, J. Edgar, 119
Freyer, Hans, 91 Horkheimer, Max, 16, 37, 39, 86-9, 92,
Fromm, Erich, 91,94, 146, 148-9 94-7, 106-7, 114, 143, 145-7, 160,
166,205
George, Stefan, 22, 40 Horney, Karen, 145
German Communist Party (KPD), Hughes, H. Stuart, 118, 134
31-2, 54,56, 58, 79 Husserl, Edmund, 39-40, 61, 65-6, 85,
German Democratic Party, 17,32 166, 170
German Democratic Republic (DDR),
217 Ideas (Husserl), 39
German Progressive Party, 17 Ideology and Utopia (Mannheim), 75
German Social-Democratic Party Independent Social Democratic Party
(SPD), 17, 24, 26-8, 30-2, 54, 58, 79 (USPD), 27,30
German Youth Movement Israel, 207-8
(Wandervogel), 19-21, 100 Italy, 133
Germany, 16, 18-9, 21, 23-4, 28-9, 31,
Jacobsohn, Siegfried, 55
45, 52, 59-60, 79-80, 85-91,96, 100,
Jameson, F'rcdric, 193
102, 105-6, 113-8, 131, 133, 144, 177,
Jaspers, Karl, 87, 210
207, 210, 213
John Birch Society, 169
Geyser, Josef, 39
Johnson, Lyndon B., 181
Gide, Andre, 22
Jung, Carl, 148
Goebbels, Josef, 86, 114
Goethe, Wolfgang, 44-5, 50, 54, 78 Kant, Immanuel, 155, 199
Goldmann, Lucien, 164 Kapp, Wolfgang, 33
Grillparzer, Franz, 20 Kartellvcrband (Catholic student
Grimmclshauscn, Hans Jacob movement), 81
ChristofTel von, 42 Kautsky, Karl, 24, 27, 62
Gutkclch, Waller, 54 Keller, Gottfried, 64
Gutzkow, Karl, 45 Kierkegaard, Sfiren, 80, 128
Kirchhcimer, Otto, 91, 113, 117, 131,
Haase, Hugo, 27 135
Habermas, Jurgen, 213 Kisch, Egon Ervvin,55
Hall, Gus, 187 Krclansky, Gertrud, 15, 17
Hamann, J. G., 44 Krieck, Ernst, 91
Hasenclavcr, Walter, 32 Ku Klux Klan, 176
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 39, 43,
46-50, 62, 67, 72, 76, 81-5, 94-6, 99, Landauer, Gustav, 31
102,127-9,147, 149-50, 154-5, 158, l^andshut, Siegfried, 66, 76
183,218 Langer, William J., 112, 135
Hegel's Ontology and the Foundations of a Lania, Leo, 55
Theory of Hisloricalily (Marcuse), 81-4 Laube, Heinrich, 45
Heidegger, Marlin, 57-8, 61-3, 65-73, League of Nat ions, 210
75, 77,81,83-5,97, 127-30, 149, 153, Ixdcbour, Georg, 27
197, 199, 218 Le, Nguyen Than, 186
 Index 2!W

Lefebvre, Henri, 162 October Revolution, 159

Lcfevre, Wolfgang, 207 One-Dimensional Man (Marcuse), 162,
Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 53, 50, 74 165-8, 171-2, 177, 180, 195, 199,200
Liebknccht, Karl, 24, 27, 30-2
Love's Body ( Brown), 180 Paul VI, Pope, 173
Lowenthal, Leo, 86,91, 107, 175 People’s Party, 58
Ludendorf, General Erich, 24, 29, 33 Perct, Benjamin, 204
Lukacs, Georg, 16, 33, 46-8, 50, 53-4, Phenomenology of Mind ( Hegel), 8 1, 83
62-3,83,192,218 Picasso, Pablo, 125
Liittwitz, Walther Freiherr von, 33 Pinthus, Kurt, 55
Luxemburg, Rosa, 24, 27, 30-2 Piscator, Erwin, 54-5
Pollock, Friedrich, 86, 91, 93, 106-7, 195
MacLeish, Archibald, 112 Progressive Labor Party (PLP), 162, 187
Mann, Heinrich, 22, 106
Mann, Thomas, 22, 44, 50, 106, 213
Mannheim, Karl, 75, 210 Reagan, Ronald, 174
MaoTse-Tung, 186 Reason and Revolution; Hegel and the Rise of
Marabini, Jean, 213 Social Theory (Marcuse), 102-3, 106,
Marcuse, Carl, 15-18, 20. 33, 37-8, 58, 147
105 Red Brigades, 213
Marcuse, Erich, 38, 56, 59, 105-6 Reich, Wilhelm, 148
Marcuse, Inge, 145, 176, 210 Reichenbach, Hans, 60
Marcuse, Sophie, 134, 209 Reinhardt, Max, 54
Marx, Karl, 28, 37, 48, 53, 56, 59, 61-3, Remarque, Erich Maria, 23
70-4, 76-7, 79, 81, 83-4, 94, 96, 99, Riehl, Alois, 39
102-4, 128, 146, 148, 150, 155, 168, Riczlcr, Kurt, 85-6
177-9, 185-6, 188, 194, 196-9,202, Robinson, Gcroid T., 135
217-20 Rockefeller, Nelson, 119
Marxism and Feminism (Marcuse), 211-2 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 111,118-9
Mayer, J. P., 76 Rothackcr, Erich, 91
McCarthy, Joseph, 134 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 44
McCormack, Alfred, 131 Russia, 24, 28, 79, 132-3, 143, 158-60
McGill, William, 175 Rust, Bernhard, 59
Mexico, 119
Molicrc, Jean Baptiste Poquelin, 213 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 126-9, 149, 166
Moore Jr., Barrington, 117, 145 Schcler, Max, 65
Moritz, Karl Philipp, 44 Schiller, Friedrich, 20, 43, 56, 155-6,
Morris, Bernard, 132 190, 199, 212
Mozart, Wolfgang, 101 Schlegel, Friedrich, 20, 45
Miihsam, Erich, 31 Schmitt, Carl, 63, 91
Mundt, Theodor, 45 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 154
Schorske, Carl E., 117, 134
Nabokov, Vladimir, 59 Schrade, Senator Jack, 174-5
National-Sozialistislischer Deutscher Science of Logic (Hegel), 81,83, 102
Studentcnbund, 81 SDS (Students for a Democratic
Nazism, 84-8, 90-1, 98, 113, 118, 130, Society), 176, 186-7
177 Second International, 27, 62
Nccp, Victor, 220 Seidemann, Alfred, 57, 61, 66
Neumann, Franz, 89, 91, 106-7, 113, Shakespeare, William, 20
116-8, 131, 134, 145,210 Shcrover-Marcuse, Erica, 211
Neumann, Michael, 175-6 Sherwood, Robert, 112
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 42, 48, 154-5, 217 Socrates, 80
Novalis, Friedrich Leopold, 44-5 Soupault, Philippe, 204
Soviet Marxism: A Critical Analysis United States Office of Strategic
(Marcuse), 158-61 Services (OSS), 112-20, 131, 135,
Spain, % 145,210
Spartacus League, 27, 30 United States Office of War
Spengler, Oswald, 48 Information (OWI), 112-3
Stalin, Josef, 53-4, 96, 159, 203
Strcsemann, Gustav, 58 Vienna Circle, 60
Stull, John, 174-5 Vietnam, 176, 179, 181-2
Stumpf, Carl, 33 Vorlandcr, Karl, 74-5
Switzerland, 87, 118
Wandervogel (German Youth
Taubes, Jacob, 154 Movement), 19-21, 100
Thaelmann, Ernst, 56 Weber, Max, 32, 48, 98-9, 170. 219
Theory of the AWZ(Lukacs), 46-7, 50 Weigert, Edith, 145
Third International, 53 Wertheimer, Max, 65
Ticck, Ludwig, 45 Wilhelm II, Kaiser, 24
Toller, Ernst, 31,55 Wilkop, Philipp, 40
Treitschke, Heinrich von, 15, 18 World War I, 21-30, 60, 177, 204
Troeltsch, Ernst, 33
Tromcl, J. G., 56 Zeilschnft fur Aesthetik und A/lgerneirte
Truman, Harry S., 120, 131, 134 Kunstivissenschaft (Dessoir), 46
Tryon, Robert C., 113 Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung (Frankfu
Turel, Adrian, 32 Institute), 89, 91-3, 97, 146
Zhukov, Yuri, 187
United States, 111, 117, 119-20, 159, Zuckmayer, Carl, 55
181 Zwcig, Stefan, 19
 Barry Katz

HERBERT MARCUSE
& the A rt o f Liberation
' Philosophical speculation seldom attracts banner
headlines, let alone threats of death. Yet such was the
fate that overtook Herbert Marcuse in the late 1960s,
when he was catapulted into international controversy
as a prophet of the revolutionary student movement.
Barry Katz shows that this startling change of fortune
was consistent with the whole pattern of the
philosopher’s life and work.

Katz follows Marcuse from his comfortable childhood

in Berlin’s Jewish bourgeoisie, through war, revolution,
depression and Nazism, to the USA. He describes the
young soldier’s role in the German revolution;
documents the exiled scholar’s wartime activities in US
intelligence; and evokes the very different political
struggles that preoccupied the philosopher in the
1960s. Simultaneously, Katz gives a compelling
interpretation of Marcuse’s intellectual development,
including his relationships with Benjamin and Lukacs,
Husserl and Heidegger, and the Frankfurt School.
Marcuse’s writings are carefully analysed — not only
the famous works such as Eros and Civilization and
One-Dimensional Man, but also the early studies of the
‘artist-novel’ and of Hegel, and a crucial, unpublished
essay on the poetry of the French Resistance.

P h o t o g r a p h UPI

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