Herbert Marcuse’s An Essay on Liberation

Herbert Marcuse’s An Essay on Liberation

We know that the economic evolution of the contemporary world refutes a certain number of the postulates of Marx. If the revolution is to occur at the end of two parallel movements, the unlimited shrinking of capital and the unlimited expansion of the proletariat, it will not occur or ought not to have occurred. Capital and proletariat have both been equally unfaithful to Marx. - Albert Camus, 1953

The validity of Marxist political theory has been seriously challenged by the realities of European civilization, both during the inter-war years and especially after WWII. The threat has been two-fold; on the one hand, was the refusal of capitalism to fail, a failure that Marxists had been predicting as immanent ever since the mid-twentieth century; on the other, was the failure of the Soviet Union to build a successful or humane society. Marxists living in the West, beyond the reach of Soviet suppression, have attempted to develop a comprehensive theory more in tune with the complexities of contemporary society than Classical Marxism.

Most prominent among these “Western Marxists” is a group known as the Frankfurt School. An eclectic group of bright intellectuals who fled Germany in the 1930s, they have sought to develop a “critical theory” that blends Freud and Weber (among others) with Marx. Herbert Marcuse’s An Essay on Liberation is an example of how they have attempted to keep their social and revolutionary theories relevant and vital. It deals with an increasingly complex society in an increasingly sophisticated manner. This effort creates an interesting historical tension within Marcuse’s work because the complexity of his analysis makes it impossible to adhere t...

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...an potential to achieve a balance between the spiritual (world of the mind) and the material (the objective world). Marcuse mentions Kant, but this section of his work borrows most heavily from Friedrich Schiller’s The Aesthetic Education of Man.

Bibliography

All quotations and references are from Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation. Boston: Beacon, 1969.

Although no secondary works were used to prepare this paper, the following books provided the necessary background for my interpretation.

Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey. New York: Norton, 1961.

Schiller, Friedrich. The Aesthetic Education of Man. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967.

Tucker, Robert, ed. The Marx Engels Reader, 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 1978.

Weber, Max. Essays in Sociology, eds. Gerth and Mills. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946.