Marcuse, Herbert

(1898-1979)

A German philosopher who was a member of the Frankfurt School in exile in the United States. Unlike others, he remained in America after the end of the war, and maintained a commitment to radical politics until the end of his life. He had a strong influence on the ideas of the student left in the 1960s.

His version of critical theory grew out of the mainstream of European philosophy: the work of Hegel , phenomenology and existentialism , and the meeting of these with some aspects of Marxism . His writings covered politics and aesthetics, as well as philosophical and cultural criticism, and were especially concerned with what he regarded as the totalitarian tendencies of modern societies. Capitalism had, as he saw it, transcended the economic condition that Marx analysed and the working-class had failed to develop as a revolutionary force. He hoped that those groups excluded from the system (for example Blacks, and for a limited period of their lives students), might provide a sense of opposition. His most important books were Reason and Revolution (1941), a presentation of a Hegelian, critical or ‘negative’ Marxism, and a vigorous critique of positivist philosophy; One Dimensional Man (1964), concerned with the ways in which modern capitalism restricts the possibility of opposition; and Eros and Civilization (1955), which appropriates some of the more metaphysical ideas of Freud , particularly his notions of the life and death instincts, into a critique of the way in which modern culture transforms and alienates desire. The best-though highly sceptical-examination of his thought is still Alasdair MacIntyre's Marcuse (1970).