3

HERBERT MARCUSE’S GERMAN REVOLUTION IN AMERICA

IN THE fall of 2011, days after the scandal triggered by police arrests at protests held at the University of California, Davis, another American campus welcomed the Fourth Biennial Conference of the International Herbert Marcuse Society. Preparations for this event hosted by the University of Pennsylvania had begun long before, yet the celebration of a radical leftist philosopher while the Occupy movement was sweeping the country is a coincidence that did not go unnoticed. The conference organizers and participants took full advantage of this charged political context. In the words of leading Marcuse scholar, Douglas Kellner, “for those of us who have been doing Marcuse scholarship this is utopia.”¹ “Is it Comeback Time for Herbert Marcuse?” asked The Chronicle of Higher Education.² The responses and comments posted on the journal’s online forum triggered a controversy all too similar to those that surrounded Marcuse’s work and reputation during his lifetime. Once again acclaimed as political guru of the New Left, accused of anti-Americanism, criticized for his philosophical work, lambasted for his Marxism as well as anti-Marxism, Marcuse emerges from the online exchange as capable of heating up a debate today as he was fifty years ago.

In the 1960s, Marcuse was better known to the general American public than his colleagues Theodor W. Adorno or Max Horkheimer. Like them, Marcuse was originally a member of the exiled Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. In a 1987 interview published in Germany, Leo Löwenthal, another well-known member of the group, insisted that Marcuse was the most famous German scholar living in America.3 By the time the 1990s rolled in, however, Marcuse’s fame had waned. Today, his philosophical work has more of a cult following among a few scholars and surviving New Leftists than a broad academic reception. Even his reputation as philosophical inspirer of the New Left movement has started to receive different assessments, revealed in the subtle shifts in the choice of words used to depict Marcuse’s role. From “guru” to “godfather,” Marcuse’s American career seems to have followed a downward spiral.⁴ His reputation is a product of political conjuncture, a distinct philosophical program, and opportune encounters with other scholars as well as political activists who were trying to ground a political agenda so radical in scope that it required intellectual justification.

In 1949, Adorno and Horkheimer returned to Germany (along with other prominent members of the German intellectual exiles). Marcuse and a few others, such as Erich Fromm and Leo Löwenthal, stayed in America. Of those who stayed, some were deliberate misfits in the new country. Löwenthal described this condition as “not going along” (nicht mitmachen): not accepting the values and beliefs of the new environment just for the sake of fitting in. Many German exiles saw adjustment as compromise.⁵ Marcuse did not simply adjust. Rather, he tried to reshape American politics and society in a way that would reflect his own vision and to some extent the German political tradition in which he was formed. If Hannah Arendt came to be seen as a member of the New York intellectuals, her status always remained rather ex officio as a European philosopher. In the 1960s, Marcuse, however, was wholeheartedly, at times even euphorically, embraced by American radicals—students, academics, and activists involved in the New Left movement. Although adopting a political stance of radical opposition to official U.S. politics and government, he emphasized participation in the polis. More than any other foreign intellectual transplanted to America, he was an organic part of American political and intellectual discourse of the time.

Yet while his political impact in America may have been the product of connections to the New Left, his political views, and the way Marcuse expressed them, reflect a stranger persona. To some of his American students, Marcuse always remained a German professor, even though he demonstrated at political marches, side by side with them. In a profile published in 1970 in Playboy magazine, one of his former students, Michael Horowitz, remembers Marcuse as “German first, Jewish second, and contemporary American hardly at all.”6 Even when deeply involved in the day-to-day of American politics, he maintained a broader awareness of the international political context. He had direct knowledge of the students’ revolt in France. He could make salient comparisons and draw important lessons applicable on American campuses, just as in Berlin or in Munich; his comments on German politics were informed by his knowledge of marginal groups in America and their political potential. His stranger persona was shaped by a broad internationalist agenda rather than a commitment to one nation in particular. This became quite clear in London, at the 1967 Congress for the Dialectic of Liberation, where Marcuse was not present as a German or as an American but as a radical leftist intellectual. In London, what he shared with the other participants was an intellectual sensibility: a combination of nonconformism and a pathos for change, whether the change was in artistic expression, scientific reasoning, or in politics. Marcuse revolved around people who shared his passion for renewal. Their goal was ambitious and could pass for either naïve or heretic: to transform the very idea of a political order throughout the world. They spoke of an egalitarian, “liberated,” society that could challenge state and regime apparatuses on both sides of the divide of that era, in the capitalist West and the Soviet-dominated socialist bloc. This far-reaching agenda was internationalist in a Marxist sense, insofar as it transcended the national order but also, more generally (though still related), in a humanist sense, as a commitment to the improvement of the human experience for people around the globe.

After World War II, although a naturalized American already, Marcuse was indeed a citizen of the world, traveling across the United States from New York to California, as well as frequently to Germany and France. On the one hand, as in Edward Said’s case, Marcuse’s cosmopolitanism was the mark of a rootless intellectual who crosses national borders easily and makes his home among books and other scholars, wherever or whoever these may be. On the other hand, the itinerant Marcuse was not only a German American scholar but also a Jew. Yet he had nothing comparable to Arendt’s experience in the Gurs internment camp or other German Jews’ experience of the Holocaust. He had never been arrested by the Gestapo. He was politically involved, but his politics were not influenced by his being Jewish and not focused on Jewish concerns. Never just an armchair revolutionary, Marcuse marched in the streets. He clashed both with academics who theorized about politics without participating and with the New Left radicals who found political reflection too abstract for their concrete purposes. For one group, he was too politicized and eventually too famous to be also a scholar interested in the objective pursuit of knowledge. For the other group, he was wise but impractical—a “smart Jew” with all the implied negative connotations this image had in postwar America as I described in the introduction.

Marcuse’s academic career in the United States was mired in scandal and controversy. His departure at the age of sixty-five from Brandeis University (where he taught from 1958 to 1965) was shrouded in rumors that he had been forced to retire because his incendiary speeches and public interventions were becoming increasingly problematic for the university officials and Board of Trustees. At his next and last academic post, Marcuse was in the center of a major political scandal as the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) was pressured to fire him on account on his involvement in the students’ movement. Controversy threatened his legal status in the United States and almost left him without income, but it made him famous. While his German colleagues in America worked on similar philosophical problems—such as the emergence of totalitarianism in modern society or mechanisms of oppression in the advanced liberal state—Marcuse took his theoretical reflection to the level of a visible practice. He made his lectures more accessible to a larger audience but also participated in marches, signed petitions, and even got involved in a case of spontaneous revolt that led to breaking into a UCSD building. He later paid for the broken door.⁷ To Adorno and Horkheimer, such actions deviated from the philosopher’s true mission in the polis: reflection and conceptual critique. Both accused Marcuse of populism and of oversimplifying complex ideas in his work for the sake of winning over large audiences. Regardless whether this was Marcuse’s intention, his critique of the advanced capitalist-liberal state constitutes a philosophical justification for the political rejection of American capitalism proposed by the 1960s American radicals. Yet some of the New Left leaders claimed in their recollections of that turbulent era that they had never even read Marcuse, or if they read, they did not understand him. By some accounts, Marcuse’s influence on the student radicals and the New Left movement was significantly smaller than that of American intellectuals, for example, sociologist C. Wright Mills.8 Paul Goodman, one of the New Left leaders, snubbed Marcuse as someone who “just doesn’t know the American scene at all,” while James Weinstein, editor of Studies on the Left, never forgave Marcuse for ignoring his requests to publish in the flagship journal of the movement.⁹ Yet Marcuse’s name became forever ensconced in the American student radicals’ slogan “Mao is our leader, Marx our philosopher, and Marcuse its interpreter.” That his influence on the New Left is so disputed reveals the reluctance to accept that a foreign-born philosophy professor could be so central to one of the most effervescent political movements inside the United States in the twentieth century.

What I am interested in here is not whether Marcuse was truly the main intellectual leader of the New Left but in how his particular brand of leftism took shape in America and how he delivered his ideas to an American public. His stranger persona is the product of a progression from abstract (and often abstruse) theory to active political participation. This persona follows a political as well as intellectual trajectory, from the arrival in the United States as a member of the Frankfurt-based Institute for Social Research to the break-up with the group, involvement in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), academic positions, and finally involvement in the events of the 1960s. His political glory, like his fall out of grace (as by the mid-1970s the New Left took its distance from him, and Marcuse, in turn, disavowed them), can be traced to a persona that combines intellectual justification for political action with the revolutionary pathos of an outsider who has come to save the polis.

GERMAN MANDARINS AND THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY

Born in 1898 as the son of a prosperous merchant, Marcuse’s political and intellectual development in Germany was, as Davis Jones has argued, “symptomatic of the possibilities available to a young man of the bourgeoisie, and his growing cultural interests and politically oppositional stance showed themselves early.”10 Indeed, after spending his early formative years in Berlin’s liberal environment—a haven for artistic innovators and the political reactionary—Marcuse served in the army during World War I and participated in the revolutionary fervor following the sailors’ rebellion in Kiel. The short-lived experience “in the political storm-center of the country” as representative of the Soldiers’ Council made Marcuse into a political radical, only to disappoint him all the more upon the failure of the Wei-mar Republic.¹¹ In 1919, no longer active in politics, Marcuse enrolled at Humboldt University in Berlin and two years later transferred to Albert-Ludwigs University in Freiburg. His intellectual identity was shaped by several encounters with key philosophical figures, whether the encounters were on the pages of a book, as was the case with Hegel and Marx, or in person at Freiburg, where Marcuse studied with Martin Heidegger.

Marcuse began his American life as a member of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, a rather eclectic group of German philosophers. Horkheimer, the group’s co-leader along with Adorno, had appointed Marcuse to the institute while it still operated in Germany, in 1933, but sent him immediately to the Geneva office. In 1934, after several European relocations (including Switzerland and England) were deemed unsafe for the majority Jewish membership of the group, the institute moved to the United States. Marcuse and his family arrived in New York, symbolically, on July 4, 1934. According to Barry Katz, “he immediately took out American naturalization papers.”¹² Whether because he had lost all hope for Germany or because he immediately liked America, Marcuse decided right away to stay. This instant commitment to America makes the harsh criticism of his later books all the more intriguing and all the more irritating to his critics.

Unlike Arendt and the other European luminaries rescued by Varian Fry at the request of the American Emergency Rescue Committee, the members of the Frankfurt Institute needed little help beyond affidavits of support, which were promptly and generously issued by the president of Columbia University. Marcuse and the rest of the group arrived in America with the mystique of an exclusivist intellectual coterie, rich enough to live a comfortable life even as refugees. In 1934, at the height of the Depression years in the United States, the institute’s annual budget of $30,000 was an enviable luxury.13 Freed of financial worries from the beginning by the generous endowment offered by its founder, Hermann Weil, the institute was formed as an independent community of scholars dedicated to the pursuit of research on social matters. Money made these men patricians, slightly detached from the worries of the everyday citizen, in Germany and even more so in America. Despite their socialist views, the members of the Frankfurt Institute were more easily identifiable, especially by their American hosts, as aristocrats rather than members of the proletarian. As Martin Jay puts it, “at no time did a member of the institute affect the life-style of the working class.”¹⁴ Marcuse was no exception.

He joined the Frankfurt Institute for intellectual, as well as political reasons. He shared their leftist orientation and was interested, like them, in developing a philosophically grounded critique of capitalism and bourgeois society. The ties that kept the group together even abroad were also more aesthetic than political, as most of these scholars were strongly drawn to the arts, and indeed several of them were artists (Adorno as a musician, Horkheimer as a writer). The Frankfurt Institute’s “distaste for the bourgeois society”¹⁵ informed its members’ political philosophy as well as their aesthetic. In their shared rejection of the bourgeois, Marcuse and his colleagues reacted as German mandarins, a special category of intellectuals and academics whose “ideology was based . . . from the beginning, upon an idealization of pure and impractical learning.”¹⁶ Ironically, the Frankfurt Institute was created in part as a rejection of the German mandarin ideology, and its replacement with a form of knowledge that was socially relevant and politically emancipatory. Yet the group retained elements of the Mandarin mentality. For instance, although all its members were committed to a socialist agenda as a result of their experience in the Weimar Republic and in connection to the German Socialist Party and Communist Party, few were politically active themselves.17 In part, this limited political involvement was the direct consequence of the intellectual agenda of the institute: to develop a theoretical reflection that could guide new forms of political practice, beyond what was already available. The intellectuals who joined the Frankfurt Institute espoused a radical form of sociopolitical reform but were also convinced that such reform needs first to be understood in conceptual terms. The institute sought to develop a blending of theory and practice, captured by the hybrid philosophical term of praxis: “a kind of self-creating action, which differed from the externally motivated behavior produced by forces outside man’s control.”¹⁸

In this regard, Marcuse was the exception all along in Germany and later in the United States. In Germany, he took part in the Berlin rising and was a member of the Soldiers’ Council. He abandoned politics, disaffected, after the murders of communist figures Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht and turned to academic life. As he turned to more abstract, academic interests, he discovered and became enthralled with Heidegger’s work at a time when this was not yet politicized.¹⁹ Nevertheless, the short-lived association with Heidegger would cost Marcuse a lot as it cast a cloud of suspicion on his philosophical views, both from his later mentors and employers, Adorno and Horkheimer, and from American commentators. The Nazis’ imminent advent to power forced Marcuse to abandon any plans for an academic career in Germany.

In the United States, avoiding direct political involvement became the institute’s rule. Adorno and Horkheimer enforced it strictly to avoid casting any suspicion on their work and presence in America. Their fears were justified, for the strong leftist agenda and Marxist orientation of the Frankfurt school could make them into an easy prey, especially during the McCarthy era. In the early days of their exile, the group was frequently “visited by German speaking New York police detectives searching for Nazi sympathizers within the German community.”²⁰ The institute leaders’ cautiousness reflects an acute awareness of their foreignness as likely to arouse suspicion and lead to accusations, which indeed happened. Marcuse and several other members of the Frankfurt Institute were placed under surveillance by the Federal Bureau for Investigation. Their files reveal that what the FBI found most suspicious about these exiled intellectuals was the very fact that they were foreign born. What began as a routine check required by his application for a position with the OSS continued for many years. Between 1943 and 1976, Marcuse was repeatedly under investigation “for his supposed connection to Communist countries, organizations, ideologies, and sympathizers.”21 He had no illusions regarding the impact of his OSS activity on American policy, as he later admitted in a conversation with Jürgen Haber-mas.²² Yet the environment he found at OSS was markedly different from that of the institute and must have had a significant influence on Marcuse as on the other immigrant scholars employed by the U.S. federal government. It was here that Marcuse had more daily interactions with Americans and with the research methodologies American scholars preferred.²³

In Germany, Marcuse withdrew from politics into academe because he felt disenchanted after the failed political reform of the Weimar Republic. Yet in America, disenchantment served the opposite purpose, leading Marcuse to some of the most trenchant critiques of capitalism and of American society in particular. His notoriety in America, by comparison to the other institute members, was first and foremost the consequence of his active involvement in American life. His German colleagues chose “to remain silent about the major political questions of the day,” and had a significantly smaller impact on the American intellectual scene, even though they lived in New York at a time when the New York intellectuals were most active culturally and politically.²⁴

In New York, the Frankfurt Institute was isolated not only because it did not get involved in the political conversation of the time but also for strictly intellectual reasons. The clash of theories and methodologies taking place at Columbia between the German critical theory, then in the making, and the far more empirically oriented American school of sociology has been well documented.²⁵ While their American colleagues despised the abstract, seemingly speculative approach of the Frankfurt School, the Germans in turn rejected the focus on empiricism as naïve and reductive. Adorno and Horkheimer had little interest in intellectual cross-pollination, even though they agreed to collaborate with American colleagues in a few projects, most notably the study on authoritarianism. In Frankfurt, the institute was created “as a community of scholars whose solidarity would serve as a microcosmic foretaste of the brotherly society of the future.”26 Yet this “brotherly society” was not a transnational one, at least not while in exile. At Columbia, the members of the Frankfurt Institute preferred to keep to themselves and did not mix much with their American colleagues. It mattered, perhaps, that these German scholars were not only financially comfortable but also acutely aware of their wealth, compared to the financial struggles of most Americans.²⁷

The members of the Frankfurt Institute stood out in America in one more way, and Marcuse was no exception in this regard: they were Jews but not particularly focused on their own Jewishness.²⁸ Unlike many New York Jewish intellectuals coming to prominence in the period who articulated their own individual and intellectual identity in specific reference to their Jewish heritage, Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Löwenthal, and Fromm, all came from assimilated families (as did Arendt). Marcuse’s son, Peter, remembers his upbringing in a relaxed Jewish household where Jewishness was not the focus of the family’s life:

We were certainly Jewish; we would never have been in the U.S. otherwise. My father was bar mitzvah’d, and to my knowledge his parents were relatively observant. But he himself was strictly secular. I remember at home hearing Jewish jokes, a smattering of Yiddish, Jewish friends, a Jewish intellectual circle—no doubt we were Jewish; but I remember no religious observance, no going to schul or services, even on the High Holy Days. At least before we arrived in the U.S., I suspect he never felt any contradiction between being German and being Jewish.²⁹

Expressed primarily in the domestic, private realm, Marcuse’s Jewishness seems disconnected from his sociopolitical views. Jay argues that it was the same for the other members of the group, all “anxious to deny any significance at all to their ethnic roots, a position that has not been eroded with time in most of their cases.”³⁰ This might seem surprising because in The Dialectic of the Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer’s most important work written in America, the examination of anti-Semitism plays an important role.31 Yet even in that book, the focus is not on Jewish identity as much as on the discrimination against Jews as a particular sociopolitical mechanism tied up with the logic of capitalism. This subtle difference results in what Jonathan Judaken refers to as the “anti-anti-Semitism” of the Frankfurt School, instead of a philo-Semitism that could have made them more interested in or attracted to American Jews as Jews.³² In New York especially, being Jewish could have led to alliances with Jewish philosophers (or philosophically inclined intellectuals) like Sydney Hook and others. Instead, as was also Arendt’s case, the German Jews and the American Jews were enemies more often than friends.

Marcuse and his colleagues encountered in America a form of anti-Semitism different from their German experience and one that they did not anticipate or understand.³³ This created a predicament that was worsened by the fact that they had no major supporters among Jewish American intellectuals. Being too Jewish for some and not sufficiently Jewish for others contributed to the isolation of Adorno and Horkheimer. It affected Marcuse much less. As his son, Peter, recounts, Marcuse “found the more informal and open atmosphere of the U.S. more congenial than the more rigid and hierarchical relationships found in Germany.”³⁴ The informality that seduced Marcuse appalled Adorno and yet their willingness to become involved in American life is both more complicated and simpler than a matter of social etiquette. Interest in American society was shared by all members of the Frankfurt Institute at least insofar as America represented the most advanced form of the capitalist society their work set out to critique. Adorno and Horkheimer critiqued it from outside—both from the abstract perspective of the philosopher who sits above the citizenry and from the perspective of the German philosopher (by continuing to write in German and publishing the institute’s journal with the Dutch publisher Felix Alcan).³⁵ By contrast, Marcuse gradually abandoned the position of the German philosopher only engaged in reflection and not in action to become the philosopher-teacher to the citizenry, and he came close to being an American activist though he never quite reached that point, as I show later in the chapter. The turning point for his transformation took place while he was working for the OSS where he was more often in the company of Americans than of fellow Germans. Soon after the family arrived in the United States, “there was no question (Marcuse) was American—although clearly of German extraction.”36

The change he experienced while in the service of the OSS can be seen as part of an immigrant acculturation in the workplace. Yet it also captures the special effectiveness of Marcuse’s stranger persona, which asserted itself early on as being as assimilated as it would seem plausible. Marcuse’s fame in America as a public figure was unprecedented for a philosopher who also happened to be a person of foreign nationality. Even though he became famous in his late years—so famous that his name was routinely mentioned in daily newspapers and known even to people with little interest in or familiarity with academics—Marcuse was speaking and writing with the authority of an insider. Ironically, notoriety was his most American feature. As Katz aptly points out, “in a great American tradition, Herbert Marcuse moved to California and became a ‘star.’”³⁷

At the same time, the “German extraction” mentioned almost as an afterthought by his son, Peter, played a key role in bringing him to the attention of American figures active on the political scene of the time, thus making it possible for him to become famous. Foreignness, in other words, gave him visibility. In an interview with Bryan Magee in 1978, Marcuse exhibited modesty in response to a question that was often posed to him: how did he become so famous? Although clearly attempting to avoid self-aggrandizing depictions, Marcuse was aware of the implied impertinence in his response and prefaced it with an apology: “I appear only as such a figure because others seem even less deserving.”³⁸ Yet rather than accept it as a value judgment, this claim challenges us to press further: how was Marcuse more deserving? Some of his German colleagues in America were, by his own accounts, more sophisticated and intellectually accomplished (in the same interview, Marcuse insisted that Horkheimer was nothing less than a genius). Some American academics who were also connected to the New Left were politically more active and more daring (such as Angela Davis, his former student). It must be that what made Marcuse more deserving was that he was more political than the other German exiles and more philosophical than the other American intellectuals involved in the political life of the time. Yet this was not merely a hyphenated identity as much as a mixture of German and American that he employed strategically in political discourse and action, variously emphasizing one part over another.

After Marcuse stopped receiving the financial backing of Horkheimer and Adorno, in 1943, he joined (like several other German exiled intellectuals) the Research and Analysis section of the OSS. Marcuse had more direct, daily contact with Americans than with his former German colleagues, and he became more and more like the Americans around him. Yet the surviving pictures and video footage of Marcuse present the image of a European who never adopted, at least in appearance, the American relaxed style he apparently appreciated: outfitted with a suit, cigar, and heavy accent, he embodied another world and another sensibility.

THE AMERICANIZATION OF HERBERT MARCUSE

Marcuse began his integration in American politics by taking his distance from the Frankfurt Institute. The separation was, to some extent, unavoidable. Adorno and Horkheimer were skeptical of Marcuse’s philosophical abilities from the moment he joined their group. They distrusted his phenomenological training and especially the influence they feared Heidegger had exerted on Marcuse. In the United States, Marcuse’s early research was done entirely under the auspices of the institute, and the topics he studied were commissioned by Horkheimer as part of a larger, collective research agenda. The correspondence between Horkheimer and Adorno reveals a certain degree of disapproval and condescendence vis-à-vis their younger colleague’s philosophical inquiries. By 1941, as the Institute’s financial resources started to dwindle and relationships with Columbia to grow tense, Horkheimer began considering a potential relocation. His move to Santa Monica, California was more than a change in décor: by the time the Institute had left New York, several of its original members were pursuing individual careers in the United States, whether academic or governmental ones.

Marcuse remained loyal to the institute longer than he could have been expected, given the increased financial difficulties he incurred with the decrease in his payments, as well as the smugness of his employees.39 According to Wiggershaus, Horkheimer deliberately pushed him to leave by offering less and less money and encouraging him to accept the first job offer he received, which happened to be at the Office of Strategic Information. But the separation from the institute had mainly intellectual causes. Marcuse, on the one hand, and Adorno and Horkheimer on the other, had widely different views on American popular culture, for example.⁴⁰ Adorno’s intense dislike of jazz contrasted with Marcuse’s appreciation of the Beat generation. Their disagreement was both philosophical and aesthetic, a clash between Adorno’s high modernism and adumbrations of postmodernism in Marcuse.⁴¹ They also differed in their attitudes toward the linguistic form of philosophical arguments. Horkheimer and especially Adorno cultivated and theorized the need for a philosophical discourse that breaks off with ordinary language by way of restoring clarity to ideas that had become muddled in mundane connotations. For them, Marcuse’s discourse was too direct and simple. And indeed, no matter how difficult his prose might still seem, it is easier to parse by comparison to Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s.

This difference in philosophical expression is a reflection of different stylistic personalities. Yet it is also more than that: a reflection of culturally, indeed nationally, inflected stylistic personalities. Adorno’s style, especially, is a distinctly German one, as he himself acknowledged.⁴² Adorno was notoriously proud to write in an “untranslatable language.”⁴³ By comparison, Marcuse’s is less German even while not in any particular way more English. Imponderable as they might be, and easy to essentialize, these national labels operated as stylistic marks, not in light of some particular linguistic feature—preferred syntactic structure or lexical choices—but in connection to an intellectual tradition chosen as a sign of distinction.

Jay notes the difference in philosophical style between Marcuse and his mentors, depicting him as more analytical in expression and attributing this difference to a more limited interest in aesthetics. In other words, by being less of an artist than Adorno the pianist and Horkheimer the novelist, Marcuse was less allusive and more precise in his philosophical writings. If such claims remain difficult to substantiate—after all, one can develop different styles in different types of discourse—they point in the same direction of a marked difference between Marcuse and the main protagonists of the institute. As Jay further maintains, “his style was perhaps also a reflection of his belief that writing in a systematic, nonaphoristic, linear way was an effective way of analyzing and representing reality.”44 Adorno, by contrast, cultivated the fragment as stylistic trope, partly by way of capturing his foreigner’s status: his writings were to be “messages in a bottle” (Flaschenposts) sent from his American exile. Furthermore, Adorno’s language, even when not translated into English, represents, as Fredric Jameson notes, “a conduct of intransigence: the bristling mass of abstractions and cross-references is precisely intended to be read in situation, against the cheap facility of what surrounds it, as a warning to the reader of the price he has to pay for genuine thinking.”⁴⁵ If to many American readers Marcuse would always sound equally intransigent and even distinctly foreign—in ways that I detail further—for the taste of his German colleagues he was accessible to the point of risking to become facile. In turn, Marcuse claimed to be aware that his writing was easier to read than his colleagues’ and that he wanted it to be so.⁴⁶

It is tempting to speculate that Marcuse’s “reality,” as he tried to analyze and represent it in his philosophical works, was increasingly a different one than what interested Adorno and Horkheimer, at least in terms of a social ontology. Moreover, it seems likely that their respective social ontologies were culturally inflected. After the publication in America of Eros and Civilization, Marcuse’s seminal study of the political significance of Freud and psychoanalysis, Adorno and Horkheimer considered the possibility of a German translation that would have been published under the aegis of the institute (by then back in Germany, with its two leaders). While interested in and convinced by the ideas, Adorno had reservations about the style of the book, as he informed Marcuse:

It’s true that I felt uneasy with a certain directness and” immediacy” (in the tainted sense we now give to the concept of mediation) in your English Freud text, although this did not affect the basic positions taken. It was precisely for this reason that I wanted you to produce the German version. It is simply a question of the difference between the levels of language. You only need to formulate your ideas in German to notice the sort of thing that was disturbing me and you’ll change them in such a way that all of us will be able to stand behind them fully.47

Marcuse seems to have ignored Adorno’s request for stylistic revisions along the lines of less “directness and immediacy,” and the book was translated and published independent of the institute. This was more than a gesture signaling emancipation. As he grew increasingly more detached from Adorno and Horkheimer—the “we” referenced in Adorno’s letter—Marcuse became philosophically more independent and original but also more tuned to the society in which he lived, which was American. Arguably, “part of the reason for the differing trajectories of Marcuse and Horkheimer and Adorno is that Marcuse stayed in America and, in some sense, sought to apply the insights of critical theory to the reality around him.”⁴⁸ Far from seeking to move beyond the “immediacy” of particular situations, as Adorno advocated, Marcuse praised more and more often the valuable lessons he had learned by going in the street, and he dedicated himself to translating philosophical ideas into concrete political action. This respect for the concrete world, against abstractions and theoretical speculation, captures the key intellectual difference between him and Adorno and Horkheimer. It was, to a large extent, Marcuse’s declared philosophical interest in a direct and immediate rendition of the “real” and Adorno’s emphatic avoidance of it that determined their political significance, making one a “guru” of the New Left and the other an Ivory Tower thinker intelligible only to a select few. Yet the difference was stylistic and rhetorical more than philosophical proper. Significantly, upon his return to Germany, Adorno addressed the key political and moral issues facing post–Nazi Germany. He spoke, however, “in his aristocratic style and from his elitist stance.”⁴⁹ Later, when the 1960s German radical students discovered and read with enthusiasm his works, using them to support their anti-capitalism critique, Adorno wanted nothing to do with the young rebels. The American Angela Davis traveled to Frankfurt in the hope that she could study with Adorno but quickly returned home when the philosopher dismissed contemptuously her interest in political activism. To Adorno, Davis recounts, being a philosopher and an activist was comparable to becoming a radio technician because one had an interest in media theory.50

Marcuse’s “Americanization”—and I use the scare quotes to point out that this was a rhetorical self-construction and not merely assimilation we can take at face value—was the result of his membership in an intellectual and political community, obtained through both real and symbolic associations with key American figures who recognized and embraced him as one of their own. Davis, already a famous activist in the 1960s, was one of the important makers of the American Marcuse. It is no coincidence or surprise that upon her return from Germany, Davis became Marcuse’s student at Brandeis. If Marcuse was the mentor, Davis, the student, was the purveyor of a new cultural identity. In her evocation of Marcuse, Davis has described him by emphasizing how different he was from Adorno. Marcuse, as she depicts him, not only allowed but also encouraged what Adorno had specifically forbidden her: to be involved in politics while studying to become a political philosopher. That does not mean that Davis made her mentor seem American just by pointing out how different he was from a philosopher such as Adorno, with similar ideas yet a resolutely German identity. Rather, through his affiliation with Davis and more generally, the New Left, Marcuse expressed solidarity with, indeed empathy for, his American colleagues and students, which became the chief characteristic of his stranger persona.

In an open letter to Davis, published in Rampart at Berkeley in 1971, after her imprisonment and trial on charges of complicity to murder, Marcuse begins by admitting a degree of discomfort at having been asked to introduce the publication of her lectures on Frederick Douglass. As he put it, “they (the essays) deal with a world to which I am still an outsider. . . . The world in which you grew up, your world (which is not mine) was one of cruelty, misery, and persecution.” Marcuse repeatedly signals in his letter the difference between his world and that of his former student, but his goal is to show that his ability to understand Davis’s reasons for political action, as well as to declare his support of her, are not dependent on a common world or a shared particular experience. “I do not know whether you were involved at all in these tragic events,” continues Marcuse, “but I do know that you were deeply involved in the fight for the black people, for the oppressed everywhere, and that you could not limit your work for them to the classroom and to writing. . . . But you also fought for us too, who need freedom and who want freedom for all who are still unfree. In this sense, your cause is our cause.”51

Signing his letter with a salutation that had been implied all throughout the text, “in solidarity,” Marcuse entered Davis’s world, even though this was, as he pointed out, fundamentally different from his. To justify his place in it, he redefined it as not only shaped by racial divide and a national-cultural history but in broader terms as the world of the “unfree.” The ambiguity of the plural first-person pronoun “our,” merging with a direct, almost intimate (within the conventional genre of the letter) singular second-person pronoun “your,” points simultaneously to a racial and internationalist harmony of those who dare to rise against oppression in their search for freedom. The solidarity between the white German professor and his former African American student renders Marcuse’s foreignness—to which he emphatically admitted in the beginning of the letter—irrelevant. This alienness to African American culture was overstated for rhetorical purposes anyway. Marcuse had a sustained interest in Frederick Douglass, who could “serve simultaneously as a revolutionary figure for the black nationalist and the German émigré alike.” He claimed that the “pure display of evil” manifested in the Holocaust had only one precedent: slavery.⁵²

In the 1960s, the relationship between Marcuse and New Left leaders like Davis served both sides, intellectually as well as politically. By embracing the New Left cause, Marcuse presented himself not as a sympathetic foreigner but as a politically engaged American. By embracing him, the American New Left presented itself to the larger American public as intellectually sophisticated. Marcuse would seem less of a stiff foreign professor and the American student rebels less of a rowdy bunch. Such mutually benefiting associations can be easily suspected of inauthenticity and opportunism. Take, for instance, the arguments proposed by Richard Wolin and Thomas Wheatland: that Marcuse cared much less than he claimed about the student radicals and the New Left movement and that Marcuse played a minor role in shaping the New Left. For Wolin, the proof that Marcuse’s real commitment was always elsewhere comes in the form of an anecdote: scheduled to appear in New York at the 1966 Socialist Scholars Conference, Marcuse cancelled at the last moment, opting instead to attend a Hegel conference in Prague. This occurrence epitomizes, in Wolin’s view, “the ill-fated alliance between Marcuse and his youthful admirers.”53 This biographical detail can indeed challenge the idea of an “Americanized” Marcuse on two levels, political and national: Marcuse, in this portrayal, chose “esoteric philosophy” over “the political aims of the movement,” and perhaps even more importantly, Europe (Prague) over New York. Indeed, Marcuse’s American commitment never took precedence over his internationalist agenda. However, his correspondence shows that he was not only especially interested in the political movement unfolding in the United States but also hopeful about its chance of success.⁵⁴

For Wheatland, the issue is not whether Marcuse was genuinely committed to an American political movement but whether the movement was truly interested in his ideas. In his view,

Marcuse may have been an unintentional prophet of the student movement, but he was never its guru. . . . Despite Marcuse’s association with the spring of 1968, neither he nor his ideas were the source of this spectacular demonstration of discontent and opposition. The popular press was mistaken in its characterizations of Marcuse, and contemporary observers and historians have been misled by the error.⁵⁵

By insisting that those who thought Marcuse was influential were wrong, Wheatland skirts an important question: why would the press promote such an “extremely unlikely American hero”⁵⁶ as mentor of an indigenous movement? Furthermore, in questioning Marcuse’s importance to the American 1960s political events, Wheatland stresses the incompatibilities between the German philosopher and his American audience. The skirted question thus becomes all the more intriguing. To deal with it properly requires more than a factual account. Reputations are symbolic goods. Marcuse acquired a considerable symbolic capital over the years of his American life, and his reputation is not an anachronistic projection by scholars, or the period’s media manipulation, but the rhetorical achievement of his particular form of stranger persona.

Regardless of whether the members of the New Left Movement read or understood Marcuse’s philosophy—an issue likely to remain disputed—many frequently invoked his name and were at least familiar with the general tenor of his ideas, even if they had encountered them in other thinkers’ (often American) books. Why did they invoke Marcuse? The answer I find most convincing comes from Paul Breines, one of the influential participants in the movement, who was especially active on the campus of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. In his reminiscences about the troubled 1960s decade, when he came of age politically speaking, Breines insists that he was “at no point in the process . . . drawn to American models of Leftism” and found instead more compelling the ones of European import. Although himself puzzled by this preference, Breines offers the following explanation:

Why, for example, was I drawn more deeply into the European cultural history course taught by the non-leftist German-Jewish émigré, George Mosse, than to the course on American foreign policy offered by the very American socialist historian, William Appleman Williams? Was this because of the differing styles of academic charisma of the two teachers, both of whose courses were vital experiences for so many students? Or was my leaning toward Europe an expression of some budding estrangement from things American; a sophomoric but critical sense that genuine Geist could be found anywhere but here?57

Marcuse and other German scholars offered a symbolic space for reflection different from what American students already knew. Breines and his close friends at Madison spent the first years of the 1960s “buried in Marcuse, Adorno, Horkheimer and the Frankfurt School’s critique of the culture industry.” For these young Americans, Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man was “the book.”58 When Breines left Madison for Germany in 1968, he joined what he jokingly calls in his reminiscences the circle of “Frankfurter-kinder” (Frankfurt kids). A point of pride for Breines, the association with the Frankfurt Institute made him suspicious to other leftist intellectuals at home, such as Paul Buhle, who questioned the “aloof cosmopolitanism” he saw as a characteristic that had slipped into the American ethos from German mentors.⁵⁹

Was Marcuse an “aloof cosmopolitan”? Even as he became more and more involved in American politics, he also continued to travel to Europe on lecture tours and follow political events in Germany and in France. However “de-Germanized” he may have emerged by becoming emancipated from the Adorno and Horkheimer group, American critics did not immediately—or some ever—hail him as a fellow national. The opposite happened as his American books were repeatedly described by critics as difficult to read and understand and more importantly as belonging to a foreign intellectual tradition.

STAGES OF RADICALISM

As Marcuse’s independent philosophical career unfolded, he became more and more critical not just of capitalism but of American capitalism in particular. His first major American publication was Reason and Revolution (1940), written under the auspices of the Frankfurt Institute and dedicated to Max Horkheimer. The book was a study of Hegel focused on defending the philosopher against any possible charges of protofascism and establishing instead a strong Marxist subtext avant la lettre. Reason and Revolution was not received well. Sydney Hook wrote a scathing review in The New Republic, depicting the book as Tendenzschfrift (deliberately using the German word in sarcasm) and ridiculing the very idea that Hegel would have to be shown not to have had a fascist ideology. Hook was a critic of the Frankfurt Institute as a group, not just of Marcuse. His dislike of critical theory came from a commitment to American pragmatism and particularly to the philosophy of John Dewey, who insisted on the need to match philosophical ideas with real-life applications. Critical theory and its practitioners, by contrast, seemed disconnected from reality, or at least American reality. Instructively, Hook’s criticism of Marcuse focused on issues of style even more than the substance of the argument. “The chief weakness of Mr. Marcuse’s exposition,” he charged, “is that it will be intelligible in the main only to professional students, who will prefer to struggle with the original text. To other readers the exposition will remain opaque.” In addition to launching a complaint that would be frequently heard regarding the general difficulty of all of the Frankfurt Institute writings, Hook uses this stylistic fault to negate the very possibility of Marcuse even having an audience. For those few readers who could both understand the text and would choose to read it, Hook follows up with an equally devastating criticism of the substance of the book. After granting that the author’s “interpretations are much clearer than his exposition,” he proceeds to maintain that “Mr. Marcuse’s interpretations are . . . wide off the mark.”60 Clarity, little as Hook saw in the book, is useless in the absence of valid ideas.

Unflattering as the entire review was, Hook left the harshest remarks for the end and only made them in a veiled manner. Claiming that Hegel was the first philosopher to develop a systematic technique for “taking over the phrases and slogans of democratic movements and fill[ing] them with completely opposite content,” Hook made clear his dislike of philosophy gone into the street. In this regard, Hegel could indeed be connected to an antidemocratic politics and held accountable as an implicit ideologue of totalitarian movements, National Socialist as well as communist. “Debasing the coinage of the mind has worse consequences than debasing currency,” Hook declared emphatically.⁶¹ By striving to defend Hegel, Marcuse was either ignoring his linguistic liberties, or worse, embracing them. Written in 1940, years before Marcuse himself furnished the New Left political slogans like “repressive tolerance,” Hook’s criticism seemed to target more a poor political taste than philosophical ideas in the author of Reason and Revolution. He ended the review rather ominously: “But this is a theme for independent development.” Did Hook anticipate that Marcuse, too, would become a master at rhetorically merging his philosophical ideas with the slogans of a political movement?

Reason and Revolution was published the same year as Hook’s own book, Reason, Social Myth, and Democracy, in 1940. Hook dedicated the volume to “the memory of a Great Adversary, Leon Trotsky.” The difference in the choice of dedications is significant. As John Patrick Diggins astutely observed, they “marked respectively the death of the Old Left and the unanticipated birth of the New Left.”62 The New Left, however, would only achieve political prominence at least a decade later. Until then, Marcuse’s American career went through another important stage, marked by the publication of his Eros and Civilization in 1955, a book often seen as the counterpart to Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of the Enlightenment. At least as difficult to understand, if not even more, than the previous work, Eros and Civilization is steeped in the psychoanalytical concepts and vocabulary that were taking hold of American social sciences, in large part due to the influence of German refugee scholars. The thesis of the book, inspired by Freud, is that civilization relies on the sublimation of erotic instincts. Marcuse argued that radical societal and political change requires a rethinking of erotic inhibitions, such that the loosening or elimination of taboos and prohibitions expressed through social customs and law makes room for reevaluation. In a sweeping critique of Freud from a Marxist perspective, Marcuse argued for the need to create a nonrepressive society “based on a fundamentally different experience of being, a fundamentally different relation between man and nature, and fundamentally different existential relations.”⁶³ At the time of its publication, the book entered more specialized debates, such as the one with Norman Brown who had also written a study inspired by psychoanalysis, Love’s Body, presenting a version of eros that was driven by biology and in Britain with ethologists attempting to ascertain scientifically whether erotic drives can be transcended non-compulsively.⁶⁴ In retrospect, however, Eros and Civilization became especially known for its author’s interest in connecting social and political life to what seemed like a plea for uninhibited sexuality.⁶⁵ Radical feminists and proponents of the liberated sexuality associated with Woodstock had easy recourse to claiming the book as a source of inspiration, or at least intellectual confirmation of their practices. Using a conceptual framework and a vocabulary that had come to be seen as symbols of the German influence on American thought, Marcuse reached conclusions that were already endorsed, independently, by some Americans during the 1960s. The stranger and the natives thought alike.

While his first American books gave him visibility beyond that of his Frankfurt School masters, Marcuse’s reputation was definitively shaped by the publication of One-Dimensional Man in 1959. The book presented a bold revision of orthodox Marxism, offering a critique of advanced capitalist society far darker than the one originally proposed by Marx. Marcuse’s was also a critique directly focused on American capitalist society. The book argued that capitalism creates a new kind of human beings, defined by conformism and dependence on others for making choices and decisions, rather than autonomous, creative, and able to imagine the world as different from what is merely given to them. At the center of capitalist society, Marcuse places consumption and technical rationality, defining both as pernicious forces that gradually colonize the individual mind and inhibit freedom. Increased consumption in the capitalist society defined by abundance and choice only leads to more consumption, spurned by the false belief that one needs more simply because more is available. Technical rationality is the logic of scientific and technological progress, which instills the wrong belief that a better life is made possible by an increase in mechanization. While mechanization might ease daily mundane challenges (such as cooking a meal faster or communicating at a distance), it does not improve the experience of life; indeed, it frequently worsens it, in Marcuse’s view, because technological progress ends up requiring more production and thus allowing human beings less free or leisure time.

“One-dimensional man,” as Marcuse defined the concept, was the modern individual deprived of the ability to dissent and thus deprived of a future. If in an overtly totalitarian society, such as the Soviet one, dissent was denied to citizens as an opportunity, capitalism denied it more subtly through distractions and an invasion of the mind that would ultimately render citizens incapable of dissent. The conformism of one-dimensional man in capitalist society is worse than the oppression experienced by a citizen in a totalitarian regime, in Marcuse’s view, because the former no longer even realizes that dissent is possible. Douglas Kellner has traced this view to the Hegelian influence in Marcuse’s work, especially as reflected in his concept of the individual as subject and as explained in Reason and Revolution: “The self-conscious subject, aware of its nature and powers, is a ‘being-for-itself’ and contains the powers of objectification in which it appropriates and makes its own ideas, forms of behavior, objects and institutions.”66

One-dimensional man has lost this self-awareness as an entity distinct from all others and is no longer capable to relate to the surrounding world in a unique way. The concept, then, described a state of affairs that combines conformism with the inability to imagine “alternatives and potentialities that transcend the existing society.”⁶⁷ It is not an exaggeration to argue that American life was the inspiration behind this concept. America presented Marcuse and his fellow Frankfurt Institute members with what they most disliked: “the regimented world of a bourgeois society without alternatives.”⁶⁸ Marcuse’s examples help us to flesh out this idea of regimentation specifically in the American context and resemble closely those that would be offered by a very different critic, Solzhenitsyn at Harvard. These examples include: advertising leading to widespread consumption of the same product, whether a deodorant or a TV show; the degradation of high art into simplified versions intended for broader audiences; the uniformization of political opinion through the dominance of media conglomerates; and the preponderance of knowledge forms that seek only to capture the existing reality rather than critique it or imagine another. These examples paint a broad picture of American life, indeed so broad that the book could easily read as a critique of America rather than capitalism, a concern at the heart of many irritated responses. Marcuse seemed to be seeing in America something different from what most Americans saw, not a prosperous and free country but the very center of evil capitalism. One-Dimensional Man was criticized from opposite directions of the political spectrum by Marxists and anti-Marxists alike. While each camp focused on a particular aspect of the book, all were equally troubled by the pervasiveness of Marcuse’s critique, which seemed to leave no room for the recognition of beneficial aspects of capitalism. Many critics were especially put off by the “totalizing” aspect of Marcuse’s argument, his overall indictment of capitalism. However, as Kellner has pointed out, such a totalizing aspect does not exist (at least not explicitly) in the book. Marcuse used one-dimensional as an adjective, rather than the noun one-dimensionality. The choice was important, as there is no one-dimensionality but rather a “co-operation between the universities, media, government, corporations and social institutions to combat nonconformist thought and behaviour” that creates the one-dimensional man.69

The depiction of advanced capitalist society as a totalitarian society could only come as a shock in a Cold War political discourse that routinely contrasted the totalitarian communist bloc to the free democratic world iconically represented by the United States. The book prompted charges that only a foreigner who did not love America could think that way. More than wounded national pride, such responses suggest a profound discomfort with a foreigner’s criticism. Marcuse, however, frequently relied on American sources, especially on authors like C. Wright Mills, who were equally critical of their own country. The comparison to totalitarianism continued to raise more than one eyebrow, even in the aftermath of the Cold War dichotomous logic. By some accounts, the recourse to such an idea, especially as Marcuse formulated it in later works, when he compared the United States to Nazi Germany, had merely a sensationalistic purpose, to incite audiences.⁷⁰ Such sensationalist effects notwithstanding, the comparison between America and totalitarian regimes was long in the making. Even when still in Germany, Marcuse belonged to a group of Marxist German intellectuals who saw the development of bourgeois capitalist society as inevitably leading to totalitarianism.⁷¹ The linchpin of this argument was the presence of totalitarian tendencies in a democratic order—a counterintuitive and disturbing thesis that seemed to create a political aporia: how can a democratic society be democratic if it can never completely escape its totalitarian tendencies? Marcuse’s book seemed to leave no room for a way out. His use of the term “totalitarianism” was a target of heavy criticism for its conceptual entanglements, especially the conflation of Nazism and communism. But with the publication of One-Dimensional Man, the use of the term instituted a stranger persona in dark key, presenting to the American public a pessimistic outsider who hardly anticipates the revolutionary and energizing figure of the involved citizen from a decade later. It was difficult for Marcuse to overcome this early image. One-Dimensional Man consecrated Marcuse’s image as a virulent critic of capitalist society, who offered even harsher condemnation in subsequent works, especially in “Repressive Tolerance” (1965) and Essay on Liberation (1969).72 By then, the author had lectured widely around the country and had acquired a public persona closely connected to controversy and scandal as Russell Jacoby would later put it.⁷³ “Repressive Tolerance” is Marcuse’s most controversial essay. Inspired by the Third World liberation movements that had swept the international arena, he argued that violence is an appropriate reaction against oppression. He differentiated the violence of the capitalist society against its citizens, often committed through nonphysical means, from the more blatant violence of citizens reacting in a revolutionary manner by destroying public property, throwing Molotov cocktails at a protest, or even committing murder. This was treading on thin ice. Trying to advance a more nuanced understanding of violence as opposition and dissent, in contradistinction to violence as repression and suppression, he became embroiled in what many critics and readers saw as murky rhetorical artifices. Against the backdrop of campus unrest around the country and the rise of the Black Panther Party, Marcuse’s abstruse reflections of the acceptable and unacceptable use of violence could easily be misunderstood or oversimplified to present him as a supporter of anarchism or downright criminality.

To make matters worse, the essay introduced the concept of “a repressive tolerance,” a euphemism built out of antiphrasis to argue that freedom of speech should not be extended to everybody. Certain groups or discourses, Marcuse insisted, deserve repressive or liberating tolerance, or, in plain speech, intolerance. To some critics, his way of phrasing such ideas was off-putting:

Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left. . . . Withdrawal of tolerance from repressive movements before they become active; intolerance even toward thought, opinion, and word, and finally intolerance in the opposite direction, that is, toward the self-styled conservatives, to the political Right—these anti-democratic notions respond to the actual development of the democratic society which has destroyed the basis for universal tolerance.74

Such discourse, as well as the explicit and relentless targeting of the Right can seem “worthy of a Bolshevik commissar.”⁷⁵ The persona of a supporter of violence and intolerance who unabashedly proclaimed “anti-democratic notions” haunted Marcuse for the rest of his career. It attracted hate mail, murder threats sufficiently convincing to lead him to flee his California residence, the termination of his tenured appointment at UCSD, and constant queries from both hostile and friendly journalists. What they all wanted to know was whether or not Marcuse hated America and why he had chosen to stay in a country he criticized so much.

By the second half of the 1960s, Marcuse’s pessimism seemed to have turned into anger, an emotional overtone that was especially attractive to the equally angry New Left movement. But anger was also a step toward the optimism of the last, most utopian, phase of Marcuse’s radicalism. This phase is best captured in Essay on Liberation, which expanded the themes and arguments presented in his previous works. Yet the work also adds the element of aesthetic consciousness, an older preoccupation for Marcuse, dating back to his philosophical apprenticeship in Germany and his doctoral dissertation on the artist novel (Kunstlerroman). This is the element of aesthetics. For Marcuse, to liberate means to release human beings from an “affluent society” that is ugly and stultifying. Liberation from the world of one-dimensional man requires an “aesthetic ethos,” which can reimagine the world after the very power to imagine has been altered by the mechanisms of the “affluent society.”

The essay sounded occasionally like a religious leaflet promising salvation: liberation will restore the original natural beauty of the world—“cleansing the earth”—and create social and political structures that will allow human beings to enjoy life. But Marcuse was fairly specific: he asked for social policies developed according to existential and aesthetic criteria, such as urban zoning regulations protecting citizens from the pollution and cacophony of highways. Marcuse was ready to admit that such regulations would not be cost-effective (as they would inhibit massive infrastructure developments of highways, along with automobile production and gas consumption) and would thus go against the logic of the advanced capitalist society. By closely matching his vision of a change with an obstacle inherent in capitalism, he offered a political program by necessity utopian. In other words, the world he envisioned did not yet exist but would also never exist without a radical change in Americans’ understanding of what it means to live and to be a human being.

Marcuse was not shy of offering grandiose visions. Where One-Dimensional Man offered a dark image of capitalism, Essay on Liberation envisioned an optimistic universe of beauty and freedom, utopian in contrast to actual America, yet nevertheless achievable. The individual inhabiting this universe is a human being refashioned by a new sensibility, who has aesthetic needs in addition to purely biological ones. For Marcuse, the need for beauty is an important element of a political consciousness, whether beauty is experienced through nature or art. At times, Marcuse’s aesthetic comes across equally as an environmentalist agenda and an avant-garde art manifesto. The avant-garde artist revolutionary, especially as illustrated by the French poet André Breton, was Marcuse’s political idol, until replaced by local inspirations, the American hippie and Black Panther.

From Breton, Marcuse borrowed the concept of the “Great Refusal” to describe the radical breaking with the reality of bourgeois society and the rejection of its moral and political order. Those capable of such refusal were artists, insofar as art allowed them to imagine an alternative universe. They were also all sorts of marginal individuals, the misfits and the disenfranchised, or simply the young who had not yet been perverted by the conventions of society. Rather surprisingly for a Marxist thinker (and disturbing for many of his critics on the left), Marcuse did not privilege the working class as a revolutionary force. In his earlier works, such as One-Dimensional Man, he overtly expressed skepticism regarding the revolutionary capabilities of the proletariat. American workers, especially, struck Marcuse as already controlled by the capitalist order and as merely subjected to the logic of overproduction and overconsumption. For Marcuse, the revolutionary subject is a marginal or maladjusted individual, not a whole social class. In this regard, his conception is more compatible with Hannah Arendt’s pariah than with the Marxist focus on the working class. Marcuse himself wanted to be understood as such a pariah, even though he was not young, Black, or a hippie. In his recollections about Marcuse, Carl Schorske recounts seeing the philosopher get involved in a student protest with no fear of being arrested or compromised by his action.76 Similarly, Davis recounts the occupation by a small group of faculty and students at the University of California at Berkeley of campus buildings with Marcuse being the second person to enter the building after the door had been pulled down. As I mentioned before, he was also, by all accounts, the one who sent an anonymous check to the university for the repairs.⁷⁷

By locating the revolutionary subject into the marginal or disenfranchised agent, Marcuse implicitly proposed a vision of political change that begins outside the existing society, and thus, outside actual America. His stranger persona benefited already from a highly visible authority that made audiences pay attention to his vision, whether they liked it or not. In his well-publicized and memorable appearance at the famous 1967 Congress for the Dialectic of Liberation, along with an impressive cast of characters that included Stokeley Carmichael, Gregory Bateson, Paul Sweezy, Lucien Goldmann, and R. D. Lang, Marcuse opened his speech, titled “Liberation from the Affluent Society,” by noticing the flowers surrounding the lectern. “I want to remind you,” he began, “that flowers, by themselves, have no power whatsoever, other than the power of men and women who protect them and take care of them against aggression and destruction.”⁷⁸ The thesis of the speech was that human beings are at risk of “submitting completely and voluntarily to a socio-political system, but also have the power to break their servitude.” In advanced capitalist society, individuals live surrounded by an affluence that only increases their vulnerability to servitude. They live, Marcuse explained, in a society in which

the material as well as cultural needs of the underlying population are satisfied on a scale larger than ever before—but they are satisfied in line with the requirements and interests of the apparatus and of the powers which control the apparatus. And it is a society growing on the condition of accelerating waste, planned obsolescence and destruction, while the substratum of the population continues to live in poverty and misery.79

Such a denouncement could be easily interpreted in the Cold War climate of the mid-twentieth century as an endorsement of Soviet-style socialism. However, in his 1957 book Soviet Marxism, he had made it clear that he was not a supporter of the Soviet Union. Marcuse was equally critical of the socialist practices in the Soviet Bloc, and he even predicted that over time capitalist and socialist societies would become increasingly alike. His stranger persona was defined by an ideological equidistance with regard to the main attitudes of the time. In the London speech, Marcuse denied again forcefully that liberation from the affluent society merely amounted to a communist takeover. Rather, in his view, to be liberated from the affluent society meant to “break in the continuum of repression, which reaches into the depth dimension of the organism itself. . . . [L]iberation, involves organic, instinctual, biological changes at the same time as political and social changes.”⁸⁰ More than an agenda for regime change, his concept of liberation is a vision for self-transformation. Marcuse was not only asking for new policies, but also, and more importantly, for a new way of imagining life.

Daring because it demanded an existential change, Marcuse’s vision was nevertheless compelling, due to its rebelliousness, to a significant segment of American readers. These readers were young, enthusiastic, and educated, many of them students and intellectuals involved in the emergence of the New Left Movement. What attracted them to Marcuse’s message, more than to similar messages issued both by other academics and by consecrated American political figures? In part, it was Marcuse’s emphasis on the visceral nature of change imagined as a radical biological transformation of humanity. Packaged in an impressive philosophical armature and sounding perhaps a bit sci-fi, his message was also rather simple: you have to embody the change in order to institute it. The “new sensibility” described in Essay on Liberation comes with a whole new set of biological “needs” rather than political rights in their traditional sense. Not only does Marcuse see the need for beauty as part of the “new sensibility,” but he also deemed justice and freedom biological needs because all three shape a “sensibility which rebels against the dictates of repressive reason” and all three “invoke the sensuous powers of the imagination.”81

It is to such “sensuous powers” that the London address had tried to appeal. Using the common metaphor of flowers as symbol of beauty and fragility, Marcuse hoped to create a moment of aesthetic awareness that could inspire political reflection. What may have simply been an impromptu remark inspired by the sheer number of flowers on the stage where he spoke became the starting point of his analysis of liberation as a form of rediscovering and experiencing life outside the norms and conventions imposed by the capitalist society. Marcuse revisited the image in his Essay on Liberation where he proposed the notion of “flower power” to capture “the ingression of the aesthetic into the political.” He assumed that liberation from capitalist society could only be an utopian project insofar as it relied on escaping ways of thinking and experiencing that had become deeply entrenched in a collective mind—“habituated thought,” as the Russian formalists had put it. Marcuse saw the insertion of the aesthetic sensitivity into political action as a strategy for contesting taken-for-granted assumptions and for reverting meanings: “giving flowers to the police, ‘flower power’—the redefinition and very negation of the sense of ‘power’; the erotic belligerency in the songs of protest; the sensuousness of long hair, of the body unsoiled by plastic cleanliness.”⁸² The political consciousness envisioned in Essay on Liberation is at the same time an artistic consciousness insofar as the artist can imagine and represent alternative worlds radically different from the ones we inhabit. Similar to Erich Auerbach, Marcuse saw art as a strategy of engagement rather than avoidance, as a way of reorganizing rather than escaping the social world.⁸³ But he also feared that in the capitalist society art had lost its ability to transform our vision of the world, because it has become adapted to the taste of a mass public interested, at best, in spectacle and at worst in drab reproductions of its daily life.⁸⁴ In surrealism and in all manifestations of contemporary art that interest Marcuse in Essay on Liberation, he finds the political potential of nonconformism but also a radical break from “thinking as usual,” as Schutz would have put it: “non-objective, abstract painting and sculpture, stream-of-consciousness and formalist literature, twelve-tone composition, blues and jazz: there are not merely new modes of perception reorienting and intensifying the old ones; they rather dissolve the very structure of perception in order to make room for . . . [a] reality [that] has to be discovered and projected.”85

Aimed at a reality “to be discovered,” this political-aesthetic vision was utopian in a way that troubled many of Marcuse’s American critics. Marcuse seemed to be advocating a republic of and for artists and other aesthetes, a modern Arcadia with no economic concerns. What to Americans seemed utopian and thus simply unrealistic was a common trope in the German political tradition. German leftist political thinkers used utopia as a trope for conveying social criticism because utopia was a pedagogically effective strategy of estrangement. As Karl Mannheim put it, utopian projections force readers to make the “world subject to doubt.” Yet once the vision thus advocated emerges, “the hour of full experimentation strikes.”⁸⁶

The job of experimentation went to the New Left activists while Marcuse remained the theorist, both praising achieved utopias (especially among the Beatniks and hippies) and renewing his plea for the importance of the utopian impulse. Philosophically, however, the notion of “utopia” continued to cause trouble for him. If utopianism is the perpetual rejection of our familiar, given circumstances, is the search for utopia a way of constantly deferring reality and creating a limbo? Was Marcuse, then, an impassion-ate revolutionary or a hopeless dreamer whose political views, though incendiary, had no content? The paradox of utopia—as clamoring for change but inevitably postponing it—created an unexpected opportunity for critics who did not want to deal with such radicalism. I review two such critical reactions in the next section. In rejecting Marcuse and his utopian vision, critics threw the baby out with the bath water, dismissing his ideas as foreign to their own intellectual tradition and the potential change they advocated as unnecessary. Marcuse’s philosophical utopianism was a plea for revolution. More than anything else, this revolutionary stance is what troubled his American public.

THE STRANGER: FROM PROPHET TO FOOL

Each of Marcuse’s works received, upon their initial publication, mixed reviews. Praise for the complexity of his philosophical ideas or temerity of political opinion came hand-in-hand with dismissal, often of the same things. Among the reviews that introduced his work to the American public, two stand out for their comprehensiveness as well as for their systematic critique of Marcuse’s intellectual foreignness. Both are devastating criticisms written with eloquence and sophistication for a general yet intellectual public by two respected philosophers, Alasdair MacIntyre and George Kateb. Mac-Intyre published a monograph dedicated to Marcuse in a series coordinated by Frank Kermode and titled “Masters.” Far from paying Marcuse a compliment through the very inclusion in a prestigious series, the book is rumored to have been commissioned by Kermode as a sort of intellectual execution: the first and last on the subject.87 Kateb published an unusually long article in the magazine Commentary mixing praise with criticism and issuing an overall verdict that could hardly have been more devastating: Marcuse as an “almost mad,” philosophically inaccurate and politically ineffectual “darling” of the lunatic fringe.

MacIntyre and Kateb treated Marcuse seriously and offered careful readings of his work. If in the end they dismissed him, their conclusions rested on their own philosophical commitments (and the arguments entailed), which they obligingly explained but did not defend. Ultimately, both philosophers mainly rejected Marcuse’s style or focused on it by way of justifying their disagreement with his ideas. MacIntyre depicts this style as that of the “professoriate in imperial Germany,” thus stressing at once its foreignness, elitism, and anachronism. Although he conceded that such style sounds “less offensive in English” than in German, MacIntyre implicitly drew attention to the negative aspects of Marcuse’s voice. “Its very strangeness lends to it a certain charm,” MacIntyre submitted, and the condescension again only emphasizes his disapproval. This disapproval, detailed over several chapters dedicated to each of Marcuse’s works, zooms in on the German philosopher’s “magical rather than philosophical use of language” by way of suggesting the philosophical inconsistency—even vacuity at times—of the ideas under scrutiny. Not only did MacIntyre find very little to agree with in Marcuse’s work, but he also found no coherent criteria of truth available in his work and thus no sign that Marcuse himself could justify his positions. This discovery made MacIntyre feel entitled to dismiss, from the beginning of his study, all of Marcuse’s “key positions” as “false.” Philosophically false, the work is also politically dangerous, in Mac-Intyre’s estimation, for it “invites us to repeat . . . part of the experience of Stalinism.”88

The continuity from philosophical to political errors—more or less assumed by MacIntyre—was the foundation of Kateb’s critique. While apparently more sympathetic to Marcuse, to whom he dispensed several compliments (“a splendid mind,” “a more sophisticated thinker than the usual strident New Left intellectual”⁸⁹), Kateb indicted him on similar grounds: Marcuse’s philosophy was based on false premises and led to a political culde-sac.⁹⁰ While MacIntyre pondered Marcuse’s style to point both to its strangeness and lack of philosophical substance, Kateb focused on its emotional overtones, on Marcuse’s pessimism and anger as signs of an inflamed and thus unreasonable mind. These critiques pinned Marcuse in an inferior position even while claiming to take him seriously. More importantly, the inferiority they attributed to him is that of a stranger. To prove that his positions were indefensible, both MacIntyre and Kateb contrasted them to philosophies they deemed—and expected their audience to deem—foolproof. Marcuse was not confronted with counter-arguments as much as held accountable to an intellectual tradition to which he did not belong, whether that tradition was John Stuart Mill’s utilitarianism (in Kateb’s critique) or analytical philosophy more broadly conceived (in MacIntyre’s). His critique compared to Chinese anti-American propaganda at the height of the Cold War (Kateb) and his claims dismissed as incompatible with his refugee status (Kateb again), Marcuse came across as a hostile outsider, prone to exaggeration or misinformation.

Commentary’s generous space allocation for Kateb’s study suggests a commitment to discussing Marcuse’s philosophy in a detailed and hence respectful manner. In such matters, length is a way of paying homage. But what did the editors and the author of the article respect in the German philosopher? Certainly, it was not his fame, depicted by Kateb as “noise” to which “we must close our ears.” Nor did they respect his political views as by 1970 Commentary had become a conservative publication. In encouraging readers to “try to hear what Marcuse is saying,” Kateb shows an interest in what was behind the fame and the political opinion: the critique of American advanced capitalist society. His study detailed Marcuse’s claims and arguments, ordering them judiciously so they could fall into five clear categories. Besides the philosophical substance captured in this division, it was Marcuse’s rhetoric that concerned Kateb. Emphasizing the “condemnatory” and “pessimistic” tone of a philosopher who even when “indulgent to the young” remains “austere, complex and full of doubt” and “too desperate to believe the worst,”91 Kateb seems interested in tracing the anatomy of an emotionally charged work. By pointing out this emotional overcharge, Kateb could dismiss Marcuse’s critique as lacking objectivity and exaggerated. Philosophical disagreements aside, Kateb faulted Marcuse for making claims that were either inaccurate depictions of American society or exaggerated some isolated, minor tendencies.

If America was not as “affluent” as Marcuse deemed it, then it also could not deserve such condemnation. By challenging the premise, Kateb could attack the conclusion. But his disagreement with Marcuse turns out to be a question of degree: not whether the critique was valid, but the extent to which it was. “Does not Marcuse grossly exaggerate,” wondered Kateb, “the quantities at the disposal of the large majority in the affluent society.” The concession that “the society as a whole is affluent beyond the fantasies of early utopia” does not prevent Kateb from insisting that we “look at the daily life of the millions. How much really could be taken away without the return of a stingy bleakness? To such “stingy bleakness” Kateb opposes an image of America as “consumer’s paradise,” the “age long dream” of the generations of immigrants flocking to the promised land. For Kateb, the “consumer’s paradise” is not only utopia achieved and indeed a palpable utopia against Marcuse’s undefined, vague alternative world; this utopia also has its own aesthetic value, the beauty of decadence with “unimpeachable finesse.”⁹²

Shifting from a philosophical disagreement to registering a difference in aesthetic preferences, Kateb’s study is not merely a defense of American capitalist society but also an argument for its superiority, however relative. On the one hand, he charged that Marcuse’s criticism contained “too much plain assertion, too much easy pessimism, too many tenuous connections in the development of the argument.” On the other hand, Kateb also insisted that “the American system has possibilities for good which Marcuse does not wish to see, or does not wish to explain as emanating from that system itself.”93 In defending American society, Kateb was not rejecting any criticism by default but implying that only complaints that also come with an answer can be taken seriously. American society, as he sees it, can benefit from reforming policies but does not require sweeping change. In such a society, those who try to be prophets of revolution can only be fools.

A RHETORIC FOR THE NEW (LEFT) REVOLUTION

Indeed, how could one argue for revolution in the “consumer’s paradise?” Yet Marcuse’s most important contribution to the New Left was precisely a philosophical and revolutionary rhetoric. The emotional overcharge of Marcuse’s stranger persona was also its key rhetorical advantage. From the dark pessimism of his earlier works to the utopian optimism of his later essays, Marcuse drew an emotional trajectory that linked the need for radical change to possibility. The task was not an easy one. Even among those most disenchanted with their country, the revolutionary impulse was not easily aroused in America (unlike in Europe). American history began with one revolution, followed by none. By contrast to the French context (with had been shaped in a long revolutionary tradition familiar to Marcuse, all the more brought to life by the events of May 1968), revolution is not a common trope in American political discourse. Even in the Port Huron statement of the Students for a Democratic Society—the most revolutionary of the New Left activist groups—the term “revolution” is absent. This “revolutionary deficit” made Marcuse’s claims seem devoid of any practical value.⁹⁴ Their dark despair could be taken to mean either that no improvement was ever possible or that an improvement meant destroying the America that Americans knew. Kateb’s verdict was that Marcuse lacked political realism. Kateb also sensed a revolutionary pathos in Marcuse’s writing, which he dismissed as tantamount to being un-American.

As late as 1999, long after the turmoil of the New Left heydays, Marcuse’s revolutionary tone triggered suspicion even from sympathetic American critics. In an article published by The New Republic in February 1999, Jeffrey Herf states: “revolution as a desirable goal has long since [the 1940s in Nazi Germany] lost any appeal for most Western leftists and all Western liberals.”95 This pronouncement allows him to add:

To the extent to which the Frankfurt School stills speaks to our political perplexities, it speaks less in the utopian Marcuse than in the sober and chastened Horkheimer. . . . Like the old Dylan records on our shelves, the well-thumbed copies of One-Dimensional Man retain a talismanic and sentimental effect; but their intellectual effect is over. The political illusions of Herbert Marcuse should justly be consigned to the past.⁹⁶

While rejecting the political contribution of Marcuse, Hart at least places him in the same cultural category as an American icon, Bob Dylan. Marcuse’s revolution, then, was not a political as much as a cultural one (and part of a larger collective American effort). Hart might be closer to a correct understanding of Marcuse than Kateb was. In the German political tradition, “revolution” was not only a specific political event, but also a discursive strategy, a “metaphor of creativity,” as critical theorist Hans Joas has described it. According to Joas, “the idea of revolution assumes that there is a potential of human creativity relative to the social world, namely that we can fundamentally reorganize the social institutions that govern human coexistence.” Against a religiously infused conception of revolution as providentially endorsed (as in the case of the American Revolution, arguably), the metaphor of revolution as primarily driven by a faith in “human beings themselves [as] the makers of this new beginning.”⁹⁷

Whether or not there was a revolution in 1960s America, the political movement most interested in organizing one, the New Left, found in Marcuse’s philosophy an intellectual justification as well as rhetorical pathos. Marcuse urged change as an outburst of creativity and affirmation of human freedom. Yet to be politically usable, a rhetorical pathos needs to strike the right chord. It hardly did so with the pessimism of One-Dimensional Man, which not only bothered conservative critics but also sympathetic revolutionary spirits, including former Frankfurt Institute colleagues, such as Eric Fromm. In the end of the book, Marcuse quoted Walter Benjamin’s famous paradox of hope: “hope is only for those who are hopeless.”98 Seizing on this quote, Fromm charged that it showed how wrong those are who attack or admire Marcuse as a revolutionary leader, for revolution was never based on hopelessness, nor can it ever be. But Marcuse is not even concerned with politics; for if one is not concerned with steps between the present and the future, one does not deal with politics, radical or otherwise. Marcuse is essentially an example of an alienated intellectual, who presents his personal despair as a theory of radicalism.⁹⁹

Fromm may have been right about Marcuse’s initial political disinterestedness, but his political commitment can hardly be contested in the later works. Marcuse’s revolutionary rhetoric underwent a transition from dark “despair” to the explosive activism that made him a speaker in much demand during the 1960s and 1970s. This rhetoric follows an ambitious emotional arc from the low notes of pessimism to the intense cry for change and self-transformation. The initial pessimism can be read as deliberate avoidance of what Walter Benjamin derisively called “leftwing melancholy”: the abstruse, clever, ironic stance of a critique that comes as a wink to those in the know and ends up merely registering its own political impotence.¹⁰⁰ By choosing pessimism instead of cynicism, Marcuse already stated political commitment rather than abandonment. His critique aimed at action rather than overindulgent preaching to the choir.

The darkness of this early pessimism was overstated by critics like Fromm. Marcuse’s is rather a strategic pessimism, as its political charge gets tempered by the philosophical abstraction of the “one-dimensional man.” Part of a larger but also pointed critique of American capitalism, the phrase “one-dimensional man” is a metonymy: it refers to American citizens but identifies them through a more general category that contains properties that are primarily characteristic of Americans. Metonymy presupposes an easily recognizable relation between objects and is thus an “irresistibly and necessarily conventional” trope. Common metonymies like “the White House” (for the American executive branch) or “home” (for one’s family or place of origin) become “closely knit into the fabric of language.”¹⁰¹ “One-dimensional man” had no such conventional, easily recognizable meaning when Marcuse introduced it. If anything, the phrase sounded abstract and technical. However, it had the advantage of allowing a deflection of the criticism. Marcuse did not appear directly as a critic of American society, just as American readers could, in principle, ignore the fact that it was their own portrait that “one-dimensional man” offered (and indeed, as I have said, the concept was broader in scope as it applied to all advanced capitalist societies). The metonymy also had the role of deflecting the pessimism, which seemed a consequence of a broader despair in the fate of democratic societies but not directly one vis-à-vis the United States.

By emptying the subject of his critique of national specificity, Marcuse was not only thinking within a traditional Marxist framework of internationalism but also prompting his readers to consider the idea of a social world in which creativity and autonomy are systematically stifled by the very functioning of that society. Once the depiction of such a world became sufficiently compelling, readers could start recognizing familiar contours and discover that world as their own. The metonymy of “one-dimensional man” demanded of American readers to confront their world and themselves by presenting them with an image they were expected to see as their own reflection. The metonymy, then, was a strategy of estrangement serving as mirroring technique: the “one-dimensional man” was the American citizen.

The metonymy of a “one-dimensional man,” in its deliberate avoidance of a directly identified referent, drove a wedge between the harshness of the analysis and its object, American society, shielding it from the otherwise dismissive force of the criticism. Redemption is implicit in Marcuse’s metonymy as American society is both critiqued and expected to act and change. Critics like Kateb accused Marcuse of indicting America without identifying any culprits. This was a political philosophy without any political agents on whom one could pin responsibility, both for what was wrong and what needed to be righted. The American C. Wright Mills had offered a political critique in his Power Elite that read almost like a detective novel by comparison to Marcuse.102 Mill’s whodunit approach identified specific agents who could be held accountable: the government, the professional politician, intellectuals, the military, or city dwellers. Yet by avoiding such specificity, Marcuse did not only leave the roster open. More importantly, he created a buffer between the abstract category and its possible referents—a hospitable space for the American New Left, who found in Marcuse the arguments of a powerful social and political critique, without feeling indicted themselves, as Americans.

“One-dimensional man” was not a common metonymy in the sense that it did not spring from everyday talk. Uncommon and unfamiliar metonymies became the hallmark of Marcuse’s thinking and played a key role in shaping his most memorable phrases, which were adopted as slogans by the New Left movement. The most famous and enduring were “affluent society” and “repressive tolerance” although each of them worked differently. “Affluent society” came closer to capitalizing on the conventionality of metonymy as a trope. By contrast to the Great Depression, American prosperity during the Cold War was not only a comforting reality to an increasing number of citizens but also a distinguishing feature of a society increasingly more pleased with itself. Poverty, always worse on the other side of the ideological divide of the Iron Curtain, became a political weapon and proof that political orders other than capitalism were defective. The affluent society was an honorific in a political discourse that conflated ideological positions with material gain and moral value. How could one, then, wish for liberation from such a society? As I have already shown, this contradiction was a challenge for Marcuse but one that he may have welcomed. Contradiction, antithesis, and antiphrasis created a shock effect that was well suited for the New Left’s slogans and the headlines that made it famous in the media. The logic of contradiction was a strategy of inversion and exposure, of giving negative force to phenomena commonly deemed positive, and vice versa. Marcuse’s penchant for antinomy came against the backdrop of a public discourse in which, as he explained, “speech moves in synonyms and tautologies; actually, it never moves toward the qualitative difference. The analytic structure insulates the governing noun from those of its contents which would invalidate or at least disturb the accepted use of the noun in statements of policy and public opinion. The ritualized concept is made immune against contradiction.” Marcuse restored the rhetorical value of contradiction, and through contradiction he challenged official political discourse with its “unified, functional language . . . an irreconcilably anti-critical and anti-dialectical language.”103

The antiphrastic tenor of Marcuse’s other famous metonymy, “repressive tolerance,” allowed him to insert a sarcastic overtone in what had previously appeared as dark despair. In the context of the seriousness of Cold War official discourse with its black-and-white dichotomies, irony and sarcasm introduced a level of skepticism, a critical echo that questioned what was otherwise taken for granted. Marcuse deplored the language of the “one-dimensional man” as too authoritarian as reflected in the preferred grammatical patterns of official discourse in which “the noun governs the sentence in an authoritarian and totalitarian fashion, and the sentence becomes a declaration to be accepted—it repels demonstration, qualifications, negation of its codified and declared meaning.”¹⁰⁴ Sarcasm was Marcuse’s antidote to such linguistic totalitarianism because its double entendre forced readers to think beyond accepted phrases and shared meanings. Sarcasm, then, was a prompt for creativity, comparable in this respect to slang and colloquial speech. Marcuse, who had not grown up on the streets of Detroit or Harlem, had an aesthetic appreciation for African American idioms and slang in general. It is tempting to speculate that this interest in non-standardized language and its elevation to an expression of freedom and creativity is the ultimate dream of the nonnative speaker liberated of the stigma of his own “deviant” linguistic identity. This was Marcuse’s subtle way of positioning himself within American citizenry and among the people on the margins that he admired. Such alignment is a double naturalization, civic and moral simultaneously, for in Marcuse’s view in slang and colloquial speech “it is as if the common man (or his anonymous spokesman) would in his speech assert his humanity against the powers that be, as if the rejection and revolt, subdued in the political sphere, would burst out in the vocabulary that calls things by their names: ‘headshrinker’ and ‘egghead,’ ‘boob tube,’ ‘think tank,’ ‘beat it’ and ‘dig it,” and ‘gone, man, gone.’”¹⁰⁵

Marcuse’s own trademark metonymies have none of the visceral quality of the American slang that excited him so much. Yet his metonymies, too, form a discourse of euphemism, understatement, and indirection in order to challenge taken-for-granted meanings without being aggressive or confrontational. All of Marcuse’s metonymies are a strategy of estrangement, as all of them demand reflection and can thus modify an existing understanding. The abstractness of his expressions, along with unabashed philosophizing even in rhetorical circumstances that could have benefited from a less specialized discourse (such as the London congress), represents another strategy of defamiliarization. Marcuse’s style strains the audiences’ attention to force them to see what would otherwise remain unnoticed. Recourse to abstraction was in all likelihood deliberate on the part of a philosopher (especially one who had also been accused by his German colleagues of too much concreteness in his style). Marcuse abhorred the political style of the time “of an overwhelming concreteness.” In his view, “this language, which constantly imposes images, militates against the development and expression of concepts. In its immediacy and directness, it impedes conceptual thinking; thus, it impedes thinking.”106

Was Marcuse’s strategy of defamiliarization through metonymy effective within the official Cold War discourse? Marcuse’s 1965 Syracuse lecture offers a sample of direct engagement with American presidential rhetoric and thus with official American Cold War discourse.¹⁰⁷ On November 12, 1965, he was invited to deliver the Arthur F. Bentley seminar on the Great Society, held at the Syracuse University Maxwell Graduate School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. The lecture offers a potpourri of Marcuse’s favorite philosophical and political statements but places them carefully in response to claims made by American officials, specifically by President Lyndon Johnson. Marcuse summarized the concept of a “Great Society,” as used by the president, focusing on its defining characteristics: unbridled growth, constantly renewed challenge, abundance and liberty for all, and progress subsumed to the citizens’ needs. In response to what official propaganda (his term) envisions as an idyllic universe, Marcuse counters by turning the image of abundance on its head: “a society which couples abundance and liberty in the dynamic of unbridled growth and perpetual challenge is the ideal of a system based on the perpetuation of scarcity.”¹⁰⁸

Introducing scarcity in this vision of abundance is a rhetorical artifice made possible by stringing the features listed by Johnson and pointing out their incompatibility. How can one have perpetual growth without perpetual scarcity? The focus on scarcity creates a paradox but one that had its risks. The perpetuation of scarcity would mean that America’s poor could never disappear. Therefore, the “affluent society” cannot exist as such, only affluent groups within society. Marcuse risked undermining his own conception of an affluent society by insisting on the existence of poverty in America. As we have seen, critics like Kateb seized this opportunity to accuse Marcuse of exaggerating or making no sense. Yet the logic of the metonymy is based on Marcuse’s distinction between actual and feared scarcity: while the poor do exist in American capitalism, scarcity is what this society most dreads. The obsession with production and accumulation thus becomes the flight from poverty, the foundational trope of the Horatio Alger narrative in its Cold War revival.

Marcuse’s critique of presidential sobriquets like the “Great Society” works by systematically subverting the president’s claims: Johnson’s vision of America was that of a place where “we will raise our families, free from the dark shadow of war and suspicion among nations.” Marcuse’s is that of “a society which wages war or is prepared to wage war all over the world.” This emphasis on a militaristic complex of American society represents more than a Cold War reflex as it draws attention to the fact that the affluent society “calls for an Enemy against whom the aggressive energy can be released which cannot be channeled into the normal, daily struggle for existence.” This “Enemy” imagined by the affluent society is not an ideology, like communism, or a country, like the Soviet Union, but the sheer irreducible existence of “have-nots, whether Communist or not.” To overcome this logic of enmity required radical change not only within the U.S. but also in world politics and especially an elimination of “the established hierarchy of Master and Servant, Top and Bottom, a hierarchy which has created and sustained the have-nations, Capitalist and Communist.”109

Marcuse found this type of hierarchical thinking everywhere in public discourse, from presidential speeches to newspapers headlines announcing U.S. victories in Vietnam, thus celebrating “one of the most shameful acts of civilization,” worse even than Nazism. “I have lived through two World Wars,” he maintained, “but I cannot recall any such brazen advertisement of slaughter. Nor can I remember—even in the Nazi press—a headline such as that which announces: ‘U.S. Pleased Over Lack of Protests on Tear Gas.’”110 While arguably minimizing the magnitude of the opposition to the war among Americans, Marcuse concluded the talk with a bleak prophesy of a violent society to come. “This sort of reporting,” he insisted, “consumed daily by millions, appeals to killers and the need for killers.”¹¹¹ The Great Society, in his view, was a world of fear, scarcity, and violence. Using apocalyptic imagery that radically reversed the presidential idyllic projection, Marcuse issued a call to violent action, with little room left in that particular speech to justify the potential violence of his own brand of radicalism. Indeed, he often had to respond to accusations that his philosophy preached violence.

As his philosophical views moved closer and closer toward espousing the need for an overthrow of the status quo by any means, it became rhetorically difficult for Marcuse to deny any support of violent means. In an interview for San Diego’s KFMB-TV, Harold Keen put it bluntly: “one of the major problems of opposition to you by the American Legion and Assemblyman Stull of San Diego, is that you are a revolutionary who has asked the students to engage in guerilla warfare and sabotage as steps toward establishing a left-wing dictatorship.”¹¹² Marcuse responded by trying to clarify his conceptual position, rather than denying the charge, as the interviewer and American audiences wanted. He expostulated on the difference between the illegitimate violence of a state or government against its people and the legitimate violent response of the victims. His metonymy of “repressive tolerance” was meant to drive home this distinction by pointing out the insidious forms of violence masquerading as freedom and tolerance: aggressive marketing, workplace policies focused on increased production, or the lack of leisure time. While not aggressive in a direct and concrete way, these were forms of repression, and dangerous no less. As an oxymoron, the metonymy of “repressive tolerance” referenced the violence as well as deception—the deceptive allure of policies and institutions that oppress while seeming to satisfy particular needs and functions. The oxymoron was an invitation to respond to deception with outrage. Such a rhetorical cliffhanger was meant to make a violent response appear justified.

More than any other of his key metonymies, “repressive violence” was confusing because it left an important question unanswered: who decides when violence is acceptable and when not? To malicious critics, the obvious answer seemed to be: Marcuse himself. The role of guru for the student activists seemed to confirm it, making Marcuse vulnerable to charges of implicit self-aggrandizement. Such charges made him uneasy, and he repeatedly rejected the role of “guru” of the New Left movement, insisting that “the students neither want a new father image, a new daddy, nor do they need one, and if I would tell them something, they would certainly have their own ideas about it and would not attempt it.”113

Far from merely self-promoting, Marcuse articulated an overall vision of the intellectual as an agent of change and moral and political guardian. His vision included force and violence. He did not present his political agenda in the same way as the New Left leaders, and in key circumstances, he seemed rather ambivalent about its justifiability. Again, after all, he did volunteer to pay for the destroyed door on the Berkeley campus.

CONCLUSION: THE LEGACY OF MARCUSE

Marcuse’s American rise and fall (and the brief revival with the Occupy movements) were unparalleled for a foreigner, regardless of whether he was the guru of the New Left or just another intellectual who lent credence to the movement. Does this mean that Marcuse was especially skilled, or that, after all, America is an inclusive and welcoming polity? The first answer seems more probable to me. The story of Marcuse’s relation with the New Left does not have a happy ending. The relation gradually deteriorated as Marcuse was increasingly accused of elitism and intellectual arrogance. Several of Marcuse’s American critics saw in him the German mandarin ideology, which had a reputation of having “always been elitist in character.”¹¹⁴ An article published in Dissent insisted that Marcuse’s views were,” though in reverse, the argument of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor.” In other words, he offered nothing short of a “dictatorship of the intellectuals.”¹¹⁵

To charges of elitism, Marcuse responded with his own charges of anti-intellectualism. Already in a 1965 letter to New Left leader Mike Davis, he complained about detecting in the movement

a strong anti-intellectual sentiment, almost an inferiority complex of being an intellectual and working as and with intellectuals. This may well be fatal to the whole movement, for this sentiment completely fails to understand the role of the intellectual today, in the one-dimensional society and totalitarian democracy. . . . Where it is first of all the question of knowledge, of developing the consciousness of what is going on and of the possible ways of getting out of the whole, the task is an intellectual one.116

Marcuse’s break with the New Left was followed soon after by the collapse of the movement, which he explicitly attributed to its “contempt for theory as a directive for praxis.”¹¹⁷ He was no longer plugged in to the collective spirit of the movement, and he no longer claimed to speak on behalf of the American people, of those 99 percent of the American population, as decades later the Occupy movement would put it. Once he had turned into a solitary dissenter, Marcuse’s stranger persona was left in a state of political nakedness. Frequently berated by extreme right groups as an ungrateful immigrant who should be deported, he found himself often in the position of having to justify his right to criticize American society. His justifications had an apologetic tone, different, for example, from the urgency and assertiveness of the native-born revolutionaries who had authored the Port Huron statement. Marcuse assured his readers that although he hated “the established power structure, [he] hate[d] by no means the people suffering under it.” He found little to praise in contemporary America, but he had once known a better, mythical America: “I came to this country on the Fourth of July, 1934. When I saw the Statue of Liberty, I really felt like a human being. If I compare the country as it was, let’s say, in 1934, when I came, and as it is now, I doubt sometimes that this is the same country.”¹¹⁸

Whether or not 1930s America was better than it would become three decades later, or than it is now, is irrelevant (although Marcuse pressed the argument of a real deterioration). Marcuse’s fated arrival in America on Independence Day, followed by his prompt naturalization, is its own political myth, reinforcing the immigrant origins of the nation. Tapping into the discourse of mythical America, Marcuse could appear as criticizing a temporary state of affairs. Why could he not be the one to start the revolution that would restore America’s greatness (hypothesized or real)? To American ears, the criticism often sounded too defeatist. Too cosmopolitan in habits, too German in his rhetoric, and too theoretical in his writing for the practical goals of Americans interested in acting, his role was that of a catalyst. He offered Americans both a dystopian and an utopian portrait, but never stopped believing in the potential of the latter.