Herbert Marcuse was born in Berlin, German, in 1898. He began university studies in
Berlin but then moved to the University of Freiburg, where he studied under Martin
Heidegger and wrote a dissertation on Hegel's theory of history. Marcuse, who was
Jewish, fled to Switzerland when the Nazis came to power in Germany, and he taught in
Geneva for a brief time. In 1934, he emigrated to the United States where he joined forces,
at Columbia University, with Max Horkheimer and the Institute for Social Research,
which had also emigrated from Frankfurt. During the War, Marcuse worked in the Office
of Intelligence Research, U. S. State Department, and became Acting Head of the Eastern
European section. After the War, and for the next ten years, he taught in the Columbia
Russian Institute and in Harvard University's Russian Research Center. This work resulted
in his book, Soviet Marxism. One should note that the Frankfurt School had led the way in
developing a contemporary, philosophical reading of Marx, called Critical Theory. Marcuse taught at Brandeis University
from 1954 to 1967, and he taught at the new San Diego campus of the University of California from 1967 until his
retirement. Angela Davis was one of his famous (if not infamous) students. He died in 1979.
Marcuse wrote Reason and Revolution, a discussion of Hegel's philosophy of history and politics, Eros and Civilization, a critique of Freud's famous Civilization and Its Discontents, A Critique of Pure Tolerance, and An Essay on Liberation. In 1964, he wrote One-Dimensional Man; and near the end of his life, he wrote The Aesthetic Dimension, a book about the crucial roles of the arts. Marcuse's engagement with Critical Theory, or neo-Marxism, increased throughout his life; and his writings focused increasingly on the manifold modes of repression and oppression evidenced in contemporary political societies.
Marcuse's writings became very popular with the Counter-Cultural Movement of the 60s and early 70s. Eros and Civilization was of special significance since Marcuse argued that Freud's pessimism about the prospects for happiness in civilization were derived from too rigid a notion of sexuality as the driving need for repression. Marcuse argued for a widened experience of sexuality through the embrace of eros, in general, within polymorphous sensuality, fantasy, and the arts. In this he was a leading inspiration to the "Flower Children," the theme of "Make Love, Not War," and a great portion of the Rock music and drug culture of the age. While much of this movement ventured far beyond the bounds of Marcuse's own North-German upbringing, he was obviously pleased by the attention and remained sympathetic to the Movement.
It is undoubtedly shocking to read this book in the late 1990s -- students who were born in the late 1970s to parents who were perhaps only 10-16 when this book was written. There is essentially no continuity of experience between contemporary readers and those for whom this book was written. Like John Dewey's Freedom and Culture, this book was written at a time of war and during a time of considerable self-examination and anxiety among American people. Of the three great wars that Americans fought during the 20th Century, the Vietnam War was by far the most traumatic to American society. Nor did the war stand alone in the decade of the 60s. John Kennedy was shot and killed by assassins in 1962; Martin Luther King was shot and killed in May 1968; and Robert Kennedy was shot and killed while campaigning for office only one month later. Racial tensions, which had been strongly felt throughout the South during the Civil Rights movement, erupted into violence in Los Angeles, in 1965. At the same time, new inventions like the contraceptive pill and Sputnik had created a revolutionary and unsettling context for human life.
The Vietnam War struck America's youth with singular violence since they were the ones being asked [no, told] to go into the jungles of Vietnam to kill and be killed. At the same time, American youth and their parents found themselves more out-of-touch than perhaps any generation before them. Accelerating social changes had produced what was called "the Generation Gap" and young people looked increasingly at their parents' generation as "the Establishment."
While American democrats had easily accepted the fact that the Second World War was a conflict between democracy and totalitarianism, the youth of America could see nothing in Vietnam other than American capitalism protecting its world-interests against communism. It was an economic contest, and young people were being told to die for the good of a profit-taking older generation that was incapable of telling the difference between principles of democracy and freedom and the secured advantages of corporate wealth. Weren't these precisely the same issues that had revealed themselves throughout the decade in the theme of racial and social injustice?
The rising protest of American youth and those older folks who joined them molded itself gradually into what became known as the "Counter Culture" -- an amazing amalgamation of political and social rebellion. Young men burned their draft cards; young women burned their bras. In a way, that said it all. Aesthetic sensuality was precisely what the Establishment was most uncomfortable with. Men embraced long hair and beards and invested in wildly fashioned and colored clothing. Women took the form of earth goddesses. Everyone embraced flowers, little animals, drugs, Volkswagen buses, communal living, and the Beatles. [This is an exaggeration, by the way.]
Marcuse employs concepts that derive from both Marx and Freud in his understanding of American society. The Marxian concepts are fairly standard, taking American society as an extreme expression of capitalism and, consequently, completely stratified in orders of domination. The Freudian concepts are somewhat non-standard, expanded as they had been in his book Eros and Civilization. In that book, Marcuse argued that modern societies had passed beyond simply repressive societies, adding what he called the Performance Principle to the already established Reality Principle. The Performance Principle, then, provided a system of Surplus Repression; and this was a concept that could be combined usefully with the Marxian concept of domination. Surplus Repression, in other words, was useful to capitalism in disciplining ordinary people to the designs of the overarching economic-political system. In a later book, One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse explored two especially insidious ways in which he believed that American capitalism had succeeded in dominating American society.
One of these ways was through the abuse of language. Language, Marcuse thought, was becoming one-dimensional and was contrived to manipulate thinking, indeed, to limit thinking. Questions are posed only in ways that permit specific ways of searching for answers; political choices are constrained to arenas in which no really thoughtful choice is empowered; and standard vocabularies (in the military, for instance) are designed to inhibit any thought about value or morality.
The second means of insidious domination was what Marcuse called "repressive desublimation," again an amalgamation of Freud and Marx. Sublimation, recall, is where instinctual energy gets deflected from its natural expression and appears, instead, in some other form of expression or satisfaction. "Desublimation," then, is a system that permits some degree of natural expression or satisfaction of instinctual energy. Desublimation is obviously so powerful that even a small dose can succeed in capturing us. We will return repetitively to satisfy ourselves even in small ways. As an example, something like Playboy magazine could be allowed to feed men a measure of unusual --- that is, formerly tabooed --- sexual satisfaction, but this would happen only by becoming a regular buying customer. When one turned to look at American society of the 60s, it was clear that sexuality was being desublimated in a variety of ways so long as people were ready to consume the right things. Thus, people were actually being repressed anew to the specific advantages of capitalist producers. Looking at American society, today, little has changed, I would say. We have become progressively more narrow (repressed) in our satisfaction of even recreation! Being convinced that we can buy it in the form of ever-more-expensive mountain clothing or recreational vehicles. Meanwhile, most people who buy mountain clothing and four-wheel-drive vehicles never go to the mountains. We have become implicitly convinced (and victimized), believing that recreation is achieved in the purchase and ownership itself. This after all is what capitalism requires -- a never ending will to consume products.
As the Counter Culture developed, it attempted to establish itself as the antithesis of what it construed as moralistic Capitalist consumerism. Young people embraced "free love" and attempted to live in simplicity, without major consumption. Some experimented with communal living situations; some experimented with agrarian communities. At the point of intersection, however, the point where the Establishment and the Counter Culture necessarily met, dialogue became progressively less friendly. Confrontations turned into protests, and protests turned into demonstrations. The violent reaction to conflict and criticism increasingly turned demonstrations into riots. In the late 1960s, students occupied buildings on campuses around the world. Banks and draft boards were special targets for invasion and occupation. Dow Chemical Company was attacked for their manufacture and distribution of napalm -- jellied gasoline which had a particularly terrifying and inhumane effect on the people of Vietnam. Much of Marcuse's attention in this book is directed to the militant youth with an eye to judging their potential status as a revolutionary force, in Marxian terms. Marx himself thought the revolutionary class would be the proletariat; but the militant youth were more-often-than-not affluent middle-class "intelligensia."
Regardless of what we conclude about the prospects for revolution, especially given the fact that neither revolution nor Counter Culture survived, Marcuse's book still calls attention to some important issues in American democracy. While Vietnam and demonstrations are now far behind us, can we say that we are entirely happy with the condition of democracy in America today? Like Dewey before him, Marcuse presents us with specific concepts that we can use to test the situation.
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