MORRIS DICKSTEIN
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from getting utterly lost in cultural speculation, as Brown does by his
last chapter. But for all of Brown's rhetorical and synthesizing power,
it was Marcuse who came closer to unifying the themes of personal
liberation and social change, authenticity and justice, in a way that
anticipated the new heterodoxies of the sixties. Both the militants
and the bohemians could fairly claim him as an ancestor. Marcuse
himself was unable to maintain this remarkable balance . With the
revival of the Left in the sixties his cultural interests receded before
his political ones. Two later prefaces to
Eros and Cvtfization,
written
in 1961 and 1966, become increasingly strident in trying to reorient
the book in a purely political direction . He may have been right in
stressing that only politics provided an avenue for true change, but in
his excitement at the revival of radicalism he all too readily identified
his politics with the insurgent forces of the moment, whatever their
aims and tactics . By 1974 he would theorize that feminism (or
"feminist socialism")-previously unnoticed in his system, but now
the last active remnant of sixties radicalism-was ordained to be the
next stage of "the Revolution ." Again and again he retreated from
social analysis and from his own daring ideas into revolutionary
cliches, the realm of the publicist rather than the philosopher.
In truth Marcuse had always been stronger as a theorist than as a
social analyst or forecaster.
One-Dimensional Man
provided a valu–
able conceptual framework for looking at society, but like his other
work it wasn't itself close to what was actually happening. Thus Mar–
cuse's well-known oscillation between optimism and pessimism over
the last twenty years, though it expresses certain interesting am–
biguities at the heart of his thinking, is peculiarly empty in relation
to the world at large. The optimism of
Eros and CvzJization
in 1955
was a utopian leap, based on an abstract reading of certain historical
forces like the growth of technology. Though a speculative work, it
remains more concrete and humanly specific than anything else he
wrote. Despite the language of liberation , however, Marcuse did not
anticipate the general liberalization of society that began to occur in
the mid-fifties, especially in the sphere of sexual behavior and
political expression. Later, in
One-Dimensional Man,
when Marcuse
does take note of these changes, he is desperate to dissociate his own
predictions from what he finds happening. By 1964, with everything
beginning to open up, Marcuse is most deeply pessimistic. He dis-
