Herbert Marcuse
(1898-1979)
Official Homepage

Site News (see also Old News page; current visitor statistics and interesting guestbook at bottom)

• April 20, 2008: The University of Hannover in Germany opened a public colloquium "40 years after 1968" with a lecture on Herbert by Peter-Erwin Jansen. See the report in the 4/16/08 Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung.
• Dec. 18, 2007: Nicolás Alberto González Varela has contributed scans of 8 book covers of Spanish language editions of Herbert's works from 1964-1972, which have been added to the Publications page (along with bibliographic information on each book). Do a ctrl-F search within the page on the word "Spanish" to find them easily.
• Dec. 8, 2007: full audio recording of 1967 Dialectics of Liberation presentation in London now available, also Alexander Cockburn's 12/17/07 Nation column mentioning that lecture (with a cute anecdote about him cooking dinner for Herbert & Inge); also pdf of Tim B. Mueller's 2004 Master's Thesis.
• Nov. 19, 2007: new publication added to Books About page: Rodney Fopp (University of South Australia), "Herbert Marcuse's 'Repressive Tolerance' and his Critics," in: Borderlands e-journal 6:1(2007), ca. 11 pages plus bibliography.
• Nov. 14, 2007: Excerpts from Herbert's 1954-1978 correspondence with Raya Dunayevskaya (formerly Trotsky's secretary) added to Publications page. The pdf includes discussions of the correspondence by Kevin Anderson and Douglas Kellner, published in the Quarterly Journal of Ideology in 1990 in commemoration of Dunayevskaya's death.
• Nov. 12, 2007: 2004 MA thesis added: Tim B. Müller: "Herbert Marcuse, die Frankfurter Schule und der Holocaust, to Unpublished papers page
• Nov. 9, 2007: information about a CD of radio broadcasts of Herbert in Germany that is currently in production added to Sound and Video page.
• Nov 8-10, 2007: " Critique and Liberation in the Work of Herbert Marcuse," conference at Saint Joseph's University Marcuse in Philadelphia (program)
• Nov. 6, 2007: Tim Mueller's publications added to Books About page; Collected papers updated
• Oct. 8, 2007: Added: notes and audio from April 1975 'dialog with Kate Millett'
  • Also: personal reminiscence by Myriam Miedzian (Guestbook page)
• Sept. 28, 2007: Doðan Barýþ Kýlýnç (Dogan Baris Kilinc), Turkish translation of Herbert's 1969 short essay "The Realm of Freedom and the Realm of Necessity: A Reconsideration" added to Publications page (where you can read the English original as well, including a discussion between Herbert and Ernst Bloch).
  • With many thanks to Mr. Kilinc, who recently completed his M.A. thesis in Ankara: "Labor, Leisure and Freedom in The Philosophies of Aristotle, Karl Marx and Herbert Marcuse," (Ankara, Turkey: Middle East Technical University, 2006), 106 pages. (pdf in English available on Unpublished Papers page)
  • 9/30/07: also added: Kilinc's Turkish translation of "End of Utopia" (1967)
• Sept. 23, 2007: scan of an article about how Herbert was invited to speak at a fraternity in 1979 added to News & Events Page (scan).
  • The second volume of Herbert's papers in Italian, Marxismo e nuova sinistra, edited by Raffaele Laudani, is now available. (publisher's website)[note to self: add to bottom of Publications page (done 11/6/07)]:
    "Questo secondo volume degli scritti di Marcuse raccoglie un’ampia selezione di testi inediti degli anni Sessanta e Settanta sul marxismo. Alla luce delle trasformazioni della società capitalistica avanzata del secondo dopoguerra e in un serrato confronto con le posizioni della nuova sinistra, del femminismo e dell’ambientalismo, il filosofo francofortese elabora una nuova «teoria critica» che ripensa radicalmente i fondamenti del marxismo critico del Novecento e lo apre alle novità del mondo globale, anticipando così molti temi del dibattito attuale, dalla nuova centralità del lavoro immateriale alle forme plurali e molteplici della soggettività ribelle dei movimenti antisistemici. Fra i testi pubblicati, sette lezioni inedite tenute a Parigi nel 1974 e un lungo commento del 1979 alle Tesi di Rudolph Bahro, che per molti versi può essere considerato il testamento intellettuale del filosofo tedesco. Correda e chiude il volume un ampio carteggio inedito con Raya Dunayevskaya, tra le figure più innovative e moderne del marxismo statunitense."
  • Myriam Malinovich Miedzian added to Scholar Activists page.
• Aug. 22, 2007: two hitherto unpublished theses about Herbert's work are now available on the Unpublished Papers page:
  • Craig Whittall, "Marcuse contra Marx: Revolutionary Strategy and the Role of the Proletariat in the Work of Herbert Marcuse," BA honors thesis in the Department of Politics and Philosophy, Manchester Metropolitan University, April 2007
  • 1998: Fabio Fino, "Herbert Marcuse: Dalla Rivoluzione All'Utopia," 1998 Tesi di Laurea, University of Bari, Italy
• August 1, 2007: The left-wing Berlin daily newspaper TAZ published a review of the fourth (and last) volume of the Adorno-Horkheimer correspondence. It turns out that the last note Adorno wrote to Horkheimer, less than a week before he died, was a comment that Herbert was 'unfriendly' because he returned Adorno's last letter because he couldn't decipher Adorno's handwriting, 'even with a magnifying glass.' The review notes: "Er [Adorno] versuchte immer wieder verzweifelt und vergeblich, Marcuse vor dem studentischen Radikalismus zu warnen: ein Dezisionismus schaue bei ihnen heraus, 'der ans Grauen erinnert'. Die linke Revolte und das Verhältnis zu Herbert Marcuse sind Adornos Hauptsorgen in seinen letzten Lebensjahren."
• June 27, 2007: Long time no updates--my apologies to those whose e-mails I haven't processed yet. Yesterday's radio broadcast on "The Legacy of Herbert Marcuse" prompts me to return to these updates.
  • June 26, 2007 San Francisco Public Radio KQED hourlong Forum on "The Legacy of Herbert Marcuse," hosted by Michael Krasny, with Peter Marcuse, Douglas Kellner, Willian Leiss and Osha Neumann. With mp3 and RealMedia stream, or 24MB mp3 archived on this site. More details on Sound and Video page .
• April 1, 2007: The Essential Marcuse: Selected Writings of Philosopher and Social Critic Herbert Marcuse, is now available. (Beacon page with TOC ; $20 at amazon)

• Archived Old News Page
  (history of this site going back to March 2001)

Frequently Asked Questions (back to top)

• How can I obtain permission to publish some of Herbert's writings?
  • Usually from the previous publisher. For hitherto unpublished materials, see the information on Herbert's son Peter's page; Peter is the literary executor.
• Do you have photographs of Herbert that can be used for a publication, conference announcement, etc?
  • Most photos on this site are scanned from various publications, or are from nebulous internet sources, and we cannot offer rights to them.
  • We do have a few photographs from the 1930s (such as the one in his biography, below, standing next to the old car in Santa Monica) and 1950s (see the header of the Books About page), as well as a number from his 1979 funeral and 2003 burial. There are also a few personal/family snapshots on the Sophie and Ricky pages, but these are not suitable for publications and we would probably not give permission. If you have further questions, ask me: marcuse@history.ucsb.edu.
  • Isolde Ohlbaum's portraits of Herbert are the best commercially available ones on the internet. (See image above right, in this page's header, and 2004 announcements.)
• How did Herbert pronounce "Marcuse"?
  • I'd write it phonetically (in US-English) [mahr KOO zeh], with the emphasis on the middle syllable. That is the standard German pronunciation.
  • Yourdictionary.com has audio (I'd put a bit more "zz" in the final s), while Allrefer, Answer.com and Infoplease have pronunciation guides.
  • As a member of Herbert's son Peter's family, we grew up in the US with an anglicized pronunciation (which you'd hear on my answering machine, phonetically [mar "QU"SS] (with the 'cu' pronounced like the letter "Q") and the emphasis on the second syllable.
• Are we related?
  • Although Marcuse is by no means a common name, there are many thousands of us. Some years ago the city of Berlin had a web site listing the names of the city's Jewish citizens who were murdered under the Nazis. There were 144 "Marcuses" on it, only a few of whom were related to Herbert.
  • I don't do genealogical research, and don't have a reliable family tree to check. The best I can offer is the information on the page about Herbert's father Carl Marcuse. We know that Carl had siblings, but not who they were. We've been told that the sexologist Max Marcuse (1877-1963) was Herbert's cousin, but that the literary scholar Ludwig Marcuse (1894-1971) was unrelated.

Herbert Marcuse was born in Berlin on July 19,1898. After completing his Ph.D. thesis at the University of Freiburg in 1922, he moved to Berlin, where he worked in the book trade. He returned to Freiburg in 1929 to write a habilitation (professor's dissertation) with Martin Heidegger. In 1933, since he would not be allowed to complete that project under the Nazis, Herbert began work at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, a Marxist-oriented think-tank (as we might say today).

He emigrated from Germany that same year, going first to Switzerland, then the United States, where he became a citizen in 1940. During World War II he worked for the US Office of Strategic Services (forerunner of the CIA), analyzing intelligence reports about Germany (1942-45-51).
In 1952 Herbert began a university teaching career as a political theorist, first at Columbia and Harvard, then at Brandeis from 1954 to 1965, and finally (already retirement-age), at the University of California, San Diego.

Herbert at a hearing where he testified in behalf of UCSD students. SDHS photo. from The Journal of San Diego History 47:4(2001) (link)

His critiques of capitalist society (especially his 1955 synthesis of Marx and Freud, Eros and Civilization, and his 1964 book One-Dimensional Man) resonated with the concerns of the leftist student movement in the 1960s. Because of his willingness to engage seriously with (and support) student protesters, Herbert soon became known as "the father of the new left" (a term he disliked and rejected). He had many speaking engagements in the US and Europe in the late 1960s and in the 1970s. He died on July 29, 1979, after suffering a stroke during a visit to Germany.

For more biographical information about Herbert, see: [back to navbar]

• a  short biography grandson Harold (the author of this page) prepared for a presentation at a screening of the documentary film Herbert's Hippopotamus in 1997 at UC Santa Barbara, where I teach 19th and 20th century German history.
   
• His own typescript Lebenslauf (CV) that was included in his 1922 dissertation at the University of Freiburg. (jpg image; html version; html with English translation; image of title page of dissertation) [from photocopies I made at the University of Freiburg library in the early 1980s]
  
• Available only on this site is a Sept. 1970 article by Michael G. Horowitz, "Portrait of the Marxist as an Old Trouper." This "personality profile" of Herbert was written by a former undergraduatestudent (1963-67) of Herbert's at Brandeis, after Herbert's April 1969 appearance at SUNY Old Westbury. It was published in Sept. 1970 in Playboy  magazine. Highlights: short biography with details about why Herbert left Brandeis, and a description of a meeting with students in 1969.
  
• ;-)  Of course you were wondering why he was called Marcuse? It's actually a Belgian-French abbreviation: "Mouvement autonome de réflexion critique à l’usage des survivants de l’économie" (Autonomous movement of critical reflection for use by survivors of the economy). See this anti-advertising manifesto by the "Group Marcuse," a group of politically engaged young sociologists, economists, philosophers, historians, psychologists and doctors (according to this review of their 2004 book De la Misere humaine en milieu publicitaire: Comment le monde se meurt de notre mode de vie [Human Misery in Advertising: How the World is Dying of Our Way of Life]).
  
• The Links Page on this site has annotated links to the best (and worst) biographical sites and texts available on the web.
  

A Film about Herbert (back to top) [back to navbar]

• See the Herbert's Hippotamus Page, as well as the Sound and Video Page.

Permission to publish Herbert's works (back to top)

• Herbert's letters and papers are held by the Marcuse archive at the City and University Library in Frankfurt, Germany (Stadt- und Universitätsbibliothek). Peter-Erwin Jansen can grant permission to scholars to see limited-access materials. (see Nachgelassene Schriften page)
• Requests to publish any of Herbert's writings should be addressed to Peter Marcuse, Herbert's son, who is the literary executor of Herbert's estate, at pm35@columbia.edu.
• see Peter's page for the required permissions text, and more information about him

Other famous Marcuses of Herbert's generation (back to top) [back to navbar]

• The literary scholar Ludwig Marcuse (1894-1971) was, as far as we know, at best a distant relative. See USC's Feuchtwanger library page about him.
• The renowned sexologist Max Marcuse (1877-1963) may have been Herbert's cousin, according to archivist Haeberle at the Robert-Koch-Institut in Berlin, which maintains a very informative website about Max and other pioneers in the field.
  OCLC: Levy, Amihai.; Ohry, Abraham, "A forgotten giant: Dr Max Marcuse, one of the founders of the science of sexology," in: Adler Museum Bulletin Vol. 11, no. 3 (Nov. 1985).

hits since March 27, 2001

for a more detailed tracking of hits,
see Visitor Statistics Page

7700 on Mar. 27, 2002 [64/day]
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10,000 on 5/3/02 [62/day]
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Herbert buried in Berlin, 7/18/03
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