Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979)
a comprehensive web page by his descendants |
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Announcements
Aug. 4,
2002: On July 19, 2003, which would have been Herbert's 105th birthday, we
are planning a small ceremony to inter Herbert's ashes in Berlin. If you would
like to contribute in some way, please contact Harold Marcuse at
hmarcuse@yahoo.com.
June 3, 2002: From January 29, 2002 to March 4, 2002 visitors were
asked to comment on appropriate resting places for Herbert Marcuse's recently
rediscovered ashes (click on view
guestbook to see those comments). We have chosen the Dorotheenstädtischer
cemetery in Berlin where Hegel's and Brecht's graves are [semi-official
web site, best
site, some
photos, tourguide].
We
would be interested in our readers' views on the type of grave marker you would
find appropriate, and on possible quotations by Herbert that could serve as an
epitaph (please enter them into the guestbook at the bottom of
this page).
March 17, 2002: The 69 minute film Herbert's
Hippopotamus is now available as streaming media on Doug
Kellner's Illuminations website. This is AMAZING footage from the late 60s
and early 70s, including then-and-now interviews of UCSD's chancellor William
McGill, Angela Davis, and Herbert (with some real gem remarks, for instance by a
May 1968 KCET interviewer).
March 4, 2002: new addition to the biography section: Michael G.
Horowitz, "Portrait
of the Marxist as an Old Trouper," a "personality profile" of Herbert
written by a Brandeis undergraduate (1963-67), after Herbert's April 1969
appearance at SUNY Old Westbury. It was published in Sept. 1970 in
Playboy magazine.
Herbert Marcuse was born in Berlin on
July 19,1898. After completing his Ph.D. thesis at the University of Freiburg in
1922, he moved to Berlin, where he worked as a bookseller. He returned to
Freiburg in 1929 to write a habilitation (professor's dissertation) with Martin
Heidegger. In 1933, since he would not be allowed to complete that project under
the Nazis, Herbert began work at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, a
Marxist-oriented think-tank (as we might say today).
He emigrated from
Germany that same year, going first to Switzerland, then the United States,
where he became a citizen in 1940. During World War II he worked for the US
Office of Strategic Services (forerunner of the CIA), analyzing intelligence
reports about Germany (1942-45-51).
In 1952 he
began a university teaching career as a political theorist, first at Columbia
and Harvard, then at Brandeis from 1958 to 1965, and finally (already
retirement-age), at the University of California, San Diego.
His critiques
of capitalist society (especially his 1955 synthesis of Marx and Freud, Eros
and Civilization, and his 1964 book One-Dimensional Man) resonated
with the concerns of the leftist student movement in the 1960s. Because of his
willingness to speak at student protests, Herbert soon became known as "the
father of the new left" (a term he disliked and rejected). He had many speaking
engagements in the US and Europe in the late 1960s and in the 1970s. He died on
July 29, 1979, after having suffered a stroke during a visit to
Germany.
For more detailed biographical information about
him, see:
Comprehensive Web Sites and Pages of Links (back to top)
- Doug Kellner's critical
theory website "Illuminations" at the University of California, Los
Angeles. Doug has a Marcuse
page with essays, including a long and detailed biography.
He also contributed to a short timeline on
the UTexas website. He has made one of Herbert's lectures available as two
RealAudio files: The Radical
Movement (part 1), part
2. You can also listen to Doug's own lecture: The
Frankfurt School.
Doug wrote the introduction to the 1992 edition of
One-Dimensional Man, and is the editor of the English edition of
Herbert's collected papers, a 6-volume series, whose first volume,
Technology, War and Fascism, was published in 1998 (see below). Doug is now a
professor of the philosophy of education at UCLA (see his web site
there).
Doug's critical
theory website at the University of Texas, Austin still exists, but is no
longer maintained.
- herbertmarcuse.com, by Brian Gonsalves, has a clearly organized set
of links to texts and reviews on other websites.
- Herbert-Marcuse-Association
is a web site run by Christian Fuchs, a Marcuse-devotee at the Technical
University of Vienna. (Begun ca. Feb. 3, 2002; counter 794 on 2/13, 1018 on
3/4/02.) The entire text of One-Dimensional
Man (in English), is on this site. Its "archive"
has taken most of the links on this page, added a bunch of others from search
engines, and organized them a little differently without commentary.
- worldsocialism.org has an informative and thoughtful page about Herbert's
relationship to Marxism, written by A. Buick.
- Patrice Deramaix' Frankfurt School site (in
French) has a biographical
page and an annotated
bibliography.
Sarah Zupko's popcultures.com has a page with links
to several articles about Herbert's work.
- University of Colorado, Denver, School of Education, maintains a
list of links on its Contemporary
Philosophy page
- ErraticImpact.com (a philosophy research database that sells books)
has a page of
links and texts.
- Google's
Herbert Marcuse page is much better than Yahoo.com's,
which only links to Kellner (July 2002).
Other Sources of Information and Sites of Interest (back to top)
Herbert's
Hippopotamus is a 1 hr. 9 min. documentary video made by UCSD film
student Paul Alexander Juutilainen in 1996. It is a wonderful film about
Herbert's traces at UCSD, with great documentary footage from the 1960s and
70s and follow-up interviews from the 1990s. One reviewer wrote: "This Emmy
award-winning documentary explores the historical background for the cultural
encounter between European Critical Thinking, the Third World, Feminist and
Anti-war movements, as well as the political turmoil and institutional
pressures in reaction to these coalitions."
- The
entire film is available in streaming media (.ram format) on Doug
Kellner's critical theory website. (higher
quality version for high-speed connections)
- The film can be purchased from http://www.cinemaguild.com/ (link to
film): Gary Crowdus, The Cinema Guild, 130 Madison Avenue, 2nd Floor,
New York, NY 10016-7038, Phone: (212) 685-6242, Fax: (212) 685-4717 (VHS
purchase: $295; rental: $95).
- The film is available through interlibrary loans from UCSB and UCSD
(search by title, or go directly to the melvyl
record).
- For a detailed description, see this UC
Santa Cruz campus newspaper article.
- The film is discussed in an article about resistance
against the marines by UC Berkeley political science graduate student
John Brady, published in 1998 in the on-line journal Bad Subjects.
- undated review by W. Mark
Cobb (at herbertmarcuse.com)
Andrew Feenberg,
professor of philosophy at San Diego State University, has an "appreciation"
(commentary on one of Herbert's last speeches, "Obstinacy as a Theoretical
Virtue"), an article he wrote
about Herbert on technology, and a nice picture of
Herbert with Feenberg's son Nick.
- The City and University Library in Frankfurt/Main holds the archive of
Herbert's papers and manuscripts. It also has a short
biography.
- Wbenjamin.org has an on-line version of Herbert's essay Aggressiveness in Advanced
Industrial Society (1967), ending in a nice list of links.
- Hans-Jürgen Krahl's Fünf Thesen zu Herbert
Marcuse als kritischer Theoretiker der Emanzipation, a defense of Herbert
after an "attack" by Rolf Hochhuth (1971; archived on partisan.net).
- 1969 review of
Eros and Civilization by Robert Young (at human-nature.com,
originally published in the New Statesman in Nov. 1969). (another copy at
herbertmarcuse.com)
- undated (2001?) review of
Essay on Liberation, by sociology graduate student Frank Samson III at
Stanford Univ.
- Bluereality.org (a social
criticism website) has a copy of his text Aggressiveness in
Advanced Industrial Society (1967) on its Marcuse page.
- Case Western Reserve University (in Cleveland) has a cryptic (who made
it?) site about the Frankfurt School, with
a page about Herbert's best-known work, One Dimensional
Man.
- "Repressive Tolerance" is one of the best-known concepts coined by
Herbert. A German
translation of his 1965 essay of that title is available on partisan.net.
Penguin
Dictionary of Sociology entry was put on the web by the Sociology &
Anthropology department of the University of Canterbury, New Zealand.
- The University of Amsterdam's SocioSite Project has entries for Marcuse,
and Habermas
(among others).
- XREFER.com, a search engine of on-line reference works, has a marcuse page, with links to
pages on other reference sites, such as an art-specific biography, and
Oxford Univ. Press's Who's who
page.
- Philosophenlexikon.de
has a very short, philosophically oriented biography.
- Philolex.de has a very
short assessment by Peter Möller, Berlin. Möller's Frankfurter Schule page is more
informative.
- Short bio in Italian
Enciclopedia Multimediale
- Good, long
quotations about big concepts (capitalism, democracy, 1917 revolution) on
redthread.com, a non-hierarchical, anarchist-Marxist site run out of
Austria.
.
- Scroll down on this page at
creativequotations.com for 5 cool, short quotations and their
sources.
- Memorablequotations.com
(affiliated with Amazon.com) has some more, unattributed, quotations--less
cool, but more substantive..
- Herbert's son Peter and third wife Erica Sherover wrote this Sept. 1979 letter to the New
York Review of Books, suggesting that people send checks to Rudi Dutschke to
help the East German dissident Rudolf Bahro.
- Doctoral Student Filip Kovacevic at the University of
Missouri, Columbia maintained a "Herbert Marcuse's Home Page" with
links to on-line articles about his work at
http://web.missouri.edu/~tapscifk/dolcevita1.html, but the page disappeared
from the UMissouri server prior to August 2001. Maybe Filip graduated. I list
the page here because it was probably the one of the first sites about
Herbert--in 2001 more web pages had links to it than any other site about
Herbert, even though it wasn't the most informative site.
- One-Dimensional Man (1964) is Herbert's best-known work,
with over 300,000 copies sold. (full text
on-line at Herbert-Marcuse-Association.) Amazon
sells the 1992 edition for $13 (or $5 used), and has 13
sample pages and a page
with 3 customer reviews.
It is available in German, too (DM20
from amazon.de).
An excerpt from Chapter 5. Negative Thinking: The Defeated
Logic of Protest, is available on bluereality.org's (a social criticism
website) Marcuse
page.
- Eros and Civilization (1955). One of Herbert's well known
early works. Its title plays on Freud's Civilization and its
Discontents. This vision of a non-repressive society, based on Marx and
Freud, anticipated the values of 1960s countercultural movements. Amazon
sells it for $13.60 and has several customer reviews.
Also available
in German (DM32
from amazon.de).
- The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics
(Boston: Beacon, 1978), 88 pages. ($13
on amazon)
Reader Elliott Green (German major at Princeton, MPhil
student in Development Studies at the London School of Economics) wrote on
Amazon: "Herbert Marcuse, original member of the so-called 'Frankfurt School',
here presents a critique of Marxist aesthetics in one of his last books.
Although only 72 pages long, the book is powerful in its argument against the
orthodox Marxist view that 'art represents its the interests and world outlook
of particular social classes.' Marcuse argues for the importance of art in
itself, apart from its source, writing, 'the criteria for the progressive
character of art are given only in the work itself as a whole: in what it says
and how it says it.' He truly believes that art's place in the world is not to
change the world directly but to influence how people perceive the world and
thereby lead them to change it. Marcuse also touches upon other aspects of
aesthetics, like his belief in a constant standard allowing us to distinguish
between high and low art and the question of the 'end of art' as posited by
Bertolt Brecht and others. Nevertheless his main argument is most powerful: he
ends the book by praising art's role in representing 'the ultimate goal of all
revolutions: the freedom and happiness of the individual.' Truly a valuable
book for all students of art, aesthetics and philosophy.
- Herbert's papers from 1942-51, Technology, War
and Fascism, edited by Douglas Kellner and Peter Marcuse (Routledge,
1998). publisher's
page (with table of contents); preface by Peter Marcuse.
Sold for $45
at Borders.com (page
with reviews), and $23
at Amazon.com.
Review in
the Canadian Journal of Sociology (Mar./Apr. 2000)
This is the first
volume in a series of six.
(See also this 1942 text, "Staat und Individuum
im Nationalsozialismus," first published in Oct.
2000 in the newspaper taz.)
- Volume II, Towards a Critical Theory of Society, with papers
from the 1960s and early 1970s and an afterword by Juergen Habermas
(Routledge, June 2001). publisher's
page ($35
from Amazon)
Contents:
Foreword by Peter
Marcuse; Introduction; 1. The Problem of Social Change in the
Technological Society 2. The Individual in the Great Society 3. The
Containment of Social Change in Industrial Society 4. 1966 Political Preface
to Eros and Civilization 5. Beyond One-Dimensional Man 6. Cultural Revolution
7. The Historical Fate of the Bourgeois Democracy 8. Watergate: When Law and
Morality Stand in the Way 9. A Revolution in Values 10. Letters: Herbert
Marcuse to Leo Lowenthal; Leo Lowenthal to Richard Popkin; Herbert Marcuse to
T.W. Adorno; T.W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer to Herbert Marcuse; Herbert
Marcuse to T.W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer; Herbert Marcuse to Raya
Dunayevskaya; Raya Dunayevskaya to Herbert Marcuse.
- Peter-Erwin Jansen (his homepage, short
blurb) is publishing Marcuse's unpublished writings in German, as well.
(Jansen is also the editor of some of Leo Löwenthal's papers for Klostermann
publishers.)
- Herbert Marcuse: Nachgelassene Schriften 1: Das Schicksal der
bürgerlichen Demokratie, edited and with a preface by Peter-Erwin
Jansen, introduction by Oskar Negt (Lüneburg: Klampen, 2000), 176 pages,
DM38.00.
Contents:
1. Zum Problem des sozialen Wandels; 2. Jenseits
des Eindimensionalen Menschen; 3. Das historische Schicksal der bürgerlichen
Demokratie; 4. Eine Revolution der Werte; 5. Antidemokratische
Volksbewegungen; 6. Kulturrevolution
Amazon.de
page with descriptions; Feb. 2000 Die
Welt review by Bernd Rabehl; hostile Dec.
1999 FAZ review by Stefan Breuer (archive
copy).
(Note that this is a different selection of manuscripts than
the English edition of Marcuse's papers.)
- 2: Kunst und Befreiung, edited with a preface by
Peter-Erwin Jansen, introduction by Gerhard Schweppenhäuser, 166 pages. (DM38
von amazon.de)
In Kunst und Befreiung sind Marcuses
unveröffentlichte Arbeiten zur Ästhetik von den späten 40er Jahren bis 1978
gesammelt. Von seinem frühen Beitrag zu Aragon über "Kunst in der
eindimensionalen Gesellschaft" bis hin zum späten "Entwurf von La Jolla"
ziehen sich die großen Motive der Marcuseschen Kunstauffassung durch die in
diesem Band versammelten Texte: der mit ihrem affirmativen Charakter
verwobene utopische Überschuß in großer Kunst, die Möglichkeit von Dichtung
nach Auschwitz, die Permanenz der Kunst angesichts des auch von einer
befriedeten Gesellschaft nicht zu verhindernden Leids und der Endlichkeit
der Menschen.
Contents:
1. Kunst und Revolte; 2. Entwurf von La
Jolla; 3. Die Zukunft der Kunst, Gesellschaft als Kunstwerk; 4. Kunst in der
eindimensionalen Gesellschaft; 5. Briefe über Surrealismus; 6. Aragon; 7.
Proust-Notizen.
See the Dec.
2000 Deutschlandfunk review of vols. 1 and 2 by Johan Hartle; Feb. 2001
literaturkritik.de review by Rolf Löchel.
- 3: Philosophie und Psychoanalyse.
Edited by Peter-Erwin Jansen, introduction by Alfred Schmidt, (sched. pub.
date October 2001).
Contents:
1. Jenseits des Realitätsprinzips; 2.
Antwort auf Erich Fromm; 3. Die Anklage der westlichen Philosophie in Freuds
Theorie; 4. Eros und Kultur; 5. Soziale und psychologiesche Repression; 6.
Die Bedeutung des Todes; 7. Gedanken zu einer negativen Metaphysik
- 4: Die Studentenbewegung und Ihre Folgen. Edited by
Peter-Erwin Jansen, introduction by Wolfgang Kraushaar, (October 2002).
Contents:
1. Hat die Demokratie eine Zukunft? 2. Die Errichtung
Israels war ein politischer Akt; 3. Komplex Angela Davis; 4. Stellungnahme
zur Kuba-Krise; 5. Briefwechsel mit Rudi Dutschke; 6. Vietnam Komplex
See
also: Wolfgang Kraushaar (ed.): Frankfurter Schule und Studentenbewegung:
Von der Flaschenpost zum Molotowcocktail 1946-1995. 3 vols. (Frankfurt:
Rogner & Bernhard, 1998), together 1816pp; 75,- DM. (June
1998 FAZ review; archive copy)
- 5: Oekologie und Gesellschaftskritik. Edited by
Peter-Erwin Jansen, introduction by Iring Fetscher. (October 2003).
Contents (preliminary):
1. Oekologie und Gesellschaftskritik; 2. Der
Eurokommunismus als 'historischer Kompromiss'.
Feindanalysen: Über die Deutschen, edited
by Peter-Erwin Jansen and introduced by Detlev Claussen (zu Klampen, 1998),
149pp.
Contents:
1. Die neue deutsche Mentalität; 2. Darstellung des
Feindes; 3. Ueber psychologische Neutralität; 4. Ueber soziale und politische
Aspekte des Nationalsozialismus; 5. Kriegs- und Nachkriegsgeneration; 6.
Deutsche Philosophie im zwanzigsten Jahrhundert; 7. 33 Thesen; 8. Ist eine
freie Gesellschaft gegenwärtig möglich?
The bol.de
page has the following description from the Zurich Weekly News, 4
June 1998 (Harold's translation): "An exciting find: Herbert Marcuse's
American Writings on Germany. What kind of people were the Germans
under Hitler? In these memoranda, published now for the first time, which the
exiled philosopher wrote for the US government during World War II, we find
astonishingly modern answers. ... We have the initiative of the small
publisher in Lüneburg and the tenacity of the Frankfurt Marcuse-Expert
Peter-Erwin Jansen to thank for the publication of these hitherto unknown
works by Marcuse. In the context of the discussions about Germans as followers
of Hitler that have been reignited by the Goldhagen debate, these texts
deserve attention far beyond the circle of unwavering Marcuse readers."
Editor P.-E. Jansen adds: "In June 1998 this book was at the top of the
best-seller lists of the Süddeutsche Zeitung (nonfiction), BuchJournal, and
the Norddeutscher Rundfunk radio station."
See also the reviews in July
1998 reviews in Junge
Welt and FAZ
(archive
copy).
(See also this 1942 text, "Staat und Individuum im
Nationalsozialismus," first published in Oct.
2000 in the newspaper taz.)
Gespräche mit Herbert Marcuse. (Edition Suhrkamp, 1978) (DM10
from amazon.de)
Contents: Theorie und Politik (July 1977 in
Starnberg, with Habermas, Heinz Lubasz, and Tilman
Spengler);
Weiblichkeitsbilder (July 1977 in Pontresina, Switzerland
[Herbert's favorite vacation spot], with Silvia Bovenschen and Marianne
Schuller);
Salecina (1975 interview and summer 1977 conversation
with Erica Sherover (Herbert's third wife), Berthold Rothschild, Theo
Pinkus);
Radikale Philosophie: Die Frankfurter Schule (undated BBC
broadcasts, with Lubasz, Alfred Schmidt, Karl Popper, Ralf Dahrendorf, Rudi
Dutschke);
"So sieht in der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft der Fortschritt
aus..." (Nov. 1977 in La Jolla, with Hans Christoph Buch).
Peter
Marcuse, Herbert's son (and a professor of urban planning at Columbia University
in New York City), is the literary executor for Herbert's estate.
Requests to publish any of Herbert's writings should be addressed to him at
pm35@columbia.edu.
(Herbert's letters
and papers are held by the Marcuse archive
at the City and University Library in Frankfurt, Germany.)
See also Peter's
preface to the 1998
and foreword to the
2001 first and second volumes of Herbert's papers (both documents archived
on this site).
A professor's legacy is visible not only through publications, but in
(former) students as well. Abbie Hoffman and Angela
Davis, now Professor in the History of Consciousness
department at UC Santa Cruz (AD's page), are two
of Herbert's best-known.
See Angela's
published autobiography (1988), or this short biography for
Black History Month. Disinformation.com has an excellent, comprehensive
Angela Davis site. You can listen to her read from her book "Blues
Legacies and Black Feminism" on KUSP's website; or peruse a
1996 course
syllabus.
On Abbie Hoffman, see this 1997
NY Times review of Jonah Raskin's biography of him.
See also Andrew
Feenberg (professor of philosophy at San Diego State), above.
The Frankfurt School and Critical Theory since the 1980s
Numerous
scholars were strongly influenced by members of the Frankfurt School (actually
the Institut fuer
Sozialforschung in Frankfurt; see its history in English)
and consider themselves practitioners of Critical Theory. Juergen
Habermas (b. 1929) is by far the best known member of this "second
generation" of critical sociologists. On Habermas see the linkography by Antti
Kauppinen, a postgraduate student of philosophy at the University of
Helsinki; or this overview
and resources by Steve Robinson, a student at Michigan State University.
A younger generation of scholars who studied in the 1960s can more properly
be considered "students" of Marcuse and other members of the Frankfurt School.
In 1999 for instance, Detlev Claussen, Oskar Negt
und Michael Werz, at the University of Hannover in Germany, began
publishing a series called the "Hannoversche Schriften," which is devoted
to the continuing influence of Critical Theory. The first volume, Keine
Kritische Theorie ohne Amerika, was reviewed by Micha Brumlik in the FAZ
in Dec. 1999 (archive
copy).
For what would have been Herbert's 100th birthday (July 18, 1998),
Detlev Claussen wrote a "Remembrance," which was published in the Zurich
Weltwoche and on the University of
Hannover website. See also the list of speakers on the program of a 1998 commemorative
conference at Berkeley.
Other famous Marcuses of Herbert's generation (back to top)
top of this
page
page begun in Nov. 1997 at history.ucsb.edu
expanded
and moved to this server in March 2001
by Harold Marcuse
last updated July 3, 2002
contact: hmarcuse@yahoo.com
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Herbert's Legacy (back to top)