Marcuse Herbert (1898–1979). German-born American political philosopher who reinterpreted the ideas of Marx and Freud. Marcuse’s work is among the most systematic and philosophical of the Frankfurt School theorists. After an initial attempt to unify Hegel, Marx, and Heidegger in an ontology of historicity in his habilitation on Hegel’s Ontology and the Theory of Historicity (1932), Marcuse was occupied during the 1930s with the problem of truth in a critical historical social theory, defending a contextindependent notion of truth against relativizing tendencies of the sociology of knowledge. Marcuse thought Hegel’s ‘dialectics’ provided an alternative to relativism, empiricism, and positivism and even developed a revolutionary interpretation of the Hegelian legacy in Reason and Revolution (1941) opposed to Popper’s totalitarian one.
After World War II, Marcuse appropriated Freud in the same way that he had appropriated Hegel before the war, using his basic concepts for a critical theory of the repressive character of civilization in Eros and Civilization (1955). In many respects, this book comes closer to presenting a positive conception of reason and Enlightenment than any other work of the Frankfurt School. Marcuse argued that civilization has been antagonistic to happiness and freedom through its constant struggle against basic human instincts. According to Marcuse, human existence is grounded in Eros, but these impulses depend upon and are shaped by labor. By synthesizing Marx and Freud, Marcuse holds out the utopian possibility of happiness and freedom in the unity of Eros and labor, which at the very least points toward the reduction of ‘surplus repression’ as the goal of a rational economy and emancipatory social criticism. This was also the goal of his aesthetic theory as developed in The Aesthetic Dimension (1978). In One Dimensional Man (1964) and other writings, Marcuse provides an analysis of why the potential for a free and rational society has never been realized: in the irrationality of the current social totality, its creation and manipulation of false needs (or ‘repressive desublimation’), and hostility toward nature. Perhaps no other Frankfurt School philosopher has had as much popular influence as Marcuse, as evidenced by his reception in the student and ecology movements. See also CRITICAL THEORY, FRANKFURT SCHOO. J.Bo.