Negations

Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) was a philosopher, sociologist, and political theorist. He studied at the University of Berlin and the University of Freiburg, and became a crucial figure at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, and of the Frankfurt School of social theory. He was forced to leave Germany in 1933, eventually settling in the United States, where he would spend much of his life and taught at many of the country's greatest schools and universities.
A Hegelian-Freudian-Marxist, Marcuse highlighted the cultural forms of repression and the role of technology and the expansion of the production of consumer goods in the maintenance of the stability of capitalism. His classic studies of capitalist society were important influences on the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s and his libertarian socialism remains an important intellectual resource.

Philosophical speculation seldom attracts headlines, let alone threats of death. Yet such was the fate that overtook Herbert Marcuse in the late 1960s, when he was catapulted into international controversy as a prophet of the revolutionary student movement. Among his major writings are Reason and Revolution, One-Dimensional Man, and Eros and Civilization.

Herbert Marcuse's Negations is both a radical critique of capitalist modernity and a model of materialist dialectical thinking. In a series of essays, originally written in the period stretching from the 1930s to 1960s, Marcuse takes up the presupposed categories that have, and continue to, ground thought and action in our administered society: liberalism, industrialism, individualism, hedonism, aggression. This book is both a testament to a great thinker and a still vital strand of thought in the comprehension and critique of the modern organized world. It is essential reading for younger scholars and a radical reminder for those steeped in the tradition of a critical theory of society. With a brilliance of conception combined with an insistence on the material conditions of thought and action, this book speaks both to the particular contents engaged and to the fundamental grounds of any critique of organized modernity.