Herbert Marcuse
1898-1979 · German-American · Critical Theory, Frankfurt School, Hegelian-Marxist Philosophy, Political Philosophy, Aesthetics, Philosophy of Psychoanalysis
A comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilization, a token of technical progress.
Radicalized by the failed German revolution of 1918, Herbert Marcuse spent six decades asking why capitalism kept winning. He broke with Heidegger over Nazism in 1933, joined the Frankfurt School in exile, and by the 1960s was the most-discussed philosopher in the Western world.
Topics Herbert Marcuse addresses
- one-dimensional man
- the Great Refusal
- repressive tolerance
- surplus repression
- the performance principle
- repressive desublimation
- technological rationality
- false needs
- the new sensibility
- the aesthetic dimension
- liberating tolerance
- negative thinking
- the power of negation
- advanced industrial society
- the integration of the working class
- one-dimensional thought
- affirmative culture
- the pacification of existence
- non-repressive civilization
- the reality principle
- the pleasure principle
- Eros and Thanatos
- the historical fate of bourgeois democracy
- the containment of social change
Questions to put to Herbert Marcuse
One-Dimensional Society and Technological Rationality
- What do you mean by one-dimensional man?
- How has advanced capitalism integrated the working class and contained opposition?
- What are false needs, and how do they differ from true needs?
- How does technological rationality close off critical thinking?
- What is the Great Refusal, and who can still carry it out?
Eros, Civilization, and Surplus Repression
- What is surplus repression, and how does it differ from necessary repression?
- How does the performance principle shape our instincts under capitalism?
- What is repressive desublimation?
- How would a non-repressive civilization actually work?
- Why do you turn to Freud to develop Marxist theory?
Repressive Tolerance and Revolutionary Violence
- What do you mean by repressive tolerance?
- Why should tolerance be asymmetric rather than neutral?
- How do you distinguish structural violence from revolutionary violence?
- How do you respond to the charge that you're advocating authoritarianism?
- Who are the marginal outsiders you see as the new revolutionary subject?
The Aesthetic Dimension and Art's Autonomy
- Why is art's truth in its form rather than its political content?
- How can autonomous art be more revolutionary than programmatic art?
- What's wrong with Lukács's demand for social realism?
- How does the aesthetic dimension relate to the new sensibility?
- What role does Schiller's aesthetic education play in your thinking?
Hegel, Marx, and the Dialectical Method
- What is the power of negation in Hegel's dialectic?
- How do you defend Hegel against the charge that he's a proto-totalitarian?
- Why did discovering Marx's 1844 Manuscripts matter so much to you?
- How does critical theory differ from orthodox Marxism?
- What does it mean to revise Marx's categories when historical conditions change?
Heidegger, Nazism, and the Early Synthesis
- What were you trying to accomplish by synthesizing Marx and Heidegger in the late 1920s?
- How did you break with Heidegger over his support for Nazism?
- Does Heidegger's politics invalidate the philosophical work you did with his categories?
- What survived from the early Heideggerian period into your later work?
Converse with Herbert Marcuse on Simposeum. Replies are grounded in Herbert Marcuse's own writing, cited to the page.