Progressives are in dire straits. Other than knowing to stay to the left of Republicans, I'm not sure we have much of a clue where to go next. We could do worse than to familiarize ourselves with Marcuse's works and see if they might help light our way out of the darkness.
http://direland.typepad.com/direland/2005/07/remembering_her.htmlToday is the 107th birthday of the late Herbert Marcuse (left), the political, social, and cultural philosopher -- a leading member of what is known as the Frankfurt School along with Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Max Horkheimer. The Frankfurt School wove insights from Marx, Freud, and Max Weber into new syntheses of social and cultural criticism. Marcuse is somewhat out of favor now in American universities -- but in the '50s, '60s, and '70s he inspired several generations trying to construct a new radical politics that rejected both Soviet communism and triumphalist monopoly capitalism and sought to create new cultural critiques and models.
One of my favorite Marcuse anecdotes is this: When Playboy wanted to interview Marcuse, and offered him a great deal of money to do so, he said he would only do it if he could be the centerfold! There are several good biographies of Herbert Marcuse available online: a quite complete biographical notice by Prof. Teresa MacKey, and a smart intellectual review of Marcuse's work by the proprietor of Blog Left, the UCLA Prof. Doug Kellner, as part of his quite useful Critical Theory website.
This fall, a major conference on Marcuse will be held November 3-6 in Philadelphia. The conference, "Reading Herbert Marcuse's Eros and Civilization after 50 Years" -- sponsored by St. Joseph's University's Philosophy Department and the Philadelphia Philosophy Commission -- will include not only a re-examination of Eros and Civilization and its place in Marcuse's social philosophy; but also consider the influence of Marcuse's work in the past five decades; its place in a critical theory of society; and the importance of Eros and Civilization for fields such as psychology, aesthetics, and political philosophy; as well as prospects for a renewal of Marcuse's approach to social philosophy.
Marcuse was a major influence on my own thinking, and so much of what he wrote is enormously pertinent to the world in which we find ourselves today. One of his most innovative and, for me, still contemporaneously vital concepts was his 1965 articulation of a theory of "repressive tolerance." Marcuse's thought, while accessible, is too densely contiguous to be reduced to a soundbite, but to give just a hint of the flavor of what Marcuse meant by "repressive tolerance," here is a particularly pungent quotation:
"It is the people who tolerate the government, which in turn tolerates opposition within the framework determined by the constituted authorities," Marcuse wrote. "Tolerance toward that which is radically evil now appears as good because it serves the cohesion of the whole on the road to affluence or more affluence. The toleration of the systematic moronization of children and adults alike by publicity and propaganda, the release of destructiveness in aggressive driving, the recruitment for and training of special forces, the important and benevolent tolerance toward outright deception in merchandising, waste, and planned obsolescence are not distortions and aberrations, they are the essence of a system which fosters tolerance as a means for perpetuating the struggle for existence and suppressing the alternatives...."
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