Marcuse and the Institute: ideas enter American radical politics

The Institute for Social Research brought a circle of exiled scholars to New York in 1934. Herbert Marcuse was one of them. His later teaching helped students connect philosophy with American radical politics. This pathway follows his branch through classrooms, a left-wing journal and Angela Davis's prison abolition work. (pp. 146–147) ^[1] (pp. 188–191) ^[2] (pp. xi–xiv) ^[3]

Historian Rolf Wiggershaus explains how the move took place. Columbia offered the Institute a building at 429 West 117th Street. The Institute accepted the offer in July. It would pay for repairs with its own funds. It would also keep control of its own work. Exile had forced the scholars to find a new home. In New York, they could carry on their work. (pp. 145–146) ^[1]

What made this work part of the development of neo-Marxism? Here, the term means later attempts to change and build on Marx's ideas. Historian Rolf Wiggershaus describes how Horkheimer brought several fields together. These included philosophy, economics and psychology. The aim was to understand society and find ways to change it. Work on economics and the labor movement continued alongside this broader inquiry. The new approach gave culture and the mind a place within Marxist social criticism. (pp. 38–40) ^[1]

Marcuse arrived from Geneva at the beginning of July 1934. Wiggershaus reports that Horkheimer wanted his help with a book on materialist logic. It would connect questions about thought with social life and history. Marcuse joined a research circle trying to explain society through several fields at once. His later work would ask how modern capitalism shaped people's wants and their sense of what was possible. (pp. 146–147) ^[1] (pp. 3–9) ^[4]

Marcuse's 1964 book One-Dimensional Man asked a question that went beyond wages or who owned a business. Could a wealthy society limit freedom while giving people comfort and choice? He argued that work, goods and public messages could shape what people wanted. They could make the existing order feel necessary. In his account, people could be controlled by the comforts they enjoyed as well as by force. (pp. 3–7) ^[4] (p. 190) ^[2]

He drew a sharp line between true and false needs. Food, clothing and shelter were basic needs. Social pressures could impose other wants. These could keep people working, buying goods and accepting unfair treatment. People could enjoy meeting those desires and still, in his view, remain unfree. He included the urge to buy what ads promoted. He also included pressure to share the likes and dislikes of others. (pp. 7–8) ^[4]

Who should decide what people need? Marcuse said people must answer for themselves, when free to do so. He rejected the right of any group to decide for them. Yet he believed social pressures could shape people's wants before they made that choice. This left a hard question: how could people know which wants were their own? (pp. 8–9) ^[4]

The book reached students who were already asking how to change American life. For Ronald Aronson, it helped explain why that life felt so stifling. In his later account, its bleak picture did not end his desire to act. It made him feel that students had to create an alternative. To see how he reached that point, we need to return to Marcuse's classroom at Brandeis University . (pp. 190–191) ^[2]

Marcuse taught at Brandeis from 1954 to 1965, according to the biographical account in Secret Reports on Nazi Germany. Students there studied Marxism as part of a wider course in philosophy. Ronald Aronson entered the graduate history-of-ideas program in 1962. He wanted to study with Marcuse. He had read Marcuse's Reason and Revolution, a book on Hegel and social theory. It had drawn him to the teacher. (p. xxiii) ^[5] (pp. 188–189) ^[2]

Aronson recalled classes on Plato, Kant, Hegel and Marxism. Close reading mattered. Students read difficult texts repeatedly and came prepared to discuss them. Marcuse taught him to use reason to judge the world. He should understand it, find its limits and ask how it could change. Aronson felt his socialism take its place in a much older school of thought. (pp. 189–190) ^[2]

A Spring 1963 reading list shows what the Marxist course taught. Politics 171b assigned Marx and Engels, Lenin and material on Soviet communism. It also listed other schools of thought and critical studies. The reading list survives with William Leiss's class notes. He warns that the notes mix his own views with remarks by Marcuse and students. They are not a word-for-word lecture record. (pp. 1–8) ^[6]

Angela Davis also studied at Brandeis. The National Archives reports that she completed a French degree in 1965. She later recalled that Marcuse urged her to join study with political action. Aronson and Davis would follow that advice in different ways. (opening biography, paragraph beginning “Davis was born”) ^[7] (p. xi) ^[3]

Aronson gives us one documented example of a student using and challenging Marcuse. In his later account, he described local political work in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and service on the editorial board of Studies on the Left. After defending his dissertation in spring 1968, he led a discussion group at the Liberation School formed after Columbia's student strike. (pp. 188–189) ^[2]

His open letter “Dear Herbert” appeared in Radical America in April 1970. Aronson credited Marcuse with helping him become a radical, then challenged his teacher. He wanted theory to speak to people trying to change their daily lives. He also wanted movement groups to give their members freedom while they worked to overthrow American capitalism. Marcuse's ideas had become a subject of argument within the left itself. (pp. 3–5, 12–18) ^[8]

The journal carried more than this former student's challenge. Its July–August 1969 issue published Marcuse's epilogue to Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire, translated by Arthur Mitzman. Marcuse argued that changes in production and political control had weakened resistance by workers. (pp. 55–59; translation credit p. 59) ^[9]

The same issue carried William Leiss's critical review of An Essay on Liberation. Leiss described Marcuse's hope for opposition among students, Black people and intellectuals. His review put that proposal before readers while questioning the book's arguments. (pp. 61–63, especially p. 62) ^[9]

The April 1970 issue widened the discussion. Alongside Aronson's letter, Martin Jay questioned Marcuse's hope for a society that could overcome deep conflict. Paul Breines defended critical thought against a fixed party line and responded directly to Aronson. Readers could follow debates about freedom, political power and how the left should organize. (pp. 21–23, 29–32, especially p. 30) ^[8]

Here is one way ideas spread. A journal printed a teacher's work, then printed readers' challenges to it. The articles show what the writers adopted or disputed. The next question is who used these arguments later, and what followed. The published articles give us a place to start. (pp. 55–63) ^[9] (pp. 3–32) ^[8]

Another route ran through Marcuse's teaching in California and Davis's developing work. To follow it, we return to his classroom.

Marcuse moved from Brandeis to UC San Diego in 1965, according to the same biographical account. Student notes record a 1966–67 graduate class on Hegel's Science of Logic. Leiss recalled 20 weekly classes. Each lasted three hours and covered roughly five pages. The only assigned text was Hegel. The class did not focus on Marcuse's own books. (p. xxiii) ^[5] (pp. 1–2) ^[10]

Davis returned from Frankfurt in summer 1967 to resume study with Marcuse at San Diego. She recalled that he showed her how study and activism could fit together. Adorno, by contrast, had advised her to keep her study of philosophy apart from direct political work. The difference mattered to a student seeking a role in American radical politics. (pp. xi–xii) ^[3]

The exchange could also run from student to teacher. In a letter dated November 18, 1970, Marcuse discussed Davis's earlier UCLA lectures on Frederick Douglass. She had described Douglass resisting a slave-breaker. This led Marcuse to rethink his criticism of Sartre's idea of freedom. He said Davis had taught him something. The letter records his response to her argument. We still need to study the original lectures. (pp. 49–50) ^[3]

Davis later put some of these ideas to new uses. She asked how the language used to describe crime could help sustain the prison system.

Davis explained the link in a November 1998 speech on Marcuse's legacy. It was later printed as a preface to his collected papers. She drew on An Essay on Liberation. In that book, Marcuse argued that political language could be used to control people. She applied that argument to the language of crime and criminals. She wanted a society without the prison system she opposed. In her view, changing this language was part of building that vision. (p. x, note 5; pp. xiii–xiv) ^[3]

She also drew on Marcuse's defense of utopia. This meant that a different social order could become possible. It gave her a reason to challenge things people often thought could never change. But she rejected the claim that his theory held every answer. She criticized his divide between high art and popular culture. Useful ideas, she argued, had to change as conditions changed. (pp. ix–xi, xiii–xiv) ^[3]

Her prison arguments also had other roots. In Abolition Democracy, she credited George Jackson with pushing her to study imprisonment more deeply. She valued Du Bois's view of Black politics across national borders. She still described herself as a communist in 2005 and defended the need for an alternative to capitalism. Marcuse was one source within that wider political outlook. (“Resistance, Language, and Law,” opening answer; “Politics and Prisons,” answers beginning “Well, in one sense it has become obsolete” and “Although I am no longer a member”) ^[11]

She wanted more than better prison conditions. In Are Prisons Obsolete?, she proposed ways to reduce imprisonment. These included stronger schools, free health care and voluntary drug treatment. Justice should seek to repair harm and help people resolve conflicts. She wanted to change the systems around punishment as well as punishment itself. (pp. 107–112) ^[12]

Davis carried these concerns into group action through Critical Resistance .

Critical Resistance met in Berkeley on September 25–27, 1998. Its original program lists Davis on the organizing committee. The welcome statement set out a shared idea: the prison industrial complex. This meant the ties the organizers saw between punishment, business and other institutions. They wanted people to build a campaign against prison growth. They also wanted to develop alternatives to prison. (cover; printed pp. 1–2) ^[13]

The program shows how they planned to act. Each panel and workshop was linked to planned task forces. These would work on law and policy, health, education, media and alternatives to prison. People were asked to plan campaigns together. The program records a plan, its political aim and areas of work. (printed pp. 1–4) ^[13]

In her later address on Marcuse, Davis described co-convening the conference. She linked its talks across fields of study and activism to an approach she valued in his work. Scholars, artists, former prisoners and people still in prison took part, according to her account. She then explained how his ideas about political language could help abolition work. (pp. xii–xiv) ^[3]

Assessment, moderate confidence: Davis named ideas she drew from Marcuse. Records also show her organizing role. Together, these support a route from his teaching to her use of some of his ideas in abolition work. This finding concerns her contribution. It leaves open which ideas other people at the meeting brought to the work. (pp. xi–xiv) ^[3] (printed pp. 1–2) ^[13]

This branch reaches Critical Resistance because Davis herself linked the conference and her abolition arguments to ideas she drew from Marcuse. Her account lets us follow those ideas into a stated political project. It also names the point where the next question begins: which later campaigns used them, and what changed? Campaign records and decisions by the institutions they sought to change are needed to answer that question. (pp. xii–xiv) ^[3]

The Institute's other American branches begin with different people, ideas and recipients. Readers can return to the Institute dossier to explore that wider history.