Herbert Marcuse Quotes on Politics
Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man (1964) gave the Frankfurt School's critical theory its most influential American statement. Advanced industrial society, Marcuse argued, has produced a one-dimensional thought and behavior in which the apparent freedoms of consumer capitalism, technocratic management, and the pluralist political system mask a structural absorption of all genuine opposition into the existing system of domination. The earlier Eros and Civilization (1955) had attempted to integrate Freudian metapsychology with Marxist political economy by showing that the surplus repression characteristic of capitalist society is not biologically necessary but politically maintained, and that a non-repressive civilization based on the Pleasure Principle remains a real historical possibility. The framework supplied much of the philosophical vocabulary of the New Left of the 1960s.
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 people recognise themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment.”
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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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“The slaves of developed industrial civilisation are sublimated slaves, but they are slaves.”
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Attributed to Herbert Marcuse:
“Not every problem someone has with his girlfriend is necessarily due to the capitalist mode of production.”
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“Bourgeois political economy … never gets to see man who is its real subject. It disregards the essence of man and his history and is thus in the profoundest sense not a ‘ science of people’ but of non-people and of an inhuman world of objects and commodities .”
The Foundations of Historical Materialism,” Studies in Critical Philosophy (1972), p. 9 -
“As the German idealists saw it, the French Revolution not only abolished feudal absolutism , replacing it with the economic and political system of the middle class , but it completed what the German Reformation had begun, emancipating the individual as a self-reliant master of his life. p. 3”
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