Herbert Marcuse's Essay On Liberation

Herbert Marcuse begins his 1969 essay on freedom and liberation this way – dedicating his words and his theories to the militants around the country who have taken their freedom and their future into their own hands. They have hit the turning point, what Marcuse calls “the Great Refusal,” the moment of recognizing societal repression in a complex capitalist system and attempting to put an end to it. They took the idea of revolution and put it where it belongs, into the dimension of liberation; they inspired Marcuse to outline new possibilities for real human freedom. Marcuse comes from the Frankfurt School of Germany, founded in the 1920s by a group of Marxist intellectuals and a major source of intellectual social theory during the twentieth
One of the main reasons why his ideas strayed from traditional Marxist theories was that, unlike Karl Marx himself, Marcuse was a citizen of the twentieth century whose perception of reality had been so heavily altered by the events of the century that no theories could completely realign his ideas with those of the past. Marcuse’s philosophies and those of the twentieth century had been influenced by events of the interwar period and World War II, which often contributed to the loss of faith in absolute values and a sense of meaningless existence. An Essay on Liberation draws heavily from Sigmund Freud and Max Weber in an attempt to keep his social and revolutionary theories relevant. Because of his knowledge of history, Marcuse is very critical of the repression stemming from the expansion of the production of consumer goods and the thriving and powerful capitalist society. He disapproves of contemporary democracy but blames the corrupting influence of capitalism and not democracy itself. He argues that the time for “utopian speculation” has come and that traditional concepts of human freedom have become obsolete thanks to the development of an advanced industrial
He calls for a revolution because capitalism oppresses by manipulating values and needs; “a new sensibility” needs to be developed which will allow the people to construct a truly free society. He believed that if society took on an aesthetic ethos, then the environment of freedom could be reached. This free society would provide a place for the “determination and realization of goals which enhance, protect and unite life on earth” (46). He sees the vicious circle in society: that revolution is the only way to bring about a free society, but in order to revolt one must possess the vital need to be freed, but this need has been suppressed by the gross capitalist society. Marcuse argues that science and technology are great vehicles of liberation and could provide so much information and progress to a free-thinking man, but the productive process of capitalism and the use of machines has changed them into vehicles of domination (12). The new sensibility and an overall aesthetic outlook would give people control of their own consciousness and therefore promote science and technology free to discover and