Vol. 31 No. 4 1964

624

MARSHALL BERMAN

dimension might open up to him, and prospects might appear a bit

less bleak.

This last complaint is more than marginal. Marcuse seems to take

a perverse pride in his isolation-indeed, this pride is the dominant

personal note in a book where personality is mostly effaced-and car–

ries it to gratuitous extremes. For instance, in a long, tortuous, esoteric

argument, full of jargon, repeated in several forms, he insists that

without a belief in the reality of universals, critical thought can get

nowhere. The only alternative to universal concepts, for him,

the

closed Newspeak which the sinister interests want to spread. The

empiricist demand for concrete reference and verification plays into

the hands of those who arrange the concrete world to which words

must refer. Thus the dominant American tradition of nominalism and

empiricism in social science is unalterably corrupt. Marcuse cites a

sociological study of workers' discontent in which social scientists work–

ing for management tried to reduce all

malaise

to specific, individual

grievances that could be adjusted individually while leaving the system

intact. Some workers complained, for example, that "wages are too low."

Marcuse comments:

The proposition is abstract. It refers to universal conditions

for which no particular case can be substituted. . . . The con–

cept "wages" refers to the group "wage-earners," integrating

all personal histories and special jobs into one concrete

universal.

Wages, in other words,

by definition,

must

always

be "too low": the

worker is actually raising questions about the

wage-system

as a whole,

questions that are potentially revolutionary. In the hands of the vil–

lainous (or helpless?) empiricists in management's pay, however,

The universal concept "wages" is replaced by "B.'s present

earnings," the meaning of which is fully defined by the par–

ticular set of operations

has to perform in order to buy for

his family food, clothing, lodging, medicine, etc. . . . the

grouping "wage-earners" has disappeared along with the sub–

ject "wages"; what remains is a particular case which . . .

becomes susceptible to the accepted standards of treatment

a company whose case it is.

Now all this is ingenious, but misleading. Marcuse thinks that to make

protest concretely "empirical" necessarily strips it ,of its force; but

this simply isn't so. Certainly, from the viewpoint of a social scientist

committed to management's interests, the worker's complaint

may

"cashed" (to use William James's term)

this

way; and indeed, for any