Herbert Marcuse Research Articles

Marcuse, Capitalism, and the One-Dimensional Student

AbstractDrawing on critical theorist Herbert Marcuse’s analysis of modern technological society in his 1964 book, One-Dimensional Man, this article argues that the forces of one-dimensionality that characterize citizens under capitalism have necessarily found their way into schools, leading to what we see as an epidemic of the one-dimensional student. Where other scholars have focused on the impacts of capitalism on schooling and possible structural reform efforts through educational policy, this analysis takes seriously the role of the individual in overcoming an all too easy tendency toward one-dimensional thinking. Applying Marcuse’s fundamental concepts of one-dimensionality, the authors point to the ways in which schools and society actively teach and promote one-dimensionality. Through this application of Marcuse to the field of education, the authors uncover the subtle ways that schools shape the consciousness of students, and in doing so perpetuate one-dimensional society. The article concludes with a number of solutions that reassess educational aims to be more in tune with the sharpening of critical consciousness, or what Marcuse calls negative thinking, for the sake of freedom of self and society.

“Repressive Tolerance” - Reflections after Sixty Years

This brief article revisits Herbert Marcuse's classic essay 'Repressive Tolerance', first published six decades ago in 1965. It explores the key ideas expressed by Marcuse and offers some thoughts about their potential relevance today.

Answering populist attacks on psychosocial ideas: why Fromm matters more than Marcuse

The reactionary American intellectual Christopher Rufo has made German critical theorist Herbert Marcuse the centre of his campaign to purge the American academy of radical ideas and movements. Marcuse’s ideas have significant influence in contemporary psychosocial scholarship, so attacks on his work may have negative consequences for psychosocial scholars. Rufo’s critique of the influence of Marcuse’s ideas is mostly exaggerated but it contains elements of truth. This article will outline ways in which some of Marcuse’s ideas are echoed in elements of the contemporary left/liberal intellectual and political orthodoxy. We revisit the Fromm/Marcuse debate from the 1950s, and offer an analysis of why Rufo might have picked Marcuse for attack when Fromm might well have been a viable target, as Fromm was in the 1980s when he was famously scapegoated by Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind (1987). I then offer an analysis of how Erich Fromm’s alternative psychosocial radicalism can help better defend the psychosocial perspective in mass politics than Marcuse’s framework. Fromm’s framework also offer a theoretical foundation for radical psychosocial studies that can help our field defend itself against the new McCarthyism of Rufo and his allies on the global right who are likely to attack radical psychosocial perspectives in the near future.

Heteronomy, Repression, and Collective Wisdom

One of the most controversial notions in Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man is the distinction between true and false needs. In this commentary, I suggest that Marcuse’s distinction is ambiguous between two readings, which I term the Repression Reading and the Heteronomy Reading, respectively. I argue that considerations from Maiese and Hanna’s (2019) notion of the Mind Shaping Thesis can help to see why we ought to reject the Heteronomy Reading in favor of the Repression Reading of false needs. I then suggest that the Repression Reading of false needs can, in turn, reveal some weaknesses in Maiese and Hanna’s theory of collectively wise social institutions.

Marcusean resources to think coloniality

The article aims to take a stand in the debates surrounding the potential contribution of the theoreticians of the first generation of the Frankfurt School to postcolonial/decolonial theory, by showing that Herbert Marcuse, in his work, has outlined coloniality as later authors have defined it. Marcuse denounced the neocolonialism and neoimperialism of which the Global South populations were prey at the time of decolonizations. He showed that the welfare state and the affluent society in contemporary Western societies largely fed themselves on the continued economic exploitation of the Global South. Marcuse decried the uneven development bred by the capitalist system and criticized the ideology and mechanisms of development imposed on the newly independent countries, which also violated the subjectivity of their peoples, ignoring their values and aspirations. He condemned the racial-based violence and war imposed on the ‘underprivileged’ in the Global South and the Global North alike. These trains of thought describe different aspects of coloniality. This article will analyze these insights through a close reading of Marcuse’s work and comparisons with the writings of Frantz Fanon, Kwame Nkrumah and Samir Amin.

Repressive suspicion, or: the problem with conspiracy theories

ABSTRACT Conspiracy culture cultivates suspicion towards the hidden workings of power. While some modes of suspicion direct critical attention towards the crimes and cruelties of oppressive social relations, other modes misdirect that same attention. When such misdirection serves to reproduce oppressive social relations, entrapping its adherents in the promise of emancipation, this may be understood as ‘repressive suspicion’. Empirically, this concept is characterized, herein, via a reception study of the QAnon conspiracy theory, reconstructing how one of the most prominent participants in the insurrection in Washington, D.C., on 6th January 2021 became wrapped up in ‘Q’ culture – a story that paints a poignant, complex picture of repressive suspicion. This concept is then further developed in historical and theoretical terms, in dialogue with the works of Herbert Marcuse, leading to an analysis of QAnon as a microcosm of the contemporary crisis of hegemony, drawing on Antonio Gramsci, Stuart Hall, and Nancy Fraser. While, in the 1960s, and even in the 1990s, repressive suspicion could be largely ignored by practitioners of political critique, in the current conjuncture this is no longer the case. Thus, as well as constructing a diagnosis, this article also poses a question: If this is what repressive suspicion looks like, how must we conceive its opposite?

Shadows of the Empire/A New Hope

Online news outlets have published a fair amount of journalism concerning Isabel Fall's 2020 science fiction short story, “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter,” later retitled “Helicopter Story.” Yet the highly polarized reception the story received has made up the bulk of the discourse. This is a tragic oversight, as the most interesting thing about “Helicopter Story” is not the online reaction to its original title but how the content of the story itself serves as an illustration of a dialectical history of gender in the United States. In Fall's story, gender is partially demystified by acknowledging the eradication of Indigenous cross-gender practices, racially imbricated plasticity, and the fusion of state and medical power that determines and shapes gender. Even so, some mystification remains. Gender is a reified social relation whose origins are an attempt to install binary biological sex. However, this reification does not result in the reinstallation of gender as ineluctable truth. Rather, it provides the opportunity for the expression of utopian desire, as theorized in the queer Marxism of Kevin Floyd or the dialectical literary criticism of Fredric Jameson, both of whom draw heavily from Frankfurt School theorist Herbert Marcuse when proposing that the only way out of reification is through. A proposed subgenre of science fiction, “speculative gender fiction,” is a literary form uniquely suited for exploring both the reification of gender and the utopian desire to escape from it.

Democracy Between Form and Content

ABSTRACT In this essay I evaluate Larry Alan Busk’s critique of contemporary democratic theorists and contemporary “democratic” politics in Democracy in Spite of the Demos in the context of Carl Schmitt’s critique of modern democracy. I argue that Busk shares Schmitt’s general conception of democracy and of the dangers attending any appeal to it. Though Busk presents Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno as alternatives to the current crop of democratic theorists, I demonstrate that Marcuse fell prey to the most significant of the paradoxes and ambivalences that Schmitt prognosticated. Adorno, I argue, is less unsteady an ally, but one that stays further back from politics than Busk evidently wishes. In the end, Busk’s Schmittian critique of democracy and democratic theory extends further than he himself suggests and reveals, not to a solution to our problems, but a new way of understanding them and their severity.

Dialektika Progresif; “One Dimensional Man”, Desublimasi Represif: Kritik Herbert Marcuse Atas Masyarakat Industri Modern

Marcuse’s main idea is that technology and mass consumption have created a social order that makes people "one-dimensional human," losing the ability to think critically and see social alternatives. Marcuse argued that a fundamental change in society was needed to allow the liberation of individuals from the pressures and constraints generated by the capitalist system. The purpose of this paper is to critically explore the dialectic of Herbert Marcuse's approach to the "one-dimensional man" and repressive desublimation. This research method uses a qualitative approach with a critical approach to the study of Herbert Marcuse's thought. The concepts of "repressive sublimation" and "administrated" describe the way modern society directs its natural human impulses into a form regulated and controlled by social and political authorities. Repressive sublimation results in the suppression of self-expression and creativity, while administrated refers to the dominance of bureaucracy and technocracy in managing society. This results in unfreedom and homogenization in society. This study contains Marcuse's biography, looking at the content of his works, contributions to knowledge and communication, and the relevance of Herbert Marcuse's critical thinking to the current context. One Dimensional Man; is used as a spectacular work a narrative created to criticize the irrational and oppressive grand narrative of capitalism with an exploitative power structure through the affirmative dimension, for which Marcuse suggests rebuilding the dimension of negation; Where society again has critical power and is no longer in a state of silence.

ВИНИКНЕННЯ ТА РОЗВИТОК ОКСФОРДСЬКОЇ ФІЛОСОФІЇ ЯК ПЕРЕДУМОВА ФОРМУВАННЯ ФІЛОСОФІЇ ПОВСЯКДЕННОЇ МОВИ

B a c k g r o u n d . According to a common prejudice, especially prevalent among philosophers in the continental tradition, the philosophy of everyday language (sometimes referred to as Oxford philosophy), with its focus on what we usually say and mean, fundamentally expresses a positivist attitude. Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), who significantly contributed to the spread of this view, interprets the appeal to the concept analysis in these philosophers' writings as purely ideological: it fails to recognize the constructed nature of the social and views the social as a domain of brute facts where critical thinking should cease. Therefore, to grasp the essence of the ordinary language philosophy, it is crucial to identify the prerequisites for the emergence of this philosophical style and delve into its historical context. M e t h o d s . In this article, the author employs the method of historical-philosophical reconstruction to clarify the conditions of the formation and genesis of Oxford philosophy. General scientific methods of cognition – such as analysis, synthesis, and generalization – are used to elucidate key ideas and concepts that influenced the development of Oxford philosophy's method. Additionally, methods of systematization and comparison are applied. R e s u l t s . The article identifies the historical prerequisites for the formation of Oxford philosophy, specifying the key ideas and concepts that impacted the development of the ordinary language philosophy. It clarifies the distinctions and interconnections between the concepts of the philosophy of everyday language and Oxford philosophy. C o n c l u s i o n s . For ten years following the end of the Second World War, the University of Oxford became a hub of exceptionally productive philosophical activity. This period laid the groundwork for the emergence of a new and original philosophical movement known as the "Ordinary language philosophy" or "Oxford philosophy". However, equating the ordinary language philosophy entirely with Oxford philosophy is not accurate. The former term pertains specifically to the methodology of analyzing natural language expressions in the post-World War II era. In contrast, Oxford philosophy encompasses a broader historical context, including the pre-war period of philosophical activity at the University of Oxford. Thus, Oxford philosophy should be understood as a historical-philosophical stage that ultimately led to the formation of the philosophy of everyday language.

Consumptive Behavior of Students: Analysis of Herbert Marcuse's Perspective

Human life in the post-modern era is characterized by very varied needs and has penetrated all levels of society, including students. In practice, students at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Law, Makassar State University tend to act excessively and prioritize desires over needs, for certain reasons. This must be addressed as soon as possible because students are a key element in the movement to stop the pressure from capitalist activities that have developed, not to become supporters in inheriting and expanding the capitalist system. Therefore, this research aims to determine the consumer behavior of students at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Law, Makassar State University. This type of research is qualitative descriptive research using Herbert Marcuse's theoretical approach. Data collection techniques, namely observation, interviews, and documentation. Researchers used source triangulation to ensure the validity of the data, where the data collected in this research was analyzed using theories related to the object of research, namely the consumer behavior of students at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Law, Makassar State University. The results of this research show that students at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Law at UNM tend to prioritize secondary needs solely to achieve inner satisfaction. In essence, a new form of control has been integrated within students, accompanied by various forms of repression. Apart from that, by using Herbert Marcuse's theory the author also found that students at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Law at UNM in the era known as Gen-Z have been influenced by the urge to fulfill their needs even by ignoring other aspects of their lives, including lectures.

Horror and the Cube Films: An unlikely medium for the negotiation of Nationalist-Cultural ideologies

Over the past several decades, scholarship has come to recognise the unexpected significance of horror cinema ventures as both culturally and politically relevant. One of Canada’s greatest horror film successes was Vincenzo Natali’s 1997 psychological thriller Cube that metaphorically explores the suffocating nature of vocational social relations under the conditions of a patriarchal military-industrial capitalism. So innovative was its premise that US interests quickly acquired the rights to produce and distribute Cube 2: Hypercube (2002) and Cube Zero (2004), but they were just as quick to reformulate the most subversive critique of the original film. Two decades later, in 2021, Japanese producers released a remake of the original film (which was so popular there), although it also re-coded the thematic critique, just as the American sequels had done. With this group of films across three national production traditions arises an opportunity to “detect shifts in the ideological constellation”, as Slavoj Žižek has argued, by “compar[ing] consecutive remakes of the same story” (2011, p. 61). Following primarily Herbert Marcuse’s understanding of political repressive tolerance, this article demonstrates the way in which constructions of cultural identity are negotiated across national traditions in the age of globalisation. Cube and its follow-ups demonstrate the nationalist-inflected limits of critical expression in the way that each subsequent film attempts to re-focus and re-code the horrors of the narrative machine in order to assert their own nationalist sensibilities threatened by the cultural levelling effect of globalisation in an age of transnational cinema distribution.

Characterization and Presentation of Capitalist Environmental Destruction: A Critical Reading of Austin Bukenya’s A Hole in the Sky (2013) and Okiya Omtatah’s Voice of the People (2007)

This paper investigates how playwrights employ characterization to illuminate acts of capitalist environmental destruction in Austin Bukenya’s A Hole in the Sky (2013) and Okiya Omtatah’s Voice of the People (2007). The central idea is to examine the presentation of environmental destruction and the critical responses as dramatized through character articulation. The paper is premised on Ecofeminist and Eco-Marxist theoretical frameworks. The proponents of Ecofeminist theory are Karen J. Warren, Vandana Shiva, Greta Gaard, Carolyn Merchant and Ynestra King, whereas those of the Eco-Marxist framework are John Bellamy Foster, Herbert Marcuse and Paul Burkett. Ecofeminists argue that there is a close interrelation between women and nature. The theorization is that there is an interconnection between women and nature, particularly regarding their nurturing abilities, exploitation, and liberation. The paper contends that the twin-exploitation aspect of ecofeminism portrays acts of domination wrought by patriarchy and capitalism. Eco-Marxists expound on the exploitation aspect by linking ecological destruction to unbridled capitalism. The article uses qualitative methodology whereby the plays were purposively sampled and thematic analysis was done to examine the articulation of characters in depicting environmental destruction. The study establishes that playwrights have appropriately used their characters to illuminate environmental degradation. The depiction of characters as either conservationists or agents and orchestrators of environmental destruction helps the playwrights present capitalist oppression, repression, and expansionism

Evaluating the role of psychedelic psychotherapy in addressing societal alienation: Imaginaries of liberation

AbstractQuestions are currently being posed concerning the implications of the clinical uptake of psychedelics. While enthusiasm surrounds the potential therapeutic benefits of psychedelics and critique surrounds their appropriation to commercial ends, limited attention has been given to the role of psychedelics in generating social transformation. Herbert Marcuse contended radical change requires ‘new imaginaries of liberation’. We consider whether clinical uptake of psychedelics may produce the perceptual shifts necessary to generate social transformation surrounding contemporary alienating conditions. Economic structures contributing to these alienating conditions are highly resistant to change and may neuter psychedelics' revolutionary potential. We illustrate how psychedelics may be instrumentalised: regulating individuals into unjust systems; redirecting psychedelic usage away from therapeutic ends towards productivity; distracting or diverting attention from systemic forms of control; usurping non-ordinary states into the domain of self-care; and fetishistically commodifying psychedelic experience as a consumable. There are, however, reasons to believe that psychedelics, in raising consciousnesses, may prove resistant to co-option. In particular, psychedelics induce perceptual experiences that: challenge the paradigmatic assumptions of industrial society by provoking alternative epistemologies and metaphysics; generate expanded or ecological constructions of selfhood, thereby offering resignifications of meanings, desires, and life potentials; and offer the enriched phenomenological insight into self, other, and world called for in combating ubiquitous social alienation. In this way, psychedelics may induce the revolution in perception necessary to imagine liberatory potentials and spark the desire for collective emancipation.

Historical Evolution of Ideas and Theories Related to the Concept of Civil Society

The article presents the historical origin and growth of civil society. The philosophies of many philosophers show the ever-changing dimensions of civil society from time to time. The historical debate starts from classical political economists’ views, continues with Hegelian, Marx’s and Gramsci’s notions of civil society and ends at the current debate on civil society. Classical scholars considered civil society as an economic sphere and the property of emerging industrial societies that were characterized by complex segmentation of labor, the centrality of production and economic interactions. They give more importance to the state rather than individuals. Hegel, Karl Marx and Gramsci are the main philosophers of the classical school of thought. Other scholars like Herbert Marcuse, Jurgen Habermas, John Rawls, Michal Sandel, Charles Tayler and Michal Walzer also contributed in the debate of relationship between the state and civil society. Current scholars like Foucault, Derrida, Deliuze, Lyotard, Fradric Jameson and Francis Fukuyama have discussed the term of civil society with new directions and ideas. The main focus of these scholars is state, human rights, morality, socialism, liberalism and social movements. Their main point is that individuals are more important than the state. The major analysis of this article is based on qualitative approach. The article concludes that the nature of ideas about relationship between the state and civil society and the influence of civil society on state and that of state on civil society have shaped civil society in different dimensions in different periods of history.

Медиаманипуляции: критический подход

This article provides a critical analysis of the phenomenon of media manipulation in the context of the philosophy of Herbert Marcuse. The works of the philosopher reveal in detail the essence of manipulation as a way of introducing imposed standards of consumption into the minds of individuals. This way of managing society in a market economy is aimed at the hidden enslavement of citizens as well as increasing the profits of the ruling class. According to H. Marcuse, the main task of the media in bourgeois society is the formation of false needs, prerequisites for the purchase of goods. As practice shows, in the conditions of the information society and the increasing influence of new media, this interpretation of manipulation remains relevant. New forms of destructive audience control (consumers, voters) are currently being used on social networks. They mimic various community initiatives that are identified through critiques of reports and fact-checking. Based on modern material, the article shows some of the characteristic features of manipulative influence. New forms of employment – freelancing and play work – are considered manipulative constructs aimed at increasing the exploitation of individuals. Such forms of employment are widespread in the modern media industry. The penetration of the phenomenon under consideration into all spheres of human life allows us to speak about the total nature of the manipulative world order. Based on the analysis performed in the article, we can conclude that H. Marcuse's conceptual apparatus still applies. Some modern followers of his philosophical views successfully use critical theory as a way to explain various events and social processes. A critical assessment of the various manifestations of a one-dimensional society in the future serves as the basis for overcoming various destructive practices. The article emphasizes that a critical analysis of manipulative influence is connected with the ethical side of the work of mass media. The idea of morally acceptable forms and practices of mass communications today is one of the most common topics in scientific, scientificpractical, and industry literature on the ethics of journalistic creativity.

Two sorts of philosophical therapy: Ordinary language philosophy, social criticism and the Frankfurt school

In a recent article, Fabian Freyenhagen argues that we should understand first-generation Frankfurt School critical theory (in particular, the work of Adorno and Horkheimer) as being defined by a kind of ‘linguistic turn’ analogous to one present in the later Wittgenstein. Here, I elaborate on this hypothesis – initially by calling it into question, by detailing Herbert Marcuse’s extensive criticisms of Wittgenstein (and other analytic philosophers of language) in One-Dimensional Man. While Marcuse is harshly critical of analytic ordinary language philosophy, he is much more sympathetic to a different sort of ordinary language philosophy, which he unpacks with reference to Karl Kraus. I show how, by getting Marcuse’s criticisms of Wittgenstein and other analytic philosophers, and lauding of Kraus, into view, we can better understand the first generation of the Frankfurt School as having practised a sort of ‘non-quietistic’ philosophical therapy (that may or may not have been the sort of thing that Wittgenstein himself had in mind).

Pädagogik der Hoffnungslosigkeit

Abstract Pedagogy of Hopelessness. After the End of Utopia The end of utopia, of which Herbert Marcuse speaks in 1967, means both: the illusory, because false, realization of the ›better life‹ in and as capitalism as well as – therefore – the suspension of a concrete utopia as a dream of a human world. As culture-industrial spectacles, utopian social ideas turn into dystopian visions of the future; social, even socialist fiction becomes mere science fiction. In a world of accumulated crises that threaten humanity, utopia is now missing. To learn to hope again would be – not only pedagogically – necessary the utopian project of ›delearning‹ hopelessness. There is no alternative. utopia – critical pedagogy – principle of hope – critical theory – Herbert Marcuse

DARI KRITIS KE TINDAKAN KOMUNIKATIF

DARI KRITIS KE TINDAKAN KOMUNIKATIF

The Living Predicament of Human on the Verge of Modernity

“One-Dimensional Man” reflects the living predicament of people on the verge of modernity, that is, the dehumanization of existence state, the atomization of existence mode and the nihilization of existence meaning. Herbert Marcuse believes that the root cause of this predicament lies in the ideological role of science and technology, and then puts forward the realization of human liberation through philosophical criticism, cultural revolution and artistic redemption. However, because it is based on cultural and ideological criticism, the liberation program has a strong utopian color. In spite of this, Marcuse's theory of "one-dimensionality" deeply reveals the homogeneity of human society in the process of modernization, and its critical spirit provides enlightening significance to China's socialist modernization.