Marcuse, Herbert

(1898–1979)

Political and social theorist. Marcuse was born in Berlin, and became associated with the Frankfurt school . His early work was a synthesis of Marxism, phenomenology, and existentialism . In 1934 he fled Nazi Germany to America and began teaching at Columbia university, subsequently holding posts with the Office of Strategic Services and the Office of Intelligence Research. He held posts at Brandeis (1954) and at San Diego (1965). His first work in English, Reason and Revolution (1941), is an introduction to Hegel and Marx, while Eros and Civilization (1955) ropes Freud into the cause of sketching a non-repressive society. Marcuse's fame rests largely on his elevation to ‘Father of the New Left’ when his book One-Dimensional Man (1964) became a bible of radical student movements of the 1960s. Like other analysts of the Frankfurt school, and theorists such as Gramsci, Marcuse argued that the workers in modern society were stupefied by the products of their own labour; revolution, therefore, must come from those outside the system, such as students, intellectuals, and minorities.