Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse was a prominent philosopher known as the "Father of the New Left" during the 1960s. Born in Berlin to a notable family, he pursued an education in philosophy and sociology, developing his thought under the influences of Marxist and psychoanalytic theories. Marcuse's academic career began in Germany but took a significant turn when he fled to the United States in the 1930s to escape the rise of the Nazis. He became a U.S. citizen in 1940 and contributed to intelligence efforts during World War II before returning to academia, with notable positions at Columbia University and Brandeis University.
Marcuse's influential works, including "Eros and Civilization" and "One-Dimensional Man," critique modern society and advocate for a non-repressive culture that prioritizes instinctual freedom over technological rationality. He argued that the forces of rebellion in American culture were found not in traditional working-class movements but among students and intellectuals, especially during the tumultuous 1960s. Though his ideas have often been considered marginal within mainstream American philosophy, they provided a voice for a generation seeking change in a time of national crisis. Marcuse's legacy continues to spark discussions about liberation, culture, and societal transformation.
Subject Terms
Herbert Marcuse
- Herbert Marcuse
- Born: July 19, 1898
- Died: July 29, 1979
Philosopher popularly known as the “Father of the New Left” in the 1960s, was born in Berlin, the son of Carl Marcuse and Gertrud (Kreslawsky) Marcuse, whose family had been prominent in that city since the eighteenth century. Marcuse attended the Augusta Gymnasium in Berlin, the University of Berlin, and the University of Freiburg. As a student he was active in the Social Democratic party, but he became disillusioned by the murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, German Communist party leaders, shortly after World War I. Marcuse received a Ph.D. from Freiburg in 1922 and remained at the university for a decade, doing postgraduate research. The failure of democracy in Germany, the developing discipline of sociology, and the theories of the Marxist psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, had a formative influence on his thought.
In 1932 Marcuse’s first book on Hegel’s theory of history was published in Germany. Together with Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer, he founded the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research; when the Nazis closed the Institute in 1933 Marcuse fled to Switzerland, where he lived for a year, working at the Institut de Recherches Sociales.
The following year Marcuse arrived in the United States, engaged to lecture at Columbia University. Becoming an American citizen in 1940, he offered his services to the United States intelligence services with the outbreak of World War II. Along with his friend Franz Neumann he worked for the Office of Strategic Services; when the intelligence community shifted its attention to the Soviet Union, he became chief of the Office of Intelligence Research’s Central European Section. Remaining in that post for four years, he supplied information to the State Department and other government agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency.
Returning to the academic world in 1951, Marcuse joined the faculty of the Russian Institute at Columbia University, lecturing there and at Harvard. The majority of his academic career, however, was devoted to teaching philosophy and politics at Brandeis University, where he held a chair from 1954 to 1965. On reaching retirement age, he moved to California and continued teaching at the University of California at San Diego. A tall, white-haired man who drove an old Peugeot and enjoyed smoking cigars, Marcuse was by the mid-1960s a cult figure, the philosopher of the young: their prophet of the “new man”—one who could bend technocracy to his will, giving the “pleasure principle” priority over the “reality principle.”
A neo-Marxist and a neo-Freudian, Marcuse published a number of works, the most important of which were Eros and Civilization (1955) and One-Dimensional Man (1964). The first was a philosophical critique of psychoanalysis that merged Marx and Freud, arguing that a new dialectic stage of civilization had been made possible by the development of an advanced technology that could free humanity from excessive work, thereby releasing instinctual energy to mate with reason and produce a nonrepressive culture. One-Dimensional Man applied Marcuse’s theories to American society; he considered the liberal welfare state to be subtly totalitarian. Marcuse explicitly stated that the purpose of his philosophy was “intellectual subversion”; the rebellious forces in American culture were not the working class, but students, blacks, and intellectuals. In the New Left ideology of the 1960s and the Vietnam War period he saw hope. In turn, the young adopted him as their soothsayer and explainer of dreams.
In the spring of 1979 Marcuse went to West Germany to work with the Max Planck Society. Hospitalized with a heart ailment shortly after his arrival, he had a stroke and died that summer in Starrberg, at the age of eighty-one. He was buried in San Diego. His first wife, Sophie, had died in 1951; they had one son, Peter. In 1955 Marcuse married Inge Werner, the widow of his old friend Franz Neumann; he had two stepsons by this second marriage.
Most American philosophers consider Mar-cuse’s work as marginal to their discipline or as important in a field of philosophy that has, at best, little currency in the United States. It was serendipity that propelled Marcuse to prominence. His theories provided an intellectual rationalization to a generation that needed a voice in a time of national crisis.
Herbert Marcuse’s most important works are Reason and Revolution (1941); Eros and Civilization (1955); One-Dimensional Man (1964); and (with Robert Wolff and Barring-ton Moore), The Critical Spirit (1967). Biographical sources include A. Maclntyre, Herbert Marcuse: An Exposition and a Polemic (1970) and G. A. Steuernagel, Political Philosophy as Therapy: Marcuse Reconsidered (1979). See also D. Kellner, Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism (1984); M. Jay, The Dialectical Imagination (1973); B. Katz, Herbert Marcuse and the Art of Liberation (1982); Current Biography, 1969, and The New York Times, March 10, 1968. and July 31, 1979.