The Marcuse factor

Modern Age, Spring, 2005 by Paul Gottfried

ONE EXPERIENCE as a graduate student at Yale University that left its lasting mark on me came in the spring of 1964, when HerbertMarcuse arrived to teach a course in the history of socialism, in which I quickly enrolled. With his flowing gray hair, aquiline nose, imposingly long figure, and distinguished German accent, Professor Marcuse made an unexpectedly positive impression on me. It may be necessary to explain the reasons. Certainly our political views were not the same. While I belonged to the Yale Party of the Right (despite being a Rockefeller Republican), Marcuse had supported, or sollearned, the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956. He also lavished praise on Fidel Castro and other Communist despots. He held no brief for Western bourgeois society, not even what was left of it. Most annoyingly, he referred to those who were left-of-center in American politics as "reactionaries" and treated the welfare state as an instrument for desensitizing American consumers to the evils of capitalism.

Despite these quirks, our new professor was bedazzling as a lecturer. He knew an enormous amount about the subjects that interested me: European intellectual history and especially German philosophy. I had grown up knowing German and had dipped into Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer years before enrolling in Marcuse's course. He brought up these and also other thinkers, like Pascal, Maistre, and Proudhon, while quoting long passages in the original languages. As an intellectually curious twenty-three year old auditor, he simply blew me away.

What is more, his background reminded me of my father's family, German-speaking Jews who had fled from the Nazis and spoke English with a similar inflection. At the time I knew Marcuse, he had not yet become the gray eminence of the New Left. He was still a philosophy professor at Brandeis University, who took a train to New Haven once a week, to hold his class at the Yale Graduate Hall. It was only later, when he had retired from Brandeis and gone to San Diego State as a teacher that he went off the deep end entirely. In his California phase he openly advocated violence and became identified with the black Communist Party activist Angela Davis. Thirty years later when I spoke to the Hegel scholar Stanley Rosen about his one meeting with Marcuse, Rosen remembered exactly the kind of person I knew, a charming Old World academic with a touch of dottiness. Rosen, too, was stunned by what Marcuse did in California and attributed such behavior to the lack of a moral center, a problem that Rosen had explored in a critical study of Martin Heidegger.

As a graduate student I had not only not perceived such a problem but also found ways of rationalizing Marcuse's defects, almost turning them into excesses of virtue. His outbursts against capitalist one-dimensionality and the corresponding indulgence of Communist mass murder could be attributable to his ancien regime elegance and to his genuine shock over American consumerist habits. For the most part, however, I tried not to think about his wicked opinions, because there was no possibility of reconciling them with my own fierce anti-Communism.

Even less did I care for the fantasy that Marcuse had inserted into Eros and Civilization (1955) about a fusion of Marx and Freud that would take place in a future socialist world practicing polymorphic sexuality. Although these themes were already present in his contributions to German journals in the 1930s, Marcuse's erotic fixation was not what drew me to him philosophically or socially. Given my up-tight Central European bourgeois upbringing, I simply could not envisage the forbidden pleasures that Marcuse hoped to make available by slaying the capitalist monster. And though he had published a thick volume on Soviet Communism in 1958, which was sympathetically critical of his subject, it was hard for me to imagine that he or anyone else really believed that Stalin was enabling his Russian subjects to enjoy sensual pleasures. Or that the Soviets were featuring more of such pleasures than "repressed" consumers could pick up in Times Square.

As I later figured out, Marcuse leaned toward the Soviets for the same reason he conceived of Western capitalist countries as sexually repressive. Like other members of the Frankfurt School--most notably Theodor Adorno, with whom he had been associated since the early 1930s--Marcuse claimed to detest bourgeois civilization and supposedly wished to see it destroyed.

Still, his connection to what he professed to despise was ambivalent and--like other members of the Frankfurt School, as noted by Lorenz Jager in his biography of Adorno--Marcuse was in some ways himself an haute bourgeoisie anachronism. This was true from the way he dressed to the gallant (but never lecherous) manner in which he spoke to female students. He oozed traditional German Bildung, with his extensive humanistic and linguistic erudition, which seemed to contrast sharply with the careerism and the narrow specialization that prevailed among his American counterparts.