[Marcuse by Jacob McNulty, Routledge, 2025; 262 pp.]
Jacob McNulty teaches philosophy at Yale University, and it is as a philosopher that he approaches Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt School of which he was a member. McNulty argues that although Marcuse is often dismissed today as a popularizer—at least by comparison with Theodor Adorno—he was in fact a thinker of significance, who had interesting and valuable ideas on epistemology, metaphysics, the philosophy of science, ethics, and aesthetics. In this goal he largely succeeds, at least if a philosopher is judged by the possibilities he suggests rather than the rigor of his arguments, at least as “rigor” is understood in contemporary analytic philosophy.
In what follows, I shall be concerned with the political and economic topics Marcuse addressed rather than with most of the more abstruse areas just mentioned, but one theme that pervades Marcuse’s thought is present throughout his work, and this is the contrast between idealism and positivism. Idealists maintain that human beings construct the world, while positivists accept the world as it exists. Indeed, when I first read Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (1941) many decades ago, I was struck by how often Marcuse speaks of “negative thinking.” In order to construct the world, we must first negate it, and McNulty—who is the author of Hegel’s Logic and Metaphysics (2023)—ably expounds Marcuse’s use of themes from Hegel in this connection.
But it is not just any idealistic construction of the world that interested Marcuse. Rather, it is the attempt to do so by Marxists aiming to establish socialism. Marcuse’s commitment to Marxist socialism never wavered throughout his long life, though he abandoned Marx’s view that the industrial proletariat would bring about this momentous change. The workers were too mired in conventional categories to overthrow capitalism, and they needed the guidance of revolutionary intellectuals—not least the members of the Frankfurt School—to lead them to socialist fulfillment.
One naturally asks, what is the nature of socialism, as Marcuse thinks of it? How does he propose to overcome the objections that Ludwig von Mises raised to its possibility? But those who seek answers to these questions will not find them:
While Marcuse reflects on questions from a socialist standpoint, he does not attempt to defend the most basic premises of his socialist outlook against objections from those who do not share it or who occupy radically opposed positions (libertarians, free market capitalists, even liberal egalitarians).
Indeed, there is little to Marcuse’s “socialism” beyond the overthrow of capitalism, and here he is true to his negative thinking. Once capitalism is dismantled, wondrous possibilities beckon. Freud has taught us that society rests on the repression of our drives to death and destruction, but he wrongly took the extent of the repression to be a permanent feature of civilization. With capitalism gone, human bodies will become eroticized and “polymorphous perversity” will run rampant, thus ending “surplus repression,” though McNulty does his best to reassure that this is not the saturnalia it seems at first glance to be.
To reiterate—incredible as you may think it to be—Marcuse does not think he needs to show how Mises’s calculation argument can be answered. We negative thinkers, he avers, have overcome such benighted expressions of positivism as anti-Marxist economic theory.
Capitalism is the enemy, and if it is not brought to an end, fascism will soon be upon us. In fact, fascism really is just capitalism by another name, and business monopolists remain firmly in control. Mises’s analysis of fascism as a form of socialism is not addressed: instead, Marcuse relied almost entirely on the account of the Nazi economy given in Behemoth (1941) by his Frankfurt School colleague Franz Neumann.
Fascism, thus, is capitalism in its naked horror, and to block its onset, drastic measures are necessary. Fascist groups should not be free to express their views, and Marcuse extended this prohibition to advocates of ideas he deemed insufficiently progressive:
Marcuse will insist that there is no reason for progressives to tolerate such ideas, and they should act against them, whether their actions are legal or not. Marcuse sometimes expressed himself more cautiously, but I fear that advocates of the free market would come under his ban. If progressives allow such ideas to circulate, they encourage people to seek to make things better within the constraints of existing society rather than to overthrow it. Such pseudo-freedom is “repressive tolerance.”
If you find Marcuse’s convoluted line of thought hard to follow, Marcuse would not disagree. In fact, in our present disordered age, too much clarity is bad and leads to conformity. As his friend the philosopher Robert Paul Wolff tells the story,
Now, Marcuse had a rather thick German accent, and I could not be sure I had heard him correctly. “Did you say that in Philosophy unclarity is a virtue?” I asked. “Yes,” he responded. Incredulous, I pressed on. “You are saying that in Philosophy, it is a virtue NOT to be clear?” I asked, being as clear myself as I could be. “Yes!” he said, with a malicious grin.
Marcuse was certainly true to his teaching, despite McNulty’s valiant efforts to enable us to understand his ideas.
