Nation: The Revolution Never Came

Herbert Marcuse: 1898-1979

It is a worldly philosopher’s dream: his long neglected works catch fire, illuminate his times and emblazon his name for posterity. It does not often come true, but it did for Herbert Marcuse. In the tumultuous 1960s his arcane and obscurely written books were suddenly discovered by student radicals in both America and Western Europe, and the white-maned, craggy-faced, cigar-puffing septuagenarian found himself a culture hero of the youth rebellion. A protesting student in Rome spoke for innumerable other rebels when he placed Marcuse in a holy trinity of revolutionaries: “We see Marx as the prophet, Marcuse as his interpreter and Mao as the sword.”

But philosophical fame, like other kinds, proved fleeting. When the swords were sheathed and the flowers withered in the 1970s, Marcuse’s reputation faded just as fast as it had bloomed. When he died at 81 last week following a stroke in West Germany, he had virtually no influence among students and his once much discussed books—Eros and Civilization, One-Dimensional Man—were little read. Noted a member of his West German publishing house: “He died bitter, disillusioned with mankind but still an idealist.”

Born to an upper-class Jewish family in Berlin, Marcuse became a confirmed Marxist while studying at the universities of Berlin and Freiburg. In the German idealist tradition, he had abnormally high expectations for mankind and came to the conclusion that only revolution could realize them. He was a founder of the leftist Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. With the rise of Hitler, Marcuse and other members of the institute fled to the U.S., where they had a continuing impact on academic opinion.

After wartime service with the Office of Strategic Services and later with the State Department, Marcuse went back to teaching (Columbia, Harvard, Brandeis). His books, as they appeared, caused scarcely a ripple until the 1960s. Then came the splash. The student radicals who appropriated him were highly selective. From Marcuse’s message, embedded in prose of almost impenetrable prolixity, they extracted the slogans that served their purposes. Explained an American radical: “It was our unrepressed intolerance and thorough antipermissiveness that brought our actions success. Who gave us the intellectual courage to be intolerant and unpermissive? Herbert Marcuse more than anyone.”

For Marcuse, American freedom was illusory. Drawing on his own disillusionment with pre-Nazi Germany, he developed the conviction that society is manipulated by its unscrupulous managers. A system of “total administration” in America co-opted and disarmed dissenters, he said. Giving them freedom to dissent was a way of allowing them to let off steam without threatening the power establishment. Thus tolerance was a form of intolerance, one of those paradoxes that abound in Marcuse. He wrote: “Freedom (of opinion, of assembly, of speech) becomes an instrument for absolving servitude.”

To overturn this hypocritical society, Marcuse did not urge a revolt of the masses. He disdained the working class for its materialism. The common people, he lamented, we’re “disinclined to risk their relative prosperity for abstract and Utopian ideas.” Revolution, he believed, lay with a special elite he described as a “democratic educational dictatorship of free men” in his influential essay, Repressive Tolerance. And the Utopia they would create? Marcuse was rather hazy except to suggest that somehow people could continue to enjoy all the good things of life without having to pay the price for them.

His was an apocalyptic vision of humanity liberated from capitalist restraints and soaring into a splendid new world of unfettered pleasure.

Though his Utopia was not achieved, Marcuse lived pleasantly enough. He spent the half decade of student upheaval lecturing genially to packed halls in the sunny tranquillity of the University of California at San Diego. Tanned, fit, cheerful students mixed musings on revolution with sunning, surfing, downing beers. “You cannot have fun with fascism,” Marcuse recently complained. Yet he seemed to have fun. Just three years ago, he married his third wife Erica (by his first marriage he had a son Peter).

He loved music, hiking, parties, endless philosophizing. “Everything was up for questioning every day,” said a friend.

He reveled in man and beast alike. He was an avid lifetime member of the San Diego Zoo. If he was embittered at the failure of revolution and the waning of his own popularity, he did not show it. His own life—robust, naysaying, always provoking—was the best refutation of his theories. Tolerance never repressed him.