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

Converse with Herbert Marcuse on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Herbert Marcuse's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.