Marcuse, Herbert. "Preface," An Essay on Liberation. 1969.
"The search for specific historical agents of revolutionary change in the advanced capitalist countries is indeed meaningless. Revolutionary forces emerge in the process of change itself; the translation of the potential into the actual is the work of political practice." "
Marcuse, Herbert. "Preface," An Essay on Liberation. 1969.
"In this transformation, the Women's Liberation Movement becomes a radical force to the degree to which it transcends the entire sphere of aggressive needs and performances, the entire social organization and division of functions. In other words, the movement becomes radical to the degree to which it aims, not only at equality within the job and value structure of the established society (which would be the equality of dehumanization) but rather at a change in the structure itself (the basic demands of equal opportunity, equal pay, and release from full-time household and child care are a prerequisite)."
Marcuse, Herbert. “Nature and Revolution". 1972.
"Herbert Marcuse gained world renown during the 1960s as a philosopher, social theorist, and political activist, celebrated in the media as "father of the New Left." University professor and author of many books and articles, Marcuse won notoriety when he was perceived as both an influence on and defender of the "New Left" in the United States and Europe. His theory of "one-dimensional" society provided critical perspectives on contemporary capitalist and state communist societies and his notion of "the great refusal" won him renown as a theorist of revolutionary change and "liberation from the affluent society." Consequently, he became one of the most influential intellectuals in the United States during the 1960s and into the 1970s. And yet, ultimately, it may be his contributions to philosophy that are most significant and in this entry I shall attempt to specify Marcuse's contributions to contemporary philosophy and his place in the narrative of continental philosophy."
Keller, Douglas. Illuminations. ?.
"Marcuse, on the other hand, constantly advocated the "Great Refusal" as the proper political response to any form of irrational repression, and indeed this seems to be at least the starting point for political activism in the contemporary era: refusal of all forms of oppression and domination, relentless criticism of all policies that impact negatively on working people and progressive social programs, and militant opposition to any and all acts of aggression against Third World countries. Indeed, in an era of "positive thinking," conformity, and Yuppies who "go for it," it seems that Marcuse's emphasis on negative thinking, refusal, and opposition provides at least a starting point and part of a renewal of radical politics in the contemporary era."
Keller, Douglas. Illuminations. ?.
"Not every problem someone has with his girlfriend is necessarily due to the capitalist mode of production."
Marcuse, Herbert. The Listener (Magazin). 1978.
"The critical theory of society possesses no concepts which could bridge the gap between the present and its future; holding no promise and showing no success, it remains negative. Thus it wants to remain loyal to those who, without hope, have given and give their life to the Great Refusal. At the beginning of the fascist era, Walter Benjamin wrote: Nur um der Hoffnungslosen willen ist uns die Hoffnung gegeben. It is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us. "
Marcuse, Herbert. The One-Dimensional Man. 1964.
"A comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilization, a token of technical progress."
Marcuse, Herbert. The One-Dimensional Man. 1964.
"Indeed, what could be more rational than the suppression of individuality in the mechanization of socially necessary but painful performances; the concentration of individual enterprises in more effective, more productive corporations; the regulation of free competition among unequally equipped economic subjects; the curtailment of prerogatives and national sovereignties which impede the international organization of resources. That this technological order also involves a political and intellectual coordination may be a regrettable and yet promising development"
Marcuse, Herbert. The One-Dimensional Man. 1964.
"Freedom of enterprise was from the beginning not altogether a blessing. As the liberty to work or to starve, it spelled toil, insecurity, and fear for the vast majority of the population. "
Marcuse, Herbert. The One-Dimensional Man. 1964.
"By virtue of the way it has organized its technological base, contemporary industrial society tends to be totalitarian. "
Marcuse, Herbert. The One-Dimensional Man. 1964.
"Today political power asserts itself through its power over the machine process and over the technical organization of the apparatus. The government of advanced and advancing industrial societies can maintain and secure itself only when it succeeds in mobilizing, organizing, and exploiting the technical, scientific, and mechanical productivity available to industrial civilization. "
Marcuse, Herbert. The One-Dimensional Man. 1964.
"Contemporary industrial civilization demonstrates that it has reached the stage at which “the free society" can no longer be adequately defined in the traditional terms of economic, political, and intellectual liberties, not because these liberties have become insignificant, but because they are too significant to be confined within the traditional forms. New modes of realization are needed, corresponding to the new capabilities of society. "
Marcuse, Herbert. The One-Dimensional Man. 1964.
"We may distinguish both true and false needs. “False" are those which are superimposed upon the individual by particular social interests in his repression: the needs which perpetuate toil, aggressiveness, misery, and injustice. "
Marcuse, Herbert. The One-Dimensional Man. 1964.
"The prevalence of repressive needs is an accomplished fact, accepted in ignorance and defeat, but a fact that must be undone in the interest of the happy individual as well as all those whose misery is the price of his satisfaction. "
Marcuse, Herbert. The One-Dimensional Man. 1964.
"The more rational, productive, technical, and total the repressive administration of society becomes, the more unimaginable the means and ways by which the administered individuals might break their servitude and seize their own liberation. "
Marcuse, Herbert. The One-Dimensional Man. 1964.
"The distinguishing feature of advanced industrial society is its effective suffocation of those needs which demand liberation - liberation also from that which is tolerable and rewarding and comfortable - while it sustains and absolves the destructive power and repressive function of the affluent society."
Marcuse, Herbert. The One-Dimensional Man. 1964.
"Our insistence on the depth and efficacy of these controls is open to the objection that we overrate greatly the indoctrinating power of the “media," and that by themselves the people would feel and satisfy the needs which are now imposed upon them. The objection misses the point."
Marcuse, Herbert. The One-Dimensional Man. 1964.
"But the term “introjection" perhaps no longer describes the way in which the individual by himself reproduces and perpetuates the external controls exercised by his society. Introjection suggests a variety of relatively spontaneous processes by which a Self (Ego) transposes the “outer" into the “inner.""
Marcuse, Herbert. The One-Dimensional Man. 1964.
"“Progress" is not a neutral term; it moves toward specific ends, and these ends are defined by the possibilities of ameliorating the human condition. "
Marcuse, Herbert. The One-Dimensional Man. 1964.
"To be sure, labor must precede the reduction of labor, and industrialization must precede the development of human needs and satisfactions. But as all freedom depends on the conquest of alien necessity, the realization of freedom depends on the techniques of this conquest. The highest productivity of labor can be used for the perpetuation of labor, and the most efficient industrialization can serve the restriction and manipulation of needs. "
Marcuse, Herbert. The One-Dimensional Man. 1964.
"The achievements and the failures of this society invalidate its higher culture. The celebration of the autonomous personality, of humanism, of tragic and romantic love appears to be the ideal of a backward stage of the development. "
Marcuse, Herbert. The One-Dimensional Man. 1964.
"In contrast to the Marxian concept, which denotes man's relation to himself and to his work in capitalist society, the artistic alienation is the conscious transcendence of the alienated existence – a “higher level" or mediated alienation."
Marcuse, Herbert. The One-Dimensional Man. 1964.
"The decisive distinction is not the psychological one between art created in joy and art created in sorrow, between sanity and neurosis, but that between the artistic and the societal reality. The rupture with the latter, the magic or rational transgression, is an essential quality of even the most affirmative art; it is alienated also from the very public to which it is addressed. "
Marcuse, Herbert. The One-Dimensional Man. 1964.
"The neo-conservative critics of leftist critics of mass culture ridicule the protest against Bach as background music in the kitchen, against Plato and Hegel, Shelley and Baudelaire, Marx and Freud in the drugstore. "
Marcuse, Herbert. The One-Dimensional Man. 1964.
"The truly avant-garde works of literature communicate the break with communication. With Rimbaud, and then with dadaism and surrealism, literature rejects the very structure of discourse which, throughout the history of culture, has linked artistic and ordinary language."
Marcuse, Herbert. The One-Dimensional Man. 1964.
"The Pleasure Principle absorbs the Reality Principle; sexuality is liberated (or rather liberalized) in socially constructive forms. "
Marcuse, Herbert. The One-Dimensional Man. 1964.
"The organism is thus being preconditioned for the spontaneous acceptance of what is offered. Inasmuch as the greater liberty involves a contraction rather than extension and development of instinctual needs, it works for rather than against the status quo of general repression – one might speak of "institutionalized de sublimation.""
Marcuse, Herbert. The One-Dimensional Man. 1964.
"To understand the game one should participate, for understanding is “in the experience." "
Marcuse, Herbert. The One-Dimensional Man. 1964.
"Obviously, in the realm of the Happy Consciousness, guilt feeling has no place, and the calculus takes care of conscience. When the whole is at stake, there is no crime except that of rejecting the whole, or not defending it. Crime, guilt, and guilt feeling become a private affair. "
Marcuse, Herbert. The One-Dimensional Man. 1964.
"The redefinition of thought which helps to coordinate mental operations with those in the social reality aims at a therapy. "
Marcuse, Herbert. The One-Dimensional Man. 1964.
"The philosophical analysis is of no such immediate application. Compared with the realizations of sociology and psychology, the therapeutic treatment of thought remains academic. "
Marcuse, Herbert. The One-Dimensional Man. 1964.
"The metaphysical dimension, formerly a genuine field of rational thought, becomes irrational and unscientific. On the ground of its own realizations, Reason repels transcendence. "
Marcuse, Herbert. The One-Dimensional Man. 1964.
"The authority of philosophy gives its blessing to the forces which make this universe. Linguistic analysis abstracts from what ordinary language reveals in speaking as it does-the mutilation of man and nature. "
Marcuse, Herbert. The One-Dimensional Man. 1964.
"The almost masochistic reduction of speech to the humble and common is made into a program: "if the words language, experience, world, have a use, it must be as humble a one as that of the words table, lamp, door." We must "stick to the subjects of our every-day thinking, and not go astray and imagine that we have to describe extreme subtleties ..." - as if this were the only alternative, and as if the extreme subleties" were not the suitable term for Wittgenstein's language games rather than for Kant's "
Marcuse, Herbert. The One-Dimensional Man. 1964.
"The self-styled poverty of philosophy, committed with all its concepts to the given state of affairs, distrusts the possibilities of a new experience. Subjection to the rule of the established facts is total-only linguistic facts, to be sure, but the society speaks in its language, and we are told to obey."
Marcuse, Herbert. The One-Dimensional Man. 1964.
"Eros and Civilization: the title expressed an optimistic, euphemistic, even positive thought, namely, that the achievements of advanced industrial society would enable man to reverse the direction of progress, to break the fatal union of productivity and destruction, liberty and repression — in other words, to learn the gay science (gaya sciencia) of how to use the social wealth for shaping man's world in accordance with his Life Instincts, in the concerted struggle against the purveyors of Death. "
Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization. Political Preface. 1966.
"As the affluence of society depends increasingly on the uninterrupted production and consumption of waste, gadgets, planned obsolescence, and means of destruction, the individuals have to be adapted to these requirements in more than the traditional ways. The “economic whip," even in its most refined forms, seems no longer adequate to insure the continuation of the struggle for existence in today's outdated organization, nor do the laws and patriotism seem adequate to insure active popular support for the ever more dangerous expansion of the system. "
Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization. Political Preface. 1966.
"Mass democracy provides the political paraphernalia for effectuating this introjection of the Reality Principle; it not only permits the people (up to a point) to chose their own masters and to participate (up to a point) in the government which governs them […]"
Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization. Political Preface. 1966.
"It makes no sense to talk about liberation to free men and we are free if we do not belong to the oppressed minority. "
Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization. Political Preface. 1966.
"“Polymorphous sexuality" was the term which I used to indicate that the new direction of progress would depend completely on the opportunity to activate repressed or arrested organic, biological needs: to make the human body an instrument of pleasure rather than labor. "
Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization. Political Preface. 1966.
"The idea of such a new Reality Principle was based on the assumption that the material (technical) preconditions for its development were either established, or could be established, in the advanced industrial societies of our time. It was self-understood that the translation of technical capabilities into reality would mean a revolution."
Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization. Political Preface. 1966.
"But in the administered society, the biological necessity does not immediately issue in action; organization demands counter-organization. Today the fight for life, the fight for Eros, is the political fight."
Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization. Political Preface. 1966.
"The concept of man that emerges from Freudian theory is the most irrefutable indictment of Western civilization and at the same time the most unshakable defense of this civilization. "
Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization. 1955.
"The concept of man that emerges from Freudian theory is the most irrefutable indictment of Western civilization and at the same time the most unshakable defense of this civilization. "
Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization. 1955.
"With the establishment of the reality principle, the human being which, under the pleasure principle, has been hardly more than a bundle of animal drives, has become an organized ego."
Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization. 1955.
"The scope of man's desires and the instrumentalities for their gratification are thus immeasurably increased, and his ability to alter reality consciously in accordance with “what is useful" seems to promise a gradual removal of extraneous barriers to his gratification."
Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization. 1955.
"Scarcity (Lebensnot, Ananke) teaches men that they cannot freely gratify their instinctual impulses, that they cannot live under the pleasure principle. "
Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization. 1955.
"The fact that the reality principle has to be re-established continually in the development of man indicates that its triumph over the pleasure principle is never complete and never secure. In the Freudian conception, civilization does not once and for all terminate a “state of nature.""
Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization. 1955.
"Repression is a historical phenomenon."
Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization. 1955.
"But ever since the first, prehistoric restoration of domination following the first rebellion, repression from without has been supported by repression from within: the unfree individual introjects his masters and their commands into his own mental apparatus. "
Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization. 1955.
"The struggle against freedom reproduces itself in the psyche of man, as the self-repression of the repressed individual, and his self-repression in turn sustains his masters and their institutions. It is this mental dynamic which Freud unfolds as the dynamic of civilization."
Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization. 1955.
"But as Freud exposes their scope and their depth, he upholds the tabooed aspirations of humanity: the claim for a state where freedom and necessity coincide. "
Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization. 1955.
"We shall first follow the ontogenetic development to the mature state of the civilized individual. We shall then return to the phylogenetic origins and extend the Freudian conception to the mature state of the civilized genus. The constant interrelation between the two levels means that recurrent cross-references, anticipations, and repetitions are unavoidable."
Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization. 1955.
"Psychoanalysis has changed its function in the culture of our time, in accordance with fundamental social changes that occurred during the first half of the century. "
Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization. 1955.
"he collapse of the liberal era and of its promises, the spreading totalitarian trend and the efforts to counteract this trend, are reflected in the position of psychoanalysis. During the twenty years of its development prior to the First World War, psychoanalysis elaborated the concepts for the psychological critique of the most highly praised achievement of the modern era: the individual."
Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization. 1955.
"It might be tempting to speak of a split into a left and right wing. The most serious attempt to develop the critical social theory implicit in Freud was made in Wilhelm Reich's earlier writings. In his Einbruch der Sexualmoral (1931), Reich oriented psychoanalysis on the relation between the social and instinctual structures. "
Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization. 1955.
"The problem of sublimation is minimized; no essential distinction is made between repressive and non-repressive sublimation, and progress in freedom appears as a mere release of sexuality. The critical sociological insights contained in Reich's earlier writings are thus arrested; a sweeping primitivism becomes prevalent, foreshadowing the wild and fantastic hobbies of Reich's later years."
Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization. 1955.
"The Neo-Freudian schools promote the very same values as cure against unfreedom and suffering as the triumph over repression. This intellectual feat is accomplished by expurgating the instinctual dynamic and reducing its part in the mental life. Thus purified, the psyche can again be redeemed by idealistic ethics and religion; and the psychoanalytic theory of the mental apparatus can be rewritten as a philosophy of the soul. "
Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization. 1955.
"The social content of Freudian theory becomes manifest: sharpening the psychoanalytical concepts means sharpening their critical function, their opposition to the prevailing form of society. And this critical sociological function of psychoanalysis derives from the fundamental role of sexuality as a “productive force;" the libidinal claims propel progress toward freedom and universal gratification of human needs beyond the patricentric-acquisitive stage. "
Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization. 1955.
"But behind the tolerant attitude of the “neutral “analyst is concealed" respect for the social taboos of the bourgeoisie." Fromm traces the effectiveness of these taboos at the very core of Freudian theory, in Freud's position toward sexual morality."
Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization. 1955.
"The revisionists do not insist, as Freud did, on the enduring truth value of the instinctual needs which must be “broken" so that the human being can function in interpersonal relations. In abandoning this insistence, from which psychoanalytic theory drew all its critical insights, the revisionists yield to the negative features of the very reality principle which they so eloquently criticize."
Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization. 1955.