MarcuseвЂ™s popularity was not due to the accessibility or wit of his style, which for some reason always brings dumplings to my mind (though I quite like dumplings-in soup), but rather in the mistiness of many of his pronouncements, which did not denote, but only connoted. His combination of denunciation and offers of salvation by something called вЂњliberationвЂќ were perfectly calculated to appeal to a generation of spoiled youth that had never known real hardship but was frightened to death by the prospect of the military draft. Unexpectedly, he became famous in the 1960s. But the times were kind to him, at least if public notice or even acclamation is what he desired. It seems to me likely that had it not been for the Vietnam War, Marcuse would have remained an obscure academic Г©migrГ©, amusing himself and a perhaps a tiny handful of others with unreadable dialectical pirouettes and angry anathemata. It seems to me likely that had it not been for the Vietnam War, Marcuse would have remained an obscure academic Г©migrГ©. With Marcuse, it was the other way around: he knew Man (at least, in his own opinion he knew him), but as for actual men, he knew them not-other, perhaps, than persons of his own type. De Maistre said that in his life he had met Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, etc., but as for Man, he had never encountered him. He could go in a short space from utter and total condemnation of the modern world, as strong as any Baptist preacher denouncing sin, to the most far-fetched utopianism-without ever having passed through anything that might be called realism. One might have expected that some slight experience of the First Word War and the subsequent Spartacist uprising in Berlin, followed by having to live through the rise of Nazism in Germany, would have given a person a fairly strong sense of proportion and of the fragility of things, but possibly no writer was more impervious to political common sense than was Marcuse. I make these remarks with Herbert Marcuse (1897вЂ“1979) in mind. The influence exerted by an intellectual is not necessarily proportional to the quality of his ideas, and there is a certain kind of erudition which, allied to a talent for polysyllabic obfuscation, is not incompatible with extreme shallowness.

Marcuse the end of utopia pdf