Freedom and Necessity

Abstract

Although Barrington Moore has been no one’s disciple or apologist, it is interesting to notice the interplay between his work and that of Herbert Marcuse, a contemporary to whom he often refers warmly in his books. Both men were employed by the US Government during the Second World War, Moore as a political analyst in the Office of Strategic Studies and in the Department of Justice, Marcuse at the State Department in the Office of Intelligence Research where he became Acting Head of the East European section. Marcuse was later employed until 1954 at the Russian Research Centre at Harvard, an institution to which Moore has been attached for much of his working life. Marcuse’s Soviet Marxism appeared in 1958, a few years after Moore’s own work on Russia. In some respects, also, the essays in Moore’s Political Power and Social Theory provide a response to suggestions made by Marcuse in another book, published three years previously, entitled Eros and Civilization. Similarly, Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, which appeared in 1964, haunts the pages of Reflections ton the Causes of Human Misery as a ghost to be laid, albeit with civility. Both men had contributed with R. P. Wolff to a small volume on tolerance in the late 1960s and at about the same time Moore co-edited a series of essays in honour of Marcuse.¹