PARTISAN REVIEW
261
ture of family life has been affected: these intermediate salaried
classes are not prepared by their professional and social life to
assume the familial authority of the old independent burghers.
This
explains in part why the growth of hierarchic and authoritarian
social relations in modern society has been accomplished by an in–
creasing liberalization of family life in the intermediate layers of
society, and a decline of parental authority, particularly that of the
father.
In this situation, the function of the university has been com–
pletely reversed. Now it must effect a transition from a liberal
family structure to an authoritarian and hierarchical social structure.
It
must convert young people who are used to a relatively high degree
of independence into specialists ready to serve as executors in an
economic and social hierarchy. The old critical and liberal univer–
sity has been slowly and imperceptibly transformed into an authori–
tarian institution nurturing a mandarin class. The transformation was
facilitated by the enormous growth of its student body, made possible
by the new affluence, and by the university's Napoleonic structure,
which up to this point had been counterbalanced by its function, but
which now lent itself admirably to the new demands of technocratic
society. Yet the university proved inadequate as a preparation for
the new society. For, when each field is too big for one man, and
often researchers, assistants and advanced students are superior to
their professors, the only way to cope is to replace authority with
tcamwork among researchers and teachers.
Of course, the transformation of the French university (which
to my knowledge has not been noted by the academic sociologists),
does not itself account for the student revolt. Many factors were
responsible, which I cannot go into here. But it should be remarked
that Marcuse, like the other sociologists, must have been surprised
by the revolts of the Blacks in the U.S., and the student movements,
which he had neither foreseen nor inspired. Nevertheless, these move–
ments, which were mainly cultural and moral and only partly and
in certain countries economic, had found their most complete
theoretical formulation in his works.
As
early as 1965, Marcuse
declared his sympathies in the famous piece, "Repressive Tolerance,"
at the conclusion of which he stated that no educator, no intellectual,
could justifiably condemn those who took the risks of a violent revolt
