Customer Reviews (1)

Contra Marcuse
Across America the violent ones rage: Weathermen throwing bombs, New Leftists disrupting academic conventions, great universities torn apart by student mobs. What motivates them? Who has instilled in them this boundless hatred for American society?

Lenin, Ho, Fidel, Che - these we know about. But on our own shores, encamped at the University of California at San Diego, is another New Left mentor who ranks with them: Herbert Marcuse. Why does he hate America?

Until now we have had only apologias for Marcuse from Liberals who pave the way for his extremism. Now a respected scholar gives us a stingng intellectual indictment of the man and his ideas. The scholar is Dr. Eliseo Vivas, retired professor of philosophy at Northwestern University.

Vivas has given Americans the ammunition they need to understand and fight - within the Academy - the nihilists, the bomb-throwers, the revolutionaries....

The Marcuseans are dangerous, Vivas warns, and just may succeed in their goal of destroying the Academy in America. As for the defense of "academic freedom," Vivas explains why he believes that "applied to Marcuse this argument is utterly irrelevant since Marcuse repudiates in advance the code of conduct that allows a man to apply for membership in the academic world."

Backed up against the wall, the last whimper of the Liberal is, "They are trying to tell us something. We ought to listen." Vivas what they are telling us, and he tells it as it is.
--- excerpts from book's dustjacket ... Read more

Product Description
Distinguished scholars--Jurgen Habermas, Claus Offe, Douglas Kellner, and Martin Jay, among others--draw upon historical, theoretical, and biographical information to assess Marcuse's philosophy, from its grounding in classical German idealism, through the break with Heidegger, to his role in the American counterculture of the sixties and seventies. Indispensable for anyone interested in an in-depth understanding of one of the most burning issues of our time: the relation of critical theory to social action. ... Read more

Product Description
One of the most important texts of modern times, Herbert Marcuse's analysis and image of a one-dimensional man in a one-dimensional society has shaped many young radicals' way of seeing and experiencing life. Published in 1964, it fast became an ideological bible for the emergent New Left. As Douglas Kellner notes in his introduction, Marcuse's greatest work was a 'damning indictment of contemporary Western societies, capitalist and communist.' Yet it also expressed the hopes of a radical philosopher that human freedom and happiness could be greatly expanded beyond the regimented thought and behaviour prevalent in established society. For those who held the reigns of power Marcuse's call to arms threatened civilization to its very core. For many others however, it represented a freedom hitherto unimaginable. ... Read more

Product Description