From the issue dated July 31, 1998
Giving a 1960s Cultural Icon His Due
A 6-volume publishing project aims to expand understanding of Herbert Marcuse, whose work has been debated more than read
By PETER MONAGHAN
In the tumult of the 1960s and 1970s, when the German philosopher Herbert Marcuse visited hotbeds of campus activism in the United States, thousands of believers in the counterculture -- radicals and hippies, students and the curious alike -- came out to hear him speak.
Few had actually read Marcuse's complex work.
That Marcuse, 70 years old in 1968, could become a cultural icon and celebrity seemed an unlikely phenomenon, says Douglas Kellner, a professor of the philosophy of education at the University of California at Los Angeles.
However, he says, Marcuse's telling critique of capitalism, and his striking advocacy of emancipation and revolution, resonated with the times. His views "were the Zeitgeist really, for at least a short period of the '60s and '70s. His work corresponded to social reality."
Mr. Kellner should know. During the "1968 rebellion" by students in the United States and France, he took part in sit-ins at Columbia University. "People were definitely inspired by Marcuse," he recalls, and by Marcuse's oft-quoted slogan "Imagination takes power."
Now Mr. Kellner is taking stock of the philosopher, who died in 1979, by editing the six-volume Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse for Routledge. The first volume, containing writings from 1942 to 1951, has just appeared.
"Marcuse got publicity everywhere for being the inspiration for these revolts, which of course was an exaggeration," says Mr. Kellner, who is also a professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. But "there was a fit between his ideas and these sorts of events."
Mr. Kellner and other cultural theorists now argue that Marcuse was the key figure of the Frankfurt School, a group of German Marxist intellectuals who, beginning in the years between the world wars, shaped thought on the intellectual and political left. They proposed far-reaching theories of society and culture -- for example, that capitalism reduced the masses to conformist consumerism.
Marcuse, who fled Nazi Germany for the United States in 1934, gained particularly prominence in his adopted land, and provoked passionate responses from every political quarter. The right hated him as a subversive polemicist, and still does. In 1968, the Ku Klux Klan and the John Birch Society tried to have him fired from the University of California at San Diego. More recently, Allan Bloom, in his 1987 jeremiad, The Closing of the American Mind (Simon & Schuster), strikingly twinned Marcuse and Mick Jagger as catalysts and emblems of nearly all the excesses of modern life.
The Shadow University (The Free Press), a forthcoming book by Alan Kors, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvey A. Silverglate, a Boston lawyer, steps up the attack. They contend that Marcuse, by arguing that progressives could reasonably limit the free speech of those for whom it served as a tool of domination, gave rise to what the authors characterize as a "political correctness" mandate on American campuses. (Marcuse's defenders are already calling the charge a ridiculous misconstruance of an isolated statement that Marcuse later tried to retract, and a hypocritical claim considering right's efforts to suppress free speech during the 1960s and '70s.)
Marcuse even had detractors on the left. Liberals considered him obscurantist. Communists thought he departed too radically from orthodox Marxist views. Progressive labor accused him of being an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency because, during World War II, he had worked in Washington, D.C., for the Office of Strategic Services, the C.I.A.'s precursor.
To his leftist critics, it didn't matter that Marcuse, like other German emigre intellectuals, had helped the U.S. government to defeat Hitler, or that after the war, he had been dismissed by the service as it became the C.I.A.
The Collected Papers will permit a summation -- and a clarification -- of Marcuse's achievements, Mr. Kellner says.
The series is a highly significant project, says Stanley Aronowitz, a professor of sociology at City University of New York's Graduate School and University Center. "Anybody who's got their head screwed on straight would realize that Marcuse was one of the leading 20th-century philosophers," he argues. "It will make a real contribution to reviving a neglected figure in American as well as world philosophy."
Carl Boggs, an authority on radical social and political theory, and in particular on the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), agrees. "Marcuse, in my opinion, stands really at the center of the tradition, whether one wants to call it Western Marxism or critical Marxism or neo-Marxism."
In fact, says Mr. Boggs, a professor of social sciences at National University, Marcuse's work cast important light on the work of Frankfurt School theorists and their ilk, like Gramsci and Georg Lukacs.
Because key figures of the era, including Gramsci and Walter Benjamin, have already been the subjects of publishing retrospectives, a similar summation of Marcuse's work was overdue, researchers say. The six volumes, to appear over the next five years, will add to an already large amount of Marcuse's writing that is still in print in English.
The new volumes will gather essays, lectures, and other papers that were never published, and many that have been inaccessible because they appeared only in obscure publications, or were reprinted in books that are long out of print.
The current volume includes an unpublished and unknown theory of social change that Mr. Kellner discovered in the Marcuse archives, in Frankfurt, as well as correspondence between Marcuse and the patriarch of the Frankfurt School, Max Horkheimer.
Volumes two through six will focus on such areas as Marcuse's critical theory of society, the foundation of the New Left, and his writings on cultural theory and art as emancipatory activities.
New even to most Marcuse scholars, says Mr. Kellner, will be analytical papers on fascism that Marcuse wrote for the U.S. government. The papers are already drawing considerable attention in Germany, where they were recently published in a one-volume, German-language selection of his writings edited by Peter-Erwin Jansen, a free-lance scholar.
Marcuse's son, Peter Marcuse, a professor of urban planning at Columbia University, says he chose Mr. Kellner to edit the collection because of Mr. Kellner's many publications in social theory, starting with his pioneering overview, Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism (University of California Press, 1984). He began that book in the 1970s, after getting to know Herbert Marcuse.
"I had, in the last years of his life, a fair amount of personal contact with him," says Mr. Kellner. "I was a member of the generation that read all his books. He was the one, with Reason and Revolution [1941], who introduced me and many of my generation to Hegel and Marx." Similarly, he says, Marcuse's Eros and Civilization (1955) introduced many American students to Sigmund Freud, and his One-Dimensional Man (1964) alerted them to the Frankfurt School's provocative analysis of contemporary society.
He says Marcuse's stature -- "this obviously highly learned and brilliant old-European scholar" -- was greatly enhanced by his having sought out, promoted, and defended the New Left, the counterculture, and the antiwar and students' movements.
Marcuse's third wife, Ericka Sherover, deposited all her husband's manuscripts, letters, lectures, and even some books from his personal library in an archive in Frankfurt. She was to have prepared an edition of collected papers, but she died before the work had progressed far. So Peter Marcuse turned microfilms of the entire Marcuse archive over to Mr. Kellner. "I'm very happy with what he's done," says Mr. Marcuse.
He says the collection will provide few new biographical details, because "my father, by and large, did not keep personal letters." In fact, few personal documents of any kind remain. However, he says, some papers in the series will shed more light on known intellectual differences and indebtedness within the Frankfurt School.
For his part, Mr. Boggs is struck by the continuing relevance of the archive. "It's amazing, rereading some of the material, how contemporary it seems," he says.
He, Mr. Kellner, and other Marcuse experts believe the time is ripe for a revival of Marcuse's analysis of the social, ideological, and cultural forces at work in advanced capitalist societies.
"We still are in an age of a rapid mutation of capitalism, even a more thoroughgoing hegemony of capitalism, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the communist system," says Mr. Kellner. "We're also undergoing an unparalleled technological evolution. All sorts of new forms of culture, of ideology, of technology are changing every dimension of life. And this is what Marcuse was theorizing."
Also germane, he adds, are the "modes of resistance" that Marcuse advocated -- "the theoretical dimension and the aesthetic dimension." Those, Mr. Kellner says, were the remedies Marcuse saw for the impoverished "one-dimensionality" of modern capitalist man.
If the Routledge collection does succeed in reviving interest in Marcuse, it has plenty of work to do because the philosopher's influence has been in decline since even before his death.
Mr. Kellner attributes that trend to the explosion of theoretical discourses, to "the French turn of mind." During the 1970s and '80s, he says, "there was poststructuralism, there was Barthes, there was Foucault, there was Derrida. There was almost a flavor of the month." All those figures, he says, were hailed as "great theoreticians who would solve all problems."
The French theorists gained favor, even though they were famously difficult to grasp, by grounding their social analysis abstractly in linguistic and literary analysis.
By contrast, Marcuse was a distinctly German theorist grounded in the social and political theory of Marx and Hegel.
Researchers also say that modern German philosophy lost out in part because the French theorists provided relief from the neo-Marxists' relentlessly negative critique of capitalism.
Now, the tide appears to have turned, Mr. Boggs says. "There's been a very significant reaction against some aspects of the whole post-structural turn."
He and others hope that researchers will recognize how applicable Marcuse's thought is to many modern phenomena -- globalization, the growing importance of mass media and popular culture, and issues like postcolonialism, environmentalism, feminism, and new social movements -- all of which Marcuse addressed before academic fashion took them up.
Of course, not the least of the reasons for suspicion of neo-Marxists in Marcuse's lifetime was the existence of the Soviet Union. But, Mr. Kellner says, Marcuse was long a critic of Soviet-style communism -- such as in his 1958 book, Soviet Marxism -- and was in fact consistently skeptical of orthodox Marxism. "Classical Marcuse," says Mr. Kellner, was the philosopher's conclusion "that the proletariat was not a revolutionary force and that capital was not going to collapse tomorrow -- that it was constantly restructuring itself."
"Marcuse is always much more than just Marxism," he says. "There's Nietzsche in there, there's Freud, there's modernism, there are any number of cultural currents and theoretical discourses."
Equally important, Mr. Kellner adds, was the powerful dialectics in Marcuse's writing. This can be seen in the striking optimism, even utopianism, that set Marcuse apart from others in the Frankfurt School. For example, he wrote of the possibility of opposing capitalism by creating "alternative realities" through art, technology, critical theory ... and eros -- love.
So, Mr. Kellner says, utopianism for Marcuse was not escapism but liberationist politics: "The utopian dimension for Marcuse is the source of his revolutionary theory. In other words, he says that life could be different, that there is another way to live."
Copyright © 1998 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
