Herbert Marcuse in the 21st Century: Eros and Civilization

Herbert Marcuse is often referred to as the philosopher of the sexual revolution. His two most popular books — One-Dimensional Man (1964) and Eros and Civilization (1955) — challenged the norms of the post-war West, which believed itself to be freer than it had ever been before. Marcuse — like his Frankfurt School cohorts — saw this freedom as Capitalism’s latest disguise for widespread misery and oppression. What people thought of as their freedom was merely their freedom to consume. When it comes to choices that really determine the quality of one’s life, like the structure of society, our choices shrink considerably. Meanwhile, our freedom to consume — what we think of as our liberty — becomes, in the words of Marcuse, ‘a powerful instrument of domination’, distracting us from the fact that the ‘range of choice open to the individual is not the decisive factor in determining the degree of human freedom, but what can be chosen and what is chosen by the individual’:

Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves

In Eros and Civilization, Marcuse argues against Freud’s premise in Civilization and its Discontents that societies require repression to exist. This, in turn, influenced the 1960s free love movement — the reverberations of which we still feel today. From this period, we have inherited a…