This paper will provide an immanent critique of the political theory of Herbert Marcuse. I argue that Marcuse’s politics are often inadequate when considered from the standpoint of his theory of socialism, the latter being understood as the realization of the negative human capacity for creation in all those fields within which the human being is active. Although Marcuse’s politics often reveals itself as instrumental and managerialist in orientation, I will argue that there nevertheless remains a certain countertendency in his philosophy, one which can be seen as affirming a negative and nonidentitarian politics of overcoming that looks always toward creation.

In this historical contextualization of Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, I present critical arguments that Marcuse deploys in the US context—especially in light of the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War. I argue that (1) Marcuse’s critical perspective worked to deprovincialize Anglo-American philosophy and to demythologize the extravagantly glorified and sanitized “American Pageant” view of the world that prevailed in the United States at the time and (2) Marcuse’s critical pedagogy thus led to a revitalization and recovery of philosophy in the United States after World War II.

Marcuse argues that society must be evaluated in terms of its unrealized potentialities. Potentialities are formulated by the imagination, which has an essential cognitive function in revealing what things might be. Utopian thinking, thinking that transcends the given facts toward their potentialities, is thus rational in Marcuse’s view. His explanation for this claim draws on Hegel, Marx, and phenomenology. With Freud, Marcuse elaborates the historical limits and possibilities of the imagination as an expression of Eros. Utopia is the historical realization in a refashioned world of the rational contents of the imagination.

This essay discusses the relevance of Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man for contemporary radical politics. It approaches the topic from an unconventional perspective: the untimely nature of One-Dimensional Man, i.e., its being conceived in the 1940s as an answer to the crisis of Marxism after the defeat of European communist revolutions in the early twentieth century, and published in the 1960s in the very moment when the postwar stabilization was to collapse. From this perspective, its relevance for a political theory and praxis of global radical movements is not to be found in its main concepts and categories (e.g., “totalitarianism”), but on its shortcuts and limits, especially those related to political subjectivity. Shortcuts and limits which are, mutatis mutandis, still ours.

In this essay, I defend the legacy of Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man and the relation it sketches between art, politics, and human instincts against detractors who see the work as defeatist. Through an examination of Marcuse’s use of ideas drawn from biology and aesthetics, I outline a creative politics that illustrates the manner in which new forms of human life might be created from the “bottom up,” through political struggle and artistic practice. I further compare these ideas to those of Jacques Rancière, Autonomist Marxism, and epigenetics in order to better understand the prescience of Marcuse’s thought and its continued relevance.

In “The Aesthetic Dimension” (Eros and Civilization), Marcuse envisions an aesthetic pedagogy as a crucible of the potentialities of human existence. A review of Marcuse’s use of Schiller and Otto Rank highlights Marcuse’s middle-period reflections on aesthetics—signaling the call for an aesthetic ethos where “technique would . . . tend to become art, and art would tend to form reality” (An Essay on Liberation). A reexamination of various interpretations of Marcuse’s insights on aesthetic education precedes the proposal of a critical pedagogy of aesthetic dimensions that would enhance “creative receptivity” and foster a “third way” in teaching Marcuse’s “The Aesthetic Dimension.”

Herbert Marcuse is a thinker associated with one of the most radical and totalising critiques of modernity ever produced. Marcuse maintains that contemporary capitalist society is a one-dimensional prison that is capable of perpetuating itself by incorporating any criticism into its logic. Despite this totalisation, Marcuse insists that the realm of aesthetics is capable of escaping the logic of modern capitalism and establishing an alternative society that is grounded in an alternative non-repressive logic. However, it is argued that not only does Marcuse ground this transformation in a specific economic formation thereby ensuring that it is economics not aestheticsthat grounds this social transformation, but his argument is based on a simplistic understanding of the relation between the aesthetic as a means of affecting individual transformation and the aesthetic affecting social transformation.

I will address Axel Honneth’s critique of the early Frankfurt School and his apparent omission of Marcuse. I will defend Marcuse against some of the criticisms of early Frankfurt School critical theory made by Honneth. I will then argue that Marcuse was always in search of radical subjectivity, even as he warned against the ongoing one-dimensional mechanisms of subject production. Finally, I will show that Honneth also builds his project around the search for radical subjectivity but approaches the problem through a theory of intersubjectivity which complements Marcuse’s project.

This paper examines Marcuse’s complex relationship to feminism, both in his own time and today. It examines Marcuse’s celebration of and comments on the feminism of his time alongside Ellen Willis’s criticisms of Marcuse’s characterization of consumerism as “feminized.” The paper suggests that the widespread “one-dimensionality” of Marcuse’s 1964 diagnosis remains an apt diagnostic tool when the continued exploitation of women in many ways includes their mass entry into the workforce—once seen as a liberation from the domestic sphere—and the continued pushing of consumerist models of existence as supposedly characterizing the “good life.”

There is at present a broad social movement opposing the advanced capitalist system and the politicians that support it. As in the 1960s, this political current is comprised of reformists (social democrats) on the one hand and radicals (anticapitalists and antiauthoritarians) on the other. In proposing a rereading of Herbert Marcuse, we hope to facilitate a better understanding of the frame of mind of the radicals participating in today’s movement against capitalist globalization. The limitations of Marcuse’s thought may point to the limitations of contemporary radicalism while highlighting its originality when compared to the protest movements of the previous generation.

The title of Herbert Marcuse’s famous book One-Dimensional Man implies the existence of one or more other dimensions beyond the one-dimensional. This essay theorizes two alternative and opposing dimensions—utopia and barbarism—and perhaps a fourth, the aesthetic dimension. This expanded treatment of the concept of dimensionality may be useful for generating theory and informing praxis in the struggle for liberation.

The Internet age has seen the influential rise of social media. Consumer culture is tied to this modern phenomenon. This paper begins with an exposition of Herbert Marcuse’s grounding in phenomenology and his subsequent critique of Heidegger’s apolitical Dasein. In explicating Marcuse’s critical theory of technology, this paper will retrace Hegel’s influence on Marcuse in the idea of the dialectic. The dialectic is an integral aspect of social transformation. While modern technology may be value-neutral, it is argued herein that the lack of depth in social media provokes thought and invites critical dissent. Marcuse believes in the capacity of modern tools to effect social reform through adaptation. But emerging pathologies from online technology also have pressing challenges. For instance, social media makes manifest a dominant order that can be manipulative. It can be said that particular interests, notably from business and capitalists, shape the type of consumer culture that online technology promotes. In advancing Marcuse’s relevance in today’s Internet age, the paper will explore how social media as a platform can truly liberate the individual from the ills that consumerism peddles online.

The paper will examine the critical psychoanalytical model of emancipation proposed by Herbert Marcuse. I will show that Marcuse’s critical model has two moments; one that I call negative, formulated around the idea of repressive sublimation—as developed by Marcuse in One-Dimensional Man—and another one that I call normative, which finds its roots in a very peculiar reading of Freudian narcissism and leads to the idea of nonrepressive sublimation. By this reading of Marcuse, I hope to circumscribe the role of psychoanalysis in the redefinition of the actual tasks of Critical Theory.

This is the introductory essay for the first of two special issues of Radical Philosophy Review marking the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of one of the twentieth century’s most provocative, subversive, and widely read works of radical theory—Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man (1964), which we now reassess in an effort to contribute to the critical theory of our time. What are the possibilities and limits of our current situation? What are the prospects for moving beyond one-dimensionality? A summary of each of the articles featured in this special issue is also provided.

The prevalence of social pathologies in contemporary societies has triggered many critical theorists to challenge or even disrupt the status quo in the hope for a better society. Thus, the notion of social transformation or, better yet, emancipation has become one of the central themes in critical social theory. This paper aims to contribute to this scholarship through an exposition of Herbert Marcuse's attempt to socialize Georg Hegel's ontology. Inparticular, this paper aims to show how Marcuse explains the possibility of social transformation by appropriating key concepts in Hegel's huge philosophical system, most particularly from Hegel's Logic and the phenomenology of mind.

This essay presents what is at stake in Marcuse’s reference to Whitehead’s theory of eternal objects in chapter eight of One-Dimensional Man. There is afecund philosophical affinity between Marcuse’s Critical Theory and Whitehead’s metaphysical alternative. The introduction parses Marcuse’s citation of Whitehead, explaining how the Critical Theory employs eternal objects. Thus a correlate aim of this essay is to provide a charitable reading of Marcuse with attention to Whiteheadian undercurrents and concerns.