The Relevance of Herbert Marcuse’s Thought Today: Or the Historical Fate of Bourgeois Democracy in and Beyond the Neoliberal Era

Abstract

This article engages Herbert Marcuse’s work from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s (his New Left period and just after) and puts it into dialogue with current radical democratic political theorists who have reflected on how the systemic dysfunctions of neoliberalism have enabled the rise of populist authoritarianism within existing liberal democracies. Revisiting the way Marcuse struggled with critical issues in theory and practice can illuminate both possibilities for, and difficulties with, liberation that remain relevant for critiques of neoliberalism today. After revisiting Marcuse I then briefly take up affinities between his analysis of how liberal democracies can become authoritarian, and recent critiques of neoliberalism in the thought of Sheldon Wolin, Wendy Brown and John Keane. These theorists have implicitly or explicitly taken up aspects of Marcuse’s analysis of authoritarianism and domination in their own critiques of neoliberalism today.