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elaborated by
St.
Simon, Fourier, and Owen. By the later nineteenth
cen'Wry, !however, it had expired as an effective political force; Engels
pronounced
its
obituary in
Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
(1880), a
polemic which declared that utopianism, having made
its
historical con–
tribution, had no further role in the development of socialist thought
and action. Marcuse, however, has refused to accept the ol'thodox Marx–
ist
view of the obsolescence of utopian socialism; he argues 'that this tra–
dition may now legitimately be rehabHitated because "utopian possibilities
are inherent in the technica:l and technological forces of advanced cap–
italism and sooialism." The weakness of this avgument
is
sinlply its fa–
miliarity: a long series of speculative thinkers, from Owen and Jules
Verne on
to
Wells and Huxley, have imagined the utopian potentialities
of technology. Within this tradition, Marcuse seems anomalous; unlike
its major representatives, he has never analyzed closely the actual prac–
tice of applied science, nor does he offer detailed proof of his assertions
about
-its
social effects. Rather, he invokes technology to lend substance
to the ideal worlds of his imagination. The vocabulary used to describe
these worlds is essentially moral, not functional, scientific, or visionary;
its key terms - domination, repression, barbaric, humane, liberated, etc.
- clearly distinguish Marcuse's speculations from those of technocrats
like Herman K<aJhn or Jacques Ellul, social engineers like B. F. Skinner,
or biomystics like Norman O. Bro,Vill.
A worthy descendant of Kant and Hegel, Marcuse has always tried
to make his moral categories consistent with a kind of all-embracing
social rationality: in his ideal future state rthere would prevail "a real
union of duty and happiness."
Eros and Civilization,
certainly his bold–
est and most impressive work, is based on Marcuse's very characteristic
refusal of Freud's dualism, his bleak insistence that culture must always
remain
the enemy of man's deepest self.
It
need no be so, Marcuse
responds: our primitive, pleasure-seeking impulses
can
be reconciled
with the demands of civilization, after we have transformed the cap–
italist Leviathan into a nonrepressive association of liberated individuals.
(Marcuse made a similar avgument as early as 1938, though wi,thout
using Freudian categories: "On Hedonism," reprinted in
Negations.)
He
thus balks at both Freud's notion of perpetual struggle between drive
and repression, and Marx's belief in a similarly ineluctable struggle,
under capitalism, between social classes. To such "hateful clash of con–
traries" Marcuse opposes the alternative of a grand mechanism of his–
torical rationality, evolving in accordance with its own inner dynamic–
a concept closer
in
spirit to the structural-functional social models of
Weber and Parsons than to the essential radical tradition .
'I1hese criticisms apply only partially to
Counter-Revolution and
