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Herbert Marcuse's Erotic Marxism
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12655 |
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Modern Thought
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| Issue
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6 / 1987 |
4,378 Words |
| Author
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Timothy Fuller
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Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), born in Berlin and a lifelong socialist, found his philosophical roots in Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Freud, and in the work of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. He became an American citizen and taught in a number of universities, including Columbia, Brandeis, and the University of California at San Diego. Marcuse came to prominence in American intellectual life in the 1960s when his writings were widely read by disaffected college students and faculty. Before that he was known here primarily for his scholarly work on Hegel, Reason and Revolution (1939); for Soviet Marxism (1958), a critique of bureaucratic socialism in the USSR, guardedly optimistic about the power of Marxist ideology ultimately to overcome the bureaucracy, just as critical (implicitly more critical) of the bureaucratization of the West; and for Eros and Civilization (1955), in which he proposed the arguments that brought him a moment of celebrity. He elaborated his themes in One-Dimensional Man (1964) and in An Essay on Liberation (1969). In these books and numerous occasional essays, he critiqued America directly, singling it out as the principal source of the modern malaise.
Marcuse's critique is fundamentally Marxist in origin and style while reflecting the mutations in Marxism produced by the cataclysmic events of the twentieth century--Nazism in Germany and Stalinism in Russia. His position accounts for the shocks delivered to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century optimism about enlightenment and progress. Nor does he ignore Marxism's failure to achieve a science of society with a moral content.
Method And Morality In Marxism
Marxism today consists of two unmediated, competing elements. On the one hand, methodological Marxism, seeking to explain social change through more or less complex economic analyses, has become guarded about expectations for major transformations in the human condition and often surfaces in the form of liberal amelioration. On the other hand, moralistic Marxism takes the form of literary-aesthetic utopianism (quite at odds with classical Marxist claims for scientific socialism) and appeals principally to the alienated intelligentsia.
The two schools of Marxism oscillated between cynicism and optimism, with each tendency defended by a judicious choice of Marxian texts. Science without moralism does not distinguish Marxists in this category from other social scientists, because it is not clear what policies, if any, necessarily follow from analysis of social trends. Social science is better at retrospective appraisals of policies than at creating them. Moralism without science distinguishes Marxists in this school at the cost of a common foundation of discussion with their opponents who do not see the world as they do and see no reason why they should. Only when Marxist social science employs the common methods of analysis within an already formed framework of expectations for the future do science and moralism coincide. To be more blunt, only when the two brands of Marxism are assumed to go together do they appear to do so.
This leads to the unsettling situation in which Marxist dialecticians switch back and forth from indictments of social ills with which one may agree (say on poverty or apartheid) to policy recommendations that are more problematic. Marxists elide the gap between the perception of evil and the choice of responses to it, but the awareness of the reality of
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