Towards a Critical Theory of Society: 2 (Herbert Marcuse: Collected Papers) by Herbert Marcuse

Author:Herbert Marcuse [Marcuse, Herbert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781136860119
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2013-04-08T07:00:00+00:00

† “Beyond One-Dimensional Man” (1968) was found in the Marcuse archives in Frankfurt (#266.04). The text was delivered as the “First Annual Hans Meyerhoff Memorial Lecture” at UCLA on October 31, 1968. In a January 9, 1966 letter from Marcuse to T. W. Adorno, he writes: “You will have heard by now that my friends Hans Meyerhoff and Otto Kirchheimer have both died within two days of one another: Hans in an automobile accident; a student ran into him while he was sitting in a stationary car and he was crushed (he died on the operating table).”

After Meyerhoff’s death, Marcuse was chosen to provide the first memorial lecture in honor of a man whom he described as his “best friend.” Meyerhoff was, like Marcuse, a German refugee intellectual who emigrated in 1934 to the United States because of a Nazi edict forbidding the matriculation of Jewish students in German universities. He studied at the University of California at Berkeley and then Los Angeles, receiving a Ph.D. in philosophy at UCLA in 1942. In 1943, like Marcuse, he joined the Office of Strategic Services and, also with Marcuse, transferred to the Department of State, where he served as section chief in the Division of Research for Europe. Joining the Department of Philosophy at UCLA in 1948, he became a productive scholar and highly popular teacher, publishing books such as Time in Literature (1955) and editing an anthology The Philosophy of History in Our Time (1962). Like Marcuse, he was an early critic of US intervention in Vietnam and at the time of his death was working on a book on existentialism.

Letters from Marcuse’s publisher at Beacon Press indicate that his 1969 text An Essay on Liberation was to be called Beyond One-Dimensional Man. An October 7, 1968 letter used this title, but by October 21, 1968 the reference was to An Essay on Liberation. Unfortunately, no letter in the Marcuse archive explains the switch, and so the title of the Meyerhoff lecture is the first text to signal that he was moving beyond the perspectives of his earlier 1960s work.

Marcuse did extensive textual revision in handwriting on the manuscript, making it difficult to transcribe. The text is one of the best expressions of Marcuse’s late 1960s revolutionary optimism, which would decline under the force of circumstances in the 1970s. The lecture’s provocative title implied a significant transformation in Marcuse’s thought and perceptions of the contemporary historical situation. The study is indeed one of the most condensed expressions of Marcuse’s synthesis of theory, politics, and art as forms of revolutionary transformation. Despite all the work on the text, it was never published, probably because Marcuse turned to work on the project that became An Essay on Liberation (1969). The Meyerhoff essay, however, provides one of the most concise and compressed expressions of his synthesis of philosophy, social theory, art, and politics, with special emphasis on the importance of art and culture as emancipatory forces, and is published here for the first time in the original.

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