Herbert Marcuse: from Affirmation to Liberation

Abstract

Marcuse’s analysis of the effects of mass society proceeds from the same structure of Marxist and Freudian ideas that Adorno and Horkheimer developed, but Marcuse modifies their picture of world society under the wholesale repressive domination of technical rationality with a set of proposals that questions: ‘the terrible necessity of the inner connection between civilization and barbarism’.¹ It is in Marcuse’s revision and adaptation of Freud and to a lesser degree of Marx that possibilities of liberation from a civilisation of technical rationality appear. Freud’s account of the process by which the individual is socialised and integrated into a repressive civilisation can be usefully abstracted from Civilization and Its Discontents. The imposition of civilisation upon the individual, in the main, involves circumscribing the individual with a whole series of restraints designed with the socially useful purpose of preserving the species and ‘to protect men against the violence of the forces of nature and to adjust their mutual relations’.² This civilisation of restraints mediated by such institutions as the family, private property and law, protects the individual from his own aggressive nature and that of other men. The tragic cost of this process in which a whole range of natural human instincts are adjusted and controlled in the name and justification of an inhibiting civilisation is described by Freud in the following way: ‘It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct, how much it presupposes precisely the non-satisfaction (by suppression, repression or some other means?) of powerful instincts’ (CD, p. 34).