Abstract
In the early 1930s Marcuse began an in-depth study of Hegel and wrote a series of articles on Hegelian and Marxian dialectics while preparing a dissertation under Heidegger on Hegel’s Ontology and the Theory of Historicity.1 Marcuse never really explained why he involved himself in such intensive work on Hegel — a project that would be at the centre of his philosophical inquiries, in different contexts, for the next decade. Perhaps Marcuse thought that Hegel’s dynamic and historical ontology provided a corrective to Heidegger’s more static and ahistorical ontology, which was not really able to conceptualize movement and change.2 Since Hegel was a great philosopher in the classical tradition of German Idealism — in whom Heidegger was also interested — Marcuse was able to do his post-doctorate work on Hegel while working with Heidegger.3 Moreover, Hegel was an important source of Marx’s theory, and Marcuse could thus continue work on his appropriation of Marxism through deepening his grasp of Hegel’s philosophy and dialectical method.4 The result of his study of Hegel was a version of Hegelian Marxism that would be a characteristic feature of Marcuse’s own work.
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Notes and References
It is necessary to write a ‘Habilitations-Dissertation’ in Germany, which must be accepted by the philosophy faculty and must then be published, in order to be promoted to a tenured position at a German university. Marcuse chose to work under Heidegger and published his dissertation on completing it, although it was never formally accepted by Heidegger. See Herbert Marcuse, Hegels Ontologie und die Grundlegung einer Theorie der Geschichtlichkeit (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1932; new edition 1968, to which pagination will refer; hereafter, Hegel’s Ontology). Seyla Benhabib is working on a translation of the text for the MIT series on German philosophy and social theory.
In Being and Time, Heidegger talks of the ‘ontological mystery of movement’ and the difficulty in characterizing movement, change and development with the categories of ontology. Marcuse probably felt that the more dynamic and historical categories of Hegel and Marx could contribute to developing a better theory of social change and historical development than that found in Heidegger, or any phenomenological or existential ontology. For example, in a review of a book on sociology by Hans Freyer, Marcuse identifies the actual movement of history with revolution, as if revolution were part of the dynamics of history itself. See ‘Zur Auseinandersetzung mit Hans Freyers “Soziologie als Wirklicheitswissenschaft”’, Philosophische Hefte, III, 1/2 (1931) pp. 89 — 90. Marcuse concluded ‘Contributions to a Phenomenology of Historical Materialism’ on a similar note, writing, ‘Organic historical development and revolution are not simply a contradiction; rather, revolution appears as the necessary form of historical movement. Further, revolution alone can transform the existence (Existenz) of the historical human being (Dasein)’ (S1, pp. 383–4). In both essays cited, Hegel was praised for his dynamic historical ontology, which provided the basis for Marx’s historical materialism.
Heidegger was giving seminars and lectures on Hegel during the early 1930s which produced, among other texts, ‘Hegel’s Concept of Experience’, later published in Holzwege (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1950) and translated into English by Kenley Dove (New York: Harper & Row, 1970).
Since it was probably impossible to work with Heidegger on a study of Marx, Marcuse chose Hegel as the thinker who was at once of crucial importance to Marxism and to traditional ontological problematics of the sort one could write about in a German academic philosophy faculty. Moreover, Marcuse saw Marx as the culmination of German Idealism and thus believed that it was important to study the roots of German Idealism to understand Marxism properly. He concluded his first published essay by presenting Marx as both the heir to German Idealism and its corrective (‘Contributions’, S1, p. 384) and took this position throughout his life.
Conversation with Marcuse, 28 December 1978.
See Chapter 2 for discussion of the impact of History and Class Consciousness on Marcuse.
For Marcuse’s discussions of Lukács in the period under investigation, see ‘Zum Problem der Dialektik’, Parts I and II, Die Gesellschaft, VII, 1 (1930) pp. 15–30, and VIII (1931) pp. 541–57, trans. Morton Schoolman and friends in Telos, 27 (Spring 1976) pp. 12–39.
Heidegger, Being and Time.
Although ‘academic socialism’ (Katherdersozialismus) was in vogue after the 1918 German Revolution, there were few university professors involved with Marxist philosophy. See Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy, pp. 29ff, and Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (London: New Left Books, 1976) for discussion of how concern with culture and philosphy would later be a defining characteristic of the emerging current of ‘critical Marxism’.
Marcuse, ‘Transzendentaler Marxismus?’, p. 445.
In ‘On the Philosophical Foundation of the Concept of Labour in Economics’, Marcuse writes: ‘every genuine economic theory is explicitly or inexplicitly connected with an ontology of man that transcends it. Furthermore, exonomic theory has at least a rough concept of historical human existence as such, which directs its development’. Throughout the essay, he claims that labour cannot be correctly conceptualized simply as economic activity, but rather its function within human life as a whole must be determined by an ontological analysis of labour, requiring ‘a fundamental philosophical discussion of the concept of labour’. Marcuse, ‘Über die philosophischen Grundlagen des wirtschaftlichen Arbeitsbegriff’, Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, 69, 3 (1933) pp. 257–92, trans. Douglas Kellner, Telos, 16 (Summer 1973) pp. 9–37.
Douglas Kellner, Telos, 16 (Summer 1973) pp. 9–37. This essay will be discussed in section 3.3
Marcuse, ‘Transzendentaler Marxismus?’, p. 445.
There is tension between this concept of philosophy as opposition and the ontological concept of philosophy as a discipline discerning and explicating the basic structures of being — a tension that would characterize Marcuse’s philosophical enterprise from beginning to end.
Marcuse, Hegel’s Ontology, pp. 9ff; Marcuse repeats this notion in Reason and Revolution, pp. 30ff.
Marcuse, ‘Das Problem der Geschichtlichen Wirklichkeit’, Die Gesellschaft, VIII (1931) pp. 350–67; reprinted in Schriften 1, pp. 469ff.; page references are to Schriften 1 source. For Korsch’s critique of current Marxian orthodoxies hostile to philosophy, see his Marxism and Philosophy, and Die materialistische Geschichtsauffassung und andere Schriften (Frankfurt: Europaische Verlagsanstalt, 1971).
Marcuse, ‘Das Problem der Geschichtlichen Wirklichkeit’, S1, p. 470.
Ibid., S1, pp. 470–1. Compare Marx’s ‘Contribution to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law’, Collected Works, vol. 3, pp. 183ff.
Marcuse, Das Problem der Geschichtlichen Wirklichkeit’, S1, pp. 471ff.
Marcuse, ‘Zur Wahrheistsproblemik der soziologischen Methode’.
Marcuse, ‘Transzendentaler Marxismus?’
Marcuse, ‘On the Problem of the Dialectic’.
Marcuse, ‘Zur Kritik der Soziologie’, Die Gesellschaft, VIII, 9 (1931) pp. 270–80, and his reviews of Noack and Freyer in Philosophische Hefte, II (1930) pp. 91–6.
his reviews of Noack and Freyer in Philosophische Hefte, II (1930) pp. 91–6.
Marcuse, ‘On the Problem of the Dialectic’. Compare Siegfried Marck, The Dialectic in Contemporary Philosophy (Tübingen: Mohr, 1929 and 1931, two volumes). Marck was a neo-Kantian and Social Democratic philosopher who later was supported by the Institute for Social Research and wrote book reviews for their journal.
Marcuse, ‘On the Problem of Dialectic’, pp. 22f.
Compare Marcuse, Hegel’s Ontology and ‘On the Problem of Dialectie’, pp. 17–22 and 25–38.
Marcuse, ‘On the Problem of the Dialectic’, pp. 25ff.
Ibid. p. 27. In fact, Marcuse was more sympathetic to Dilthey’s ontology than Heidegger’s during this period-another theoretical difference which might have caused Heidegger displeasure, leading to his rejection of Marcuse’s Habitationsschrift on Hegel; see the discussion in Chapter 4.
Ibid., pp. 35ff.
Ibid., p. 35. Further, ‘It is already evident … that Hegel here means the process of reification (Verdinglichung) and its transcendence (Durchbrechung) as a basic occurrence of human life, which Marx represented as the basic law of historical development’ (p. 36).
Ibid., p. 36.
Ibid., p. 38.
Ibid., p. 22.
Marcuse, Hegel’s Ontology, p. 1. The term ‘historicity’ appears in almost all of Marcuse’s 1928–1932 essays; the use of this term indicates that he has not yet liberated himself from the ontological perspectives of German Idealism for a more materialist approach to history.
Ibid.
Ibid., pp. 2–3.
Ibid., pp. 3ff, passim.
Ibid., p. 8.
Ibid., pp. 1–2, 363–8, passim.
See Georg Lukács, Die Zerstörung der Vernunft (Neuwied und Berlin: Luchterhand, 1962) pp. 491–2.
This judgment was frequently expresssed to me by philosophers in Germany. See also Richard Bernstein, ‘Herbert Marcuse: An Immanent Critique’, Social Theory and Practice, vol. 1, no. 4 (Fall 1977) who calls Hegel’s Ontology Marcuse’s ‘most serious and brilliant work’ (p. 97).
Marcuse, Hegel’s Ontology, pp. 79ff. Compare Chapters 5 and 8 of this book.
T. W. Adorno, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung I, 2 (1932) pp. 409–10.
Ibid., p. 410.
Ibid. See also another Adorno review which indicates his high regard for Marcuse’s book on Hegel’s Ontology. Zeitschrift für Sozialforschuung, II, 1 (1933) pp. 107–8.
On Adorno’s early critique of Idealism, see Susan Buck-Morss, The Origins of Negative Dialectics (New York: The Free Press, 1977). Adorno’s PhD dissertation was a critique of Husserl, and he had just finished writing a long critique of Kierkegaard. Adorno and Marcuse did not really know each other well until the late 1930s, when they were together with the Institute for Social Research in New York and later in California. I shall later discuss Adorno’s impact on Marcuse’s post-Second World War theory.
The differences between Marcuse’s two Hegel books are discussed by Jean-Michel Palmier, Herbert Marcuse et la nouvelle gauche (Paris: Belfond, 1973) pp. 42–98.
See my discussion in Chapter 5.
Marcuse, ‘Neue Quellen zur Grundlegung des Historischen Materialismus’, Die Gesellschaft, IX, 8 (1932) pp. 136–74; trans. Joris de Bres in Studies in Critical Philosophy (hereafter SCP); page references will be to the English publication, but the translations will often be my own. I might note that Marcuse’s review of Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 brought his name to the attention of a broader public, especially on the Left, than he had earlier enjoyed. Henry Pachter told me of the admiration that he and others in Korsch’s circle had for Marcuse’s review when it was first published and that this was the first time they had taken notice of Marcuse (conversation with Pachter, 11 July 1978, New York).
Istvan Meszaros, Marx’s Theory of Alienation (London: Merlin, 1970) p.11. See Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1944, Collected Works, vol. 3, pp. 231ff.
Marcuse, Conversation with Habermas and others, ‘Theory and Politics’, p. 25.
Marcuse’s essay was both an anticipation of, and direct influence on, this trend to assign a fundamental importance to the writings of the early Marx in interpreting the Marxist corpus as a whole. The Marxist-Leninist Steigerwald claims that Marcuse’s article is ‘actually the mine of almost all attempts up until now to revise Marxism on the basis of the early Marx’, and ‘contains all the stereotypes of bourgeois and re-visionist Marx-critiques that start with the early Marx, and which are today still influential’, Herbert Marcuse ‘dritter Weg’, p. 87. Iring Fetscher gives Korsch, Lukács and Marcuse credit for inaugurating ‘the current interpretation (dominant in the West) from the early writings of Marx’, in Marx and Marxism (New York: Seabury, 1971) p. 46.
The project of revising the accepted picture of Marxism on the basis of the new material found in the early writings of Marx was also formulated, but differently, by two Social Democrats, Landshut and Mayer, who edited and wrote an introduction to the first German edition of the Manuscripts, Die Frühschriften (Leipzig: 1932). They argued that Marxism was ‘fundamentally an ethical doctrine’, and developed an interpretation that influenced later ethico-humanist trends of Marx interpretation that emphasized the philosophical character of Marxism, playing down the importance of its critique of political economy and revolutionary social theory. See, for example, Karl Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967); Jean-Yves Calvez, La Pensée de Karl Marx (Paris: Seuil, 1956);
Erich Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man (New York: Grove Press, 1963). The Manuscripts also had a strong influence in France and helped produce a succession of syntheses of Marx, Hegel and existentialism in the works of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Kojeve, Hippolyte and to some extent Lefevbre and Garaudy. On the impact of the early Marx on the French scene, see Poster, Existential Marxism.
Steigerwald summarizes this Marxist-Leninist devaluation of Marx’s Manuscripts in Herbert Marcuses ‘dritter Weg’, pp. 86–91, and on p. 116 lists several ‘Marxist’ commentaries which ‘correct’ ‘bourgeois’ Marx-interpretations. See also Louis Althusser, For Marx (New York: Vintage, 1968) who claims that there is an ‘epistemological break’ between the philosophical (= ‘ideological’ = ‘non-scientific’) early works and the ‘scientific’ later works of Marx.
Marx’s early writings have been frequently used by Eastern European Marxists in the interests of developing a ‘humanistic’ version of Marxism used to criticize the orthodox ‘Stalinist’ versions. See the articles in Socialist Humanism, ed. Erich Fromm (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966) and the works of Kosik, Schaff, Kolakowski, Markovic, Petrovic, Stojanovic and others.
A fuller documentation of the various interpretations of Marx’s Manuscripts and their wide-ranging effects can be found in Erich Thier, ‘Etappen der Marxinterpretation, Marxismusstudien, I (Tübingen: 1954)
Jurgen Habermas, ‘Zur philosophischen Diskussion um Marx und den Marxismus’, Theorie und Praxis (Berlin und Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1963) pp. 261–335 — an important discussion left out of the English translation of Theory and Practice;
Emilo Bottigelli, Introduction, Manuscripts de 1844 (Paris: 1969) pp. vii ff.
Marcuse makes this even more explicit in his discussion of the relation between Marx and Hegel at the end of his article; see SCP, pp. 40–8.
Marcuse, SCP, pp. 5ff, 31f, passim. On this theme, see my article ‘Karl Marx and Adam Smith on Human Nature and Capitalism’ in The Subtle Anatomy of Capitalism, ed. Jesse Schwartz (Santa Monica, Cal.: Goodyear, 1977).
For Marx’s celebrated discussion of the alienation of labour, see Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, and the commentary by Meszaros, Marx’s Theory of Alienation.
The relationship between the concepts of objectification (Vergegenständlichung), externalization (Entäusserung) and alienation (Entfremdung) in Hegel and Marx has been a central issue of debate since the publication of Marx’s Manuscripts. Marx ends his Manuscripts with a discussion of Hegel, where he objects to a ‘double error’ (pp. 331ff): (1) Hegel’s idealism reduces concrete history to a thought-process and illicitly tries to grasp history through ‘abstract philosophical thinking’ (p. 331); and (2) Hegel presents alienation as the externalization and objectification of spirit, and thus fails to grasp the historically specific material conditions of alienation which revolutionary practice is to eliminate (pp. 332ff). Both Marx and Marcuse claim that Hegel collapses objectification, externalization and alienation into one ontological process which fails to distinguish between the necessary features of externalization and objectification in all human activity and the contingent features of alienation, removal of which is necessary for human liberation. This point is highlighted in a study by George Lukács, The Young Hegel (London: Merlin, 1975). Lukács compares Hegel’s theory of ‘externalization’ (Entäusserung) with Marx’s theory of alienation, providing a detailed historical and conceptual analysis of these terms (pp. 537–49); he then contrasts Hegel and Marx on the concept of ‘objectification’ (pp. 549ff).
See also the commentary and critique by Jean Hippolite, ‘Alienation and Objectification: Commentary on G. Lukács’ The Young Hegel’, in Studies on Marx and Hegel (New York: Harper & Row, 1969). Hippolite in turn defends Hegel by re-ontologizing both alienation and objectification and criticizing Marx’s ‘optimistic’ view that alienation could be overcome (pp. 87ff).
Many critics claim that Marx’s anthropology in the Manuscripts is primarily Feuerbachian and is utilized as a polemical model against Hegel’s idealist anthropology. See Lloyd Easton and Kurt Guddat, Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967);
Schlomo Avineri, The Social and Political Writings of Karl Marx (New York: Cambridge, 1968);
Althusser, For Marx, pp. 45ff. The interpretation of the early Marx as a Feuerbachian critic of Hegel is wrong in that Marx is neither a Hegelian nor a Feuerbachian in his early writings but is instead creating his own synthesis of Feuerbach and other young Hegelians, Hegel and British political economy. Although Marx frequently champions Feuerbach’s naturalism against Hegelian Idealism, he counteracts the passive aspects of Feuerbach’s theory of human nature with emphasis on the active, creative aspects of the human being and concepts of labour and Geist of Hegel. On the heterogeneous origins of Marx’s theory of labour, see the article by R. N. Berki, ‘On the Nature and Origins of Marx’s Concept of Labor’, Political Theory, vol. 7, no. I (February 1979) pp. 35–56).
Marcuse is one of the first to stress explicitly that Marx’s anthropology conceives of human beings in terms of needs and powers. On this theme, see Bertell Ollman, Alienation (New York: Cambridge, 1971)
Agnes Heller, The Theory of Need in Marx (London: Allison & Busby, 1976).
We see here that Marcuse historicizes the concept of essence in the context of historical materialism. For other attempts to rethink the problematics of human history and essence, see György Markus, ‘Human Essence and History’, International Journal of Sociology, vol. IV, no. 1 (Spring 1974) pp. 82ff, and Erich Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man. It is still to me an open question whether a concept of ‘essence’ is necessary to talk about alienation, or whether materialist concepts of needs and powers would not serve better as anthropological concepts critical of capitalist society which enable us to criticize the capitalist mode of production, its dominant needs, values and consciousness, and its effects on human beings. To avoid philosophical mystification, it is necessary to conceptualize a theory of human nature that does not adopt an idealist concept of human essence, explicated in terms of a fixed species characterized by simplicity, identify, unchangeability, etc. On this issue I think that Breuer, Die Krise der Revolutionstheorie, is wrong to claim that Marcuse remains trapped in an idealist theory of essence, for Marcuse rejects idealist doctrines of essence and is groping for a historicist-materialist concept. That is, although there are features of the idealist problematic in Marcuse, he is struggling, with the help of Dilthey’s historicism and Marx’s materialism, to overcome the presuppositions of German Idealism and to develop a new philosophical theory of human nature and history. In his work with the Institute for Social Research, it is clear that he has made progress in this direction; see the essay, ‘The Concept of Essence’, Negations, pp. 96ff. where he criticizes the Platonic, Christian and idealist theories of essence and advocates a Marxian materialist conception. A mark of Marcuse’s project henceforth will be reformulation of a materialist theory of human nature — a problematic that will surface in his work with the Institute, his appropriation of Freud and his later anthropology of false needs — which will be discussed in the next several chapters. For another critique of Breuer’s reduction of Marcuse’s theory to the problematic of German Idealism,
see the penetrating review by James A. Ogilvy, Telos, 35 (Spring 1978) pp. 219–26.
On the allegedly ‘idealist’ and ‘historicist’ nature of Marcuse and critical theory, see Göran Therborn, ‘The Frankfurt School’, in Western Marxism: A Critical Reader (London: New Left Books, 1977);
for a critique of Marcuse’s falling prey to a reductionistic Marxian materialism, see Jean Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production (St Louis: Telos Press, 1975).
The term the ‘metaphysics of labour’ was introduced by Adorno as a critique of an alleged reduction of essential human nature to labour by Marx. See T. W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971) p. 270. Habermas and his colleagues criticized the reductionistic anthropology of labour in Marx, which failed to conceptualize adequately symbolic interaction and pointed to a ‘secret positivism’ in Marx.
See Jürgen Habermas, Human Knowledge and Interests (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971)
Albrecht Wellmer, Critical Theory of Society (New York: Seabury, 1974); and Jóhann Páll Árnson, Von Marcuse zu Marx, who criticizes Marcuse for his reductionistic anthropology of labour (pp. 28ff). Stefan Breuer takes a similar line in Die Krise der Revolutionstheorie, pp. 45ff and 111ff.
Jean Baudrillard claims in The Mirror of Production that the presuppositions of capitalist political economy remain operative in the Marxian-Marcusian theories of labour, production, use-value, etc. He believes that radical social theory must break with the presuppositions of political economy to conceptualize human emancipation in terms of play, sexuality, symbolic exchange and other cultural activities (pp. 17ff, passim). But Baudrillard’s critique is also misplaced, because Marx includes aesthetic, erotic and even ‘spiritual’ activity in his discussion of emancipation and talks of the ‘play’ of human senses, imagination and body-power in non-alienated labour. Marcuse analyses in detail emancipatory aesthetic and erotic activity in his later writing; thus it is nonsensical to claim that he remains strait-jacketed by the presuppositions of political economy. Further, in his critique of ‘the ethic of labour’ and ‘aesthetic of non-labour’, Baudrillard misinterprets the thrust of Marx and Marcuse’s theory of labour, falsely claiming that they ‘exalt labour as value, as end in itself, as categorical imperative. Labour loses its negativity and is raised to an absolute value’. Against this view, it is clear that both Marx and Marcuse described oppressive features of socially necessary labour and call for an emancipation of labour that will raise labour to a form of creative and fulfilling activity.
Baudrillard contrasts the Marxian emphasis on labour with an ideal of ‘symbolic exchange’ described as a ‘discharge with a pure waste, a symbolic discharge in Bataille’s sense (pulsating, libidinal) … a gratuitous and festive energizing of the body’s powers, a game with death, or the acting out of a desire’ (p. 43). But does not the paradigm of Baudrillard’s ideal of human activity seem to be masturbation (‘a discharge with a pure waste … pulsating, libidinal’) or gratuitous violence and destruction (‘a game with death’)? Thus, whereas some of Baudrillard’s criticisms are justified (i.e. that there is a tendency in Marxism to overestimate the role of labour in human life and to impose its categories on primitive and non-capitalist societies), his own ideal of ‘symbolic exchange’ is extremely vague and tinged with irrationalism. See my critique of Baudrillard in Theory, Culture and Society (1984, forthcoming).
Marcuse told me that Rosa Luxemburg’s theory of revolution and the events of the Russian and German Revolutions decisively influenced his early concept of revolution, which he perceived as a ‘catastrophic upheaval’ and total restructuring of social life (conversation, 28 December 1978). We shall see how this concept continued to be operative in Marcuse’s 1960s understanding of revolution and that only in the 1970s did Marcuse reformulate his concept of revolution (see Chapter 9).
See Marx, Manuscripts, especially pp. 293–326 and SCP, pp. 30ff.
Ibid., pp. 300ff and 322ff. This is the utopian notion of socialism explicated in the Critique of the Gotha Program by the formula, ‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs’. On the origins and history of this formula, see the book by Marcuse’s friends, Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979) pp. 697ff.
Steigerwald, Herbert Marcuses ‘dritter Weg’, p. 102.
Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, p. 295.
Marcuse, ‘On the Philosophical Concept of Labour.’
Ibid., p. 11.
Ibid., pp. 12ff.
Ibid., pp. 29ff.
Ibid., p. 25. See the discussion in note 63. The notion that labour is a burden goes back to ‘Jehovah’s curse’ in the Bible, and was repeated by Adam Smith, who saw labour as a ‘sacrifice’. In insisting that all labour is a burden, Marcuse is transposing Heidegger’s notion that ‘life is a burden’, Being and Time, p. 173, to the labour process.
Marcuse, ‘On the Philosophical Concept of Labour’, pp. 14ff, 23ff, and 29ff.
Breuer, Die Krise der Revolutionstheorie, p. 111. Breuer’s critique of Marcuse’s alleged hypostatizing conditions of labour under capitalism into an ontological concept is interesting, but his claim that ‘Capital, as the Substance become Subject, has incorporated labour into itself’, reproduces the worst features of Adorno’s paranoia over the disappearance of subjectivity in the ‘totally administered society’. Compare Ogilvy’s review, Telos, 35. What I call ‘the fallacy of ontological generalization’ criticizes the illicit projection of historically specific conditions onto a universal Concept.
Compare Baudrillard, The Minor of Production. Breuer never mentions Baudrillard — although he cites Foucault, Derrida and other French thinkers — but many of his criticisms of Marx and Marcuse are quite similar to Baudrillard’s anti-Marxist polemic.
Karl Marx, Capital III (New York: International Publishers, 1966). See also the Marx-Engels Reader, pp. 440–1. Marcuse ends his essay on labour with the famous quotation on the realms of freedom and necessity. We shall see that one of the most significant developments in Marcuse’s later thinking is his reformulations of the relation between the realms of freedom and necessity and his notion of the possibility of freedom entering the realm of necessity through nonalienated labour (see Chapter 10). Marcuse would discover passages in Marx’s Grundrisse (first published in 1939) which contained notions of non-alienated labour within the realm of necessity that would lead him to rethink these issues.
The desire to preserve a realm of unconditioned freedom of the self also helps explain tendencies in the essay on labour towards a dualism between the self and the world, as in the passages where Marcuse claims that the self is other than its body and is not subject to the same forces and laws as historical processes. Such passages in the essay on labour suggest an uncharacteristic dualism which Marcuse is usually careful to avoid in his early essays. See, for example, ‘Zur Kritik der Soziologie’, where he stresses the indissolvable unity of the human being and its world and claims that this dialectical unity is an essential condition of the possibility of social-historical transformation (pp. 276ff).
Marcuse, ‘On the Philosophical Concept of Labour’, pp. 31ff.
See Albrecht Wellmer, ‘Communications and Emancipation: Reflections on the Linguistic Turn in Critical Theory’, in On Critical Theory, ed. John O’Neill (New York: Seabury, 1976).
Curiously, the issue does not explicitly come up in Marcuse’s discussion with Habermas, ‘Theory and Politics’, although there is detailed debate over other aspects of their rather different anthropologies. See especially pp. 132–40.
Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, pp. 273–312.
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Kellner, D. (1984). Studies in the Marxian Philosophy. In: Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism. Contemporary Social Theory. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17583-3_4
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