With his kindly Kris Kringle smile, his Katzenjammer accent and his snow-white hair, Professor Herbert Marcuse of the University of California's San Diego campus seems too charmingly ge nial to be a revolutionary. He coos over the fine fur of his rust-colored cat, Freddie, and holds a lifetime membership in the San Diego Zoo, where he affectionately favors owls, elephants and hippopotamuses. Yet whether in Berkeley or Berlin, today's youthful radicals, who are challenging the most basic premises of industrial society, increasingly turn to the writings of the aging (he will be 70 in July) German-born philosopher to find a satisfactory rationale for rebellion.
On their protest marches, the militant student leaders who recently forced the closing of the University of Rome bore a banner inscribed with the three Ms of a new trinity: Marx, Marcuse and Mao. "We see Marx as prophet, Marcuse as his interpreter, and Mao as the sword," said one student-power advocate. On a visit to the Free University of Berlin last summer, Marcuse (pronounced Markooza) drew jammed lecture halls and wild ovations as he spoke glowingly of "the moral, political, intellectual and sexual rebellion of youth."
Agent of Domination. In the U.S., Marcuse's most recent book, One-Dimensional Man (1964) is one of Beacon Press's bestselling paperbacks and a growing campus favorite—even though it is on few required reading lists. Almost as popular is his earlier, Freudian interpretation of social change, Eros and Civilization, which intrigues students seeking an intellectual basis for today's hippie culture. Taking advantage of the rising interest in Marcuse, Beacon Press next month is publishing a collection of early essays called Negations.
What makes Marcuse a guru of the student rebels is his chilling and strident critique of modern industrial civilization, which he sees as an impersonal, all-pervasive agent of domination over the individual. Modern technology, which should be used to free man from oppressive work, Marcuse argues, has overreached itself, turned wasteful and created a massive fusion of interlocking military, corporate and political interests. As a result, he says, the normal channels of protest and dissent are rendered impotent.
General Anesthesia. Marcuse concedes that modern technology provides man with material well-being and even admits that more men may be happier today than ever before—but it is a happiness born of an ignorance ("a state of anesthesia") of what they could become. Men may think they have more freedom and more choices, he says, but the options open to them are not meaningfully different. In this state, man rejects all thoughts that challenge society's rationale—hence Marcuse's definition of man as "one-dimensional."
"The goods and services that the individuals buy," he writes, "control their needs and petrify their faculties. They have dozens of newspapers and magazines that espouse the same ideals. They have innumerable gadgets that keep them occupied and divert their attention from the real issue—which is the awareness that they could both work less and determine their own needs and satisfactions."