Herbert Marcuse Quotes on Freedom
Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization (1955) and One-Dimensional Man (1964) gave the postwar Frankfurt School its most influential analyses of advanced industrial freedom. The central thesis of One-Dimensional Man is that the apparent freedoms of late capitalist society — consumer choice, political participation, sexual permissiveness — function as the principal mechanisms of repressive desublimation through which the working class is integrated into the system that exploits it, with the genuinely critical political and aesthetic dimensions of human life systematically foreclosed. The framework, drawing on Hegel, Marx, Freud, and the broader Frankfurt School tradition, shaped the New Left of the 1960s and the subsequent critical-theoretic engagement with the political ambivalences of consumer-capitalist freedom.
Quotes
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Attributed to Herbert Marcuse:
“Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.”
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Attributed to Herbert Marcuse:
“The most effective and enduring form of warfare against liberation is the implanting of material and intellectual needs that perpetuate obsolete forms of the struggle for existence.”
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Attributed to Herbert Marcuse:
“Art breaks open a dimension inaccessible to other experience.”
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“The slaves of developed industrial civilisation are sublimated slaves, but they are slaves.”
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Attributed to Herbert Marcuse:
“One can rightfully speak of a culture of alienation only when the works are not part of the prevailing one.”
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“In conditions of private property … “life-activity” stands in the service of property instead of property standing the service of free life-activity.”
The Foundations of Historical Materialism," Studies in Critical Philosophy (1972), p. 32