JEFFREY HERF
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David Levine, Ronald Radosh, Lloyd Gardner, Anson Rabinbach, Joan
Scott, Charles Sowerwine, and Dale Tomich.
Connections
was the underground
newspaper (launched by Bob Gabriner, a veteran of the civil rights move–
ment in the South) in which Stuart Ewen brought some of the
complexities of Marcuse's book
One-Dimensional Man
to the level of the
student masses. This was a bookish group. People enjoyed reading and dis–
cussing books that were not required for class. I recall that Wini and
Elizabeth Ewen had a women's reading group that worked through
Simone de Beauvoir's
The Second Sex
while we boys pondered what
Herbert Marcuse meant by "repressive desublimation" in his book
Eros and
Civilization.
The campus daily paper,
The Daily Cardinal,
was also distin–
guished, astute, and very literate. Its liberal-that is, firmly to the right of
the New Left-edi tors included Jeff Greenfield, now of ABC-TV News,
and Joel Brenner, now a senior partner of his own Washington law firm.
My leftism was shaped by the values of my liberal Jewish family and com–
munity in Milwaukee, and refined by reading and studying, especially in
European intellectual history, particularly German philosophy and social
theory from Kant and Hegel to Marx, then Lukacs, Freud, and Marcuse,
followed by the then less well-known-in this country-thinkers of the
Frankfurt School : Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin,
and Franz Neumann.
In both Europe and the United States, the Frankfurt School, particular–
ly Marcuse, has been both criticized for laying the basis for subsequent
leftist terrorism and defended as a theorist of an anti-authoritarian left
utterly at odds with communist vanguards. For me, Marcuse's work had
both effects. On the one hand, critical theory meant that the vision of a bet–
ter society should be prefigured in the way a social movement behaves and
that social change requires individual autonomy and rationality. Both of
these assertions precluded any return to Marxism-Leninism and certainly to
Stalinism or a new cult of personality. On the other hand, for me-and I
know this was also the case for other SDS members who had one foot in
the intellectual early days and another in the maelstrom of 1968-1970-–
even this "anti-authoritarian" Marxism contained seeds of a different kind
of left, one in which the authoritarian and violent vanguards appeared to
be a logical extension of some of these ideas. Central to the continuity of
1968 to 1969 was the conviction that the great mass of the population in
the advanced capitalist societies suffered from "false" or "one-dimension–
al" consciousness, defined happiness as the satisfaction of false and distorted
needs, was profoundly racist, and was therefore highly unlikely, barring a
renewed economic catastrophe, to ever turn to a socialist alternative.
Experience appeared to reinforce theory as the white New Left based
in the universities found common cause at home with first the civil rights
