Human Needs and Politics: The Ideas of Christian Bay and Herbert Marcuse

Abstract

This article demonstrates the way in which a notion of pivotal to the political theory of Christian Bay and Herbert Marcuse. Although Bay distinguishes from wants, desires and demands while Marcuse differentiates true from false needs, both theorists connect prescriptions about what to be done in politics with what they regard as empirical statements about the (true/real/authentic) needs of human beings as individuals and as members of groups and politics. The article also demonstrates how the notion of need itself coalesces is and ought and argues how a politics based on a theory of human needs has dangerous authoritarian implications and involves a denial of individual freedom.