Some important contributions have already been made toward moving beyond the myths about Marcuse and providing a more comprehensive and penetrating account of his work as a whole – most notably in the three intellectual biographies published on him in the early eighties. Since then Marcuse has received little scholarly attention, so that much work still needs to be done in order properly to reassess his role as one of the twentieth century’s most influential theorists and to determine which aspects of his thought are still relevant today. The spate of conferences held in 1998 in his honor signal a renewed interest in his work, as do several recent books published in the US and Germany. What sets these books apart from their predecessors is that they draw extensively upon materials only recently made available in the Herbert Marcuse Archive in Frankfurt. In fact, Technology, War and Fascism, edited by Douglas Kellner, and Feindanalysen: Über die Deutschen, edited by Peter-Erwin Jansen, are the first installments in what will be multi-volumed editions that will present previously unavailable material from the Marcuse Archive. Stephan Bundschuh’s “Und weil der Mensch ein Mensch ist...” Anthropologische Aspekte der Sozialphilosophie Herbert Marcuses is the first comprehensive study of Marcuse’s work to draw extensively upon archival material. The greater historical distance and the increased availability of archival material should make it possible to move beyond the “diatribes and distortions” of the late sixties and early seventies that have hindered an adequate reception of Marcuse’s work.

Technology, War and Fascism is the first of a six-volume “Collected Papers” edition of Marcuse’s works that is being published by Routledge and edited by Douglas Kellner. The first volume contains much interesting archival material from the early forties, including two lengthy essays Marcuse wrote on Nazi Germany and an overview of a major research project on the history of social change from antiquity to the present that Marcuse initiated with Franz Neumann. Other archival material in the volume includes a thesis paper outlining Marcuse’s understanding of the postwar political situation as well as numerous letters Marcuse wrote to Horkheimer in the forties. Along with this previously unavailable material Kellner has also included “Some Social Implications of Modern Technology,” Marcuse’s first serious treatment of technology, which was originally published in the final issue of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung in 1941; an essay on Louis Aragon’s novel Aurelien, which Marcuse used to reflect upon the aesthetic implications of fascism; and a brief exchange of letters with Heidegger after the war in which Marcuse distanced himself from his former mentor after the latter’s refusal to take a public stance on his involvement with the Nazis. So while the primary purpose of the Routledge “Collected Papers” series is to make available material from the Marcuse Archive, some previously published essays, lectures, and letters will also be included. Although the material in the first volume is limited to the forties, this and the following volumes of the edition are organized along thematic, not chronological lines. This presumably is the reason why Kellner has chosen to republish Marcuse’s first technology essay rather than, for example, his trenchant critique of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, which was also written in the late forties. The themes to be addressed in the next five volumes include critical theory, aesthetics, the New Left, psychoanalysis, and Marxism.

In his lengthy introduction to the volume, Kellner argues convincingly that the research Marcuse conducted on Germany for the US government during the war should not be seen merely as a hiatus in his theoretical work, but rather as an important empirical basis for many of his later insights. Reading the essays on Nazi Germany, it is indeed apparent that central concepts of Marcuse’s later work, such as technological rationality and repressive desublimation, were first formulated at this time. Kellner also argues, less convincingly, that a serious rift was opening up in the forties between the former members of the Institute, with Marcuse and Neumann on one side and Horkheimer and Adorno on the other. Kellner points to Marcuse and Neumann’s plans for a massive research project on social change as evidence that they were attempting to develop a more politically engaged version of critical theory to counter the growing pessimism and resignation of Horkheimer and Adorno. But if this was true, one wonders why Marcuse and Neumann never went beyond the beginning stages in their work on the social change project. It is clear that Marcuse was influenced by Neumann during this time, but not in a way that diminished his opinion of Horkheimer’s position. Marcuse’s letters to Horkheimer in the forties demonstrate clearly that he wanted nothing more than to continue his theoretical collaboration with Horkheimer.

By the early forties the Institute’s financial situation had become critical, so when Marcuse was offered a research position at the Office of War Information in Washington DC – ironically enough, a precursor organization of the CIA – in 1942, Marcuse reluctantly followed Horkheimer’s advice and joined a number of other leftist émigrés employed by the US government in the fight against fascism. During this time Marcuse prepared the final versions of the two essays on Nazi Germany contained in this volume: “State and Individual under National Socialism” and “The New German Mentality.” The former, which was originally written as a contribution to a series of lectures that Institute members were giving at the time at Columbia University, is concerned primarily with the political and socio-economic structure of National Socialism. Marcuse had already argued in his 1934 essay, “The Struggle Against Liberalism in the Totalitarian View of the State,” that National Socialism had liquidated the liberal-democratic political principles of the Weimar republic, while at the same time consolidating the monopolistic forms of capital accumulation that had made great strides in Germany in the twenties. In “State and Individual under National Socialism” he makes a similar argument, although he places greater emphasis on the achievements of Weimar. In his view, the Nazi regime allowed German industry to cast off the fetters imposed upon it by the Weimar republic, and thus cleared the way for imperialist expansion in the East. He also focuses – clearly demonstrating the influence of Neumann’s Behemoth – on the abolition of the Weimar Rechtsstaat and the dissolution of universalist law, which placed German society under the direct control of particularistic groups, such as big industry, the Nazi party, and the Wehrmacht. In other words, Marcuse tried to convince his American audience that fascism was not the complete antithesis of their own society – it was not a monolithic state and it brought to fruition certain tendencies operative in all capitalist economies – while at the same time reminding them that the universalist political principles they were defending were far more than metaphysical abstractions.

In “The New German Mentality,” a memorandum Marcuse circulated among his colleagues in Washington that was based on an earlier text he had prepared for the Institute, Marcuse turned his attention to the cultural transformation brought about by National Socialism. He was particularly concerned with the continuities and breaks between German Kultur and National Socialist ideology, a topic he had addressed the year before in his massive study on Hegel and the rise of social theory, Reason and Revolution. In that work – the first he wrote in English – Marcuse countered the belief, common in the US and England at the time, that Hegel’s emphatic concept of the state was an intellectual precursor of Nazism. In the “New German Mentality” he continued this line of argument, stating that the new mentality is not the realization of any abstruse metaphysical doctrine, but rather a form of capitalist reorganization characteristic of a “late-comer who tries to break into the entrenched system of powers with terroristic means” (146). This thoroughly rationalized and efficient social system gave rise to an ideology of myth and pragmatism, which represented the negation of the German ideals of Kultur and Bildung. Truth, goodness, and beauty were meaningless for those absorbed in the pursuit of their immediate interests. As Marcuse put it, “The German dreamer and idealist has become the world’s most brutal pragmatist” (143). While Marcuse did tend toward a rather orthodox Marxist interpretation of National Socialism, which located its origins in the general contradictions of capitalist modernization, he also took psychological factors and the peculiarities of German history into account. Drawing upon a recent essay by Horkheimer, Marcuse discussed the social-psychological underpinnings of Nazism: the vast reservoir of anti-Christian, anti-capitalist, and anti-modern ideas that existed in Germany because of the relative weakness of the middle class and the persistence of feudal social relations. According to this analysis, the Nazis’ success depended largely on their ability to tap these emotions and manipulate them for their own ends.

Marcuse shed much light on the political, socio-economic, and ideological factors that made the National Socialist reign of terror possible, but the two essays do have several important weaknesses. His view of the Third Reich as a totally mobilized, technologically streamlined version of monopoly capitalism places too much emphasis on its “rational” aspects. Despite his discussion of the recrudescence of myth, Marcuse had relatively little to say about the irrational forces unleashed by the Nazis, antisemitism being only the most obvious example. One wonders if Marcuse would have modified his analysis if he had written the essays a few years later, after the irrational elements of the regime had become even more apparent – such as its willingness to pursue a campaign of extermination against Jews and other “undesirables” even though it meant diverting badly needed resources from the war effort. Considering the widespread appeal of fascism in Europe, Marcuse was right to look beyond national peculiarities in his analysis of Nazi Germany, but his focus on the contradictions of capitalist modernization caused him to overlook the important differences between National Socialism and Western constitutional democracies. For example, Marcuse made the questionable claim that the cynical matter-of-factness and technological rationality propagated by the National Socialists “brings the German mentality much closer to the Western mind than it has ever been and builds the first bridge of communication between the two worlds” (165).

This tendency to see Nazi Germany and Western democracies as variations on the same theme of monopoly capitalism is also apparent in Marcuse’s “33 Theses,” a position paper he wrote shortly after the war, in which he claimed that the world will soon be divided into a Soviet and neo-fascist camp (217). His pessimistic belief that “what remains of democratic-liberal forms will be crushed between the two camps or absorbed by them” (ibid.) led Marcuse to characterize Western European Communist Parties, and, to a lesser extent, the Soviet Union, in uncharacteristically generous terms. They appeared to him as the only place in which it might be remotely possible to revitalize the essence of Marx’s theory, which for Marcuse “is not the nationalization of the means of production, or their better development, nor the higher standard of living, but rather the abolition of domination, exploitation and labor” (224). But even the unprecedented prestige the Western European Communist Parties enjoyed in the post-war period – due to their important role in the resistance – was not enough to entice Marcuse to follow the lead of Lukács, Bloch, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and other critical Marxists who were either Communist Party members or fellow travelers for varying lengths of time. At a time when real-existing socialism had “objectively discredited the revolution” (221) and “bourgeoisification” had reached deeper than ever before into the ranks of the working class, uncompromising theoretical critique was the best way to remain true to emancipatory ideals, according to Marcuse.

So while Marcuse was contributing on a practical level at his job in Washington to the Western capitalist democracies’ fight against fascism, he refused to relinquish his hopes for more substantial social change. Throughout his life Marcuse would turn to history and aesthetics to understand and seek alternatives to the one-dimensional status quo, and the forties were no exception. In the early forties he began an ambitious research project on “The History of the Doctrine of Social Change” with Franz Neumann. Technology, War and Fascism contains an overview of the project as a whole as well as a more detailed outline of its modern section, which bears the title “Theories of Social Change.” As mentioned, the project was never completed, probably because Marcuse began working for the US government shortly after it was conceived. But the two pieces provide a good overview of Marcuse and Neumann’s understanding of the history of philosophy. The discussions of Vico, Helvétius, the theorists of the counterrevolution, Saint-Simon, and Marx in the second piece are particularly interesting.

Whereas history provided a means of reflecting upon the origins of the one-dimensional status quo, art offered a way of resisting it in the present. It was a form of protest less overt than genuine praxis, the possibility of which seemed foreclosed for the foreseeable future. Paradoxically, though, in order truly to realize its critical potential in an increasingly totalitarian era, art, like theory, had to become more abstract and utopian. Marcuse makes this point in an essay from 1945, “Some Remarks on Aragon: Art and Politics in the Totalitarian Era.” Aragon had maintained close ties to the Communist Party, and at times even broken ranks with his surrealist friends by willingly subordinating his art to the party line. But during the war he wrote a lengthy novel, Aurelien, which focused on the failed love of a Montmartre poet and a provincial housewife, and made only oblique reference to the political catastrophe engulfing France at the time. Marcuse uses Aurelien’s return to the classical form of the nineteenth-century Gesellschaftsroman and its negation of explicit political content to argue that art can best maintain its emancipatory promesse du bonheur by upholding aesthetic autonomy, not by subordinating itself to political imperatives.

Feindanalysen: Über die Deutschen contains several of the same texts as Technology, War and Fascism, including “The New German Mentality” and “33 Theses” as well as an earlier version of “State and Individual Under National Socialism” that bears the title “Über soziale und politische Aspekte des Nationalsozialismus.” Also like Technology, War and Fascism, Feindanalysen will be the first of a six-volume series – published by the zu Klampen Verlag in Lüneburg – intended to present unpublished material from the Marcuse Archive to a German-speaking audience. The book aroused considerable interest in Germany; it was on the national best-seller list for several months. The collection was edited by Peter-Erwin Jansen, a freelance journalist and publicist. Detlev Claussen, a professor of sociology at the University of Hannover, wrote the introduction to the volume. Claussen too calls for a rereading of Marcuse’s work that moves beyond the myths about ‘68. He places the articles on National Socialism within the context of more recent debates, which, according to him, could benefit greatly from a reexamination of the largely forgotten insights that Marcuse and his colleagues gained using the methods of critical social theory.

In addition to the texts already discussed in conjunction with Technology, War and Fascism, Feindanalysen also contains several other texts from the Marcuse Archive. These include an overview of a proposed study on the subject of the “Kriegs und Nachkriegsgeneration” (“The War and Post-War Generation”), which was part of a larger collaborative research project on “Cultural Aspects of National Socialism” that the Institute hoped to carry out in cooperation with Eugen Anderson of the American University in Washington DC. Marcuse intended to pursue the question of how the experience of war, inflation, and unemployment contributed to the skepticism vis-à-vis the Weimar Republic and to the rise of authoritarian personalities and political forms. He suggested a generational approach that would focus on the German youth movement, the front generation in general and the Freikorps in particular, as well as marginal and criminal youth. Unfortunately the project was never carried out.

Also of interest in Feindanalysen is a ten-page text Marcuse wrote in 1940 on “Deutsche Philosophie im zwanzigsten Jahrhundert” (“German Philosophy in the Twentieth Century”), in which he portrayed German philosophy at the beginning of the century as a struggle between the heirs of liberalism and the precursors of the authoritarian state. Marcuse portrays Nietzsche and Freud as critical defenders of the Enlightenment and individualism whose work was misappropriated by various irrational and collectivist precursors of authoritarianism. He sees Dilthey as a precursor of an insidious historicist relativism that would culminate in the work of Weber, Simmel, and Troeltsch. Marcuse’s attitude toward Heidegger was still rather ambivalent in this text. He praised him as one of the “truly great interpreters of the history of philosophy” (128) while at the same time condemning the pseudo-concreteness and blind voluntarism that led him to embrace National Socialism. Marcuse’s positive reevaluation in this text of the progressive aspects of the legacy of liberalism – which, as he notes, were increasingly abandoned by the bourgeoisie in the late nineteenth century – represents the continuation of a trend that had occupied him since his break with Heidegger in 1933. It culminated in Reason and Revolution, a defense of Hegel’s dialectical and critical rationalism.

Whereas Technology, War and Fascism and Feindanalysen are the first collections of material from the Marcuse Archive, Stephan Bundschuh’s study “Und weil der Mensch ein Mensch ist...” Anthropologische Aspekte der Sozialphilosophie Herbert Marcuses is the first comprehensive study of Marcuse’s work to draw extensively on archival material. The book was originally written as a dissertation in the philosophy department at the University of Frankfurt, under the direction of Alfred Schmidt. In the preface, Bundschuh too distances himself from the polemical reception of Marcuse in the late sixties and early seventies. He makes it clear from the beginning that his study was conceived in a melancholy rather than utopian spirit, and that its focus is not so much on the political revolutionary as on the reflective philosopher mourning the ongoing catastrophe of history. The solemn tenor of the book is reflected in both its style and content. Bundschuh works through Marcuse’s arguments patiently in starkly lucid and laconic prose. He designates as the “secret center” of his interpretation Marcuse’s writings on National Socialism, which he believes set the tone for his later work.

As the title indicates, Bundschuh’s study focuses on the anthropological aspects of Marcuse’s work, although it is important to keep in mind that “anthropology” refers not to the familiar discipline in American universities, but rather to the philosophical study of human nature, also known as “philosophical anthropology.” But for Marcuse human nature is of course two-dimensional, so Bundschuh develops a concept of dual anthropology which he uses to structure his study as a whole. In the first half, Bundschuh uses Max Horkheimer’s notion of the “anthropology of the bourgeois era” to discuss those human characteristics that Marcuse believes develop specifically in capitalist societies. In the second half, he uses Kant’s “anthropology from a pragmatic point of view” to investigate those human traits and abilities which, according to Marcuse, transcend modern capitalism. Bundschuh divides Marcuse’s oeuvre heuristically into five phases: Heideggerian Marxism (1928–33), Critical Theory (1933–50), Psychoanalysis (1950–57), One-Dimensional Society (1957–69), and Beyond One-Dimensionality (1969–79). In both halves of the study he examines each of these phases from the standpoint of anthropology – “of the bourgeois era” in the first half, and “from a pragmatic point of view” in the second. Proceeding in this way allows Bundschuh to give a systematic and theoretically rigorous presentation of the various manifestations of the two-dimensionality of Marcuse’s thought. It must also be noted, though, that Bundschuh does not believe that Marcuse adhered to any emphatic notion of philosophical anthropology himself. Bundschuh uses the concept merely to explicate Marcuse’s work. So even though Bundschuh uses Kant’s ahistorical anthropology as a heuristic model – to draw attention to the various manifestations of the utopian “second dimension” in Marcuse’s work – he is careful to point out that these transcendental concepts serve primarily as “regulative ideas.” In other words, they provide a theoretical standpoint from which one can gain a critical purchase on the bad immediacy of present society. They are not static models to be reconstructed mechanically in the real world.

Bundschuh begins his examination of the effects of capitalism on modern man, to which the first half of the study is dedicated, with an examination of Marcuse’s reception of Heidegger. He shows how Marcuse appropriated Heidegger’s analysis of the fallenness and inauthenticity of modern man but located their origins in reified capitalist social relations, not Seinsvergessenheit. Bundschuh goes on to demonstrate that with the publication of Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts in 1932, Marcuse discovered the foundations of a truly concrete and rigorous theoretical critique of modern society that he had sought in vain in Heideggerian phenomenology. Bundschuh examines Marcuse’s writings for the Institute for Social Research in the thirties with a view to their analysis of authoritarian ideology. In his examination of Marcuse’s writings on National Socialism, Bundschuh places his arguments within the larger debate between Neumann and Friedrich Pollock on whether capitalism had entered a new phase characterized by the primacy of the political and the dominance of the state, or if the earlier trends toward monopolization had become more entrenched. Bundschuh shows how Marcuse draws from both while at the same time using empirical data from Nazi Germany to develop his own position, based on the primacy of technological rationality. In the fifties Marcuse developed the concepts of the performance principle and surplus repression to describe the reality principle under capitalism. Bundschuh approaches these concepts via a careful discussion of the development of social psychology in the early work of Eric Fromm, and then shows why Marcuse rejected Fromm’s later revisionist position. He concludes the first half of his study by returning to the concept of technological rationality, which received its mature formulation in One-Dimensional Man. Setting the stage this time with a careful discussion of Weber’s concept of formal rationality, Bundschuh examines Marcuse’s critique of Weber, and, by default, his critique of the mobilization of rational means for irrational and exploitative ends in advanced industrial society.

But the pathologies of modern capitalism do not get the last word in Marcuse’s work, and nor do they in Bundschuh’s study. In the second half, he examines Marcuse’s various attempts to find remedies for them, beginning with Marx’s concepts of species being and labor, which Marcuse discovered with delight in 1932 in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. Bundschuh shows how Marcuse used these concepts to develop a materialist theory of subjectivity that would remain one of the distinguishing features of his later work, setting him apart even from Horkheimer and Adorno. In the thirties materialist subjectivity took a hedonistic turn in Marcuse’s philosophy, as he looked to individuals’ desires for happiness and sensual gratification as a source of opposition to the fascist demand of heroic self-sacrifice. Bundschuh also examines other crucial critical-transcendent concepts from the thirties, including objective possibility, imagination and essence. In the fifties, in what he would later consider his most important work, Eros and Civilization, Marcuse argued that the disciplining of the subject to accept alienated labor and renunciation, which had made the progress of Western civilization possible, was no longer necessary to the same degree. Bundschuh shows that the abolition of surplus repression would lead not to sexual anarchy, as some of Marcuse’s detractors have claimed, but to new forms of non-repressive sublimation, which would manifest themselves in work and art. In the pessimistic pages of One-Dimensional Man, the only alternatives to the “happy consciousness” of late capitalism Marcuse offers are abstract ones, according to Bundschuh, such as “the great refusal” and “the hope of the hopeless.” But Marcuse, whose work was always closely attuned to the historical situation, was inspired by the revolts of May ’68 to sketch the outlines of a new anthropology in his late work, which rested upon the politicization of the senses. According to Bundschuh, Marcuse’s attempt to discover a “biological” foundation for socialism in human needs and perception was a return to his early interest in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, when the influence of Feuerbach and the French materialists on Marx’s thought was still palpable. Bundschuh concludes with a short discussion of Marcuse’s aesthetics. He argues that the aesthetic dimension was not only Marcuse’s last refuge in times of despair, but also the site where the reorganization of the senses could occur, a process of “aesthetic education” which he increasingly viewed as the prerequisite of genuine social change.

Bundschuh’s anthropological approach to Marcuse’s work has its strengths and weaknesses. On the one hand, it allows him to analyze systematically what is without doubt one of the pillars of Marcuse’s thought, namely its two-dimensionality. Bundschuh’s discussion of the materialist foundations of Marcuse’s anthropology are of particular interest at a time when many theoreticians are looking for alternatives to the hypertrophy of language and culture characteristic of postmodern theory. On the other hand, from an anthropological perspective Marcuse’s work appears, despite Bundschuh’s intentions to the contrary, more static than it actually is. The dynamic, Hegelian dimension of Marcuse’s thought is lost from view, as is Marcuse’s interest in social theory. Bundschuh discusses neither of Marcuse’s two books on Hegel, both of which were concerned with recovering the dynamic and critical elements of the dialectical method for social theory. But all in all, Bundschuh’s study is a welcome addition to the uneven secondary literature on Marcuse. His rigorous, systematic approach, and his detailed and patient discussions of the thinkers, concepts, and debates at the center of Marcuse’s thought make his study the best comprehensive philosophical treatment of Marcuse’s work that exists, although one should look elsewhere for historical or biographical background information. One can only hope that the planned publication of material from the Marcuse Archive will lead to more serious interpretations of Marcuse’s work, such as Bundschuh’s, that keep his critical spirit alive.