Herbert Marcuse

Herbert Marcuse, born in Berlin in 1898, was a member of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research alongside Horkheimer and Adorno, emigrated to the United States in 1934, worked for American intelligence during the war and taught at Brandeis and at the University of California, San Diego. In the 1960s he became the philosopher of the New Left and of the student revolts, from Berkeley to Paris, and died in 1979. His son Peter Marcuse is one of the most cited critical urbanists.

One-Dimensional Man (1964) is his central book for the city. It argues that advanced industrial society has integrated the working class through consumption, television and suburban housing, creating false needs that flatten critical thought: a society without opposition in which comfort is the most effective form of domination. The post-war suburb, with its car, its house and its appliances, is for Marcuse the landscape of that one-dimensionality.

Eros and Civilization (1955) sought in Freud a way out: a non-repressive society in which work would become play, and An Essay on Liberation (1969) entrusted that possibility to students, minorities and the Third World, in what he called the Great Refusal. His critique of repressive tolerance and of technology as ideology influences Lefebvre, Harvey and the whole reading of the city as a space of consumption and control. He was reproached for pessimism and elitism; his answer was that critique is the only freedom left.