Marcuse Family website > Herbert Marcuse homepage > Old Announcements page
June 2003 version of Herbert Marcuse homepage
June 2003 version of Herbert Marcuse homepage

Old Announcements
from the
Official Herbert Marcuse Homepage

page maintained by Harold Marcuse
(Harold Marcuse homepage)

part of the Official Herbert Marcuse website,
created Jan. 2, 2005; updated 9/3/2018

see also the Visitors Statistics Page


As I remove announcements from the homepage, I archive them here in chronological order.
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016-17

2001 Announcements (back to top)

  • March 2001 version of Herbert Marcuse homepageOn March 27, 2001 I (Harold Marcuse, Herbert's grandson) turned a one-page biography that I had on my UC Santa Barbara faculty website into a comprehensive web page with annotated links on the marcuse.org server maintained by my brother Andrew. The thumbnail at right shows what that first homepage looked like.

    The short narrative biography on the original herbert.htm page was followed by an annotated list of links. As time went on, site visitors got in touch with me, and I began adding material to the site myself. The first announcement follows below.


2002 Announcements (back to top)

  • March 4, 2002: new addition to the biography section: Michael G. Horowitz, "Portrait of the Marxist as an Old Trouper," a "personality profile" of Herbert written by a Brandeis undergraduate (1963-67), after Herbert's April 1969 appearance at SUNY Old Westbury. It was published in Sept. 1970 in Playboy  magazine. [this was the first "announcement" I added to that page, which soon began to grow. See images at right.]

  • March 17, 2002: The 69 minute film Herbert's Hippopotamus is now available as streaming media on Doug Kellner's Illuminations website. This is AMAZING footage from the late 60s and early 70s, including then-and-now interviews of UCSD's chancellor William McGill, Angela Davis, and Herbert (with some real gem remarks, for instance by a May 1968 KCET interviewer).

  • June 3, 2002: Herbert with hand on chin, looking to the right; early 1970sFrom January 29, 2002 to March 4, 2002 visitors were asked to comment on appropriate resting places for Herbert Marcuse's recently rediscovered ashes (click on view guestbook to see those comments [2017: offline but now archived as pdf]). We have chosen the Dorotheenst�dtischer cemetery in Berlin where Hegel's and Brecht's graves are [semi-official web site, best site, some photos, tourguide].
    We would be interested in our readers' views on the type of grave marker you would find Portrait of Herbert Marcuse in 1970, with autographappropriate, and on possible quotations by Herbert that could serve as an epitaph (please enter them into the guestbook at the bottom of this page).

  • Aug. 4, 2002: On July 19, 2003, which would have been Herbert's 105th birthday, we are planning a small ceremony to inter Herbert's ashes in Berlin. If you would like to contribute in some way, please contact Harold Marcuse at [email protected]. (letters to the cemetery and the Berlin Senate, added 12/18/02)

  • Oct. 21, 2002: New addition to site: a page collecting information about Herbert's wives Sophie Wertheim, Inge Neumann, Erica Sherover. (updated 12/18/02, including letter from Ricky; update 4/7/03: 1937 photo)
    Casual portrait of Herbert in the 1970s

  • Oct. 23, 2002/April 26: New section added: "Books about Herbert Marcuse." This is just beginning, based on suggestions from readers and authors. Someday I'll try to do it systematically. (updated 1/6/03). An "Archive of Texts" has been added as well. [Jan. 2005: separate page]
  • Nov. 24, 2002: Material from Herbert's 1922 dissertation has been added: title page and CV.
  • Dec. 18, 2002: Added after a query by the daughter of Hans Meyerhoff, an old friend of Herbert's: The story of the discovery of Herbert's ashes, and some letters we wrote to the cemetery and City of Berlin about the gravesite. [after burial in July 2003: Burial Articles & Burial Photos pages]

2003 Announcements (back to top)

  • Two male hippos doing a threat display; Hippos were Herbert's favorite animalsFeb. 17, 2003: Update to the Aug. 4, 2002 entry, below: The interment of Herbert's ashes will take place on July 18, 2003.

  • March 8, 2003/Apr. 7: review(s) of vol. III of German version of Herbert's papers (1956-1971) added, below.

  • April 26, 2003: Neues Deutschland interview (archive version in English with German translation) with Herbert's son Peter about how Herbert influenced his son. [published article in ND Archiv (in German; link update 2018)]

  • June 1, 2003: the interment ceremony for Herbert's ashes will take place on July 18. (See the Dec. 18, 2002 announcement, below.)

  • Marcuse family on tour of the Reichstag with Petra Pau (PDS)
    Prior to the burial of Herbert's ashes in Berlin, some family members were taken on a tour of the Reichstag by Member of Parliament Petra Pau (PDS), while the rest attended a conference at the Free University. [from Petra Pau's website- July 2003 news; article "Begegnung mit Angela" (scroll down)
    Angela Davis at Herbert Marcuse colloquium in Berlin, July 2003July 4, 2003: Prior to the burial there will be a conference in the Audimax of the FU Berlin, on Thursday, July 17, 2003, 14h-19h. The public is invited. There will be presentations and discussions by me (Harold Marcuse), Angela Davis, Axel Honneth, Hartmut Häußermann, Ulf Kadritzke, Wolfgang Lefévre, Eberhard Lämmert, Peter-Erwin Jansen, Frieder Otto Wolf and Detlef Claussen. Click on the image at left for a large version of the poster. [note July 29, 2003: there are several articles and a long interview in ND with Angela Davis on the Articles about Herbert's Ashes page][note Dec. 21, 2003: also announced in Informationsdienst Wissenschaft (link), and in the FU-Nachrichten (link)]. July 2004: see this summary of the conference by Michael Funken. [May 2005: conference page in development]
  • July 7, 2003: I've updated the Herbert's Ashes Story page, to help satisfy the curiosity of some of the journalists who have been calling, and replaced the poster at left with a newer version with the correct times. German TV An independent film crew (with funding from a cultural foundation?) is making a documentary film with footage of the funeral homes, from Peter's cellar study in Waterbury, the ashes boarding the plane in NYC, etc, etc. And there'll be lots of newspaper stories. Come back in early August to see if I've been able to upload some! [Articles Page]
  • July 30, 2003: Perusing the guestbook, I decided to start Haters and Quotations pages. This web page/site has clearly outgrown its single-page design, so I plan on reorganizing it soon with a navigation bar leading to several separate pages. Here's a draft (now links just jump around this page):

    Current
    news

    old news

    Biography

    burial 2003

    comprehensive
    websites

    links to other biographies

    Herbert's Books

    main works,
    with reviews, commentary,
    and links

    best bibliography

    Books about
    Herbert

    (i.e. secondary literature)

    Archive of texts and documents
    and
    Multimedia
    archive

    photographs,
    sound files,
    video

    Legacy

    Herbert's students,
    Frankfurt school

    Links

    annotated guide to other
    web sites

    and
    individual pages


  • Aug. 3, 2003: An (illustrated) reflection on the personal, political and symbolic meanings of the burial of Herbert's ashes, by his son Peter (link).
  • Berliner Zeitung article about the burial of Herbert's ashesBerliner Morgenpost photo of the hearse that picked up Herbert Marcuse's ashes at the Berlin airportAug. 5, 2003: Table of contents and biographical essay by Peter Marcuse added from a forthcoming publication: Herbert Marcuse: A Critical Reader (link to toc; Peter's essay; in books about, below).
  • Aug. 25, 2003: Questia.com ("the world's largest on-line library") has quite a few full-text secondary works about Herbert's philosophy, and his book The Aesthetic Dimension: link. The catch is that you have to subscribe to the service, which costs $20/month. I may explore this further and add info when I have time.
  • Sept. 8, 2003: Link to wonderful biographical article by Bettina Aptheker about Erica Shereover-Marcuse, at UnlearningRacism.org, added to the SophieIngeErica page.
  • Dec. 17, 2003: Program of the Feb. 2004 conference in CologneOn Sat., Feb. 7, 2004 the Thomas Morus Academy Bensberg in Bergisch Gladbach will hold an all-day conference about Herbert Marcuse, titled "Philosophie der Befreiung. Herbert Marcuse zum 25. Todestag." The program is now available as a pdf (link) and jpg (link); more information will be published on the academy's website (link).
  • Dec. 22, 2003: Students at the (formerly East German) Humboldt University are on strike. It appears that many of them want an "open university" without taking attendance and grading, while some leftist critics want to hold protest seminars about more traditional leftist issues: the economy of the future, and US imperialism. Trying to reform the world before establishing a adequate basis at home was one of the problems that plagued the "1968" student movement. The first item on the agenda is what to name this "open university". One suggestion is "Herbert Marcuse University"--but most students in the room don't know who he was, never mind what he wrote about and stood for. The author recommends an exchange of copies of One Dimensional Man for Christmas. (link to ND article [in German]; archive copy)

2004 Announcements (back to top)

  • Ohlbaum portrait of HerbertOhlbaum portrait of HerbertApril 10, 2004: added: link to page of famous portraits by Isolde Ohlbaum.

    I've also just scanned the text of Herbert's July 1967 presentation "Liberation from the Affluent Society" (full text of "Liberation from the Affluent Society").

  • April 28, 2004: Since there is interest in having a one-volume selection of Herbert's most important writings published, I combed the web to see what readings of his are being assigned in college courses. This gives rise to a new section: "What's read in courses," below.

  • April 29, 2004: added: response by some of Herbert's students to a 1964 New York Review of Books review of One Dimensional Man added (archive page on this site; NYRB page) [thanks to former student William Leiss for his guestbook entry]

  • Thumbnail of Jansen's articleMay 12, 2004: A May 2004 article (in German) by Peter-Erwin Jansen about Herbert and Rudi Dutschke has been added to my Dutschke-Herbert page: direct link to scanned text.
  • July 9, 2004 (update Sept. 8)cover of Nachgelassene Schriften, volume 4: Reviews of vol. 4 of Herbert's papers ('The Student Movement and Its Consequences') added:
    - June 28, 2004 FAZ :see below; direct link;
    - July 29, 2004 Neues Deutschland review by Roger Behrens;
    - July 29, 2004 SZ review by Tim B. Muller (added 10/3/04)
    - Aug. 12, 2004 FR review by Gottfried Oy.
    - Oct. 2004 GlanzUndElend - quotations from many reviews
    In September 2004 this volume ranked 5th on a German non-fiction bestseller list (link).
    See also perlentaucher's Seite, and the publisher's page.
  • July 29, 2004: cthe newspaper Neues Deutschland published this reflection by Roger Behrens: "»In der Geschichte ist nichts für immer« Herbert Marcuse zum 25. Todestag" ['In History Nothing Is Forever'].
  • Sept. 8, 2004: design for Her'bert's gravesone, June 2004A gravestone was installed on Herbert's Berlin gravesite in August 2004. I've added a gravestone picture page to the "Herbert's Ashes" page. (finished 10/3/04--includes images of the July 1979 ceremony in Starnberg with Habermas and Dutschke immediately after Herbert's death)
  • Oct. 4, 2004: I've started restructuring this site, first by breaking out the long list of links into a "Web Site Index" page. While I was at it, I updated that page with new sites, and added material to the Haters page. That index of sites will be under construction for a while. I'd like it to become a two-column table with screenshots on the left, and my site assessments on the right.
    Also, I've added photographs of the July 1979 ceremony in Starnberg after Herbert's death, with Brick, Dubiel, Dutschke, Habermas, Neumann and Postone, to the Burial & Grave page, and reformatted the Ashes Story page.
  • Oct. 6, 2004: An on-line version of Herbert's famous 1965 essay "Repressive Tolerance" is now available here. (links to it from my Herbert Haters page, where conservatives rail against their misunderstanding of the concept, added as well). See also the German translation, Repressive Toleranz.

  • Oct 20, 2004: Marcuse Schriften bei zu KlampenIn July, on the 25th anniversary of Herbert's death, zu Klampen publishers reissued Herbert's collected works in paperback. (publisher's website)
    Schriften in 9 Bänden; Paperback, im Schuber; � 98,00; ISBN 3934920462
    Band 1: Der deutsche Künstlerroman. Frühe Aufsätze, 594 S.
    Band 2: Hegels Ontologie und die Theorie der Geschichtlichkeit, 368 S.
    Band 3: Aufsätze aus der Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 1934-1941, 320 S.
    Band 4: Vernunft und Revolution. Hegel und die Entstehung der Gesellschaftstheorie, 399 S.
    Band 5: Triebstruktur und Gesellschaft. Ein philosophischer Beitrag zu Sigmund Freud, 232 S.
    Band 6: Die Gesellschaftslehre des sowjetischen Marxismus, 260 S.
    Band 7: Der eindimensionale Mensch. Studien zur Ideologie der fortgeschrittenen Industriegesellschaft, 282 S.
    Band 8: Aufsätze und Vorlesungen 1948-1969, 319 S.
    Band 9: Konterrevolution und Revolte; Zeit-Messungen; Die Permanenz der Kunst, 241 S.


  • Nov. 30, 2004: A new book of biographical "portraits" based on interviews with the children of prominent parents has been published in German. There is a chapter on Peter Marcuse.
    Das eigene Leben Leben: Kinder berühmter Eltern von Brandt bis Seghers, by Gabriele Oertel and Karlen Vesper-Gräske, Militzke Verlag Leipzig, 19.90 (publisher's page).
  • Dec. 2, 2004: "El arte como forma de la realidad," a Spanish translation of Herbert's 1972 New Left Review article "Art as a Form of Reality," added to publications.

2005 Announcements (back to top)

  • January 1, 2005: I've begun a massive restructuring of this site, starting by breaking down this formerly huge homepage into several major subpages: Publications Page, Book About Page, Courses Page, Scholars and Activists Page, Links Page.
    • The Publications Page is the backbone of the materials on this site. It links to full text versions of several of Herbert's best-known writings (One Dimensional Man, Repressive Tolerance), and provides links and information about many others.
    • It will take a while before I find the time to bring the formatting and links up to date. Please excuse the "under construction" look to some of the pages, and the broken links.
  • Jan. 2005: Upcoming events and conferences: Panel "Marcuse and Education" at the AERA conference in April (Douglas Kellner, "Marcuse's Challenge to Education," Friday, Apr 15 - 2:15pm - 3:45pm, abstracts); also a conference in May 2005 in Brazil.
  • January 25, 2005: On November 3-6, 2005 there will be a conference entitled "Reading Herbert Marcuse's Eros and Civilization after 50 Years." It will be held at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia PA. If you are interested in participating, contact Dr. Arnold Farr
    <[email protected]>. [see March 1, 2005 update]
  • 1/25/05: recent article about Herbert's June 1969 lecture tour in Italy added to News page: Diego Giachetti, "Giugno 1969: I 'Caldi' Giorni Italiani di Herbert Marcuse," Il Protagora, n. 4, luglio-dicembre 2004
  • Jan. 31, 2005
    Collected Works, volume 3
    Collected Papers,
    vol. 3:
    The New Left and the 1960s
    ,
    publ. Dec. 2004
    $69.95
    Routledge publishers
    amazon.com; .de
    Papers page
    Collected Works, volume 3
    Nachgelassene Schriften, vol. 4:
    Die Studentenbewe- gung & ihre Folgen

    publ. June 2004
    € 24,00
    zu Klampen publisher
    amazon.de
    Schriften page
    : Russell Jacoby's Nation review of vol. 3 of Herbert's papers, with brief responses by Douglas Kellner and Peter Marcuse, added.
  • Feb. 18-20, 2005: massive updates to the Publications and Books About pages; as well as Wikipedia entry
  • March 1, 2005: 50th Anniversary Eros and Civilization conference, Nov. 3-6, 2005 in Philadelphia.
    The Philosophy Department at Saint Joseph's postcard advertising Eros & CivilizationUniversity in Philadelphia invites paper submissions to a conference devoted to the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Herbert Marcuse's Eros and Civilization. Papers are welcome on a wide range of topics: explication of Marcuse's project in Eros and Civilization; its place in his social philosophy; the influence of Marcuse's work in the past fifty years; its place in a critical theory of society; the importance of Eros and Civilization for fields such as psychology, aesthetics, and political philosophy; and prospects for a renewal of Marcuse's approach to social philosophy.
    See the conference website with call for papers, registration form, and contact information.
    For more information on Eros & Civ, including a list of reviews, see the Publications page.
  • March 8, 2005: The pages that were not available since March 3 are back on-line. The counters are still not working. Sparklit was doing technical work from 3/4-3/10/05
  • April 15, 2005: you can use google to search this site:
  • Google
    WWW www.marcuse.org
  • April 23, 2005: May 2005 conference in Brazilupcoming conference, May 18-20, 2005: "Dimensão Estética: Homenagem aos 50 anos de Eros et Civilização," Belo Horizonte, Brazil. conference website. The title in English: "The Aesthetic Dimension: Homage to 50 years of Eros and Civilization"

     



  • May 11, 2005: envelope from Franklin Rosemont to Herbert, 1973new Herbert and Surrealism Page (scans of 1989 article by Franklin Rosemont and Herbert's letters to the surrealists, 1971-73)
  • May 18, 2005: Scans of Das Ende der Utopie (1967) added to Publications Page.


  • May 20, 2005: Fuchs, Interkulturell Fuchs, Emanzipation!Two new books by Christian Fuchs added to Books About Page: a short introductory reading guide to his intellectual background and works, and, a continuation of the introduction, a discussion of the implications of Herbert's ideas.
  • May 23, 2005: major site reorganization after move to a new server; use of background color on pages. Note: server now defaults to index.html, not .htm.
  • May 27, 2005: Formatting and links on many pages updated. Full texts of The End of Utopia (also scans of German original with discussion), 1947-48 Marcuse-Heidegger correspondence (English and German) added. Numerous new entries on News and Conferences, and Scholars and Activists pages.
  • May 30, 2005: site search (using google) now added to header box, above. Numerous new entries on Publications, Books About pages, including texts of reviews of Herbert's works and by Herbert from the 1940s and 1950s. I'm sure there are still bugs in the images, but I'll work on them as time permits. I'd appreciate notification if you encounter a missing page.
  • June 15, 2005: The site search function will return some broken links and miss some pages until google crawls this site again. I am now finished with my major reorganization and updates. Since the site search is powered by google, it will not register that many pages have moved until it reindexes this site (should be done every 4-6 weeks). I've left redirect pages in some of the more important locations. Sorry about any inconvenience you may encounter.
  • July 7, 2005: google has re-crawled this site, so the search function is reliable again. After his note in the guestbook, I've added Alan J. Dobson's 1989 dissertation to the Books About page, as well as some 1968 articles. Theresa MacKey's excellent biographical article has been archived, and many citations of interesting articles added to the Publications page. Finally, I put many images on the Sophie Marcuse page.
  • June 9, 2005: I've added scans of many (!) reviews Herbert wrote in the 1940s and 1950s, and reviews of his 1932 Hegel, 1941 Reason & Revolution, 1958 Soviet Marxism books, to the Publications Page, also a 1969 interview about Adorno after Adorno's sudden death, and started a Sound and Video page to collect links to multimedia sources.
  • June 12, 2005: hippos bellowing at each otherIn addition to a new page about the film Herbert's Hippopotamus (with a time-coded description of the film), I've cleaned up the site. That means that until google crawls it again, some of the duplicate results from the "site search" feature (showing the same file in multiple locations) won't be available. But that shouldn't pose much of a problem.
    As an addendum to the June 9 announcements, I've added the full texts of a number of articles to the Books About Page. See esp. 1952, 1970, 1971, 1979, 1999. And there are new entries (from York University) on the Courses Page.
  • June 14, 2005: I'm still trying to keep abreast of new material, which has been added to the Heidegger page, as well as Scholars and Activists and News & Events (links to full texts of Italian articles from 1998 to 2003).
    I've also started a section for Raffaele Laudani's Italian edition of Herbert's collected/unpublished papers.
  • July 19, 2005: Today is Herbert's 107th birthday. For this occasion Doug Ireland wrote an excellent blog entry, with reminiscences by his "former Village Voice colleague Jeff Weinstein, who these days is both culture columnist and Fine Arts Editor for the Philadelphia Inquirer," and Ariel Dorfman, "the prolific Chilean playwright-political essayist-poet-scenarist-novelist," now at North Carolina. (Added to News and Events Page, with links from Scholar-Activists.)
    July 20: updated with reminiscence by Norman Birnbaum, and republished (without images) on Z-Net [7/2018: link updated to web archive version].
  • July 19, 2005: Newly found: journalist and critic Danny Postel's August 2000 interview with Lowell Bergman, The 60 Minutes producer who was played by Al Pacino in the 1999 movie The Insider (entry added on Scholar-Activists, and link on the Sound & Video Page).
  • July 24, 2005: Doug Ireland's blog entry has been drawing visitors to this site (see the stats, below). On July 22, Ireland's page was selected as dissidentvoice.org's site of the day with the following text: "Marcuse's work, though unknown to most younger activists and university students today, inspired countless activists and thinkers from the '50s to the '70s to construct a new radical politics that rejected both capitalism and authoritarian communism. His writings and seminal ideas may indeed be more relevant today than ever before, and people concerned about the future in these agonizing times would do well to revisit Marcuse's work. Journalist Doug Ireland remembers this important figure, and provides many valuable links to web sites featuring Marcuse's writings as well as critical essays and audio/video clips about him."
    Based on my correspondence with Doug, I've added several more entries on the Scholars & Activists Page: Ron Aronson, Norman Birnbaum, Norman Geras, and Ireland himself.
  • Aug. 2, 2005cover of One-Dimensional Man: Oct. 4, 2005 presentation in Berlin by Dr. Wolfgang Lenk: "Klassiker der Kritik I: Herbert Marcuse - Der eindimensionale Mensch (1964)," added to the News & Events page. Sponsored by Anders arbeiten. For more information follow the link above or contact: [email protected].
    Blurb: 'Marcuses Buch stammt unverkennbar aus dem sog. "goldenen Zeitalter" des Kapitalismus - es diagnostiziert den "Sieg über das unglückliche Bewußtsein" durch die Kräfte der Massenkultur, die Vergöttlichung von Arbeitsethos und neuester Technologie. Und es war von größter Bedeutung für die Revolte von 1968. Heute, in Zeiten des marktliberalen Umbaus, sind wir erneut mit umfassenden Transformationen von Kultur, Technologie und Menschenbild konfrontiert. Ist Marcuses eindimensionaler Mensch ein Vorläufer des "flexiblen Menschen" (Richard Sennett), also eines vollständig der Vermarktlichung unterworfenen Lebensmodells? Was macht seine Analyse heute wieder lesenswert? Was unterscheidet die Bedingungen für Protest damals und heute?'
  • Aug. 3, 2005: additions and corrections to J.J. Shapiro and Shierry Weber Nicholsen entries on Scholars & Activists Page. Both attended the May 2005 Brazilian Eros & Civ. conference.
  • Aug. 29, 2005: May 2005 Eros & Civilization conference program (Belo Horizonte, Brazil) now available; also Raffaele Laudani's new book, an Aug. 6 review of vol. 1 of the Italian edition of Herbert's papers, 'Beyond One Dimensional Man,' edited by Raffaele Laudani (see Publications page).
  • Aug. 31, 2005: I'm working through a backlog of things people have sent me for the website. I've added a 2002 article by Elena Tebano on the origin of Herbert's "Proust Notes," and a hitherto unpublished 2002 essay by Amy Serrano drawing on Herbert's ideas to examine female artist-activists. For the latter I've created a new "Unpublished and Student Papers Page" -- students out there, submissions are welcome. Also full text of chap. 2 of Raffaele Laudani's 2002 dissertation; F.O. Wolf's July 2003 Berlin presentation.
  • Oct. 14, 2005: With only hours to spare, there's a talk this evening, 8pm, in Starnberg:
    as part of the "Literarischer Herbst": KD Wolff spricht über Herbert Marcuse: "Vernunft als erotische Energie" (der Titel stammt nicht von ihm), in the Villa Böhler, (jetzt Montessori-Schule), EUR 10.- Eintritt, veranstaltet vom Kulturbureau Borst. (I've also added an entry on Wolff on the Scholars & Activists Page)
  • Nov. 2, 2005: Eros and Civilization conference in Philadelphia starts tomorrow.
    (Publications page updated and counter added.)

2006 Announcements (back to top)

  • Jan. 2, 2006: new contents of Zur Aktualitaetcover of Zur Aktualitaetaddition to Books About page: Allgemeiner Studierendenausschuss der Freien Universität Berlin (ed.), Zur Aktualität der Philosophie Herbert Marcuses: Dokumentation einer Veranstaltung an der Freien Universität Berlin am 17. Juli 2003 (Berlin: Asta, 2005)(Hochschulpolitische Reihe, vol. 12), 175 pages.
    • contributions by: Detlev Claussen, Angela Davis, Thomas Flierl, Gunter Gebauer, Hartmut Häussermann, Axel Honneth, Peter-Erwin Jansen, Eberhard Lämmert, Wolfgange Lefévre, Harold Marcuse, Peter Marcuse, Frieder Otto Wolf  (all in German, except Harold's and Angela Davis's contributions are in both German and English). scan of table of contents; Asta der FU Hochschulpolitsche Reihe page
  • Jan. 15, 2006: 1998 French article added to News/Events page: Gilles Châtelet, "L'Homme pour qui la résignation était ringarde: Relire Marcuse pour ne pas vivre comme des porcs," in: Le Monde diplomatique, August 1998, pp. 22-23. The title translates as: 'The Man for whom resignation was old-fashioned: Rereading Marcuse in order not to live like pigs.' Link thanks to Doug Ireland, who found it while doing a column on Gilles Deleuze (Châtelet connected the two for an interview in 1995). The title refers also to Châtelet's 1998 book, whose title translates as: "To Live and Think Like Pigs: envy and boredom in market-economy democracies."
  • Feb. 6, 2006: YEESSS!!! We are proud to announce that former UCLA campus Republicans chair Andrew Jones's "Dirty Thirty" list of radical professors features two scholars with links of some sort or other to Herbert. This week Doug Kellner even made it to "Radical of the Week" (he's no. 3 on the list). Russell Jacoby squeaked in at no. 28, and I spot Jackie Leavitt's picture in the header collage. Jones' site is at uclaprofs.com. For more information see the California Federation of Teachers summary and links page.
  • Feb. 28, 2006: Added: 1978 interview about the Aesthetic Dimension, and Ralph Dumain to the Scholars & Activists Page (with links to several of the Marcuse-texts on his site).
  • March 5, 2006: Not only did several of Herbert's students make Andrew Jones' top "dirty thirty" list of UCLA professors (see Feb. 6 announcement), but Herbert himself features in Jones' intellectual mentor David Horowitz's "101 most dangerous academics in America". I'd love to include here the relevant excerpt from Horowitz' new book The Professors ($28/18 at amazon), but I'd hate to buy another cranky, whiney conservative author's book. Anyone care to send me a scan or excerpt for my Haters Page? [note 6/28/06: I should be able to add text in late July; added 8/6/06]
    Ready for Halloween scariness? Here's some publisher's hype from the dust jacket (courtesy of amazon):
    • "David Horowitz reveals a shocking and perverse culture of academics who are poisoning the minds of today's college students. ... Today’s radical academics are, ... far from being harmless, ... spew violent anti-Americanism, preach anti-Semitism, and cheer on the killing of American soldiers and civilians—all the while collecting tax dollars and tuition fees to indoctrinate our children. ... The Professors is truly frightening—and an intellectual call to arms from a courageous author who knows the radicals all too well."
    • 6/28/06: an April 5, 2006 entry in the guestbook suggests adding a link to this 4/4/06 Guardian article by Gary Younge: "Silence in class: University professors denounced for anti-Americanism; schoolteachers suspended for their politics; students encouraged to report on their tutors. Are US campuses in the grip of a witch-hunt of progressives, or is academic life just too liberal?"
  • June 28, 2006: David Satz, a musician and recording engineer who at the time recorded an October 1970 radio broadcast of a lecture by Herbert with an hourlong Q&A afterward, donated two sound files for inclusion on this site.
    • 44min/21Mbyte mp3 of the lecture; 60min/28M mp3 of the Q&A.
      Note: I have broadband, and these are 4 1/2 and 6 min. downloads for me.
    • I don't know the title yet (may be able to add the introduction soon), but the topic seems to be something like: 'to what extent is The Revolution possible today'?
    • Archived on the Sound and Video page.
    • This is a superb lecture with fascinating and evocative Q&A. Many thanks, David
  • Aug. 7, 2006: I just added a longer excerpt from David Horowitz's 2006 book The Professors to the Haters page.
  • Sept. 15, 2006: Added to Books About page: 1971 interview by Sam Keen and John Raser, "A Conversation with Herbert Marcuse: Revolutionary Eroticism, the Tactics of Terror, the Young, Psychotherapy, the Environment, Technology, Reich," in: Psychology Today 4:2(Feb. 1971), 35-40, 60-66. This is a superb piece in which Herbert gives frank answers to excellent questions. (On Aug. 17, 2006 an Australian graduate student wrote the following in the site guestbook: "Do you have any info about the late Professor John Raser, a former student of Herbert Marcuse and his advocate in Perth, Western Australia?")
  • Dec. 11, 2006: Thanks to Uli Schöberl (Bauhaus University, Weimar), who notes in the guestbook that you can watch the full video Herbert's Hippopotamus on google video.
  • Dec. 11, 2006: The International Herbert Marcuse Society will hold its second annual conference at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia PA on November 8th-11th, 2007. The topic is "Critique and Liberation in the Work of Herbert Marcuse." If you wish to present a paper, please send an abstract to Arnold Farr <[email protected]> by March 15, 2007. I've also added Prof. Farr to the Scholars page.
  • Dec. 11, 2006: I have removed the bulk of One-Dimensional Man from this website (leaving only the introduction, chap. 1, and the conclusion) because Beacon Press requested it, attributing a recent decline in sales to the existence of this internet version. If any visitors have thoughts about how the existence of this web version might affect their decision to purchase (or not to purchase) the book itself, please share them in the Guestbook, below.
    • I see two conflicting factors: On the one hand, its existence on this site makes the work available to many people around the world who would never be able to purchase the book, while generally increasing the book's visibility, thereby not decreasing, but probably promoting sales.
    • On the other hand, if college courses are requiring the book, students might be tempted to read it on-line instead of purchasing it. However, there is a thriving used market (over 90 copies on amazon.com, and over 200 on abebooks.com), indicating that there is a large buffer before readers have to purchase a new copy.
  • Dec. 14, 2006: two new publications added to the Books About page: a collection of key Frankfurt School texts edited by Axel Honneth, and an essay by Peter-Erwin Jansen, "'Die Begierde nach Gesellschaft:' Herbert Marcuses Blick für die Unzulänglichkeiten staatlicher Utopien." Stasi file: Jansen's article includes a description of the file maintained about him by the East German Stasi spy agency (pdf p. 9, essay p. 35).
  • Dec. 21, 2006: Scanned 1968 sermon added to Books About page: John Ruskin Clark, What's Wrong with Marcuse's One Dimensional Man (San Diego, First Unitarian Church of San Diego, 1968). Transcript of a sermon delivered to the First Unitarian Church of San Diego Oct. 13, 1968; concerning Herbert Marcuse's famous philosophical tract; seven pages.
  • Dec. 21: 19 page pdf (473K) contains front matter and Jansen's 15 page essay (courtesy of Offizin Publishers--thank you!)
    [I also typed in some excerpts from A.Soellner's Zur Archäologie d. Dem. (1982)]

2007 Announcements (back to top)

  • Jan. 17, 2007Art and Liberation, book cover: A new and a forthcoming publication:
    • Art and Liberation (Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, vol. 4), edited by Douglas Kellner (Routledge, Dec. 2006), 272 pages.
      ($78 at amazon; Routledge page)
    • The Essential Marcuse: Selected Writings of Philosopher and Social Critic Herbert Marcuse, edited by Andrew Feenberg and William Leiss (Beacon, 2007), 304 pages is due out March 15. (Beacon page; $20 at amazon)
  • Feb. 17, 2007: The site was down for about a week, but is now running again on a new server. Sorry to our readers for any inconvenience!
  • 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) Essential Marcuse, book cover
  • 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.
  • 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."
  • 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
  • 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.
  • 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)
  • Oct. 8, 2007: Added: notes and audio from April 1975 'dialog with Kate Millett'
  • Nov. 6, 2007: Tim Mueller's publications added to Books About page; Collected papers updated
  • Nov 8-10, 2007: " Critique and Liberation in the Work of Herbert Marcuse," conference at Saint Joseph's University Marcuse in Philadelphia (program)
  • 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. 12, 2007: 2004 MA thesis added: Tim B. Müller: "Herbert Marcuse, die Frankfurter Schule und der Holocaust, to Unpublished papers page
  • 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. 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.

2008 Announcements (back to top)

  • 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.
  • June 12, 2008: I just added a couple of dozen pdfs of articles and reviews, mostly from the 1960s and 70s, to the Publications and Books About pages (from ProQuest title keyword search Herbert Marcuse).
  • Oct. 5, 2008: Added to Gravestone page--link to Klaus Nerger's Herbert Marcuse gravestone page, which has links to photos of the graves of people Herbert knew, such as Heidegger and Adorno.
    • Also added links for Reinhard Lettau on Scholars & Activists page, courtesy of Sylvia Hobbs, and entry for Alan R. Wald, a UCSD student 1967-69, with anecdote.
  • Oct. 9, 2008: Biographical document added (pdf): Herbert's Feb. 1, 1976 letter to his brother Erik in England, on the occasion of the latter's birthday, recently found by Herbert's niece Carol. It has handwritten notes at the bottom by Herbert and his 3rd wife Ricky--the German "Ätsch" translates roughly as 'Nyah nyah' (he's on his way to the beach in February). Herbert refers to the "present crisis" (snapshot of 1976 economy) as a "normal phase of capitalist development."
  • Nov. 3, 2008: "The Right to the City: Prospects for Critical Urban Theory and Practice" is a conference being held in Berlin on Nov. 6-8 in honor of Herbert's son Peter on the latter's 80th birthday. The link above gives the full program.

2009 Announcements (back to top)

  • May 18, 2009: long time, no updates--I'm sorry I'm so backlogged, but here's an important announcement of an upcoming conference:
    • "Marcuse and the Frankfurt School for a New Generation,"
      Conference at York University, Toronto, Canada, October 29-31, 2009
      sponsored by York University, the University of Kentucky, and the International Herbert Marcuse Society.
      Call for Papers: Papers should take no more than thirty minutes reading time leaving fifteen minutes for discussion. Abstracts should be submitted no later than July 15 to:
      Dr. Arnold L. Farr
      Associate Professor of Philosophy
      International Herbert Marcuse Society
      University of Kentucky
      e-mail [email protected] [7/29/09: added to News & Events page]
  • June 9, 2009: New addition to the Sound & Video page: 3 min 30 sec. video clip of a June 14, 1971 interview in French (I've never heard Herbert's French before--it's excellent), about the role of technology in future societies, available at archives.tsr.ch/player/personnalite-marcuse.
    (thanks to Alain Martineau for the link).
  • June 9, 2009: Marcuse Society conference posterThe International Herbert Marcuse Society website, www.MarcuseSociety.org, is now up and running. It is the sponsor of the Oct. 2009 conference announced May 18.
    (also added to Links page)
  • July 9, 2009: Reader Jorge Mariscal at UCSD sent me this link to 10 faculty portraits of Herbert taken by Gay Crawford on April 2, 1968, held by the UCSD library, which put lo-res copies online. Thanks, Jorge! (Added to faq re: pictures on homepage.)
  • July 29, 2009: A visitor requested that I post an interview Herbert gave during a spring 1968 conference on East-West dialog at the Santa Barbara Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. Harvey Wheeler caught him between conference sessions and had a 28 minute conversation about varieties of humanism. Unfortunately, the tape cassette at USC is of poor quality. Not only is it very faint, but fades in and out. Still, this 3.4MB .wma copy can be understood with a bit of effort. At the end of the tape the narrator notes that excerpts would be published in the Center's July newsletter. [On p. 279 of the 1979 Sahmel bibliography, no. 123 is a German article published in Neues Forum 17(1970), 349-353: "Humanismus--gibt's den noch?" which might be derived from that.]
  • July 29, 2009: Today the Berlin Radio station RBB posted an article on the 30th anniversary of Herbert's death: "Herbert Marcuse: Ikone der Studentenbewegung" by Alice Lanzke. She summarizes Herbert's philosophy as follows: "Marcuses zentrale These ist, dass die Menschen im Spätkapitalismus dumm gehalten würden und die vorgegebene Kultur durch die Kulturindustrie auf die Begrenztheit des Denkens ziele – der Mensch werde eindimensional."
    A fair amount of the article appears to be drawn from an 2:01 min. Hessischer Rundfunk report to which the RBB page links.
  • Aug. 24, 2009: The Jewish Museum in Frankfurt, Germany, is showing an exhibition titled "Die Frankfurter Schule und Frankfurt: Eine Rückkehr nach Deutschland," from 17. September 2009 to 10. Januar 2010, which includes information about Herbert Marcuse. (exhibition page)
  • Oct. 21, 2009: Added to the Books About page:
    • Luca Scafoglio, Forme della dialettica: Herbert Marcuse e l'idea di teoria critica [Forms of Dialectic. Herbert Marcuse and the Idea of Critical Theory] (Manifestolibri., 2009). (€ 23 at la Feltrinelli)
    • Charles Reitz, "Marcuse In America — Exile as Educator: Deprovincializing One-Dimensional Culture in the U.S.A," in: Fast Capitalism 5.2(2009), online journal.
    • Thomas P. Wheatland, The Frankfurt School in America: A Transatlantic Odyssey from Exile to Acclaim (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).
      • In addition to many discussions of Herbert & his work, chapter 8 is titled "Marcuse's Mentors: The American Counterculture and the Guru of the New Left"
      • Review by Douglas Kellner in: Fast Capitalism 5.2(2009).

2010 Announcements (back to top)

  • Feb. 7, 2010: Osha Neumann's Up against the wall, coverIn 2008 Osha Neumann, Herbert's stepson, published a memoir, Up Against the Wall Motherf**ker: a Memoir of the 60s with Notes for Next Time. The subtitle was intended to be "A Memoir of the 60s with Notes on Reason, Obsession, and the Dream of Revolution," which more accurately describes the book. At least half the book is taken up with reflections on reason and the irrational as it plays out in politics and as he experienced it in his personal life, which was of course heavily influenced by Herbert. (Herbert married Osha's mother, Inge Neumann, the wife of his recently deceased best friend Franz Neumann, in 1955.) (Publisher's webpage with preview; amazon)
  • Feb. 14, 2010book cover vol. 6: Last October vol. 6 of Herbert's unpublished papers was published in Germany: Oekologie und Gesellschaftskritik. It contains 11 works from 2 different periods: In 1932-34 Herbert's confrontation with Heidegger's & Jaspers' philosophy, and some 1965-75 writing about theories of society. The papers were edited by Peter-Erwin Jansen and introduced by Iring Fetscher.
  • Apr. 30, 2010: The Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie is now available for free online. Here is a link to the ADB Herbert Marcuse article (in German) by Hauke Brunkhorst, published in vol. 16(1990). I didn't know that Herbert was a visiting professor in Frankfurt in 1964 (between Brandeis and UC San Diego)--is that true?
  • May 5 & 15, 2010: Added to Sound&Video page: Peter Davis of villonfilms.com put together a DVD of Herbert's lecture and the subsequent discussion at the 28 July 1967 "Dialectics of Liberation" conference in London for the 2009 Marcuse Association conference. I've made a rough 5:40 youtube clip (filmed off of my TV) of the beginning of his talk "Liberation from the Affluent Society." I ripped a slightly longer clip as well (5/15: 8 min. clip). Contact Peter Davis to order a copy.
  • May 23, 2010: Added to the Books About and Herbert-Rudi Dutschke pages:
    2009: Giovanni Pasquali and Dzintars Kalnins: "Masturbation* or Practical Consciousness–Raising? Rudi Dutschke's Way to Democracy." 31 page paper written for a course on Modern Social Theory taught by Prof. Martin Nonhoff at the University of Bremen in Germany in Fall 2009.
    • The author writes the following in an email: "It is mainly based on Marcuse's thought and Dutschke's interpretation with regard to the concept of democracy and the meaning that it assumed among the student movements in the 60's and 70's."
  • May 27, 2010: Finally added to Books About Page: Joan Norquist's 64-page 2000 bibliography (as searchable pdf). It lists 17 books in English by Herbert (with the reviews of those books), 22 books in German, 113 articles by him; 67 books about him, ca. 50 dissertations & theses, and 101 articles about him.
  • Aug. 18, 2010: Added to Unpublished Papers page: "Reflections on Herbert Marcuse’s Technology Critique through the Analysis of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times" (18 pages), by Prof. Aydan Turanli, Istanbul Technical University (Prof. Turanli's web page).
  • Aug. 18, 2010: Added to Sound & Video page: links to interviews with Herbert that were uploaded to youtube in the past year, one in German (1976) and one in English (1977/78)--see the April and Dec. 2009 entries in the YouTube section there.
    • The exchange with Bryan Magee about whether or not politicians are dominated by private economic interests (p. 49 of the print version) is amusing from a 2010 perspective.
  • Sept. 21, 2010: made a new page in biography section (only link to it is from here), with 3 photos from Herbert's 10th grade high school gradebook at the Kaiserin Augusta Gymnasium in Berlin-Charlottenburg. Many thanks to Dutch collector W.O. who sent these in June 2008. His grades, by the way, were fairly mediocre--mostly 3s, 4 in math & science (but a 2 in comportment).
  • Sept. 21, 2010: Two New York Times articles added to the publications page:
    • 1969, May 4: "Student Protest Is Nonviolent Next to the Society Itself," New York Times, p. 137. (jpg scan)
      Herbert argues that police intervention in civil disobdience actions on college campuses are justified only when their education mission is threatened.
    • 1971, May 13: "Reflections on Calley," New York Times, p. 45. (jpg scan, pdf)
      Has a massive sense of guilt turned into its opposite, a strident identification with the crime and criminal, seeing it as justified? Herbert looks at the public support for Calley.
  • Sept. 22, 2010: three letters placed in the biography section (no page or other links yet).
    • 1946, October: Herbert Marcuse to Max Horkheimer. Translated into German and commented by Tim B. Müller.
    • 1953, April: Herbert Marcuse to Max Horkheimer, April 15, 1953, Max Horkheimer Archiv, Frankfurt am Main. Marcuse reported to Horkheimer that Karl Löwith – who had defended his Habilitationsschrift under Heidegger’s direction in 1928 -- knew about Heidegger’s comment.  Marcuse adds “Nur aus psychopathischen Gründen würde mich interessieren, was H[eidegger] gesagt hat.”
    • 1969, January: Herbert Marcuse to Robert E. Goldburg, January 24, 1969, Herbert Marcuse Archive, Frankfurt, 371.04.
    • Coming soon:  “Marcuse on The University Music New Culture Ecology Personal & Social Liberation Workers The Mideast,” Street Journal, (April 1970).
  • Oct. 17, 2010: One of Herbert's last talks, published posthumously in 1992, added to Publications page "Ecology and the Critique of Modern Society," with commentaries by Andrew Feenberg, Joel Kovel, Douglas Kellner and C. Fred Alford (37-48), published in: Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 3:3(1992), 29-48 [UC Santa Cruz].
  • Nov. 6, 2010Farr 2009 book, cover: Arnold Farr's 2009 book added to Book About page:
    • Arnold L. Farr, Critical Theory and Democratic Vision: Herbert Marcuse and Recent Liberation Philosophies (New York: Lexington Books, 2009). (google books version; $60 at amazon)
  • Nov. 7, 2010: British philosopher Nina Power has published One Dimensional Woman, (Zero Books, 2009), 74 pages. ($10 at amazon, with table of contents and intro with discussion of Herbert's ODM)
  • Dec. 2-12, 2010: New additions:
  • Dec. 22, 2010: The new google tool that uses its scans of 500 years of books to graph the frequency of use of certain words shows a graph for marcuse, 1950-2008 that reveals a peak in 1972, a mild blossoming in the mid-1990s, and a steady climb since 2000 towards an even higher peak.
    Note 1/12/2011: That graph was for lower-case marcuse. I'm now inserting images of the results for Marcuse and Herbert Marcuse, which are orders of magnitude larger (and more consistent without the fall-off from 1974 to 1980). The top image below is for English books, the bottom for German. Clicking takes you to the google nGrams viewer.
    nGram Herbert in English
    ngram in German for Herbert
    See also this 12/16/10 NYT article about the database: "In 500 Billion Words, New Window on Culture"
  • Dec. 23, 2010: Tim Mueller: Krieger & GelehrteCollected Papers vol. 5Vol. 5 of Herbert's Collected Papers: Douglas Kellner and Clayton Pierce (eds.), Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and Emancipation (Routledge, 2011) is now available. (amazon page). It includes 24 short, previously unpublished pieces by Herbert. (Routledge page)
    Details on this site: Papers page; also entered on Publications page.
    • In October Tim B. Müller's Krieger und Gelehrte: Herbert Marcuse und die Denksysteme im Kalten Krieg (Hamburger Edition, 2010), 736 Seiten was published. (EUR 35/25 at amazon.de)

2011 Announcements (back to top)

  • Jan. 1, 2011: A reminiscence by Elisha Porat about Herbert's 3rd wife Ricky's time at Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh in 1959-60/61 added to Erica Sherover-Marcuse page.
  • 1/12/11, 2/14/11: on Oct. 27-29, 2011 the Fourth Biennal Conference of the International Herbert Marcuse Society will be held in Philadelphia. The theme is Critical Refusals. For more information, go to the conference page at the Int'l H.M. Society website. 2011 Critical Refusals conference posterSee also this 9 page pdf "10 things to know about the 2011 Conference" (updated 4/16/11).
    NOTE: Abstracts of papers are due by Apr. 23; send to [email protected].
  • Jan. 13, 2011: I've added pdfs of Herbert's 1965 Nachwort and translated Epilog to Marx's 1852 text The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon to the Publications page.
  • Jan. 14, 2011: I've added quite a few items to the booksabout page, esp. for 2004-2010, based on a title search in google books. Also a description of Brazilian Marcuse Studies based on an email from Robespierre de Oliveira (take a look at the Marcuse puppet one of his students made).
  • Feb. 7, 2011: Added to the Unpublished papers page:
    Alan Dobson (2008) , '"Be realistic, demand the impossible:" Alan Dobson examines the ideas of a thinker whose ideas were a major influence upon the student radicals of 1968.' (7 page pdf)
  • Feb. 9, 2011: After adding below (12/23/10 announcement) Tim B. Müller's new book Krieger und Gelehrte: Herbert Marcuse und die Denksysteme im Kalten Krieg [Warriors and Scholars: HM and the Schools of Thought in the Cold War] (2010), a new review, by Detlef Claussen, has been published in the TAZ:
    "Herbert Marcuse als CIA-Agent," (Feb. 8, 2011). Claussen likes Müller's reading of Herbert's 1950s books (Reason & Rev; Eros & Civ; Soviet Marxism), but says he misinterprets the CIA connection in order to sensationalize it.
  • July 25, 2011: Cover of Brazilian 18th BrumaireNot quite a week after the 113th anniversary of Herbert's birth, I have a few new and long overdue items to add:
    • David Kettler and George Katsiaficas added to the Scholars Page; Michael Schwandt (2009) to the Books About page.
    • In January I uploaded pdfs of Herbert's 1965 Nachwort and translated Epilog to Marx's 1852 text The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, which was being translated for a Brazilian edition of Marx's text. That edition, with Herbert's epilog in Portuguese, has now been published by Boitempo Editorial.
    • Volume 4 of Herbert's works in Italian has been published (Publications page): Raffaele Laudani (ed.), Teoria critica del desiderio (Manifestolibri, 2011), 285 pp. [Writings on art, 1957-1978]
    • I came across an article on Slate.com with interview quotations from Andrew Breitbart (the conservative windbag whose doctored videos of a setup against Acorn and a speech by Agriculture Secretary nominee Shirley Sherrod [July 2011 AP story] destroyed the reputations of both), who made headlines again by--correctly--exposing the sexual twitter shenanigans of NY representative Anthony Wiener, bringing him down as well. That article, "What Is Andrew Breitbart Thinking?," contains the following quotation:
      Breitbart traces everything he despises about cultural liberalism to his college days. "When I told my parents I was an American studies major, they were like, 'That's fantastic! Did you read Mark Twain?' 'No, I didn't.' 'What did you read?' 'Marcuse, Adorno, Horkheimer, Michel Foucault.' 'They don't sound American!' 'They're not.' " Luckily, recalls Breitbart, "I was too drunk to be completely indoctrinated by it."
      After doing a little research, I found that Breitbart goes into much greater detail about Herbert in his modestly titled 2011 book, Excuse me while I save the world. I've added him to my "Haters page" on this site, with excerpts from the relevant pages that are available online (pages in google books). (I also updated and reformatted the Haters page, adding very early material from 1968 by Don Feder at the bottom as well.)
    • Finally, I came across this unpublished undergraduate honors thesis from Stanford University:
      Israelachvili, David B., Radical Psychoanalysis, Critical Theory, and the Search for a Sane Society: The Fromm-Marcuse Debate Reconsidered (2009). (Unpublished Papers page).
  • July 29, 2011: More items added--2 of Herbert's early publications in Die Gesellschaft (on the Publications page), and a 1976 textbook chapter about Herbert (on the Books About page):
    • "Zur Wahrheitsproblematik der soziologischen Methode: Karl Mannheim, Die Ideologie und Utopie," in: Die Gesellschaft 2(1929), 356-369. (searchable pdf)
    • "Das Problem der geschichtlichen Wirklichkeit: Wilhelm Dilthey," in: Die Gesellschaft 8(1931), 350-367. (searchable pdf)
    • David Kettler, "Herbert Marcuse: The Critique of Bourgeois Civilization and its Transcendence," in: Crespigny and Minogue (eds.), Contemporary Political Philosophers (London: Methuen, 1976), 1-48. (searchable 26 page pdf)
    • Last and least, a 2010 anecedote from a former UCSD student added to the Guestbook and Stories page.
  • Aug. 6, 2011: links to online versions of Herbert's 1974 Stanford lecture "Marxism & Feminism" added to the Publications page.Hert and Leo Lowenthal, 1970
  • Sept. 17, 2011:1962-65 exchange of letters with Paul Tillich about Kennedy and US politics added to Publications and Books About pages (published 2007). Also this 1970 photo with Leo Löwenthal:
  • Nov. 4, 2011: Several new items, a couple from the just completed 4th Conference of the International Herbert Marcuse Society:
    • Charles Reitz and Stephen Spartan's paper, "Critical Work and Radical Pedagogy: Recalling Herbert Marcuse" (46 page pdf). It is also available in hard copy (as a booklet) for $15 at www.createspace.com. This is a discussion document that can also be seen as supporting the Occupy Wall Street movement through critical analysis and by invoking some of Herbert Marcuse's most radical statements and ideas.
    • Charles Howard did a write-up on Angela Davis at the conference and at the 10/28 "Occupy" march in Philadelphia (with 14 min. YouTube clip of Angela speaking, starts 4:00), 11/1/11 on Huffington Post: "Angela Davis: Power to the Imagination."
    • Peter Marcuse published a new blog entry on 11/3: "Occupy Wall Street’s Common Message to its Diverse Potential Supporters"
    • Nicolás Varela contributes pdfs of several Spanish translations and secondary works (first two added to Publications page):
      • a Spanish translation of Herbert's 1969 Essay on Liberation: "Un ensayo sobre la liberación" (94 page pdf, cropped so that it prints nicely with 2 pages per sheet)
      • La sociedad industrial y el Marxismo (1969) (101 page pdf, also cropped for 2 pages/sheet printing)
      • A 48-page Chilean book comprised of
        Carlos Maldonado, Marcuse y el poder joven [and the power of youth] , and
        Sergio Vuskovic, Lenin o Marcuse?
      • Nicholas's own new book on Nietzsche came out in 2010: Nietzsche contra la democracia: el pensamiento politico de Friedrich Nietzsche (1862-1872). (amazon page)
  • Nov. 27, 2011: Some more new items:
  • Dec. 12, 2011:

2012 Announcements (back to top)

  • Feb. 16, 2012:
  • Feb. 24, 2012: A sampling of some recent citations in the news (the first not-so-recent):
    • Galleycat publishing blog, July 25, 2011, "Norway Killer Targeted Writers & Lit Professors in Manifesto" about Anders Behring Breivik, who murdered 8+69 people on July 22. Brevik's compendium of texts, titled 2083 – A European Declaration of Independence, cites Herbert in several places--search this 1518 page pdf to find them. It is pretty much standard Haters' fare: advocating political correctness, women's liberation, multiculturalism. For excerpts, see the Haters' page on this site.
    • "A blood-spattered trip through today's lamentable lingo" Alexander Cockburn's Feb. 10 column in The Week uses Herbert as a lead-in: "Back in the 1960s, Herbert Marcuse pointed out in one of his books that the Pentagon had given up on verbs. The dialect known as Pentagonese consisted of clotted groups of nouns, marching along in groups of three or four. Verbs, which connected nouns in purposive thrust, were regarded as unreliable and probably subversive. They talked too much, gave too much away."
    • Counterpunch, Feb. 10-12, 2012 "The Sixties: From Attica to the Fugs Younger Than That Now" by Ron Jacobs cites Eros & Civ: "One could argue that, unlike the sexism of today’s media, which bases itself on the complete commodification of the body while also putting a price tag on the emotion of love, it can be argued that the sexism of the Beats and hippies was a genuine attempt to create a world of Eros referred to in Herbert Marcuse’s classic text Eros and Civilization which visualized a society 'based on a fundamentally different experience of being, a fundamentally different relation between man and nature, and fundamentally different existential relations.'"
    • American Catholic, Feb. 19, 2012 A.D.[sic!] "In the Birth Control Controversy, the Mocking of Conservative Religious Women by Militant Secularists Will Soon Backfire" by Dave Hartline. This is one for the Haters' page: "Families that adhere to the clinically proven facts of Natural Family Planning are treated as if they are some sort of religious nuts. Militant secularists in the corridors of power (Legislative and Fourth Estate) have even thrown out their favorite term “sexually repressed.” Now this term is so widely repeated in our popular culture, perhaps we should examine where it came from. Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) of the infamous Marxist “Frankfurt School” came up with the term. Marcuse left pre-World War II Germany and taught at Columbia. Marcuse believed in free love and surmised that the more narcissistic society was with regard to sexual relations, the better the world would become. Before his death, he claimed his prized student was 1960s militant radical Angela Davis. Marcuse was way out in left field in his day and yet the militant secularists in our pop culture have made him seem as mainstream as Dr. Phil. When societies turn away from religion they embrace the crazies like Marcuse; sadly something has to fill the vacuum and it is usually the ideas which come from the half baked among us that do so."
  • April 6, 2013: another delayed addition to the Books About page:
    • 2011: Charles Reitz and Stephen Spartan, "Critical Work and Radical Pedagogy: Recalling Herbert Marcuse," 44pages; paper presented at the 2011 Critical Refusals conference of the International Herbert Marcuse Society. (pdf for on-screen; formatted for printing)
      Reitz wrote in Oct. 2011: "This is a discussion document that can also be seen as supporting the Occupy Wall Street movement through critical analysis and by invoking some of Herbert Marcuse's most radical statements and ideas."
  • Apr. 23, 2013: Artwork by Antje WichtreyA new art book with quotations from Herbert's works was published in January:
    • Herbert Marcuse. Versprechen, dass es anders sein kann. Promise that it can be different; paintings: Antje Wichtrey, afterword by Peter-Erwin Jansen. Bilingual reprint of the one-of-a-kind art book by Antje Wichtrey about Hebert Marcuse. Edition Boot, Granada·Frankfurt, 2013, € 25 / $ 30.
    • The book can be purchased by contacting Peter-Erwin Jansen via email: petererwinjansen(a)aol.com.
    • You can see four of the 15 double page spreads at Anthe Wichtrey's website.
    • The quotation text in the sample image above reads:
      "Rationality is indeed an essential aspect of art: making present (re-present) of that which is depressed, hidden, distorted - not as end in itself but as elements in the creation of the aesthetic universe: the universe of form. For it still holds true: form is the triumph over the destructive disorder and order, the banning of fear."
  • July 5, 2013: In the month of the 115th anniversary of Herbert's birth there's a lot going on!
    • His family and numerous scholars are exploring institutions in the US where an archive and study center for secondary materials about Herbert and Critical Theory might be established. In addition to the conference in November in Lexington (see below), after a chance discovery of the manuscript to One-Dimensional Man in a box of donated manuscripts at Brandeis, Brandeis is thinking of organizing a conference about Herbert. And one may be in the works at Cornell as well. Stay tuned.
    • UCSD's library has many materials relating to Herbert in its special collections, for instance:
      "University of California, San Diego, Office of the Chancellor (McGill, 1968-1970), files concerning Herbert Marcuse, Archives 941 Rec, Mandeville Department of Special Collections." (referenced in note 5 of Winter 1991 edition of the San Diego History Quarterly).
  • July 29, 2013: new publication on Books About page: Raffaele Laudani (ed.), Secret Reports on Laudani, Secret Reports, coverNazi Germany: The Frankfurt School Contribution to the War Effort Franz Neumann, Herbert Marcuse & Otto Kirchheimer, foreword by Raymond Geuss (Princeton University Press, 2013), 704 pages. (PUP website with TOC & pdf of introduction; $40 at amazon.com)
    • Publisher's blurb: " During the Second World War, three prominent members of the Frankfurt School--Franz Neumann, Herbert Marcuse, and Otto Kirchheimer--worked as intelligence analysts for the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime forerunner of the CIA. This book brings together their most important intelligence reports on Nazi Germany, most of them published here for the first time."
    • Kevin B. Anderson added to the Scholars' page.
  • July 18, 2013: Interested in what Herbert was doing before he went to Freiburg to study with Heidegger? Here a 74-page pdf scan of his 1925 Schiller-Bibliographie: unter Benutzung der Trömelschen Schiller-Bibliothek (1865) (Berlin: Martin Fraenkel, 1925), 137 pages. (added to publications page) [link fixed 8/19/13]
    • Cited in Douglas Kellner, Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism (1984), p. 385n54: "Marcuse expressed his evaluation of the Schiller bibliography to me in an interview on 26 March 1978."
  • Aug. 11, 2012: From Martin Schulz, Stuttgart, via this page's guestbook, a 2:57 min. YouTube clip showing the arrival of Herbert's ashes at the Berlin cemetery in July 2003 (uploaded Dec. 2011; 64 views on 8/17/2012). The Cadillac hearse, by the way, was used for Marlene Dietrich and Benno Ohnesorg, and this was its last trip before being put in a museum.
  • August 17, 2012: Robespierre de Oliveira is planning a Marcuse conference in Brazil in 2015. He has put a couple of his relevant publications on the web:
    • "A teoria crítica como teoria da mudança social: o marxismo de Marcuse" ('Critical Theory as Theory of Social Change: The Marxism of Marcuse'), in: Marxism and Human Sciences (2011), pp. 59-70 (need to scroll down).
    • "Crítica Cultural e Sociedade Unidimensional" ('Culture Critique and One-dimensional Society'), in: Arte e Filosofia 11(2011?), 158-169. (12 page pdf)
      Abstract: The cultural critique of “Frankfurt School” is not summed up in the cultural or artistic question, nor can it be considered as “pessimist” or “elitist”. Cultural critique concerns the critique of culture as much as of society, in the same way Marx showed the relation between material production and spiritual reproduction of society. In this way, Benjamin developed his criticism of cinema, Adorno coined an expression “culture industry,” and Marcuse “repressive de-sublimation”. Benjamin noted the effects on experience by new technologies of cultural reproduction. Adorno pointed out the regression of hearing in the phenomenon of music distribution, which could be extended to the regression of the senses. Marcuse also developed the “loss” with the concept of “repressive de-sublimation” pointing to the one-dimensional society. The changes in contemporary society show the limits of Frankfurt School cultural criticism, but at the same time show its relevance
  • Aug. 25, 2012: In December 1971 Herbert requested a conversation with Israeli Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan. In the Spring 2012 issue of Telos Zvi Tauber published an article about the meeting and a translation of the minutes of the meeting. These have been added to the Interviews section of the Sound and Video page (although they are print renditions), as well as to the 2012 section of the Books About page.
  • August 31, 2013: 2013 conference advertisementI'm posting a number of new items that I've become aware of:
    • The Nov. 7-9 Int'l Herbert Marcuse Society Conference is approaching, and the poster has been released. Here is a 6x9" pdf for printing if you want to post this.
    • Richard V. Kahn, Critical Pedagogy, Ecoliteracy, and Planetary Crisis: The Ecopedagogy Movement Kahn 2010 book cover(New York: Peter Lang, 2010) has extensive discussions of Herbert's work over 36 mentions in the book (according to a google books search). Here's a sample:
      p. 22: "Recently, Latin American theorists of ecopedagogy have begun to connect their work to the critical theory of Herbert Marcuse (Magelhaes, 2004; Delgado, 2005) ... . As recent critical readers on Marcuse assert (Kellner, Lewis, Pierce & Cho, 2008; Abromeit & Cobb, 2004), ecological politics were an important aspect of Marcuse's revolutionary critique, and he should be considered a central theorist of the relationship between advanced capitalist society and the manifestation of ecological crisis." ($25/35 & searchable on amazon)
    • An essay by a German historian now at UC San Diego, offering a 'contemporary reading' of one of Herbert's most famous--and most vilified by the right--essays, Repressive Tolerance:
      Frank Biess, "Gewalt der Toleranz, Toleranz der Gewalt: Herbert Marcuse: Repressive Toleranz (1965),"
      in: Gewalt und Gesellschaft: Klassiker modernen Denkens neu gelesen: Bernd Weisbrod zum 65. Gebutstag (Wallstein, 2011), 285-293. (5 page pdf).
      The title translates as 'The Violence of Tolerance, the Tolerance of Violence."
    • Charles Reitz (ed.), Reitz 2013 book coverCrisis and Commonwealth: Marcuse, Marx, McLaren (Lexington Books, 2013), 332 pages. ($95 at amazon; flyer for 20% discount)
      This book "advances Marcuse scholarship by presenting four hitherto untranslated and unpublished manuscripts by Herbert Marcuse from the Frankfurt University Archive on themes of economic value theory, socialism, and humanism. Contributors to this edited collection, notably Peter Marcuse, Henry Giroux, Peter McLaren, Zvi Tauber, Arnold L. Farr and editor, Charles Reitz, are deeply engaged with the foundational theories of Marcuse and Marx with regard to a future of freedom, equality, and justice. Douglas Dowd furnishes the critical historical context with regard to U.S. foreign and domestic policy, particularly its features of economic imperialism and militarism. Reitz draws these elements together to show that the writings by Herbert Marcuse and these formidable authors can ably assist a global movement toward intercultural commonwealth. "
    • A forthcoming collection of seminal Frankfurt School writings will include 4 essays by Herbert:Subject and Object book cover
      Ruth Groff (ed.), Subject and Object Frankfurt School Writings on Epistemology, Ontology and Method (Bloomsbury, March 2014)(publisher's book page), namely:
      * Epistomology: “A Note on Dialectic” (8pp.)[1930 essay or 1941 in Reason & Revolution]
      * Ontology: “The Concept of Essence” (45pp.) [1936 essay, translated in Negations, 1968]
      * Method: “Critical Theory and Philosophy” (25pp.)[1937 essay, translated in Negations, 1968]
      * “Karl Popper and the Problem of Historical Laws” (17pp.) [1959 essay, republished 1972]
  • November 7-9, 2013: International Herbert Marcuse society logoFIFTH BIENNIAL CONFERENCE of the International Herbert Marcuse Society at the University of Kentucky, Lexington. For information contact Professor Arnold L. Farr, Department of Philosophy, [email protected], and see the International Herbert Marcuse Society website.
    • The Call for Papers (3 page pdf) was released in April--abstracts are due July 1, 2013.
    • The conference theme is: "Emancipation, New Sensibility, and the Challenge of a New Era: Theory, Practice, and Pedagogy."
  • Sept. 23, 2013: "But what are we to make of a society in which liberation is defined as scarfing down a ham sandwich?" In a July 2013 blog post about a New York Times article about employees actually taking lunch breaks, Corey Robin writes: "Back in the 1960s, Herbert Marcuse coined a phrase in One-Dimensional Man for capitalism’s ability to use (and tame) an emancipated sexuality for the sake of advancing capitalism itself: repressive desublimation. The basic argument was that the fantasy and idea of liberation could be mobilized to reproduce the very system that produced a need for liberation."
  • Oct. 13, 2013: The program for the upcoming Int'l HM Society conference (Nov. 7-9 in Louisville) is now available. In the final panel, an archivist from Brandeis university will report on the discovery of the manuscript of One-Dimensional Man.
    Two articles have recently been published about it:
  • Oct. 25, 2012: Trying to catch up on adding a few new things:
  • Dec. 4 , 2012: Herbert and Heidegger
    • I came across this reference on the German Heidegger Wikipedia page:
      Frithjof Rodi (Hrsg.): Martin Heidegger, Wilhelm Diltheys Forschungsarbeit und der gegenwärtige Kampf um eine historische Weltanschauung. 10 Vorträge, gehalten in Kassel vom 16. bis 21. April 1925. Maschinenschriftliche Abschrift von Herbert Marcuse nach einer Nachschrift von Walter Bröcker. In: Dilthey-Jahrbuch für Philosophie und Geschichte der Geisteswissenschaften Band 8 / 1992-93, S. 143 bis177.
      Thus at a later time Herbert transcribed lectures Heidegger gave about Dilthey in 1925.
      The Heidegger texts are available on google books (minus 8 pages or so). The Nachwort notes that Walter Bröcker (another Heidegger student) made the original stenographic notes and then transcribed them longhand, from which Herbert created the 31 page typescript, which is preserved with Herbert's papers in Frankfurt. It cites the following:
      • Thomas Regehly, "Übersicht über die 'Heideggeriana' im Herbert-Marcuse-Archive der Stadt- und Universitätsbibliothek in Frankfurt am Main," in: Heidegger Studies 7(1991), 179-209. (also added to my Herbert-Heidegger page, at the bottom)
    • Mahon O’Brien, "Re-assessing the ‘Affair’: The Heidegger Controversy Revisited ," in: The Social Science Journal 47 (2010), 1–20 (author's copy).
  • Dec. 29, 2012 additions to Booksabout and Courses pages, plus some random things:
    • Bob Samuels' Dec. 12, 2012 blog: "The One-Dimensional University: The Destructive Marriage of Technology and Administration." Bob is a writing instructor at UCLA, union organizer, and tireless advocate for implementing and improving universal undergraduate instruction.
    • Luis Diego Fernandez's Sept. 8, 2012 article in N: Revista di Cultura: ' El rescate de un hedonismo libertario: La reedición de tres obras clave de Herbert Marcuse expone el pensamiento de uno de los portavoces del “freudomarxismo”.'
      [The rescue of a libertarian hedonism: The reissue of three books on Herbert Marcuse's thought exposes a spokesman of "Freudian Marxism"]
    • The "Philosophy Documentation Center" at pdcnet.org has 936 documents in a search on "marcuse"--mostly reviews of his works, and reviews of works about his works.
      For example, this 1970 summary of Negations in The Review of Metaphysics.

2013 Announcements (back to top)

  • Jan. 14, 2013: quite a few (2 dozen?) pdfs of articles 1960-1999 added to the Booksabout page, and a few to the Publications page (noted there in the announcements), and two names to ScholarActivists (noted there).
  • Added Jan. 29, 2013:International Herbert Marcuse society logo
    • November 7-9, 2013: FIFTH BIENNIAL CONFERENCE of the International Herbert Marcuse Society at the University of Kentucky, Lexington. For information contact Professor Arnold L. Farr, Department of Philosophy, [email protected], and see the International Herbert Marcuse Society website.
  • Feb. 4, 2013: I just came across a very interesting personal reminiscence by Jürgen Habermas about 2 seminal lectures by Herbert that Habermas heard in 1956 and 1964:
    • Jürgen Habermas, "Grossherzige Remigranten: Über jüdische Philosophen in der frühen Bundesrepublik. Eine persönliche Erinnerung," in: Neue Zürcher Zeitung (July 2, 2011) .
      • Excerpt:
        "Die Veranstaltungsreihe [1956 Freud Vorlesungsreihen in Heidelberg und Frankfurt] schloss übrigens mit zwei Vorträgen eines Philosophen über «Die Idee des Fortschritts im Lichte der Psychoanalyse», die mich elektrisiert haben wie kaum ein Vortrag je vorher oder nachher. Damals sah ich Herbert Marcuse, der Gedanken aus seinem noch unveröffentlichten Buch «Eros and Civilization» vortrug, zum ersten Mal. Ich hatte erst zwei Monate zuvor meine Arbeit an dem Institut aufgenommen, aus dessen verschollener Vergangenheit mir nun, unerwartet und ohne dialektische Schnörkel, ein vital gegenwärtiger Geist entgegentrat. Das Bild, das wir uns aus den engagierten Zeiten der Studentenbewegung von Marcuse bewahren, blendet die Qualität des Wissenschafters aus, der in Freiburg eine solide philosophisches Ausbildung genossen hatte. Im Kreis der «alten» Frankfurter war Marcuse derjenige, der sich in seinen philosophischen Untersuchungen an konventionelle wissenschaftliche Massstäbe hielt – dafür ist «Reason and Revolution» das beste Beispiel. Ohne diese Qualität hätte Marcuse auch acht Jahre später mit seinem Vortrag über «Industrialisierung und Kapitalismus» unter den Jüngeren nicht das Echo finden können, auf das es mir in unserem wirkungsgeschichtlichen Kontext ankommt."
        Es folgt eine Beschreibung eines Vortrags von Herbert über Max Weber auf dem Heidelberger Soziologenkongress im Jahre 1964.
  • Feb. 6, 2013: In Fall 2011 a Finnish translation of Herbert's essay "Repressive Tolerance," 'Sortava suvaitsevaisuus,' was published in Paatos magazine (by students at the University of Tampere, Finland). My thanks to Mikko Niemelä for the translation and link. (In Dec. 2011 Mikko noted that Herbert's The Aesthetic Dimension had just been published in Finnish as well.)
  • Sept. 20, 2013Debora NeriNeri 2013 book cover: Debora Neri's book Torno così ai Beatniks: Immaginazione critica e rivolta nell'estetica dell'esistenzada Marcuse alla Beat Generation ['Thus I Return to the Beatniks: Critical Imagination and Revolt in the Aesthetics of Being from Marcuse to the Beat Generation'](Edizioni Tracce, 2013), 224 pages (Tracce book page).
    Added to BooksAbout page (with google translate's English version of the Italian blurb).
  • Nov. 8, 2013book cover Greek 3 essays: guestbook entry by Prof. Konstantinos Rantis: there is a new Greek edition of three of Marcuse's texts: On Dialectics: Three Essays (96 pages, 8.00 €)

2014 Announcements (back to top)


2015 Announcements (back to top)

  • Jan. 10, 2015: deadline for submission of papers to a special issue of Radical Philosophy Review devoted to "Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man." See the call for papers on google docs. This deadline was extended so that papers presented at Columbia and Brandeis in Sept/Oct 2014 can be submitted as well.
  • May 4, 2015: The 2015 International Herbert Marcuse Society Conference will be held November 12-14, 2015 at Salisbury University (in Maryland on a peninsula across the Chesapeake Bay from Washington & Baltimore). Conference highlights:
  • Aug. 2 & 11, 2015:
    • Added about a dozen citations and pdfs to the Booksabout page, found on the Wiley database (these are not separately marked; 1970, 1974, 1975, 1982, 1997, 2004, 2008, 2012-14)
    • new translations available:
      1977 Spanish
      : "El asesinato no es un arma política," translated by Juan David Palacios Suárez (2 page pdf). Original: "Mord darf keine Waffe der Politik sein," in: Die Zeit, Sept. 23, 1977. [translation available under this Creative Commons License](posted on Publications page)
    • Palacios, a scholar at the National University of Colombia, also added to the ScholarActivists page.
    • 1964 Spanish: "Un Mundo sin un Logos," translation of "World Without Logos," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 20 (January 1964): 25-26. Translation by Juan David Palacios (2 page pdf).(Original available on google books; archived pdf [use "fit to printable area" if printing]) [translation available under this Creative Commons License]
    • Dialectic of Liberation 2015, coverRe-publication of 1967 "Liberation from the Affluent Society" lecture, in: David Cooper (ed.), The Dialectics of Liberation (Verso, June 2015; $17 at publisher's website). With contributions by Gregory Bateson, Stokely Carmichael, John Gerassi, Lucien Goldmann, Paul Goodman, Jules Henry, R.D. Laing, Herbert Marcuse, and Paul Sweezy. This volume is part of Verso's Radical Thinkers series. Book tagline: "A revolutionary compilation of speeches which produced a political groundwork for many of the radical movements in the following decades."
  • Aug. 18, 2015:1974 Paris lectures, table of contents In 1974 Herbert presented 7 lectures to students in Paris. The texts, transcribed from audiotapes with Herbert's annotations, are now available: Paris Lectures at Vincennes University, 1974: Global Capitalism and Radical Opposition ($20 on CreateSpace; same price on amazon)
    • Blurb: "This volume advances Marcuse scholarship by presenting seven newly discovered, hitherto unpublished, lectures to students at Vincennes University, a branch of the Sorbonne. Marcuse's critical analysis focuses on core features of American society, its political economy, its culture, and the potential attainability of a free socialist future. These 1974 manuscripts were found in 2014 in the Marcuse archive at the University of Frankfurt by Peter-Erwin Jansen. Jansen and Charles Reitz edited and annotated the lectures for publication. Commentary by Sarah Surak, Detlev Claussen, and Douglas Kellner illuminates the historical context of Marcuse's theoretical perspective and his relevance to contemporary movements for social change." (cover image)
    • Also added to Publications and BooksAbout pages.
    • Also new on BooksAbout: Shannon Brincat and Damian Gerber, "The Necessity of Dialectical Naturalism: Marcuse, Bookchin, and Dialectics in the Midst of Ecological Crises," in: Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography 47:4(Sept. 2014), pages 871–893. (pdf)
  • Oct. 11, 2015: Happening soon: the 2015 International Herbert Marcuse Society Conference will take place November 12-14, 2015, at Salisbury University in Maryland. Registration is now open.
  • Nov. 11, 2015: The 2015 International Herbert Marcuse Society Conference starts this week!
    • Also recently added: pdf scans of Herbert's essay "Repressive Tolerance" in English and German (a reader found that 2 paragraphs had been omitted from the html version, which are now added back in there as well.)
    • In other news, Helmut Dubiel, a former director of the Frankfurt Institut für Sozialforschung, died in a tragic accident November 3. He was 69 and had been suffering from Parkinson's disease. (Helmut's wikipedia page; death announcements in FAZ)
  • **Nov. 12-14, 2015**: The sixth biennial conference of the International Herbert Marcuse Society will be held at Salisbury University (wikipedia page) in Salisbury, Maryland, on November 12-14, 2015. Details forthcoming, or contact Prof. Sarah Surak (poli sci/faculty webpage; Environmental Studies webpage).

2016-17 Announcements (back to top)

  • June 6, 2016: In February Harold Marcuse (me--the author of this website) was interviewed by the German broadcaster Südwest Rundfunk (SWR channel 3) for their long running (since 1977!-German wikipedia page) quiz-show-documentary series "Ich trage einen grossen Namen" (I bear a famous name). "My" segement aired on June 6, 2016. If you're interested, the 15-min. clip is available on youtube (8 views on 6/8/16; 1428 views on 7/5/18).
  • June 8, 2016: a few items after a longer hiatus of not posting:
  • Sept 9, 2016: Harold (me, the author of this website) uploaded and added English captions to the interview I did in February (aired June 6, 2016) for the Southwest German channel 3 SWR quiz show "I have a famous name" (14 mins): https://youtu.be/fxjqm1CBKUw (38 views on 9/8/16; 395 on 1/31/17).
  • Jan. 31, 2017: long time no updates, but not for want of important things to post. Most urgent as new social movements emerge to mobilize against the new US government's reactionary agenda, is on the BooksAbout page: Andrew LamasLamas, Great Refusal, thumbnail of book cover, Todd Wolfson and Peter Funke (eds.), The Great Refusal: Herbert Marcuse and Contemporary Social Movements (Philadelphia: Temple, 2016), 410 pages. ($40 at amazon, w/ contents and preview)(pdf flyer).
    • The cover shows a sculpture of Sisyphus by the contemporary British sculptor Jane McAdam Freud, a great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud and the daughter of the painter Lucian Freud (JMF's wikipedia page).
    • Book mentioned and concept discussed over several paragraphs in the Jan. 20, 2017 New Yorker by Emily Eakin, "What Can Artists Accomplish by Saying No to Trump?" Eakin states: Marcuse "remains one of few contemporary thinkers to have articulated a political theory of refusal."
    • Book blurb: Herbert Marcuse examined the subjective and material conditions of radical social change and developed the “Great Refusal,” a radical concept of “the protest against that which is.” The editors and contributors to the exciting new volume The Great Refusal provide an analysis of contemporary social movements around the world with particular reference to Marcuse’s revolutionary concept.
      The book also engages—and puts Marcuse in critical dialogue with—major theorists including Slavoj Žižek and Michel Foucault, among others. The chapters in this book analyze different elements and locations of the contemporary wave of struggle, drawing on the work and vision of Marcuse in order to reveal, with a historical perspective, the present moment of resistance. Essays seek to understand recent uprisings—such as the Zapatistas in Mexico, the Arab Spring, and the Occupy movement—in the context of Marcuse’s powerful conceptual apparatus. The Great Refusal also charts contemporary social movements against global warming, mass incarceration, police brutality, white supremacy, militarization, technological development, and more, to provide insights that advance our understanding of resistance today.
  • March 28, 2017: A thought-provoking article draws on Herbert's ideas (e.g. Great Refusal) to formulate a conservative+liberal strategy for the anti-Trumpian movement: Charles Leadbeater, "The prophets of Trumpism: How the ideas of two pre-war intellectual refugees – the radical Herbert Marcuse and the reactionary Eric Voegelin – are influencing the new culture wars among Trump and his acolytes," in: New Statesman and Society (March 28, 2017).
    • Excerpt: "A true sense of order, Voegelin argues, comes from living with an open soul and a full spirit, not being part of a machine manufacturing false promises. If we cannot manage to create order from within, by returning to the life guided by the soul, we will find order imposed, more brutally, from without. Marcuse, likewise, thought that turning the Great Refusal into a creative movement required an inner renewal, a “liberation of consciousness” through aesthetics, art, fantasy, imagination and creativity. We can only escape the grip of the one-dimensional society, which reduces life to routines of buying and selling, by recognising that we are multidimensional people, full of potential to grow in different ways. It is not enough merely to resist reality; we have to escape it through leaps of imagination and see the world afresh."
  • July 25, 2017: The guestbook provider since 2001, Sparklit, has cancelled their guestbook service. They provided me with a spreadsheet of the comments, which I've turned into a text document, which is a very interesting record of visitors to this site, interspersed with anecdotes by people who knew Herbert. You can read them here compiled as a pdf: Guestbook entries 2001-2017.
  • Sept. 18, 2017: I've fallen behind on updating recent publications, quite a few of which I've just added to the Books About page (and the Scholar-Activists page). Here are two examples:
  • Sept. 24, 2017: The International Herbert Marcuse Society's 7th biennal conference is coming up:
    • Oct. 26-28, 2017at York University in Toronto: Conference website with program under the theme "The Dialectics of Liberation in the Era of Neoliberalism." 2017 Five New Lectures Cover
    • A book of five previously unpublished lectures will be distributed at the conference: Herbert Marcuse, Transvaluation of Values and Radical Social Change: Five New Lectures, 1966-1976, edited by Peter-Erwin Jansen, Sarah Surak and Charles Reitz; introduction by Terry Maley; commentary by Andrew Feenberg. Soon it will also be available on amazon for $20. Click on the images at right for details.

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