Talk:Herbert Marcuse

Note from grandson

Herbert (my grandfather) was not really a "soldier" in World War I. A physical impairment (flat feet, I think) kept him out of combat. He once quipped that he "wiped horses' asses" in Berlin (he was assigned to a cavalry unit). Also, his participation in the 1918 revolution was limited. He did join one of the Workers' and Soldiers' Councils in Berlin, but he never claimed to have played an active role. Just as a historical sidenote, "the forces of the Weimar Republic" did not crush that revolution. The Weimar constitution was completed in August 1919, well after the revolution had been crushed (in January 1919 revolutionary leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were murdered; the last revolutionary gov't was put down in Munich in March). It is true that those who put down the revolutionary movement worked with the later leaders of the Weimar government, but they were and remained outsiders until the early 1930s, when the Nazis were gaining followers.

Finally, Habermas did not really "care for him" during his final illness. Habermas did live nearby in Starnberg and was present at that time, but Herbert was in a hospital with his wife and son at his side around the clock. Rudi Dutschke's recently published diary contains some interesting entries about Rudi's conversations with Habermas during Herbert's final days.

I am, by the way, the actual author of most of the text on the wikipedia site. It was taken verbatim from the site I created and maintain about Herbert: http://www.marcuse.org/herbert/#biography. From what I glean from the wiki "page history," my text was taken in September 2001 by "Stephen Lea, a psychology professor and www-enthusiast from Exeter in south-west England." Since then, four sentences were added by others (two of which I correct here).

Harold Marcuse

Took out seemingly irrelevant reference

An anonymous person added the following text today: "Nothing has been said about his relation to Emmy Marcuse, the first woman to graduate from UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall with a JD degree in 1906." Since it doesn't seem to me that the relationship or comparison is relevant, I took it out, but left it here because of my understanding of the Wikipedia principle of not summarily reverting without explanation. Since I wondered at various times about his possible relaitonship with Ludwig Marcuse, i.e. another German scholar of his era, the non-relation statement seems relevant. I don't think the comparison with an American Marcuse of an earlier generation is an important part of any short biography of Herbert Marcuse. Jeremy J. Shapiro 20:26, 16 September 2005 (UTC)

Criticism

Shouldn't there be a section detailing Marcuse's use of Orwellian Newspeak? His idea of tolerance was the acceptance of ideas from the Left, while refusing ideas from the Right. He also felt if his ideas were illogical, the problem wasn't with his ideas, but with logic itself. GreatGatsby 20:10, 19 November 2005 (UTC)

Actually there isn't yet much at all about most of his main ideas or summaries of his most important works -- not only the Critique of Tolerance but of Eros and Civilization and One-Dimensional Man -- compared, for example, to the article about Adorno. So it would be nice to get clear and NPOV contributions about most of his main ideas. The article is good as it is, but could benefit from more on his works. Jeremy J. Shapiro 03:28, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

• Marcuse's critical perspective on tolerance can be applied to analyze either a tactical approach of either left or right to the other. If a left-dominant regime tolerates rightist ideas in order to defuse them, that is repressive tolerance. A good example of this is when KKK proponents were allowed to speak on the Jerry Springer Show. The point, in my analysis then which you may disagree with, was to allow people to express KKK ideologies to the point of making themselves appear foolish publicly. Then, the dominant left, center, and/or moderate right viewers amuse themselves with the show and derive pleasure from distinguishing themselves from the taboo counter-culture. This produces a sense of superiority, civility, etc. by scoffing at the people on stage and the ensuing bickering and fighting with audience members.

Important: please note that I am not endorsing KKK ideas in any way, nor am I rallying for sympathy for supporters. On the contrary, I am strongly anti-racist. I am just providing an example of how repressive tolerance has been used as a tactic against the (extreme) right as well as other politics and idea, right/left/etc. The basic strategy is to cage the dog and let it bark itself out of energy. There may be taunting or leading designed to further bring out the behavior/ideology targeted for repression. A bull-fight might be another good example, where the bull is encouraged to attack and even taunted with the red flag - only each time it expresses its point of view (if you can call it that), the matador casually steps out of the line of attack and gives the bull a stab, slowly wearing him out with his own persistence.

I don't know if I'm expressing it clearly enough, but I find this tactic of dominant power extremely offensive and inhumane. Even when used on an ideology as inhumane as the KKK, I find that it brings the critic to the same level. How can people gleefully consume KKK members making fools of themselves without noticing their own arrogance and superioristic attitude? White supremacy is a nasty thing, but white-supremacy over white-supremacists is the same thing, isn't it? Or maybe it is more so since it denies its own supremacy, whereas the KKK at least acknowledges it explicitly (when people dare to show their faces at least).

Wasn't planning to pursue so much in this post, but hopefully the example of repressive tolerance of a rightist movement is helpful. 24.250.239.250 (talk) 05:10, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

Feeling superior to members of the KKK is not white supremacy over white supremacists. Anyone with half a brain may rightly feel superior to members of the KKK, whether they are white, black, brown, yellow, green, purple, etc. Further I don't know if I'd take such a situation as an example of repressive tolerance. Clearly in your situation, the KKK are displayed as examples of a mentality that is to be laughed at, encouragement I would say for others to shy away from such a mentality. The KKK certainly do hold views that are repressive. However, allowing members of the KKK to demonstrate that such views are backwards and retarded, is not the same as tolerating support for repression. We are not tolerating their views, if we were tolerating them, we would not hold them up for ridicule.

Example's of repressive tolerance include:

• Giving religious organizations any sort of exemption from anti-discrimination laws, because of their religious beliefs
• Not holding the repressive aspects of other societies up to the same level of critique as we do to repressive aspects of our own society

Alans1977 (talk) 13:23, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

Article Organization

"Early History and Education" includes information up to subjects death at age 81 or so. I will remove the heading unless other have different suggestions. I also would appreciate elaboration of Marcuse's important ideas. user:Edivorce

Free Love

Why is there no mention of his early theories of free love? In his later years he never mentioned them but they were still his theories at one point or another.

response by Harold Marcuse

Herbert's theories from the 1950s do not explicitly advocate "free love" (nor, by the way, did he coin the phrase 'make love, not war', contrary to the claims on many conservative websites). However, his ideas do point in that direction, and he certainly endorsed that motto of the 1960s antiwar movement. In his 1955 book Eros and Civilization, a melding of the ideas of Freud and Marx, Herbert argues that advanced capitalism is based in part on the sublimation and repression of sexual drives. You can find lots more about this on the wiki Eros and Civilization page. (Click on the link under "major works" on the main Herbert Marcuse page.)

Second last paragraph

I deleted the last sentence ("What this usually amounts to is intolerance of any criticism of critical theory or groups protected under critical theory as well as "any ideas coming from the right.") in the second last paragraph. That sentence is not of the sort I would expect to find in a tertiary reference, it is quite clearly an opinion and a strongly POV one at that. If you disagree with me please discuss it here and we can together work out how to express it in a manner that is not biased. BTW - I'll state my perspective and say that I'm a member of the socialist left of the Australian ALP, however I'm not a Marxist (even though I've read more Marx than almost all Trots). Alans1977 18:39, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

Post modernism, etc.

Does anyone feel like this article could be improved by a section on how his ideas (along with Derrida and others) led to ideas about liberation from tradition. Alans1977 18:47, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

Editing the introduction

Another user (Mtevfrog) "undid" my adjustment to the introduction i.e., rather than introducing Marcuse as a German philosopher, it would make more sense to refer to his ideas i.e., a Marxist philosopher otherwise, if its about cultural heritage it would be better to call him both German and Jewish to be more accurate and to share the credit. If no arguments against this, I will "undo" the change sometime at a later date. Gmotamedi (talk) 03:54, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Not a relative...

'Marcuse was unrelated to the émigré literary scholar Ludwig Marcuse,' Does this really need to be in the article? Should it also mention every other person with the surname 'Marcuse' to whom Herbert Marcuse was not related? Skoojal (talk) 09:59, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

I am going to remove the passage about Ludwig Marcuse soon for the reason given above (irrelevance) unless somebody objects. Skoojal (talk) 06:32, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

Aesthetic Dimension entry

I've created an entry for Marcuse's final work, The Aesthetic Dimension. Please edit and retool as you see fit - this is my first Wikipedia article regarding Critical Theory. Colinclarksmith (talk) 14:59, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

repressive tolerance

The statement that Marcuse believed that tolerance was repressive because it tolerates repression is inaccurate. Marcuse criticizes tolerance as itself a means of repression. I will transcribe the following two quotations from Cuff et al. Perspectives in Sociology, for convenience:

"Marcuse argued, this tolerance is one of the forms of repression, rather than being the opposite of repression; it is one of the ways in which the system inhibits the possibility of change in itself by effectively drawing the teeth of any challenges to it." (Cuff 193)

also:

"Thus to tolerate diversity is not to tolerate real revolutionary determination; instead, it is defused, and dissent is regularised into merely another and inconsequential activity within the system. Dissenting ideas are turned into commodities, into commercialised products of the system; they can be harmlessly (and profitably) disseminated as books, television programmes and films. Critical, even revolutionary, thought is reduced to a kind of leisure activity." (Cuff 193)

So, repressive tolerance is a strategy of dominance where the dominant person/party/class/etc. listens non-judgmentally, or even joins into the the dissent - but at the same time maintaining the resolve that the dissent is harmless precisely because it will will not have any effect on the dominant institutions. Intolerance, on the other hand, puts the dominant individual or ideology into a position of accountability and acknowledges the possibility that dissent or critique has a possibility of achieving something.

The classic everyday example would be parents or teachers who avoid reacting to behavior they consider bad, instead tolerating it. They fail to see the child's rebelliousness as containing any substantial arguments, so they let her/him express the rebellious behavior with the assumption that the child will eventually give up and accept the parental perspective. This is a more effectively repressive form of governance because the governed are given the impression they are gaining ground and thereby pacified. Of course, once they become aware that they are being tricked with tolerance, they become more angry at the dominant ideology, but the question is where else this might lead other than more tolerance or repressive violence. The question is whether the dominant party can legitimately engage in negotiations with dissent and seek compromises and reforms that incorporate the dissenting ideology into the ruling paradigm. Or does dominance inevitably result in fetishization of status quo and repressive tolerance of dissent? I can't believe the former is not possible because that would mean that true democracy is impossible - and there are simply too many examples of democracy working to abandon it in cynicism.

Regardless of whether you agree with the cynicism of Marcuse's ideas of repressive tolerance, at least get them right in the wiki article. 24.250.239.250 (talk) 18:03, 4 December 2008 (UTC)