Herbert marcuse critical theory

Detlev Claussen is a professor of social theory and cultural sociology at the Institute for Sociology at the University of Hannover, Germany. Angela Y. His most recent book is Questioning Technology Routledge, His work concerns the relation between art and ethics in modern philosophical discourse. He is the author of Missing Marx Carl E. He is the author of Against Nature Michael Werz received his Ph.

His Marxist scholarship inspired many radical intellectuals and political activists in the s and s, both in the United States and internationally. Marcuse's family was a German upper-middle-class Jewish family that was well integrated into German society. Marcuse's formal education began at Mommsen Gymnasium and continued at the Kaiserin-Augusta Gymnasium in Charlottenburg from to He would sit out his entire military service in Germany.

While in Berlin, he managed to secure permission to attend lectures at the university of Berlin while still on active duty. In , he attended the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, taking classes for four semesters. In , he transferred to the University of Freiburg to concentrate on German literature, philosophy, politics, and economics.

Two years later he married Sophie Wertheim, a mathematician. He returned to Freiburg in to study with Edmund Husserl and write a habilitation with Martin Heidegger , which was published in as Hegel's Ontology and the Theory of Historicity Hegels Ontologie und die Theorie der Geschichtlichkeit. This study was written in the context of the Hegel Renaissance that was taking place in Europe with an emphasis on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 's ontology of life and history, idealist theory of spirit and dialectic.

In , Marcuse stopped working with Heidegger, who joined the Nazi Party in Marcuse understood that he would not qualify as a professor under the Nazi regime. The Institute deposited their endowment in Holland in anticipation of the Nazi takeover, so Marcuse never actually worked in the school there. Marcuse worked closely with critical theorists while at the Institute.

Marcuse emigrated to the United States in June He served at the Institute's Columbia University branch from through He traveled to Washington, D. Adorno among others. In , Marcuse published Reason and Revolution , a dialectical work studying G. Hegel and Karl Marx. Directed by the Harvard historian William L. At its zenith between and , it employed over twelve hundred, four hundred of whom were stationed abroad.

He retired after the death of his first wife in Marcuse began his teaching career as a political theorist at Columbia University , then continued at Harvard University in Marcuse worked at Brandeis University from to , then at the University of California San Diego from to Marcuse was a friend and collaborator of the political sociologist Barrington Moore Jr.

Wright Mills , one of the founders of the New Left movement. Wright Mills. Marcuse's critiques of capitalist society especially his synthesis of Marx and Sigmund Freud , Eros and Civilization , and his book One-Dimensional Man resonated with the concerns of the student movement in the s because of his willingness to speak at student protests and his essay " Repressive Tolerance " The New Left provided an attractive alternative to American society and Marcuse was able to appeal to many young individuals through his teachings of utopianism.

His ideas critiqued contemporary liberalism and its conservative vestiges of nineteenth-century liberalism. In particular, he influenced youth because he "spoke their language. He had many speaking engagements in the US and Western Bloc in the late s and s. Marcuse married three times. His first wife was mathematician Sophie Wertheim — , whom he married in and had his first son Peter with in In , Sophie Wertheim died due to cancer.

After his second wife Inge died in , Marcuse married Erica Sherover — , a former graduate student at the University of California, in In his first marriage with Sophie Wertheim, they had one son, Peter Marcuse, born in Marcuse's granddaughter was the novelist Irene Marcuse and his grandson, Harold Marcuse , is a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

On July 29, , ten days after his eighty-first birthday, Marcuse died after suffering a stroke during his trip to Germany. Marcuse's concept of repressive desublimation , which has become well-known, refers to his argument that postwar mass culture, with its profusion of sexual provocations, serves to reinforce political repression. If people are preoccupied with inauthentic sexual stimulation, their political energy will be "desublimated"; instead of acting constructively to change the world, they remain repressed and uncritical.

Marcuse advanced the prewar thinking of critical theory toward a critical account of the "one-dimensional" nature of bourgeois life in Europe and America. His thinking has been seen as an advance of the concerns of earlier liberal critics such as David Riesman. Two aspects of Marcuse's work are of particular importance. First, his use of language more familiar from the critique of Soviet or Nazi regimes to characterize developments in the advanced industrial world.

Second, his grounding of critical theory in a particular use of psychoanalytic thought. During his years in Freiburg, Marcuse wrote a series of essays that explored the possibility of synthesizing Marxism and Heidegger's fundamental ontology, as begun in the latter's work Being and Time This early interest in Heidegger followed Marcuse's demand for "concrete philosophy," which, he declared in , "concerns itself with the truth of contemporaneous human existence.

Marcuse's analysis of capitalism derives partially from one of Karl Marx's main concepts: Objectification, [ 26 ] which under capitalism becomes Alienation. Marx believed that capitalism was exploiting humans; that by producing objects of a certain character, laborers became alienated, and this ultimately dehumanized them into functional objects themselves.

Marcuse took this belief and expanded it.

Herbert marcuse critical theory

He argued that capitalism and industrialization pushed laborers so hard that they began to see themselves as extensions of the objects they were producing. At the beginning of One-Dimensional Man Marcuse writes, "The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment," [ 27 ] meaning that under capitalism in consumer society , humans become extensions of the commodities that they buy, thus making commodities extensions of people's minds and bodies.

Affluent mass technological societies, he argues, are controlled and manipulated. In societies based upon mass production and mass distribution, the individual worker has become merely a consumer of its commodities and entire commodified way of life. Modern capitalism has created false needs and false consciousness geared to the consumption of commodities : it locks one-dimensional man into the one-dimensional society which produced the need for people to recognize themselves in their commodities.

The very mechanism that ties the individual to his society has changed, and social control is anchored in the new needs that it has produced. Most important of all, the pressure of consumerism has led to the total integration of the working class into the capitalist system. Its political parties and trade unions have become thoroughly bureaucratized and the power of negative thinking or critical reflection has rapidly declined.

As a dialectical thinker, Marcuse was also able to see both sides of the coin. That is, while art embodied revolutionary potential, it was also produced, interpreted, and distributed in a repressive society. Instead, they develop in a dialectical relationship where one produces the conditions for the other. This should not be taken to mean that there will never be a point in time when human beings are liberated from the forces of domination.

This simply means that if an individual group seeks liberation, their analysis or critique of society must come to terms with how things actually work at that moment in that society if any form of liberation is possible. As Marcuse saw it, there is a form of ideology that serves domination and creates the conditions for liberation at the same time.

This will be discussed later. Also, there is a form of liberation that lends itself to be co-opted by the forces of domination. Just as art embodied the potential for liberation and the formation of radical subjectivity, it was also capable of being taken up by systems of domination and used to further or maintain domination. Culture, which is the domain of art, develops in tension with the overall structure of a given society.

The values and ideals produced by culture call for the transcending of oppressive social reality. Culture separates itself from the social order. That is, the social realm or civilization is characterized by labor, the working day, the realm of necessity, operational thought, etc. Marcuse This is the realm of real material and social relations as well as the struggle for existence.

The cultural realm or civilization is characterized by intellectual work, leisure, non-operational thought, and freedom Marcuse The freedom to think and reflect that is made possible at the level of culture makes it possible to construct values and ideals that pose a challenge to the social order. This is the emancipatory function of art.

However, art itself does not bring about liberation; it must be translated into political activity. Nevertheless, art is important because it opens up the space for thinking that may then produce revolution. The separation between culture and society does not suggest a flight from social reality. Instead, it represents an alien or critical space within social reality.

The ideals produced by culture must work within society as transformative ideas. In affirmative culture art becomes the object of spiritual contemplation. The demand for happiness in the real world is abandoned for an internal form of happiness, the happiness of the soul. Hence, bourgeois culture creates an interior of the human being where the highest ideals of culture can be realized.

This inner transformation does not demand an external transformation of the real world and its material conditions. The belief that the soul is more important than the body and material needs leads to political resignation insofar as freedom becomes internal. Hence, the soul accepts the facts of its material existence without fighting to change these facts.

Affirmative culture with its idea of the soul has used art to erase radical subjectivity. In his last book The Aesthetic Dimension , Marcuse continues his attempt to rescue the radical transformative nature of art. In this text he takes a polemical stance against the problematic interpretation of the function of art by orthodox Marxists.

These Marxists claimed that only proletarian art could be revolutionary. Marcuse attempts to establish the revolutionary potential of all art by establishing the autonomy of authentic art. It is the experience that art tries to express that Marcuse will focus on and it is this which separates him from orthodox Marxists. It must be remembered that for Marcuse and the Frankfurt School there was no evidence that the proletariat would rise up against their oppressors.

In addition to developing theories that disclosed the social and psychological mechanisms at work in society that made the proletariat complicit in their own domination, Marcuse saw possibilities for revolution in multiple places. Some of this will be discussed later. That is, the need for social change includes class struggle but cannot be reduced to class struggle.

There is a multiplicity of social groups in our society that seek social change for various reasons. There are multiple forms of oppression and repression that make revolution desirable. Orthodox Marxism focused on the proletariat by excluding all other possible sites for revolution. For this reason, orthodox Marxism itself becomes a form of ideology and produces a reified state of affairs.

In orthodox Marxist aesthetics. The subjectivity of individuals, their own consciousness and unconscious tends to be dissolved into class consciousness. Thereby, a major prerequisite of revolution is minimized, namely, the fact that the need for radical change must be rooted in the subjectivity of individuals themselves, in their intelligence, and their passions, their drives and their goals.

Marcuse 3—4. In orthodox Marxism, radical subjectivity was reduced to one social group, the proletariat. Marcuse greatly expands the space where radical subjectivity can emerge. Each subject as distinct from other subjects represents a particular subject position. For example; white female, working class, mother of two, born in the mid-west, etc. However, with each distinct feature of the individual subject corresponds a structural position.

That is, in a given society, gender, race, class, level of education etc. Given that there are many subject positions that are positions of repression and dehumanization, radical subjectivity and art may come from any of these positions. Economic class is just one structural position among many. Hence, it is not only the proletariat who may have an interest in social change.

Between and he attempted to develop what has been called Heideggerian or phenomenological Marxism. By the early twentieth century it appeared to be the case that the proletarian revolution predicted by Marx was not going to happen. Europe had witnessed several failed attempts at a revolution. The Bolshevik Revolution of was not lead by the proletariat and it simply produced a different form of totalitarianism.

Wolin xiv. The political crisis of Marxism was entangled with its epistemological crisis Wolin xiv. The epistemological crisis was the result of the scientific reductionism of Marxism which was encouraged by Engels and Karl Kautsky Marcuse xiv. So-called scientific Marxism is a non-philosophical, mechanistic form of Marxist theory that teaches the inevitable, automatic collapse of capitalism.

The Second International produced a form of positivism that eliminated the dialectical approach of Marxism and erased the role of human subjectivity. That is, if the collapse of capitalism was inevitable because of the effects of certain natural laws and not due to the conscious, intentional efforts of the proletariat, then there is no need to work toward the development of revolutionary consciousness.

He gravitates toward Marxism because Marxism is an attempt to rescue subjectivity or humanity from the reifying, oppressive forces of capitalism. Unfortunately, the Marxism of the Second International also erased human subjectivity as this form of Marxism became mechanistic in nature. It is in this context, where subjectivity and human agency are being whittled down, that Marcuse turns to Heidegger for a possible solution.

Wolin For Marcuse, radical action was needed to overcome the oppressive, repressive, and reified structure of advanced industrial society. He saw common ground between Marx and Heidegger regarding this problem. Wolin xiv—xv. Like Horkheimer and Adorno, Marcuse saw western society as moving in the direction of a totally administered society.

His later notion of one-dimensionality was developed via his critique of such a society. However, he eventually became disillusioned with Heidegger. At the ontological level Heidegger merely examined the fundamental structures of Dasein. That is, Dasein in general carries out its life within a certain universal structure which is constituted by modes of existence such as fallenness, idle talk, boredom, care, being toward death, etc.

What has been disclosed here are mere universal conditions or modes of existence in which Dasein happens and experiences happenings. However, these modes of existence are experienced in different ways, at different times, and with different levels of intensity by different individuals. At the end of the day, Marcuse sees that Heidegger avoids the type of analyses that would reveal systems of oppression and domination from which many human beings suffer.

The modes of existence for Dasein have a social, historical, and political context that shape the way they are experienced. For example, Dasein has a race, gender, class, etc. Heidegger gives no account of the multiple forms of oppression and domination present in advanced industrial societies nor the way that individuals respond to these forms of oppression and domination.

In a interview conducted by Frederick A. Olafson, Marcuse raises the following criticism of Heidegger:. How does the individual situate himself and see himself in capitalism—at a certain stage of capitalism, under socialism, as a member of this or that class, and so on? This entire dimension is absent. To be sure, Dasein is constituted in historicity, but Heidegger focuses on individuals purged of the hidden and not so hidden injuries of their class, their work, their recreation, purged of the injuries they suffer from their society.

There is no trace of the daily rebellion, of the striving for liberation. The Man the anonymous anyone is no substitute for the social reality Marcuse b: Although Marcuse breaks with Heidegger in , for some scholars the break is not all that clear. Does Marcuse continue to employ Heideggerian ideas in a new language? The problem of some form of intellectual elitism is not only found in Heidegger but in Marxism itself.

According to Marcuse, the Manuscripts had the possibility to accomplish two things. They also make it possible to pose the question of the actual connections between Marx and Hegel in a more fruitful way. However, these manuscripts also provided Marcuse with the necessary theoretical tools needed for developing a critical, philosophical anthropology that would aid him in the development of his own brand of critical theory.

Instead, it refers to the German idea of anthropology which is more of a philosophical and social scientific examination of human nature. The Manuscripts are important for Marcuse because in them Marx provides a philosophical foundation for his later critique of political economy as well as an action-theoretic, philosophical anthropology. In a nutshell, what Marcuse sees in the Manuscripts is an analysis of the social conditions for a communist revolution.

The revolution itself requires the development of radical subjectivity. Radical subjectivity refers to the development of a form of self-consciousness that finds present social and economic conditions intolerable. The radical act is a refusal of these conditions and an orientation toward social transformation. Philosophical anthropology and radical subjectivity are connected here insofar as the intolerable conditions that must be overcome by revolution or the radical act represent social distortions of the human essence.

It is Marx and Hegel who provided Marcuse with a philosophical anthropology that discloses human essence and the social mechanisms by which it is distorted. According to Marcuse, Hegel, and Marx, human beings develop through a self-formative process wherein the external world nature is appropriated and transformed according to human needs.

Labor is one of the main areas for this self-formative activity. The idea that labor is an essential part of a self-formative process is what distinguishes Marx from the classical economists such as Smith, Ricardo, etc. In classical economics, labor is simply the means by which individuals make provisions for themselves and their families.

In these theories labor is not viewed as that activity by which the human subject is constituted. The Marxian view of labor as a self-formative process is what makes possible the Marxian theory of alienation and revolution. Marcuse argues that in the Manuscripts Marx shows how the role of labor as a self-realization or self-formative process gets inverted.

Instead of having his or her subjectivity affirmed, the individual becomes an object that is now shaped by external, alien forces. As a result, critical theory was left, in Habermas's words, without "anything in reserve to which it might appeal, and when the forces of production enter into a baneful symbiosis with the relations of production that they were supposed to blow wide open, there is no longer any dynamism upon which critique could base its hope".

In the s, Habermas , a proponent of critical social theory , [ 61 ] raised the epistemological discussion to a new level in his Knowledge and Human Interests , by identifying critical knowledge as based on principles that differentiated it either from the natural sciences or the humanities , through its orientation to self-reflection and emancipation.

Habermas's ideas about the relationship between modernity and rationalization are in this sense strongly influenced by Max Weber. He further dissolved the elements of critical theory derived from Hegelian German idealism , though his epistemology remains broadly Marxist. Perhaps his two most influential ideas are the concepts of the public sphere and communicative action , the latter arriving partly as a reaction to new post-structural or so-called " postmodern " challenges to the discourse of modernity.

Habermas engaged in regular correspondence with Richard Rorty , and a strong sense of philosophical pragmatism may be felt in his thought, which frequently traverses the boundaries between sociology and philosophy. Contemporary philosophers and researchers who have focused on understanding and critiquing critical theory include Nancy Fraser , Axel Honneth , Judith Butler , and Rahel Jaeggi.

Honneth is known for his works Pathology of Reason and The Legacy of Critical Theory , in which he attempts to explain critical theory's purpose in a modern context. Honneth established a theory that many use to understand critical theory, the theory of recognition. Like many others who put stock in critical theory, Jaeggi is vocal about capitalism's cost to society.

Throughout her writings, she has remained doubtful about the necessity and use of capitalism in regard to critical theory. To provide a dialectical opposite to Jaeggi's conception of alienation as 'a relation of relationlessness', Hartmut Rosa has proposed the concept of resonance. Focusing on language , symbolism, communication, and social construction , critical theory has been applied in the social sciences as a critique of social construction and postmodern society.

While modernist critical theory as described above concerns itself with "forms of authority and injustice that accompanied the evolution of industrial and corporate capitalism as a political-economic system", postmodern critical theory politicizes social problems "by situating them in historical and cultural contexts, to implicate themselves in the process of collecting and analyzing data, and to relativize their findings".

As a result, research focuses on local manifestations rather than broad generalizations. Postmodern critical research is also characterized by the crisis of representation , which rejects the idea that a researcher's work is an "objective depiction of a stable other". Instead, many postmodern scholars have adopted "alternatives that encourage reflection about the 'politics and poetics' of their work.

In these accounts, the embodied, collaborative, dialogic, and improvisational aspects of qualitative research are clarified. The term critical theory is often appropriated when an author works in sociological terms, yet attacks the social or human sciences, thus attempting to remain "outside" those frames of inquiry. Michel Foucault has been described as one such author.

When, in the s and s, Habermas redefined critical social theory as a study of communication , with communicative competence and communicative rationality on the one hand, and distorted communication on the other, the two versions of critical theory began to overlap to a much greater degree than before. Critical theory can be used to interpret the right of asylum [ 89 ] and immigration law.

Critical finance studies apply critical theory to financial markets and central banks. In the book, he calls traditional pedagogy the " banking model of education ", because it treats the student as an empty vessel to be filled with knowledge. He argues that pedagogy should instead treat the learner as a co-creator of knowledge. In contrast to the banking model, the teacher in the critical-theory model is not the dispenser of all knowledge, but a participant who learns with and from the students—in conversation with them, even as they learn from the teacher.

The goal is to liberate the learner from an oppressive construct of teacher versus student, a dichotomy analogous to colonizer and colonized. It is not enough for the student to analyze societal power structures and hierarchies, to merely recognize imbalance and inequity; critical theory pedagogy must also empower the learner to reflect and act on that reflection to challenge an oppressive status quo.

Critical social work is the application to social work of a critical theory perspective. Critical social work seeks to address social injustices, as opposed to focusing on individualized issues. Critical theories explain social problems as arising from various forms of oppression and injustice in globalized capitalist societies and forms of neoliberal governance.

Critical environmental justice applies critical theory to environmental justice. While critical theorists have often been called Marxist intellectuals, their tendency to denounce some Marxist concepts and to combine Marxian analysis with other sociological and philosophical traditions has resulted in accusations of revisionism by Orthodox Marxist and by Marxist—Leninist philosophers.

Martin Jay has said that the first generation of critical theory is best understood not as promoting a specific philosophical agenda or ideology, but as "a gadfly of other systems". Critical theory has been criticized for not offering any clear road map to political action praxis , often explicitly repudiating any solutions. Another criticism of critical theory "is that it fails to provide rational standards by which it can show that it is superior to other theories of knowledge, science, or practice.

Hughes and Hughes argue that Habermas' theory of ideal public discourse "says much about rational talkers talking, but very little about actors acting: Felt, perceptive, imaginative, bodily experience does not fit these theories". Some feminists argue that critical theory "can be as narrow and oppressive as the rationalization, bureaucratization, and cultures they seek to unmask and change.

Critical theory's language has been criticized as being too dense to understand, although "Counter arguments to these issues of language include claims that a call for clearer and more accessible language is anti-intellectual, a new 'language of possibility' is needed, and oppressed peoples can understand and contribute to new languages. Bruce Pardy, writing for the National Post , argued that any challenges to the "legitimacy [of critical theory] can be interpreted as a demonstration of their [critical theory's proponents'] thesis: the assertion of reason, logic and evidence is a manifestation of privilege and power.

Thus, any challenger risks the stigma of a bigoted oppressor. Robert Danisch, writing for The Conversation , argued that critical theory, and the modern humanities more broadly, focus too much on criticizing the current world rather than trying to make a better world. Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools.

Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikimedia Commons Wikiquote Wikidata item. Approach to social philosophy. For the journal, see Critical Sociology journal. Not to be confused with Critical thinking or Critical philosophy. Key themes. Conflict theory Critical theory Structural functionalism Positivism Social constructionism Social darwinism Symbolic interactionism.

Major theorists. Major works. Notable theorists. Important concepts. Related topics. History [ edit ]. Marx [ edit ]. Adorno and Horkheimer [ edit ]. Habermas [ edit ]. Modern critical theorists [ edit ]. Schools and Derivates [ edit ]. Postmodern critical social theory [ edit ]. Communication studies [ edit ]. Critical disability theory [ edit ].

At the intersection of disability studies and critical theory is critical disability theory. Work includes the intersections of race and ethnicity with disability in the field of education studies and has attempted to bridge critical race theory with disability studies. Critical legal studies [ edit ]. These paragraphs are an excerpt from Critical legal studies.

Critical legal studies CLS is a school of critical theory that developed in the United States during the s. Immigration studies [ edit ]. Critical finance studies [ edit ]. Critical management studies [ edit ]. These paragraphs are an excerpt from Critical management studies. Critical management studies CMS is a loose but extensive grouping of theoretically informed critiques of management , business and organisation, grounded originally in a critical theory perspective.

Today it encompasses a wide range of perspectives that are critical of traditional theories of management and the business schools that generate these theories. Critical international relations theory [ edit ]. These paragraphs are an excerpt from Critical international relations theory. Positivist critiques include Marxist and neo-Marxist approaches and certain "conventional" strands of social constructivism.

Postpositivist critiques include poststructuralist , postcolonial , "critical" constructivist, critical theory in the strict sense used by the Frankfurt School , neo-Gramscian , most feminist , and some English School approaches, as well as non-Weberian historical sociology , [ 92 ] " international political sociology ", " critical geopolitics ", and the so-called " new materialism " [ 93 ] partly inspired by actor—network theory.

All of these latter approaches differ from both realism and liberalism in their epistemological and ontological premises. Critical race theory [ edit ]. These paragraphs are an excerpt from Critical race theory. Critical race theory CRT is an academic field focused on the relationships between social conceptions of race and ethnicity , social and political laws , and mass media.

CRT also considers racism to be systemic in various laws and rules, not based only on individuals' prejudices. Critical pedagogy [ edit ]. Main article: Critical pedagogy.