Herbert Marcuse

Herbert Marcuse (Berlin, 1898 – Starnberg, 1979) was a German-American philosopher and social critic of Jewish background, a leading figure of the first generation of the Frankfurt School. Combining Marxism with Freudian psychoanalysis and cultural criticism, his work became one of the most influential voices of twentieth-century critical thought.

He came from a well-established upper-middle-class Jewish family in Berlin. He studied in Berlin and Freiburg, where he earned his doctorate in 1922 with a thesis on the German Künstlerroman. After the First World War he joined the Social Democratic Party, but left it in 1919 after the murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, which he saw as a sign of the party's complicity. At Freiburg he prepared a habilitation under Martin Heidegger, published in 1932 as Hegel's Ontology and the Theory of Historicity. The relationship ended when Heidegger moved toward National Socialism, which Marcuse regarded as a betrayal of philosophy.

After Hitler came to power he joined the Institute for Social Research, which had moved its funds to Holland, and began working in Geneva. He emigrated to the United States in 1934 and worked at the institute's branch at Columbia University. During the war he worked for the Office of War Information and the Research and Analysis Branch of the OSS, where he analyzed Nazism. After 1945 he joined the State Department, and later taught at Harvard, Brandeis and the University of California, San Diego.

In Reason and Revolution (1940) he reread Hegel and Marx dialectically. In Eros and Civilization (1955) he argued that industrial society imposes a surplus repression beyond what civilization requires, and he looked to the erotic nature of human beings as a path to liberation. In One-Dimensional Man (1964) he described a society that absorbs its citizens through consumption and technology until the capacity to imagine alternatives fades. In his essay Repressive Tolerance (1965) he held that indiscriminate tolerance tends to benefit the powerful.

In the 1960s and 1970s he came to be seen as a key figure of the New Left and the student movements, although he downplayed the title of father of that movement. His analyses remain present in debates about technology, consumption, tolerance and mass culture.