when Alasdair McIntryre published his "Modern Masters" monograph condemning Marcuse's work as "incantatory and anti-rational, a magical rather than a philosophical use of language." The well respected philospher criticized an approach that "does not invite questioning, but suggests that the teacher is delivering truths to the pupil which the pupil has merely to receive. ... Marcuse seldom, if ever, gives us any reason to believe that what he is writing is true ... he never offers evidence in a systematic way.” But as true as McIntyre’s observations were they did not prevent ODM from becoming a world wide classic, selling hundreds of thousands of copies in Russia and China as well as Europe. The yellow and black paperback was s ubiquitious fixture for a while in campus bookstores. And a few decades later his reputation was on the rise.
As Richard Wolin in Heideggers Children (2001), his benchmark of social progress remained the "emancipatory ends of Marxism—putting an end to the degradation of the working class at the hands of a commodity-producing society." For the sixties, the first generation to so widely reject religious orthodoxy Marcuse message about the need to reject transcedence has an odd twist. In some ways drugs were the transcendent experience that replaced in some fashion some of the offerings of religion but transcendence was never an end in itself except for a marginal group. The real enemy was phoninesss, inauthenticity, selling out to the corporation. Marcuse’s answer was the "Great Refusal" --” the proper political response to any form of irrational repression.” Kellner sees this as”at least the starting point for political activism in the contemporary era: refusal of all forms of oppression and domination, relentless criticism of all of all policies that impact negatively on working people and progressive social programs, and militant opposition to any and all acts of aggression against Third World countries.” But without clear “emancipatory alternatives” as Kellner puts it a Marcusian mind set can lead to violence. After all it might and has been argued by the extreme radicals (and we recall that both Angela Davis and Abby Hoffman were his students) that a repressive system justifies an aggressive response. As Kellner notes excessive pessimism and negativity without emancipatory alternatives can lead to cynicism, apathy and hopelessness. The Occupy movement has revived Marcuse;s fortunes of late. Two years ago at the University of Pennsylvannia The International Herbert Marcuse Society's Fourth Biennial Conference attracted hundreds of attendees. As Peter Marcuse (Herbert’s son commented “Over the last 20 or 30 years," Marcuse was totally missing. ... Now Marcuse comes from the outside. That was not the case in the 1960s. He's almost an unknown name." Angela Davis who gave the keynote stated that she considered it a "privilege" to have been Marcuse's student and that it is her obligation to champion "the 21st-century relevance of Herbert Marcuse's work..where rural living and peace and love could prevail between all people.”
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