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dent that their own enormous apparatus of analysis and research had
missed the fundamental tensions of the society they were designed
to study.
To round out this sketch of Marcuse's work, let me mention
two more things. I have said that his thought demanded as a tran–
sitional factor a force outside consumer society, and that this led
him occasionally to refer to the idea of a dictatorship of the phil–
osophers (which perhaps explains the fact that, according to several
witnesses, he once in a lecture defended the role of the universities).
But Marcuse did relate other forces alienated from the consumer
society - the Third World, the American Blacks and the bohemians
- to his central idea of the philosophers as the agent of historical
change.
As for the controversy between Marcuse and psychoanalytical
and Marxist revisionism, let me say again that Adorno and Marcuse
had been for a long period on a much higher level, not only than
academic sociology and literary criticism, but also than official
Marxism. But Fromm's more recent work in psychoanalysis, and
that of a few Italian theoreticians and of Serge Mallet in sociology,
who abandoned the letter of Freudian and Marxist theories to
preserve their spirit,
is
of a still different order. I am not competent
to judge the differences between Marcuse and Fromm. It seems
evident, however, that Freud had no idea of forces for the adapta–
tion of the individual to society, or society to the individual. Thus
one cannot go along with Marcuse when he lumps together all
attempts to adjust the individual to the social system, whether
critical or not.
Similarly, one has to question Marcuse's attitude toward what
is currently known as Marxist revisionism. There is an essential
difference between the accommodation to existing society on the
part of a whole sector of thought which still calls itself socialist, and
the doctrine of "revolutionary reformism," associated with Serge
Mallet and And!1c Gorz. Discarding such outworn ideas as the
p~uperization
of the working class, the proletariat as the universal
revolutionary class, the necessity of a political revolution as a condi–
tion for any economic transformation and even the idea of the
dictatorship of the proletariat in Western societies, the "revolutionary
