For These Texts Revealed a Romantic, Philosophical Marx, Still under Hegel’s Thrall, for Whom the Alienation of Human Essence — Man’s “Species Being” — Was the Central Issue

Herbert Marcuse was an unlikely candidate for the role of spiritual godfather of the New Left. Born in Berlin in 1898, Marcuse witnessed the German Revolution of 1918–19 first hand, and these events would leave an indelible mark on his subsequent political formation. He was drafted into the German army at the age of eighteen, and his early political sympathies lay with the moderate Social Democrats. In 1918 Marcuse was elected as a deputy to one of the revolutionary soldiers councils that emerged throughout the country during the war’s later stages. Like many leftists of his generation, his alienation from Social Democratic politics followed from the brutal murders of Spartacus League members Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in January 1919 at the hands of the ruling Social Democratic government.

Thereafter Marcuse embarked on a fascinating intellectual and political odyssey. In 1928 he moved to Freiburg where for four years he studied philosophy with Martin Heidegger. At the time he was
convinced that Heidegger’s existentialism offered a dimension of “concreteness” that was missing from the reigning scientific currents of Marxism. But soon he came to view the potentials of Heideggerian Marxism as illusory. In 1930 he submitted a habilitation study on Hegel that Heidegger rejected. In any event the political winds of Germany’s moribund Weimar Republic were rapidly shifting. Heidegger himself would soon go over to the Nazis. As a Marxist and a Jew, Marcuse realized his future as a German academic was hopeless. Through the mediation of Edmund Husserl, he established contact with the Frankfurt-based Institute for Social Research, whose new director, Max Horkheimer, was already anticipating the rigors of political exile. Marcuse’s association with the Frankfurt tradition of critical Marxism would prove a defining intellectual influence.

Marcuse recognized the 1932 publication of Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 as “a crucial event in the history of Marxist studies.” For these texts revealed a romantic, philosophical Marx, still under Hegel’s thrall, for whom the alienation of human essence — man’s “species being” — was the central issue. At odds with the narrowly determinist, economic approach to Marx that had been decreed by the Second International, the Paris Manuscripts unveiled a humanist Marx for whom “communism” represented a solution to the fundamental existential dilemmas of mankind.

--Richard Wolin, “Critical Reflections on Marcuse's Theory of Revolution,” in The Frankfurt School Revisited and Other Essays on Politics and Society (New York: Routledge, 2006), 81-82.