MARCUSE, HERBERT

born July 19, 1898, Berlin died July 29, 1979, Starnberg, W.Ger. German-born U.S. political philosopher whose Marxist critical philosophy and Freudian psychological analyses of 20th-century Western society were popular among student leftist radicals, especially after the 1968 student rebellions in West Berlin, New York's Columbia University, and the Sorbonne in Paris. Having become a member of the Social Democratic Party while a student at the University of Freiburg (Ph.D., 1922), Marcuse later conducted philosophical research there (192232) and was a co-founder of the Frankfurt Institut fr Sozialforschung. He fled to Geneva in 1933 as Hitler rose to power, then went to the United States in 1934, where he taught at Columbia University and became a naturalized citizen in 1940. An intelligence analyst for the U.S. Army during World War II, he headed the Central European Section of the Office of Intelligence Research after the war. He returned to teaching in 1951 at Columbia and Harvard (to 1954), Brandeis University (195465), and the University of California at San Diego (196576), where after retirement he was honorary emeritus professor of philosophy until his death. A Hegelian-Freudian-Marxist, Marcuse was wedded to the ideas of radicalization, vociferous dissent, and resistance to the point of subversion. He believed that Western society was unfree and repressive, that its technology had bought the complacency of the masses with material goods, and that it had kept them intellectually and spiritually captive. However, although a frank exponent of resistance to the established order, Marcuse did not applaud the campus demonstrations. I still consider the American University an oasis of free speech and real critical thinking in the society, he said. Any student movement should try to protect this citadel . . . try to radicalize the departments inside the university. Among his major writings are Eros and Civilization (1955), One-Dimensional Man (1964), Counterrevolution and Revolt (1972), and Studies in Critical Philosophy (1972).