Marcuse and One-Dimensional Man

Herbert Marcuse, a member of the Institute for Social Research since 1933 and, like Horkheimer and Adorno, an exile who eventually settled permanently in the United States, taught at Brandeis University and later the University of California, San Diego, and became, more than any other Frankfurt School figure, a direct intellectual influence on the American and European New Left of the 1960s. His major work Eros and Civilization (1955) had already offered a distinctive synthesis of Marx and Freud, arguing against Freud's own pessimistic assumption in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) that instinctual repression is an inescapable price of civilization; Marcuse instead distinguished "basic repression," a minimal and genuinely necessary renunciation for any organized society, from "surplus repression," the historically specific, avoidable excess of instinctual constraint imposed by particular systems of domination — above all by capitalism's "performance principle," which channels eros into the discipline of alienated labor.