- His Marxist scholarship inspired many radical intellectuals and political activists in the 1960s and 1970s, both in the United States and internationally.
- In 1932 Marcuse stopped working with Heidegger, who later joined the Nazi Party in 1933. Marcuse understood that he would not qualify as a professor under the Nazi regime as the Nazis seized power and anti-Semitism increased. Marcuse was then hired to work in the Institute of Social Research in the Frankfurt School. The Institute deposited their endowment in Holland in anticipation of the Nazi takeover, so Marcuse never got to actually work in the school.
- Although he never returned to Germany to live, he remained one of the major theorists associated with the Frankfurt School, along with Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno (among others).
- In his written works, he criticized capitalism, modern technology, Soviet Communism, and popular culture, arguing that they represent new forms of social control.
- His best-known works are Eros and Civilization (1955) and One-Dimensional Man (1964).
- In 1940, he became a US citizen and resided in the country until his death in 1979.
- In the 1960s and the 1970s, he became known as the preeminent theorist of the New Left and the student movements of West Germany, France, and the United States; some consider him "the Father of the New Left".
- In 1940 he published Reason and Revolution, a dialectical work studying G. W. F. Hegel and Karl Marx.
- After leaving Germany for Switzerland in May 1933, Marcuse emigrated to the United States in June 1934. Marcuse served at the Institute's Columbia University branch from 1934 through 1942. He traveled to Washington, D.C., in 1942, to work for the Office of War Information, and afterward the Office of Strategic Services. Marcuse then went on to teach at Brandeis University and the University of California, San Diego later in his career.
- In 1916, he was drafted into the German Army, but only worked in horse stables in Berlin during World War I. He then became a member of a Soldiers' Council that participated in the aborted socialist Spartacist uprising.
- He returned to Freiburg in 1928 to study with Edmund Husserl and write a habilitation with Martin Heidegger, which was published in 1932 as Hegel's Ontology and the Theory of Historicity (Hegels Ontologie und die Theorie der Geschichtlichkeit). This study was written in the context of the Hegel Renaissance that was taking place in Europe with an emphasis on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's ontology of life and history, idealist theory of spirit and dialectic.
- He was a prominent figure in the Frankfurt-based Institute for Social Research - what later became known as the Frankfurt School.
- Marcuse's formal education began at Mommsen Gymnasium and continued at the Kaiserin-Augusta Gymnasium in Charlottenburg from 1911 to 1916.
- In 1920 he transferred to the University of Freiburg to concentrate on German literature, philosophy, politics, and economics. He completed his Ph.D. thesis at the University of Freiburg in 1922 on the German Künstlerroman, after which he moved back to Berlin, where he worked in publishing.
- In 1919 he attended Humboldt University in Berlin, taking classes for four semesters.
- Between 1943 and 1950, Marcuse worked in US government service for the Office of Strategic Services (predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency) where he criticized the ideology of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the book Soviet Marxism: A Critical Analysis (1958).
- Marcuse's family was a German upper-middle-class Jewish family that was well integrated into German society.
- He was a German-American philosopher, social critic, and political theorist, associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory.
- Born in Berlin, Marcuse studied at the Humboldt University of Berlin and then at Freiburg, where he received his PhD.
- Marcuse began his work in 1933 with the Institute in Geneva, where a branch office was formed. While a member of the Frankfurt School (also known as the Institute of Social Research), Marcuse developed a model for critical social theory, created a theory of the new stage of state and monopoly capitalism, described the relationships between philosophy, social theory, and cultural criticism, and provided an analysis and critique of German National Socialism. Marcuse worked closely with critical theorists while at the institute.
- In 2003, after his ashes were rediscovered in the United States, they were buried in the Dorotheenstädtischer cemetery in Berlin.
- Marcuse's granddaughter is the novelist Irene Marcuse and his grandson, Harold Marcuse, is a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
- During World War II, Marcuse first worked for the US Office of War Information (OWI) on anti-Nazi propaganda projects. In 1943, he transferred to the Research and Analysis Branch of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency.
- After the dissolution of the OSS in 1945, Marcuse was employed by the US Department of State as head of the Central European section, becoming an intelligence analyst of Nazism. A compilation of Marcuse's reports was published in Secret Reports on Nazi Germany: The Frankfurt School Contribution to the War Effort (2013). He retired after the death of his first wife in 1951.
- Leszek Kolakowski described Marcuse's views as essentially anti-Marxist, in that they ignored Marx's critique of Hegel and discarded the historical theory of class struggle entirely in favor of an inverted Freudian reading of human history where all social rules could and should be discarded to create a "New World of Happiness." Kolakowski concluded that Marcuse's ideal society "is to be ruled despotically by an enlightened group [who] have realized in themselves the unity of Logos and Eros, and thrown off the vexatious authority of logic, mathematics, and the empirical sciences.".
- Directed by the Harvard historian William L. Langer, the Research and Analysis (R&A) Branch was the largest American research institution in the first half of the twentieth century. At its zenith between 1943 and 1945, it employed over twelve hundred, four hundred of whom were stationed abroad. In many respects, it was the site where post-World War II American social science was born, with protégés of some of the most esteemed American university professors, as well as numerous European intellectual émigrés, in its ranks.
- Marcuse was a friend and collaborator of the political sociologist Barrington Moore Jr. and of the political philosopher Robert Paul Wolff, and also a friend of the Columbia University sociology professor C. Wright Mills, one of the founders of the New Left movement. In his "Introduction" to One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse wrote, "I should like to emphasize the vital importance of the work of C. Wright Mills.".
- In the post-war period, Marcuse rejected the theory of class struggle and the Marxist concern with labor, instead claiming, according to Leszek Kolakowski, that since "all questions of material existence have been solved, moral commands and prohibitions are no longer relevant." He regarded the realization of man's erotic nature as the true liberation of humanity, which inspired the utopias of Jerry Rubin and others.
- While working as a graduate fellow under Marcuse, Lowell Bergman (who three decades later was portrayed by Al Pacino in The Insider (film)) served as a "de facto bodyguard" for the philosopher during a period when Marcuse was regularly receiving threats of physical violence.
- A fictional representation of Herbert Marcuse appears in the Coen brothers film Hail, Caesar! played by John Bluthal.
- Jessica Benjamin and Nancy Chodorow believed that Marcuse's reliance on Freud's drive theory as the source of the desire for societal change is inadequate for both philosophers since he fails to account for the individual's intersubjective growth.
- In his first marriage with Sophie Wertheim, they had one son Peter Marcuse born in 1928. Peter Marcuse was a professor emeritus of urban planning at Columbia University located in New York.
- Marcuse first began his teaching career as a political theorist at Columbia University, then at Harvard University in 1952. Marcuse worked at Brandeis University from 1954 to 1965, then at the University of California San Diego from 1965 to 1970.[13] It was during his time at Brandeis that he wrote his most famous work, One-Dimensional Man (1964).
- Marcuse is not widely remembered outside of contexts where critical theory is taught or referenced. This theory, rooted in Marxist philosophy, remains as one of the main components of Marcuse's influence. FIRE co-founders Alan Kors and Harvey Silverglate wrote that Marcuse's theory of Repressive Tolerance was the origin of political correctness on college campuses.
- In March 1943, Marcuse joined fellow Frankfurt School scholar Franz Neumann in R&A's Central European Section as senior analyst; there he rapidly established himself as "the leading analyst on Germany".
- He became a close friend and inspirer of the French philosopher André Gorz.
- His work strongly influenced intellectual discourse on popular culture and scholarly popular culture studies. In particular, he influenced youth because he "spoke their language." He understood the importance of rock and roll, for example, as a symbol for New Left activism. He had many speaking engagements in the US and Western Bloc in the late 1960s and 1970s.
- Marcuse defended the arrested East German dissident Rudolf Bahro (author of Die Alternative: Zur Kritik des real existierenden Sozialismus [trans., The Alternative in Eastern Europe]), discussing in a 1979 essay Bahro's theories of "change from within.".
- Marcuse's critiques of capitalist society (especially his 1955 synthesis of Marx and Sigmund Freud, Eros and Civilization, and his 1964 book One-Dimensional Man) resonated with the concerns of the student movement in the 1960s. Because of his willingness to speak at student protests and his essay "Repressive Tolerance" (1965), Marcuse soon became known in the media as "Father of the New Left." Contending that the students of the sixties were not waiting for the publication of his work to act, Marcuse brushed the media's branding of him as "Father of the New Left" aside lightly, saying "It would have been better to call me not the father, but the grandfather, of the New Left.".
- On July 29, 1979, ten days after his eighty-first birthday, Marcuse died after suffering a stroke during his trip to Germany. He had just finished speaking at the Frankfurt Römerberggespräche, and was on his way to the Max Planck Institute for the Study of the Scientific-Technical World in Starnberg, on invitation from second-generation Frankfurt School theorist Jürgen Habermas.
- Marcuse's thought remains influential in the 21st century. In the introduction to an issue of New Political Science dedicated to Marcuse, Robert Kirsch and Sarah Surak described his influence as, "alive and well, vibrant across multiple fields of inquiry across many areas of social relations.".
- Herbert Marcuse appealed to students of the New Left through his emphasis on the power of critical thought and his vision of total human emancipation and a non-repressive civilization. He supported students he felt were subject to the pressures of a commodifying system, and has been regarded as an inspirational intellectual leader.
- The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre asserted that Marcuse falsely assumed consumers were completely passive, uncritically responding to corporate advertising. MacIntyre frankly opposed Marcuse. "It will be my crucial contention in this book," MacIntyre stated, "that almost all of Marcuse's key positions are false. For example, Marcuse was not an orthodox Marxist. Like many of the Frankfurt School, Marcuse wrote of "critical theory" not of "Marxism" and MacIntyre notes a similarity in this to the Right Hegelians, whom Marx attacked. Hence, MacIntyre proposed that Marcuse be regarded as "a pre-Marxist thinker". According to MacIntyre, Marcuse's assumptions about advanced industrial society were wrong in whole and in part. "Marcuse," concluded MacIntyre, "invokes the great names of freedom and reason while betraying their substance at every important point.".
- Marcuse's concept of repressive tolerance attracted renewed attention following the 9/11 attacks. Repressive tolerance is also relevant to 21st century campus protests and the Black Lives Matter movement.
- He is also considered among the most influential of the Frankfurt School critical theorists on American culture, due to his studies on student and counter-cultural movements on the 1960s. The legacy of the 1960s, of which Marcuse was a vital part, lives on, and the great refusal is still practiced by oppositional groups and individuals.
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