"Marcuse, a naturalized citizen since 1940, joined the U.S. Office
of
War Information as a senior analyst in the Bureau of
Intelligence
in December 1942 and prepared a report on ways
that the mass
media of the Allied countries could present images of
German
fascism. In March 1943 Marcuse transferred to the
Office of Strategic
Services (OSS), working until the end of
the war in the Research
and Analysis division of the Central European Branch.
He and
his colleagues wrote reports attempting to identify Nazi
and
anti-Nazi groups and individuals in Germany and drafted a
civil
affairs handbook that dealt with denazification. In
September
1945, after the dissolution of the OSS, he moved to the
State
Department and was head of the Central European bureau
until
1951, when he left government service following the death of
his wife."
How many non-Jews would end up in sensitive, high-ranking positions like
those within a few years of arriving in a foreign country?
Marcuse, Herbert (19 July 1898-29 July 1979), author, professor,
and
political activist, was born in Berlin, Germany, the son
of Carl Marcuse, a
prosperous Jewish merchant, and Gertrud Kreslawsky,
the daughter of a wealthy
German factory owner. Marcuse studied
at the Mommsen Gymnasium in Berlin
before World War I and served
with the German army in the war. Transferred to
Berlin early
in 1918, he observed and sympathized with the German
revolution
that drove Kaiser Wilhelm II out of Germany and established
a
Social Democratic government.
After demobilization, Marcuse went
to Freiburg to pursue his
studies and received a Ph.D. in literature in 1922
for a dissertation
on the German artist-novel ("Der deutsche Kunstlerroman").
In
1923 he married Sophie Wertheim, with whom he was to have one
child,
and for a time he worked in Berlin as a bookseller. But
by 1928 he was back
in Freiburg, enrolled as a student of Martin
Heidegger, whose influence in
German philosophical circles was on the rise.
Marcuse soon began
drawing together strands from different lines
of thought, resulting in a type
of Marxism colored by existential
and phenomenological themes, which
anticipated the work of the
main exponents of existentialism and
phenomenology of the post-World
War II era. According to Marcuse, Marxist
dogma regarding economics
and the political sphere had led to a theory-laden
paralysis
that could only be alleviated by relating Marxism to
contemporary
cultural and social phenomena and to the existential needs
of
individuals. While socialist principles were meant to free society
from
the grip of capitalist exploitation, they also ought--in
Marcuse's view--to
liberate individuals from the narrow conventions
of bourgeois life.
When Marcuse reviewed an edition of Karl Marx's previously
unpublished
"1844 Manuscripts" in 1932, he was one of the first to
stress
the importance of Marx's early philosophical perspectives on
labor,
human nature, and alienation, which were in line with
Marcuse's own thinking
at the time. For his Habilitationsschrift
(qualifying publication for
university employment), Marcuse turned
to Hegel, in whom there was increasing
interest among European
philosophers, and wrote a study of the Hegelian
categories of
life and history, Hegels Ontologie und die Grundlegung
einer
Theorie der Geschichtlichkeit (1932; published in English as
Hegel's
Ontology and the Theory of Historicity).
In 1933, the year that Adolf
Hitler came to power in Germany,
the Institut fur Sozialforschung (Institute
for Social Research)
in Frankfurt-am-Main offered Marcuse an appointment. The
institute's
aim was to develop a model of "critical theory" to counter
more
descriptive, empirical "traditional theory." A haven for
interdisciplinary
studies, the institute was well suited to Marcuse's outlook
and
interests, and he felt at home there. Several of his
colleagues,
including Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Leo Lowenthal,
and
Franz Neumann, were to remain lifelong friends of his.
Of Jewish
birth and openly leftist in his politics, Marcuse
was compelled to flee
Nazism; his move to the United States in
1934 proved to be permanent. To his
good fortune, however, Columbia
University was able to house the Institute
for Social Research,
thus allowing Marcuse and other emigres to sustain their
intellectual
projects begun in Europe. With Reason and Revolution
(1941),
the first significant treatise of his to appear in English,
Marcuse
carried forward his study of Hegel and Marx, demonstrating
affinities
in their thinking, and challenged the notion that Hegel's
philosophy
of state provided a rationale for German fascism, seeing it
instead
as part of a liberal constitutional tradition.
Marcuse, a
naturalized citizen since 1940, joined the U.S. Office
of War Information as
a senior analyst in the Bureau of Intelligence
in December 1942 and prepared
a report on ways that the mass
media of the Allied countries could present
images of German
fascism. In March 1943 Marcuse transferred to the Office of
Strategic
Services (OSS), working until the end of the war in the
Research
and Analysis division of the Central European Branch. He and
his
colleagues wrote reports attempting to identify Nazi and
anti-Nazi groups and
individuals in Germany and drafted a civil
affairs handbook that dealt with
denazification. In September
1945, after the dissolution of the OSS, he moved
to the State
Department and was head of the Central European bureau
until
1951, when he left government service following the death of his wife.
Marcuse received a Rockefeller Foundation grant to study
Soviet
Marxism, lecturing on the topic at Columbia in 1952-1953 and
at
Harvard in 1954-1955. Meanwhile, he undertook an intensive
study of Sigmund
Freud's writings, which lead him to propose
a philosophical nexus where
Marxist and Freudian theories seemed
to intersect logically. Using Freud's
categories to provide a
critique of bourgeois society, Marcuse attempted to
adumbrate
in Eros and Civilization (1955) a society in which
repressive
tendencies are held in check and the possibilities for
self-fulfillment
are enhanced. Critics generally thought well of the book,
and
it was to become an intellectual touchstone of sorts in the
latter
half of the 1960s, when the revolt against establishment
culture
was animated by utopian visions of individual liberation.
In
1955 Marcuse married Inge Werner, the widow of his friend
Franz Neumann, who
had died in an automobile crash the year before;
this second marriage did not
result in children. Marcuse's appointment
to a faculty position at Brandeis
University in 1958 coincided
with the publication of his Soviet Marxism,
which was notable
for being a leftist's sharply critical examination of the
USSR.
Although he did not consider the Soviet Union incapable of
reform,
he saw much in the country's bureaucracy and culture that was
at
odds with his conception of Marxist theory. His view of how
the USSR might
evolve was borne out by the introduction of structural
and organizational
changes (perestroika) that caused Soviet Marxism
to wither thirty years
later.
In One-Dimensional Man (1964), perhaps his most important
work,
Marcuse turned his attention to the "ideology of advanced
industrial
society," in both its capitalist and socialist
manifestations.
As new forms of social control were being developed, so
Marcuse
argued, a "society without opposition" was emerging. Against
the
conformism engendered by mass media, ceaseless commercialization,
and the
constantly stimulated addiction to consumer goods of
little intrinsic value,
Marcuse counterpoised critical and dialectical
thinking that could suggest a
freer and happier form of culture
and society. In One-Dimensional Man he also
analyzed the integration
of the industrial working class into capitalist
society and new
forms of capitalist stabilization, thus questioning the
Marxist
postulates for the revolutionary proletariat and the
inevitability
of capitalist crisis. Marcuse perceived in the struggles of
the
U.S. civil rights movement an exemplary form of oppositional
thought
and struggle. In response to all modes of repression
and domination, he
advocated a "great refusal." While U.S. involvement
in the Vietnam War during
the mid-1960s was radicalizing many
younger people and abetting the growth of
the counterculture,
One-Dimensional Man gave expression to widespread
feelings of
social alienation and cultural discontent as well as to
desires
for a more liberated society and culture.
Having provoked
fierce intellectual controversy over his views,
Marcuse was forced to depart
from Brandeis in 1965. He spent
the remainder of his teaching career on the
faculty of the University
of California at San Diego. In a series of
influential books
and articles, including "Repressive Tolerance" (1965), An
Essay
on Liberation (1969), Five Lectures: Psychoanalysis, Politics,
and
Utopia (1970), and Counterrevolution and Revolt (1972), Marcuse
contributed
to the ideological underpinnings of New Left policies
and expanded his
critique of capitalist societies. A charismatic
teacher, he nurtured students
who rose in the academic world
and further disseminated his ideas. During
this time Marcuse
became an international icon--in the words of Time
magazine,
the 'guru of the New Left'--although the notoriety that he
gained
was ironic in light of his scathing assessment of the mass media
as
a corrosive agent of uncritical thought.
Following the decline of the
New Left in the mid-1970s, Marcuse
concerned himself to a large extent with
questions of aesthetics.
In The Aesthetic Dimension (1979), the last of his
books, he
argued for an "authentic art" that has the power to
unshackle
thought and feeling. He criticized, however, both Marxist
aesthetics
that celebrated "proletarian culture" and the "anti-art"
movement
of the time, which renounced the exigencies of aesthetic
form.
Within bourgeois art, Marcuse saw an admirable critical
tradition
that used aesthetic form to expose what was false or
destructive
in society and to envision a less repressed and repressive
existence.
He believed that the "aesthetic dimension" was a crucial
component
of an emancipated life.
Marcuse's second wife died in
1974, and two years later he married
Erica Sherover. She was with him on his
last trip to Germany
when he died in Starnberg.
Primarily a
philosopher, rather than an analyst of empirical
data, Marcuse possessed a
highly developed dialectical imagination
that exemplified the kind of
critical thinking espoused at the
Institute for Social Research. Like others
in the Frankfurt school
of cultural criticism, such as Adorno and Horkheimer,
he tended
to conceptualize the world from the perspective of the
social
sciences; indeed, hostile critics denounced Marcuse's writing
style
as a morass of dense, obscure sociologese. Nonetheless,
he was often
prescient in his ruminations on social and cultural
trends, and he provided a
philosophical language for identifying
the dynamics of both repression and
emancipation. More than any
other thinker in the tradition of critical
theory, Marcuse had
a direct impact on American culture. To the youth-
oriented New
Left during the 1960s, he was the exceptional elder whose
views
could be taken seriously; to political and social conservatives,
he
was anathema. Although he vanished from the popular American
scene, Marcuse
left an intellectual legacy of lasting import,
having articulated the
cultural pathologies of a "society without
opposition."
Bibliography
The Stadtsbibliothek in Frankfurt, Germany, holds
Marcuse's
papers. For analysis of his thought and influence, see Paul
A.
Robinson, The Freudian Left: Wilhelm Reich, Geza Roheim,
Herbert
Marcuse (1969; repr. 1990); Paul Breines, ed., Critical
Interpretations:
New Left Perspectives on Herbert Marcuse (1970); Vincent
Geoghegan,
Reason and Eros: The Social Theory of Herbert Marcuse
(1981);
Barry Katz, Herbert Marcuse and the Art of Liberation: An
Intellectual
Biography (1982); Douglas Kellner, Herbert Marcuse and the
Crisis
of Marxism (1984); and John Bokina and Timothy J. Lukes,
eds.,
Marcuse: From the New Left to the Next Left (1994). The New
York
Times of 31 July 1979 has an obituary.
Douglas
Kellner
Citation:
Douglas Kellner. "Marcuse, Herbert";
http://www.anb.org/articles/20/20-01202.html;
American National Biography Online Feb. 2000.
Access Date:
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