Herbert Marcuse: biography of this German philosopher

The human being has always been a gregarious being that tends towards the community, and throughout history we have seen how as the number of human beings grows we tend to generate increasingly complex structures and societies. And this development does not occur in a linear and unitary way, but different environments and cultures have generated their own organization and management systems.

The way societies have developed has been the subject of debate and research over the centuries, with authors like Marx being some of the best known. Another of the most relevant, this one from the last century, is Herbert Marcuse. And it is about this author that we are going to talk in this article; we will see a short biography of Herbert Marcuse in order to better understand his thinking.

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The biography of Herbert Marcuse

Herbert Hermann Marcuse was born on July 19, 1998 in the city of Berlin. He was the first-born and first of three siblings from the marriage of merchant Carl Marcuse and Gertrud Kreslawskyun, who was the granddaughter of a factory owner.

The family, of Jewish origins, had a prosperous and wealthy socio-economic position, something that would allow their children to have a good education.

Training and World War I

With the arrival of the First World War, and with only sixteen years old, Marcuse enlisted in the army. He first worked in the care and maintenance of horses, in Berlin itself. In addition to this, he would serve as a soldier at the front, and would become part of both the Berlin city council of soldiers and the Social Democratic Party of Germany.

End the war, Herbert Marcuse He became interested in academic life and decided to study Economics, Philosophy and Germanistics at the University of Berlin. After that he enrolled in the University of Freiburg, in which he studied Literature. He would go on to get a doctorate in the same discipline in 1922, with a thesis devoted to the study of the fundamentals of Germanic literature. He also dropped out of the Social Democratic Party after the murder of Rosa Luxemburg.

After finishing his doctorate he would return to Berlin, where he worked in a bookstore. In 1924 he would marry Sophie Wertheim in that city. Over time, specifically in 1928, the author decided to return to the University of Freiburg to study Philosophy together with authors like Heidegger, whom he admired and who would be highly influential in his thinking existentialist.

During this time he began to be interested in the field of sociology, receiving influences and reading the theories of Marx and Weber.

He tried to qualify and enter the University as a teacher alongside Heidegger, but the growing rise of Nazism and the initial position of the latter in this regard made the author fail to do so. He made one of his first works, a monograph entitled "Hegel's Ontology and the theory of historicity", and also published and even directed magazines such as Die Gesellschaft.

Institute for Social Research and World War II

In 1933 Marcuse came into contact through Kurt Riezler with the Institut für Sozialforschung or Institute for Social Research, directed at that time by Max Horkheimer.

The author moved to Frankfurt and became part of what would eventually be called the Frankfurt School, where he, together with Horkheimer and other researchers would analyze social elements such as the role of families, social movements and the revision of theories Marxists. Also he criticized the orthodoxy and positivism that underlie capitalism and communism.

He would begin to integrate and make Critical Theory his own, as well as to work the search for an integrating perspective of the praxis and the theory of Hegel and Marxism. Already at this stage the author began to have a reputation, developing different investigations.

The arrival of Hitler and Nazism to power made Marcuse, of Jewish origin, make the decision to leave Germany. He passed through Paris and Geneva, where he would become the director of the Institute's branch, but would end up emigrating to the United States.

Professional life in the United States

There he would work and continue his research at Columbia University, where a headquarters of the Institute was opened. In addition, he collaborated until the end of World War II with the United States Office of Secret Services to overthrow the Nazi regime and the rest of the fascist regimes. He was able to become an American in 1940.

Later he would begin to act as a teacher in political philosophy. In the first place he worked at Columbia University itself, to later do the same at Harvard (where he also worked with the Russian Research Institute, although he would be fired in 1958 for divergences regarding his research and the approach taken gave them).

In 1954 he also began teaching at Brandeis University. During this vital stage and after becoming interested in Sigmund Freud's theory, he theorized about repression in society even within the democratic and unconscious level, whether it is capitalist or communist.

Wrote Eros and civilization (published in 1955) and The malaise of culture, and in them it can be observed how the author proposes that even immersed in oppression and repression both consciously and unconsciously, we tend to seek freedom and development.

He wrote one of the best known works of him, The one-dimensional man, in 1964. In this work he developed the way that even in democratic societies we can find oppression and a tendency to force homogeneity and unidimensionality, something that hinders development to the point that practically only the most marginal elements of society are capable of generating change.

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Last years, death and legacy

During the sixties and seventies the author began working at the University of Berkley, at the time when great movements and student revolts began to emerge. The author supported the student body, becoming a critical figure with the establishment and liberalism and a strong influence for the social movements of the time.

The author sought to generate a society that did not exercise repression and the elimination of the alignment and domination of consumer societies. He also had a great interest in art, especially in the final stretch of his life, as an instrument that allows us to direct us to a freer society.

In 1979 Herbert Marcuse traveled to Germany in order to make some speeches. However, during his stay in the city of Starnberg, the author suffered a stroke that finally ended his life on July 26, 1979.

Herbert Marcuse was an intellectual of great prestige and renown, whose philosophy has served as an inspiration especially for socio-political movements and to analyze from a critical perspective and with the purpose of change the functioning of different types of societies and their way of acting on the population.

Bibliographic references:

• Kellner, D. (1984). Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism. London: Macmillan.
• Mattick, P. (1972) Critique of Marcuse: One-dimensional man in class society Merlin Press.