One Dimensional Man

Published as: "A M arcuse Renaissance?," M arcuse. From the New Left to the Next Left, edited by John Bokina and Timothy J. Lukes. Lawrence, University of Kansas Press, 1994: 245-267.

A M arcuse Renaissance? By Douglas Kellner Since his death in 1979, Herbert M arcuse's influence has been steadily waning. The extent to which his work is ignored in progressive circles is curious, as M arcusewas one of the most influential radical theorists of the day during the 1960s and his work continued to be a topic of interest and controversy during the 1970s. While the waning of the revolutionary movements with which he was involved helps explain M arcuse's eclipse in popularity, the lack of new texts and publications has also contributed. For while there have been a large number of newtranslations of works by Benjamin, Adorno, and Habermas during the past decade, few new publications of untranslated or uncollected material by M arcuse have appeared, although there have been a steady stream of books on M arcuse.1 In addition, while there has been great interest in the writings of Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard, Lyotard, and other French "postmodern," or "poststructuralist," theorists, Marcuse did not fit into the fashionable debates concerning modern and postmodern thought.2 Unlike Adorno, M arcuse did not anticipate the postmodern attacks on reason and his dialectics were not "negative." Rather he subscribed to the project of reconstructing reason and of positing utopian alternatives to the existing society -- a dialectical imagination that has fallen out of favor in an erathat rejects totalizing thought and grand visions of liberation and social reconstruction. The neglect of M arcuse may be altered through the publication of a wealth of material, much of it unpublished and unknown, that is found in the Herbert M arcuse archives in Frankfurt.3 During the summers of 1989 and 1991, and the Fall of 1990, I went through the archival material and was astonished at thenumber of valuable unpublished texts. The M arcuse archive is a treasure house and plans are shaping up to publish many volumes of this material. In this essay, I shall call attention to some of the most important archival material, focusing on some extremely interesting manuscripts from the 1940s and some unpublished book manuscripts and articles from the 1960s and 1970s. M y focus, in accord withthe interests of this anthology, will be how this new material can contribute to a M arcuse renaissance. M y argument is, first, that M arcuse addresses issues that continue to be of relevance to contemporary radical theory and politics and that the unpublished manuscripts contain much material pertinent to contemporary concerns which could provide the basis for a rebirth of interest in M arcuse'sthought. Secondly, I argue that M arcuse provides comprehensive philosophical perspectives on domination and liberation, a powerful method and framework for analyzing contemporary society, and a vision of liberation that is richer than classical M arxism, other versions of Critical Theory, and current versions of postmodern theory.4 Thus, I believe that

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M arcuse overcomes the limitationsof many current varieties of social theory and radical politics and that his writings provide a viable starting-point for theoretical and political concerns of the present age. Philosophy and Politics: Unpublished Papers From the 1940s Some of the richest manuscripts result from M arcuse's work during the 1940s when he was working for the U.S. government. The manuscripts include some fascinatingstudies of national socialism, a 1945 essay on art and politics in the totalitarian age, thirty-three theses on the contemporary era, which forecast the themes of One-Dimensional M an, and some manuscripts, coauthored with Franz Neumann, sketching out a book-length project on theories of social change.5 These texts are important because they provide original analyses of the psychological,...