Immigrant of the Day: Herbert Marcuse (Germany)

Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) was a philosopher and sociologist, and a member of the Frankfurt School. His best known works are Eros and Civilization and One-Dimensional Man.

Born in Berlin. Marcuse served in the German Army during the First World War. After completing his Ph.D. thesis at the University of Freiburg in 1922, he moved back to Berlin, where he worked in publishing. With his academic career blocked by the rise of the Third Reich, Marcuse in 1933 joined the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, emigrating from Germany that same year, going first to Switzerland before heading to the United States, where he became a naturalized citizen in 1940.

Although he never returned to Germany to live, Marcuse remained one of the major theorists associated with the Frankfurt School. In 1940, he published Reason and Revolution, a dialectical work studying Georg W. F. Hegel and Karl Marx.

During World War II, Marcuse first worked for the U.S. Office of War Information on anti-Nazi propaganda projects. In 1943, he transferred to the Office of Strategic Services. Marcuse next worked for the U.S. Department of State as head of the Central European section. In 1952, he began a teaching career as a political theorist, first at Columbia and Harvard, then at Brandeis University from 1958 to 1965, where he taught philosophy and politics, and finally at the University of California, San Diego.

Marcuse's critiques of capitalist society, especially his synthesis of Marx and Freud, Eros and Civilization (1955), and his book One-Dimensional Man (1964) resonated with the concerns of the student movement in the 1960s. Because of his willingness to speak at student protests, Marcuse soon became known as "the father of the New Left in the United States."  Many radical scholars and activists of the '60s were influenced by Marcuse, such as Angela Davis and Abbie Hoffman.

Marcuse's 1965 essay "Repressive Tolerance", in which he claimed capitalist democracies can have totalitarian aspects, has been criticized by conservatives.

For a commprehensive Marcuse website, constructed by one of his grandsons, with full bibliographies of his works, click here.

KJ