The Unknown Herbert Marcuse

Abstract

The year 1998 is the hundredth anniversary of Herbert Marcuse’s birth. After decades of teaching and writing for relatively limited, mostly academic audiences, in the 1960s he became a figure of international renown, and some of his books became bestsellers. But it seems that he had just fifteen minutes of fame; his work is now out of fashion and virtually unread by students, activists, and academics, save for the narrow circle of those who work and teach in the tradition of the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School. Nevertheless, due to one of those mysterious conjunctions of history and thought, Marcuse was one of the figures from which Russell Jacoby derived his model of the “public” intellectual. A philosopher who never ceased to remind his readers that he was an “orthodox Marxist,” he borrowed freely from the phenomenological tradition, especially its Heideggerian spin; from sociology, mainly Max Weber’s; and, most famously, from the metatheories of Sigmund Freud regarding the relation of the individual to society.¹