Their Dialectics and Ours

See Kevin B. Anderson, “On Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory: A Critical Appreciation of Herbert Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution, Fifty Years Later,” Sociological Theory, Vol. 11, No. 3 (Nov., 1993): 254.

Douglas Kellner, Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 129. See also: Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute for Social Research, 1923-1950 (Boston: Little Brown, 1973), 78; and Anderson, "Hegel," 244.

In the original preface, Marcuse declares his intention of showing that “Hegel’s basic concepts are hostile to the tendencies that have led into fascist theory and practice” (Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory [Boston: Beacon Press, 1960], xv). Contrary to Sidney Hook’s assertion that Marcuse defended Hegel “before the event” of his association with fascism (Sidney Hook, “Reason and Revolution,” in The New Republic, July 21, 1941: 91), German philosophy had in fact been widely denigrated across the Anglophone world since the First World War. Hence one reviewer’s remark that Hegel “has become popularly known as the glorifier of the Machtstaat… in short, as a bogey forerunner of Nazism” (John H. Herz, “Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory,” American Historical Review, Volume 47, Issue 3 [4/1/1942]: 591).

For a critical account of the “pessimistic turn” of the Frankfurt School—one to which Marcuse represents a “partial exception”—see Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 86. See also: Marcuse, “Some Social Implications of Modern Technology,” in Douglas Kellner, ed., Technology, War, and Fascism: Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, Volume One (New York: Routledge, 1998), 39-66. This essay illustrates the distance separating Marcuse from the Horkheimer Circle in the early 1940s, for, while critical of instrumental reason, he finds reason to be optimistic about emerging conditions in technological society.

See Anderson, "Hegel," 244.

Marcuse, “New Sources on the Foundations of Historical Materialism,” in Richard Wolin and John Abromeit, eds., Heideggerian Marxism: Herbert Marcuse (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 90. Sidney Hook cited this article the following year (Sidney Hook: "Materialism," Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences 10 [1933]: 209-220).

Marcuse, “Foundations,” 90.

See Abromeit, “Critical Encounter,” 138.

See Thomas Wheatland, The Frankfurt School in Exile (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009); and Jay, Dialectical Imagination.

See Marcuse, "Some Social Implications of Modern Technology,” in Kellner, Technology, 39-46. This essay clearly contradicts the mistaken idea that the Frankfurt School exiles took little notice of intellectual developments in the United States (see Wheatland, Exile, 85).

See Edward A. Purcell, Jr., The Crisis of Democratic Theory: Scientific Naturalism and the Problem of Value (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1973). I am using his concept of scientific naturalism as a philosophical approach that abjures a priori deduction from abstract principles in favor concrete, empirical investigation.

Hook, “Reason and Revolution,” The New Republic (July 21, 1941): 91. Marcuse’s other reviewers, many of whom were on the Left, rejected the anti-empiricist thrust of the book. V.J. McGill, for instance—an editor of the Marxist journal Science and Society—argued that Nazi ideology is better characterized as the suppression and denial of empirical evidence rather than as submission to scientific facts and methods. “It should be remembered,” he wrote, “that positivism has been attacked by the Nazis far more frequently and vehemently than has Hegel,” (V.J. McGill, “Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory,” Journal of Philosophy Vol. 52, Issue 18 [9/1/1955]: 502).

Christopher Phelps remarks that Hook helped to initiate “a revolt against formalism within American Marxism,” (Phelps, Young Sidney Hook, 89); See also: Cristiano Camporesi, “The Marxism of Sidney Hook,” Telos 12 (Summer 1972): 115.

Hook, “Communism Without Dogmas,” in Charles Capper and David A. Hollinger, The American Intellectual Tradition, Vol. II: 1865 to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 237.

Sidney Hook, “The Failure of the Left,” Partisan Review 10 (March-April 1943): 168. See also: Phelps, Young Sidney Hook, 221-225.

Ibid, 6.

Ibid, 9.

See Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Verso, 2005); and Lucio Colletti, “From Hegel to Marcuse,” in From Rousseau to Lenin: Studies in Ideology and Society, trans. John Merrington and Judith White (New York: Monthly Review Books, 1972).

See Phelps, Young Sidney Hook, 232. See also: Benjamin Serby, “Recalling Lewis Feuer,” Society, Vol. 50, Issue 4 (Aug. 2013): 356-359.

Quoted in Anderson, “Hegel,” 258.

See Kevin B. Anderson, “The Marcuse-Dunayevskaya Dialogue, 1954-1979,” in Studies on Soviet Thought, Vol. 39, Issue 2 (March 1, 1990): 89; Kevin B. Anderson and Russell Rockwell, eds., The Dunayevskaya-Marcuse-Fromm Correspondence, 1954-1978: Dialogues on Hegel, Marx, and Critical Theory (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012); and Anderson, “Hegel.” See also, C.L.R. James, Notes on Dialectics: Hegel, Marx, Lenin (London: Pluto Press, 2005).

Ibid., 22.