Herbert Marcuse

Marcuse was born in Berlin to a wealthy Jewish family. Serving at the end of the First World War he joined a soldiers' council and the Social Democratic party, leaving it in 1919 over its stance on the killing of Rosa Luxemburg. He studied German literature at Freiburg, took his doctorate in 1922, worked some years as a bookseller in Berlin, and in 1928 returned to Freiburg to study with Heidegger, writing Hegel's Ontology and the Theory of Historicity in an attempt to join Marx with Heidegger's ontology. When Heidegger turned to the Nazis in 1933, Husserl's recommendation brought him into the Institute for Social Research.

He followed the Institute into exile in Geneva and New York. Reason and Revolution (1941) defended Hegel, arguing that his dialectic is a negative reason critical of the existing order and has nothing to do with fascism. During the war he analysed Germany for the Office of Strategic Services and then worked at the State Department until 1951; he researched at Columbia and Harvard, became professor at Brandeis in 1958, and moved to the University of California at San Diego in 1965 until retirement.

Eros and Civilization (1955) joined Freud with Marx: civilisation requires instinctual repression, but modern society represses far beyond what survival needs, and this 'surplus repression' serves domination; an affluent society could let eros and play replace toil. One-Dimensional Man (1964) argued that advanced industrial society absorbs all opposition through consumption, technological rationality and false needs, that the working class has been integrated, that the critical dimension has vanished and people have become one-dimensional. The book became the textbook of the 1960s revolt, and students chanted 'Marx, Mao, Marcuse'.

He supported the student movement without flattering it, arguing that the revolutionary subject was no longer the worker but students, minorities and the Third World, and that hope lay in the 'Great Refusal' and a new sensibility. In 1968 he spoke in Paris and Berlin, received death threats, and Governor Reagan of California demanded his dismissal. The late Aesthetic Dimension returned to Schiller, holding that the autonomous form of art is itself a protest against reality. He died in 1979 on a visit to Germany with Habermas at his side, the only member of the Frankfurt School to have engaged directly in political movements.