Herbert Marcuse

Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

by Paul Kingsnorth  · 23 Sep 2025  · 388pp  · 110,920 words

in a post-natural world. The Canadian ‘Red Tory’ philosopher George Grant once observed that ‘the directors of General Motors and the followers of Professor [Herbert] Marcuse sail down the same river in different boats.’ These days, they have abandoned their separate vessels and are sailing downstream in a superyacht together, while

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both helped, wittingly or unwittingly, to undermine the foundational assumptions of Western Christianity, thus unmooring the culture from its spiritual roots. Finally, figures such as Herbert Marcuse and Wilhelm Reich provided the justification for the removal of sexual taboos which exploded in the sixties counter-culture and brought us into the pornified

Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy

by Quinn Slobodian  · 4 Apr 2023  · 360pp  · 107,124 words

both the Global North and the Global South. People’s choice to divorce, have children out of wedlock, or loll around on university campuses studying Herbert Marcuse and Karl Marx had strained government budgets.30 There was no such mollycoddling in Hong Kong. What made such discipline possible was first and foremost

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and Balaji Srinivasan, “#3 Network State with Balaji Srinivasan, former CTO of Coinbase and Founder of 1729,” The Deep End, podcast, May 26, 2021.   26.  Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964); and Naomi Klein, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand

American Marxism

by Mark R. Levin  · 12 Jul 2021  · 314pp  · 88,524 words

political organization in favor of strategies of mass protest, direct actions, and civil disobedience.”25 The movement was greatly influenced by a German-born Marxist, Herbert Marcuse, who, expectedly, was a fierce anticapitalist. Also, unsurprisingly, Marcuse taught at several American universities during his career, including Columbia, Harvard, and Brandeis. A prolific writer

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quo, in accordance with Marx’s famous statement: ‘Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.’ ”2 Herbert Marcuse is credited with hatching the Critical Theory ideology from which the racial, gender, and other Critical Theory–based movements were launched in America. As mentioned

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, and their Marxist roots, is undeniable. As should be clear, the Critical Theory movement, born and developed by German Marxists, chief among them the late Herbert Marcuse, is more influential in the Oval Office, the halls of Congress, university and college classrooms, public schools, corporate boardrooms, the media, Big Tech, and the

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Guide to Modern Social and Political Theorists, eds. Noel Parker and Stuart Sun (London: Routledge, 1997), 238. 28 Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press: 1964), 3. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid., 4. 31 Herbert Marcuse, “The Failure of the New Left?” in New German Critique 18 (Fall 1979), https://www.marcuse.org/herbert

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/ (April 8, 2021). 11 Ibid. 12 Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society (New York: Basic Books, 2011), 468. 13 Ibid., 469. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991), 256–57. 17 Faith Karimi, “What critical race theory is

The Idea of Decline in Western History

by Arthur Herman  · 8 Jan 1997  · 717pp  · 196,908 words

The Decline of the West 8. Welcoming Defeat Arnold Toynbee PART THREE THE TRIUMPH OF CULTURAL PESSIMISM 9. The Critical Personality The Frankfurt School and Herbert Marcuse 10. The Modern French Prophets Sartre, Foucault, Fanon 11. The Multiculturalist Impulse 12. Eco-Pessimism The Final Curtain Afterword Notes Bibliography Acknowledgments Index INTRODUCTION Every

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everything that characterizes modern man,” Nietzsche wrote in 1885. In fact, a straight line of descent runs from Nietzsche and his disciples Martin Heidegger and Herbert Marcuse, to the Unabomber and beyond: a line of descent that produced a single view of the modern West, summed up in

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Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man: “A comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilization, a token of technical progress.” For the cultural pessimist, the

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this baneful Jewish influence, including both Communism and Nazism. PART THREE THE TRIUMPH OF CULTURAL PESSIMISM CHAPTER 9 THE CRITICAL PERSONALITY The Frankfurt School and Herbert Marcuse Terror and civilization are inseparable. —M. Horkheimer and T. Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment , 1944 Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were fugitives on the run

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was not whether the modern West was doomed but why. The answer the Frankfurt School critics—Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Franz Neumann, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse—developed meant abandoning the old-fashioned Marxist faith in progress and scientific rationality for a far more despairing vision of the future. Marxism provided a

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neurotic and dysfunctional human type, who surfaced not just in liberal bourgeois society but among its right-wing fascist antagonists as well. Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse would later insist that any remaining hope for human freedom required overthrowing the bourgeois mechanisms of psychological repression as well as class oppression. The other

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unpublished until almost half a century after his death, in 1932. Their release to the public forced Marxists, including the members of the Frankfurt School (Herbert Marcuse was one of the first to work on them), to radically revise their thinking about the development of Marx’s ideas. In 1844 Marx was

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refuge. Columbia University’s president, Nicholas Butler, was a political conservative but also a strong believer in academic freedom and diversity (a point of view Herbert Marcuse would later attack as “repressive tolerance”). At the urging of his faculty, Butler gave the Marxist group a building on 117th Street, with offices for

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staff and visiting scholars. Horkheimer and Adorno were soon joined by two other institute members, Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse. Ensconced in Morningside Heights amidst an unfamiliar sea of American affluence, Horkheimer’s tiny coterie proceeded to shut their gates against the vibrant polyglot society

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preferably) from the safety of the classroom or the pages of a scholarly journal. Since the negative critic, like C. Wright Mills at Columbia or Herbert Marcuse at Brandeis University, had already declared his spiritual independence from a moribund social and cultural system, he was no longer part of it, even as

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OF FREUD Is not the individual who functions normally, adequately, and healthily as a citizen of a sick society—is not such a person sick? —Herbert Marcuse In the end, the Frankfurt School’s historical pessimism rested on a crude parallel between America and pre-Nazi Weimar: both were seen as lifeless

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” fascist movement in America, like the absence of any “genuine” anti-Semitism, was in fact a sign of how far the corruption had spread. As Herbert Marcuse put it somewhat later, “The fact that we cannot point to an SS or SA here, simply means that they are not necessary in this

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products, who directed their sadistic energies at anyone who was different or vulnerable. “The world of the concentration camps was not an exceptionally monstrous society,” Herbert Marcuse would later write. “What we saw there was … the quintessence of the infernal society into which we are plunged every day.”50 Adorno’s most

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-Semitism or even the authoritarian personality. At their epicenter lay a “sick” Western civilization, lashing out to corrupt or destroy everything in its lethal embrace. HERBERT MARCUSE: THE PROMISE OF UTOPIA The Dialectic of Enlightenment appeared almost simultaneously with the D-day invasion, marking the beginning of the end for Hitler’s

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unrelieved as Henry Adams’s—the intellectual, he lamented, must live with “the shame of still having air to breathe, in hell”*—his younger colleague Herbert Marcuse assumed a different stance. Like Adorno and Horkheimer, Marcuse would stress the inevitable death of the West by its own hand, not so much through

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After the war they would cost him his rectorship and academic honors, as well as the friendship and respect of many colleagues and students (including Herbert Marcuse). Yet it says something about Sartre’s own political naivete that he was oblivious to the lesson in this. He did not actually read Heidegger

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was the young Leo Strauss. * The similarity to The Dialectic of Enlightenment is striking and not coincidental—it reflects the hand of Nietzsche on both. Herbert Marcuse studied with Heidegger in the late twenties, while Adorno and Horkheimer both felt the power of Heidegger’s ideas and targeted him as an important

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put it, and “civilization [passes] into history.”1 In the seventies, environmentalism acquired a powerful dose of cultural pessimism derived from by-now-familiar sources: Herbert Marcuse, Martin Heidegger, and Michel Foucault. Like their predecessors in the twenties and thirties, environmental pessimists were prepared to turn from analysis to action. When Michel

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man,” he wrote in 1926, “whether or not he knows and wills it as an individual, is the functionary of technology.”35 Heidegger’s student Herbert Marcuse brought these assumptions to his own view of “post-scarcity society” in One-Dimensional Man. Its bold images of a technological capitalism poised to subjugate

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human happiness rather than otherwise; and in the pursuit of happiness as an essentially rational activity—as a source of corruption, exploitation, and death. If Herbert Marcuse, Toni Morrison, Ronald Takaki, Michel Foucault, Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, and Murray Bookchin seem startlingly new and radical to their admirers, their words seem all

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. 46 Wiggershaus , Frankfun School , p. 414; Adorno , et al., Authoritarian Personality , p. 249. 47 Adorno , et al., Authoritarian Personality , p. 976. 48 Quoted in Kellner , Herbert Marcuse , p. 296. 49 Quoted in Wiggershaus , Frankfun School , p. 339. 50 Quoted in Cranston , ed., Prophetic Politics , p. 88. 51 Adorno , Minima Moralia , pp. 34

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in A. MacIntyre , Marcuse (New York, 1970). 54 Marcuse , One-Dimensional Man , p. 7; quoted in Kellner , Herbert Marcuse , p. 293. 55 Marcuse , Essay on Liberation , p. 7; Fromm , Escape From Freedom , p. 278; Kellner , Herbert Marcuse , p. 293. 56 Marcuse , One-Dimensional Man , p. 9. 57 A point developed in Frances Fox Piven

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. 256-57. 65 Marcuse , Essay on Liberation , p. 7. 66 Marcuse , et al., Critique of Pure Tolerance , pp. 107-09; Kellner , Herbert Marcuse , p. 289. 67 Marcuse , Negations , p. 251. 68 Kellner , Herbert Marcuse , p. 299; R. Radosh , “On Hanging Up the Old Red Flag,” in J. Bunzel , ed., Political Passages , p. 224. 69

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Marcuse , et al., Critique of Pure Tolerance , Postscript, p. 120. 70 Quoted in Kellner , Herbert Marcuse , pp. 292, 300-01. Chapter 10 1 Quoted in Hughes , Consciousness and Society , pp. 114-15. 2 Bergson , Creative Evolution , p. 294. 3 Ibid., pp

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. Weidenfield and Nicholson, London, 1970. Keller, M. Affairs of State: Public life in Late-Nineteenth-Century America . Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1977. Kellner, Douglas . Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism . University of California Press, Berkeley, 1984. Kelly, Alfred . The Descent of Darwin: The Popularization of Darwin in Germany 1860-1914

Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex

by Rupert Darwall  · 2 Oct 2017  · 451pp  · 115,720 words

political and intellectual class became increasingly influenced by environmentalist thinkers such as the Norwegian Arne Næss, the German Fritz Schumacher, and the Frankfurt School’s Herbert Marcuse. From the mid-1970s, the Golden State led the U.S. in turning green ideology in a fight against reality, with disastrous consequences. Rising demand

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than its formal writings. L’Express: Can we say for the students who have chosen a doctrine for their revolt that you are their theorist? Herbert Marcuse: “I have tried to show that contemporary society is a repressive society in all its aspects, that even the comfort, the prosperity, the alleged political

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his speech at the Stockholm UN environment conference to attack the United States over the Vietnam War in language that could have been spoken by Herbert Marcuse. “The immense destruction brought about by indiscriminate bombing, by large scale use of bulldozers and herbicides is an outrage sometimes described as eco-side,” Palme

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secular clerisy, to borrow Joel Kotkin’s term, to propagate their values through the media and into the governing bureaucracies of the state. From 1965, Herbert Marcuse was teaching the Frankfurt School’s critical theory at the University of California, San Diego; Paul Ehrlich, author of the 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb

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Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Phoenix and New Berlin, WI, 2004), p. 159. 32Herbert Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance,” in Robert P. Wolff, Barrington Moore Jr., and Herbert Marcuse, A Critique of Pure Tolerance (London, 1969), p. 98. 33Ibid., p. 125. 34Ibid., p. 119. 35Herbert Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance,” in Robert P. Wolff, Barrington Moore

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Jr., and Herbert Marcuse, A Critique of Pure Tolerance (London, 1969), p. 95. 36Jean-Louis Ferrier, Jacques Boetsch, and Françoise Giroud (tr. Helen Weaver), “Marcuse Defines His New Left

The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time

by Yascha Mounk  · 26 Sep 2023

the institutions.” In Dutschke’s original formulation, the purpose of this infiltration was to subvert and sabotage. But by 1972, when the German American philosopher Herbert Marcuse picked up on these ideas in his highly influential Counterrevolution and Revolt, the strategy had come to encompass more subtle avenues of influence. When “working

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us, come from? THE ROOTS OF THE “PROGRESSIVE” REJECTION OF FREE SPEECH The most influential rejection of free speech from the left was formulated by Herbert Marcuse. When Adolf Hitler ascended to power, Marcuse, a German Jew, was about to take a position at the prestigious Institute for Social Research, more commonly

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both a disdain for the traditional institutions of parliamentary democracy and a deep enmity to liberalism. Some Marxist thinkers, like Frantz Fanon, Paulo Freire, and Herbert Marcuse, even continue to influence advocates of the identity synthesis. But to equate the two ideologies is to miss that the differences and tensions between them

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. The focus on cultural hegemony in many academic disciplines is in part inspired by Antonio Gramsci. Critiques of free speech often invoke the work of Herbert Marcuse. And one of the most widely read texts in American education schools is by Paulo Freire. There are also some striking similarities between the core

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Institutions “long march through”: “To extend the base of the student movement, Rudi Dutschke has proposed the strategy of the long march through the institutions.” Herbert Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), 55. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “working against the established institutions”: Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt, 55. GO

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”: Ellen Pao (@ekp), Twitter, April 5, 2022, 7:31 p.m., twitter.com/ekp/status/1511486807451463680. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT in “Repressive Tolerance”: Herbert Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance,” in A Critique of Pure Tolerance, ed. Robert Paul Wolff and Barrington Moore, 5th ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 81–123. GO TO

Hacking Capitalism

by Söderberg, Johan; Söderberg, Johan;

. Marxist scholars have followed Marx’s lead and passed over Schiller’s work as a footnote in German, idealist philosophy, with the notable exception of Herbert Marcuse. He declared his indebtedness to Schiller for his own life-long investigation into the liberating potential of aesthetics and play. Marcuse insisted on play as

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alienated labour by circumventing it. A different labour relation is being invented in the play of FOSS developers. The utopian hopes of Friedrich Schiller and Herbert Marcuse are accentuated with the current development in the computer underground. The chapter reviews scholarly definitions of play, and calls attention to ludic forms of resistance

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the capitalist relation of production. On a more general note, dis-belief is by now the common response to the modernist notion of historical progress. Herbert Marcuse is iconic for formulating a pessimistic, leftist position on technology. His reproach was not directed against any technology in particular but against technological rationality as

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involving ‘the most intense exertions’. These last comments throw back the question on Karl Marx and his disparaging of play. One of his many disciples, Herbert Marcuse, made an appropriate observation on the general disregard for play in modern society: “[…] Play is unproductive and useless precisely because it cancels the repressive and

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of Karl Marx’s harsh words on the topic, a disparate group of socialists have figured that play could become an alternative to alienated labour. Herbert Marcuse is the thinker that most consistently has pursued this line of inquiry. Theories on Liberation, Aesthetics, and Play As the book draws to a close

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, the many lines of argument converge in the thinking of Herbert Marcuse. He was an idiosyncratic member of the Marxist family. Previous to joining the Frankfurt School, he had been a student of Martin Heidegger. Though Marcuse

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first and foremost be a product of her senses and not of her reason, an outlook rather consistent with the materialist understanding of human existence. Herbert Marcuse too admitted to the slant of idealism in Schiller’s thinking but maintained that the poet nonetheless had been a radical. Marcuse pointed out a

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to towards the end of the chapter, the hacker movement enables us to explore their utopian claims with a bit more self-assurance than before. Herbert Marcuse is not the only anti-capitalist to deduce a liberating potential in art from Marx’s critique of alienated labour. Similar thoughts surfaced among nineteenth

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need to investigate more closely the concept of play. Defining Play from Work We have not specified what unalienated labour is by calling it ‘play’. Herbert Marcuse didn’t dwell on a definition but took the term as rather self-evident. The activity we know as play is familiar to everyone, and

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an end in itself. If play is instead a means for ideological ends, the activity is not play at all but suspiciously akin to work. Herbert Marcuse made a similar reflection on the relation between art and revolution during the social upheavals in the early twentieth century. The role of aesthetics was

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the world subject to digitalisation, and, thus, it is a trend likely to continue in the same direction in the future. At the time when Herbert Marcuse expressed his regrets over the inability of imagination and poetry to have real outcomes in the world, the computer industry was just about to prove

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. Notes to Chapter Seven 1. Kostas Axelos, Alienation, Praxis, and Techné in the Thought of Karl Marx (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976), 194. 2. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization—A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (London: Routledge, 1998), 195, italics in original; hereafter cited in text as Eros. 3

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. Herbert Marcuse, ”On the Philosophical Foundation of the Concept of Labor in Economics”, Telos, 16 (summer 1973). 4. Georg Lukács, Goethe and His Age (London: Merlin, 1968).

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5. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), 140; hereafter cited in text as history. 6. Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978). 7. Eve Chiapello, “Evolution and Co-optation: The ‘Artist Critique’ of Management

How Much Is Enough?: Money and the Good Life

by Robert Skidelsky and Edward Skidelsky  · 18 Jun 2012  · 279pp  · 87,910 words

. Keynes, we add in Chapter 2, was not alone in thinking that motives bad in themselves might nonetheless be useful. John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, Herbert Marcuse—even Adam Smith in bolder moments—all granted such motives a positive role as an agent of historical progress. In the language of myth, Western

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. The radicalism of the 1960s was a campus phenomenon, theorized and promoted by the professors. Of these, none was more influential than the émigré philosopher Herbert Marcuse, who proclaimed the new doctrine of erotic liberation with heavy Germanic learning. Marcuse’s books Eros and Civilization (1955) and One-Dimensional Man (1964) became

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to an impenitent and optimistic utopia, which cannot be described in terms of concepts based on an unredeemed world.”49 Despite his often impenetrable prose, Herbert Marcuse was a playful devil. The only truly progressive attitude, he said, was one of denial. “That which is cannot be true” was one of his

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academic. Two decades later, however, they felt increasingly urgent. A slew of influential books—The Affluent Society by J. K Galbraith, One-Dimensional Man by Herbert Marcuse and The Joyless Economy by Tibor Scitovsky—questioned the equation of “utility” and happiness. Rousseauesque anxieties were rekindled. What if technological progress creates new wants

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made over for the left by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer after the Second World War and exported to America by Adorno’s old colleague, Herbert Marcuse. (“The ecological movement,” said Marcuse with typical intransigence, “must seek not the mere beautification of the existing Establishment but a radical transformation of the very

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: Princeton University Press, 2007). 48. Reich, The Greening of America, pp. 381–2. 49. Quoted in Alain Martineau, Herbert Marcuse’s Utopia (Montreal: Harvest House, 1984), p. 7. 50. Quoted ibid., p. 20. 51. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, ed. Douglas Kellner (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991

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), pp. xlii, xxx. 52. Ibid., p. 246. 53. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (New York: Random House, 1961), p. 48. 54. Ibid., p. 260. CHAPTER 3. THE USES OF WEALTH 1. Joseph Schumpeter, History of

The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads

by Tim Wu  · 14 May 2016  · 515pp  · 143,055 words

able to connect Leary’s prescription with the vision of other social critics. Among the most influential of these was another guru of the counterculture, Herbert Marcuse of the “Frankfurt School,” one of a set of German philosophers who’d fled the Third Reich in the 1930s. Marcuse believed that he was

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Schuster, 2004), 209. 4. Russell Jacoby, The End of Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 152. 5. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (London: Routledge Classics, 1964), 6; Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), ix. 6. Timothy Leary, High Priest (Oakland, CA: Ronin

1968: The Year That Rocked the World

by Mark Kurlansky  · 30 Dec 2003  · 538pp  · 164,533 words

commercial and political style, is one of the many ways in which discourse and communication make themselves immune against the expression of protest and refusal. —HERBERT MARCUSE, One-Dimensional Man, 1964 NO ONE was more surprised to discover a student movement in “the happiest barracks in the Soviet camp” than the students

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ear. Polish communist youth, not always in agreement with their parents, felt this “unfreedom,” as another extremely popular German writer of the mid-sixties, philosopher Herbert Marcuse, called it. Poland and much of the Soviet bloc exemplified Marcuse’s theory that the communication of opposites obstructed discourse. To criticize the government or

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Notebooks: “The revolution as myth is the definitive revolution.” By 1968 there was another intellectual it seemed everybody wanted to quote: Marxist-Hegelian revisionist revolutionary Herbert Marcuse. His most appealing idea was what he called “the great refusal,” the time to say “No, this is not acceptable”—another idea that was expressed

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as recruitment of executives by Dow Chemical, not to mention recruitment of officers by the military. And while universities were famous for their intellectuals like Herbert Marcuse or C. Wright Mills, a more typical product was Harvard’s Henry Kissinger. The Ivy League in particular was known as a bastion of conservative

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figure was projected to double between 1968 and 1985. It was a widespread belief in the 1960s that American technology would create more leisure time, Herbert Marcuse being one of the few to argue that technology was failing to create leisure time. John Kifner, a young New York Times reporter respected by

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Pete Seeger. He loved to study, and many of the books he read came from his politically savvy girlfriend, the school intellectual. She even knew Herbert Marcuse’s stepson, Michael Neumann, who later became Rudd’s college roommate. Neumann’s older brother, Tommy, was a member of the affinity group the East

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not in Eastern Europe to support the invasion. Of the eighty-eight Communist Parties in the world, only ten approved of the invasion. Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse called the invasion “the most tragic event of the post-war era.” A few young people in East Germany passed out leaflets of protest. And

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