Marcuse: the Dialectics of Hopelessness

ECAUSE Marcuse did not surface as a semi-popular social critic till the 1960s during the time of mounting and, for awhile, hopeful social protest, he is often assumed to be a spokesman for the protestors. Indeed, some of his writings in the sixties (most notably his Essay on Liberation) directly addressed the protest movement. Moreover, as protest in the U.S. subsided in the seventies, Marcuse became less prominent.1 Yet the conclusions which Marcuse draws from his studies seem far more apt in the politically quiescent seventies (and, earlier, in the fifties) than the sixties. And if we look clearly at what Marcuse was saying, even in the sixties, it appears that he was always a pessimistic revolutionary. He generally spoke dourly to the fervent youth. It is Marcuse's peculiar brand of pessimism which I will attempt to elucidate in this study. My focus will be on Marcuse's psychological theories specifically, on some of his revisions of Freud's social-psychological theories. This narrow focus can only be maintained by deliberately ignoring related themes and theories that Marcuse has developed in his various writings. In particular I will not deal at any length with Marcuse's notion that art, the imagination and, more generally, the human intellectual capacity for negation of historical realities provides a basis for changing these realities. However I will indicate very briefly near the end of this paper why I think this Marcusean theme does not fundamentally challenge the outcome of my analysis. For, in my opinion, Marcuse, the post-Freudian, delivers pessimistic conclusions that neither Marcuse, the neo-Marxist, nor Marcuse, the upholder of the (current) "truth value" of the arts, can quite get around.2