Herbert Marcuse

Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) was a German-American philosopher and sociologist, a core member of the Frankfurt School whose work brought the categories of Critical Theory into direct confrontation with the political movements of the 1960s. His best-known work, One-Dimensional Man (1964), argued that advanced industrial society had succeeded in integrating all opposition — artistic, political, even psychological — into a seamless totality of domination that left no conceptual space from which resistance might be articulated.

Marcuse distinguished between basic and surplus repression: the former necessary for any civilization, the latter specific to a particular social order and eliminable in principle. His defense of the great