Godfather of the revolution?

You almost never hear the name Herbert Marcuse anymore, but 40 years ago, he was a leading critic of American economic and political life, as controversial as Howard Zinn or Noam Chomsky. A self-professed Marxist, he escaped Nazi Germany in the early 1930s and became an American citizen in 1940. Although he taught at Columbia, Harvard and Brandeis, it was when he went to UC San Diego in the mid-1960s that he became a counterculture superstar, inspiring many members of the New Left.

Marcuse died in 1979, at 81. But a number of his books remain in print, and now a new collection, “The Essential Marcuse: Selected Writings of Philosopher and Social Critic Herbert Marcuse,” edited by Andrew Feenberg and William Leiss (Beacon: 250 pp., $20 paper), seeks to distill the essence of his work. It’s not easy reading, but what makes it interesting is the way that, at his best, Marcuse looks past theory to an almost utopian sense of possibility.

In his day, this got Marcuse in trouble; his essay “Repressive Tolerance,” which argues that tolerance can be a negative social force by making room for (and, indeed, empowering) oppressive ideologies, was widely criticized on all sides when it appeared in 1965. And yet, there’s something undeniably compelling about such a notion, especially in a culture in which so many public debates are dominated not by the best and the brightest but by the loudest and the most uncouth. What is the nature of society? In what kind of world do we want to live? There may be no definitive answers to such questions, but one place to start, Marcuse suggests, is by thinking for yourself.

David L. Ulin