In 1971 John Lennon released his famous song Imagine. It is a song that calls on us to imagine a certain kind of utopia, one in which there are no nations and no religions but only a global solidarity, a brotherhood of man.
From what intellectual milieu did this song spring from? It's hard to ignore the influence of a leading intellectual of this period, Herbert Marcuse.
Marcuse was born into a Jewish family in Berlin in 1898, studied Marxism as a young man, came under the influence of Heidegger, before joining the Frankfurt Institute. He ended up emigrating to the United States in 1934. He was a leading theorist for the New Left in the 1960s, but his influence subsequently waned.
Herbert Marcuse
Marcuse was a self-proclaimed leftist utopian. As such, he stands in a tradition that goes back to at least the later 1700s. Marcuse absorbed a great deal of thought from the past. Evident in his writing is the influence not just of Marx, but of Freud, Nietzsche, John Stuart Mill and Hegel, amongst others.
Leftist utopianism has certain common characteristics. It often involves a belief that you can achieve an absolute form of autonomous individual freedom, of perfect equality and lasting peace; that you can and should have solidarity between people, but only at a universal, global level; that human nature can be remade to make possible these achievements, so that you bring into being a New Man; and that human nature is currently corrupted by the institutions of civilisation, so that change requires an attack on these institutions and a subverting of culture and religion.
It is interesting to me just how similar the basic underpinnings of Marcuse's worldview of the 1960s are with that of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in the 1810s. Marcuse's ideas are much the same as Shelley's, albeit expressed in the language of Marx and Freud. Leftist utopianism has been remarkably stable over a long period of time.
The aims
What was Marcuse aiming for? He did not present this in an entirely systematic way, but it's possible to identify certain themes.
First, he believed in "liberation", by which he meant, in part, absolute individual autonomy. He wrote:
Liberty is self-determination, autonomy...It stipulates the ability to determine one's own life: to be able to determine what to do and what not to do
This is a standard aim across most modernist political currents. It's noteworthy that Marcuse, who identified as a socialist, should share this belief with liberals of all stripes.
If you want to be completely free as an autonomous individual, then there will be nothing that might limit what you determine for yourself. Nor will you be defined by anything outside of your own individual choice. You will not be defined by nation or class, nor by family or sex. You will not be limited in your choices by religious belief. There will be nothing above you and nothing below you. There will just be you, a discrete individual, existing on the same plane as everyone else and everything else.
Here is how Shelley puts his vision of the new autonomous man:
The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains/ Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man/ Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless,/ Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king/ Over himself
However, Marcuse did not entirely reject the idea of solidarity. But the only kind of solidarity that was permissible was a global, universalist one, that of humanity. He wrote of how the revolution had the aim of "creating solidarity for the human species" and said of happiness that "its validity depends on the real solidarity of the species “man,” which a society divided into antagonistic classes and nations cannot achieve".
He used Freudian concepts to try to make this scientific. Freud had claimed that Eros represented a life force that aimed at higher unities of life. Marcuse used this theory to claim that prior to all social forms of morality, there was a biological, instinctual one that aimed to create unities at the highest level possible (i.e., ultimately at the universal level, that of humanity):
Prior to all ethical behavior in accordance with specific social standards, prior to all ideological expression, morality is a “disposition” of the organism, perhaps rooted in the erotic drive to counter aggressiveness, to create and preserve “ever greater unities” of life. We would then have, this side of all “values,” an instinctual foundation for solidarity among human beings – a solidarity which has been effectively repressed in line with the requirements of class society but which now appears as a precondition for liberation.
But solidarity was not, in Marcuse's view, to impinge on our individual autonomy. He praised the student rebellion of the 1960s for not creating any hierarchy of leadership or any stable forms of organisation:
Socialist solidarity is autonomy: self-determination begins at home…. There is a strong element of spontaneity, even anarchism, in this rebellion, expression of the new sensibility, sensitivity against domination: the feeling, the awareness, that the joy of freedom and the need to be free must precede liberation.
Another angle to liberation for Marcuse was that surrounding the Marxist concept of alienation. Marcuse followed the idea that man is formed through his productive labour, but that he is alienated from this self-formation under the conditions of capitalism. His labour is treated as a kind of commodity, and he does not control the conditions of his labour, nor does he receive all of his productive output. He is forced to spend his life toiling for others.
Marcuse thought there was a way out of this. Modern capitalism had raised industrial output to such a level that if this output was distributed more equally, there could be a great reduction in the need to work for necessity.
The general aim here of reducing working hours is easy to support. The issue is whether Marcuse's political orientation was likely to help achieve this aim or not. My own belief is that he unintentionally made things worse (I will explain this further on). I would just note, for now, that one component of Marcuse's ideal of liberation, and the achievement of individual autonomy, was overcoming alienation from our labour.
A third aspect of Marcuse's utopia is more difficult to explain. Marcuse had a lifelong interest in aesthetics. It led him to the idea that in a utopia reality would be remade along artistic lines. He believed that if a repressive form of reason could be overturned that, "The rational transformation of the world could then lead to a reality formed by the aesthetic sensibility of man." Art would no longer be a separate sphere of life, the whole of life and reality would be art. In Marcuse's utopia, the distinctions between science and art, logic and imagination would no longer exist:
Technique would then tend to become art, and art would tend to form reality: the opposition between imagination and reason, higher and lower faculties, poetic and scientific thought, would be invalidated.
For Marcuse, the imagination was a liberating force. Reason by itself would not liberate people, because it was too bound to current conditions of life. Marcuse therefore strongly supported the surrealists, and thought that dreams and the poetic imagination could envisage a different and better way of life. He quoted a leading French surrealist, Benjamin Péret, who held that a poet "can no longer be recognized as such if he does not oppose himself by a total non-conformism to the world in which he lives." Marcuse felt that the libertarian possibilities of the revolution,
are “sur-realistic”: they belong to the poetic imagination
The ideal for Marcuse was a world in which "mediations" would,
...reside in modes of work and pleasure, of thought and behavior, in a technology and in a natural environment which express the aesthetic ethos of socialism. Then, art may have lost its privileged, and segregated, dominion over the imagination, the beautiful, the dream.
Note the similarity to the beliefs of Percy Bysshe Shelley back in the 1810s:
Shelley’s poetry often expresses a utopian vision of a better society...Shelley’s poetry reflects a profound belief in the power of the human imagination. He viewed the imagination as a force capable of transcending boundaries, inspiring change, and shaping the world. Through his writings, Shelley encourages readers to tap into their creative faculties, to dream, and to envision a more just and compassionate society. His emphasis on the transformative power of the imagination resonates with readers, reminding them of their capacity to bring about positive change.
And think too of John Lennon's song, with its title "Imagine" and the line "You may say I'm a dreamer/But I'm not the only one".
A fourth aspect of Marcuse's utopia was the idea that we could not really know what the utopia might be like. He ends his "Essay on Liberation" on this note:
And there is an answer to the question which troubles the minds of so many men of good will: what are the people in a free society going to do? The answer which, I believe, strikes at the heart of the matter was given by a young black girl. She said: for the first time in our life, we shall be free to think about what we are going to do.
Marcuse was aware of the problem of describing his alternative vision. He refused to set out a blueprint for his utopia:
What kind of life? We are still confronted with the demand to state the “concrete alternative.” The demand is meaningless if it asks for a blueprint of the specific institutions and relationships which would be those of the new society: they cannot be determined a priori; they will develop, in trial and error, as the new society develops.
He recognised, though, that it was reasonable for people to ask for some vision of the new before committing to destroying the old:
However, the question cannot be brushed aside by saying that what matters today is the destruction of the old, of the powers that be, making way for the emergence of the new. Such an answer neglects the essential fact that the old is not simply bad, that it delivers the goods, and that people have a real stake in it. There can be societies which are much worse – there are such societies today. The system of corporate capitalism has the right to insist that those who work for its replacement justify their action.
Marcuse did sketch out a vague and abstractly intellectual picture of what the organising principles of his utopia would be. But it is still striking how willing he was to subvert the traditions of his society, even what he terms the "most sublime manifestations of traditional culture", in favour of a roughly drawn, unlikely utopia.
How would Marcuse's utopia come about? Like other leftist utopians he thought that human nature was malleable. What was corrupting this nature was the influence of oppressive and exploitative institutions, and so there is much mention in his writings of the need to subvert these institutions.
He thought, as well, that it was both possible and necessary to create a type of new man and that this would not happen automatically as a result of institutional change. Marcuse suggested that if there were revolutionary changes to morality, that this might reach into the "biological" nature of man (by which he meant that the organism of man would be reconditioned so that it could only function along the lines of the new morality):
To the degree to which this foundation is itself historical and the malleability of “human nature” reaches into the depth of man’s instinctual structure, changes in morality may “sink down” into the “biological" dimension and modify organic behavior. Once a specific morality is firmly established as a norm of social behavior, it is not only introjected – it also operates as a norm of “organic” behavior: the organism receives and reacts to certain stimuli and “ignores” and repels others in accord with the introjected morality, which is thus promoting or impeding the function of the organism as a living cell in the respective society.
Marcuse did not believe that the working-class was likely to initiate revolutionary changes. He looked instead to social movements of his time, such as those of Black Americans and feminists. He placed particular hope in the feminist movement, because one other aspect of his utopia was the ideal of peace (Lennon: "Imagine all the people/living life in peace").
It makes sense for someone on the left side of modernity to emphasise peace. The original wave of liberalism had based its politics on an anthropology of conflict, making the starting point the claim that man in a state of nature would engage in a war of all against all. Marcuse makes reference to this in his Essay on Liberation, in which he notes the existence of classes and nations, and the absence of universal solidarity, and claims that,
As long as this is the history of mankind, the “state of nature,” no matter how refined, prevails: a civilized bellum omnium contra omnes [war of all against all], in which the happiness of the ones must coexist with the suffering of the others.And this is where his excitement about the radical feminist movement comes in. Marcuse believed in the Freudian idea that Eros, or libidinal energy, was the Life Instinct, that was locked in battle with aggressive energy, the Death Instinct. Marcuse identified feminine qualities (receptivity, sensitivity, non-violence, tenderness) with the Life Instinct and masculine ones (aggression, dominance, performance, assertiveness, competitiveness) with the Death Instinct. He hoped that the feminist revolution would ultimately make traditionally feminine qualities universal, thereby ushering in an androgyny, in which men and women were equally feminine:
No other rational meaning can possibly be attributed to the idea of androgynism than the fusion, in the individual, of the mental and somatic characteristics, which in patriarchal civilization were unequally developed in men and women, a fusion in which feminine characteristics, in cancellation of male dominance, would prevail over their repression.
Marcuse was aware of the disorder and pain that such a transition would involve: "This will be struggle permeated with bitter conflicts, torment and suffering (mental and physical)". But it was his answer to the issue of creating an anthropology of peace - human nature would be remade to be universally feminine.
A brief reply
Marcuse's utopia can be criticised from many different angles. I want to focus on just one, his concept of solidarity.
Marcuse thought that you could position solidarity at the universal level of humanity, rather than, say, at the level of family or nation. I would argue that this is not realistic and is ultimately detrimental to the good of individuals.
Marcuse believed in the concept of reification, i.e., that under capitalism people are treated more as objects or things, and that relationships between people are treated as relationships between things. Marcuse was also critical of the "performance principle" in which the norms and values of a society are geared toward economic competition and acquisition.
I would argue that the family used to put certain limits on these things. Yes, the family has had a certain economic function in history, either as a household economic unit or, at the aristocratic level, via the arranging of marriages for economic and social advancement.
The family, however, has also been held up as a haven from the competitive pressures of the outside world, particularly following on from the industrial age. A well-functioning family was envisaged as being, ideally, a place where a certain kind of peace might be sought.
Rather than being "reified", relationships between family members were to be highly personalised, and based on mutual loyalty and natural affection. There was to be a self-sacrificing commitment to the common good of family life, rather than a competitive and self-seeking dynamic between family members.
The solidarity of family life, based on mutual support, was intended to help buffer individuals against the indifference of the outside world, and to make them less vulnerable to exploitation and poverty.
The feminism of the 1970s, which Marcuse championed as "liberation", pushed things in the wrong direction. It emphasised the idea of men and women as contending political classes, which not only undermined solidarity between the sexes, it represented a shift toward aggression and competitiveness in human relationships rather than away from it. It destabilised family life, with the rise in unmarried adults rising from 28% in 1970 to 47% by 2019. These adults do not have the same level of economic or emotional support (for instance, a married couple will accrue three times more household wealth than an unmarried adult, similarly 80% of married women express confidence in being able to retire comfortably compared to only 50% of unmarried and divorced women).
Nor did 1970s feminism push back against reification. If anything, this has intensified. Consider the feminists who complain about having to "perform" what they call "emotional labour" in marriages.
It seems likely, as well, that relationships between the sexes have become more, rather than less, transactional since the 1970s. It is not uncommon now to hear women argue that, as they don't really need a man (economically), that they will only consider a man who is able to "add value" to their lives. Men, similarly, might ask what a woman "brings to the table". It has become less common to hear either sex talk about a loving spousal union as a primary aim of life.
It is a similar story when it comes to nation as a source of solidarity. National solidarity places limits on certain types of exploitation. For instance, open borders mean that the workers of one nation must compete for jobs with other workers around the world. If employers have no solidarity with the workers of their own country, they are free to employ whoever will work the longest for the least money. It is noteworthy that wages have stagnated since 1980 whilst GDP growth has continued to rise:
In other words, the share of national wealth going to the working classes has fallen over time as national solidarity has waned. This, in Marcusian terms, means that the alienation of labour has increased - it has gone in the wrong direction - as national solidarity has been undermined.
Again, when a country has a stable sense of national identity, then relationships between individuals involve a sense of a shared history and culture, with a deeply held connection to place and to a particular tradition. Relationships between people are not mediated as strongly by economics, by a sense of living in a society marked by labour and consumption on a mass scale, of existing within a kind of global entrepôt. In this way, too, national solidarity places limits on the reification that Marcuse so opposed.
The position I am arguing here is that Marcuse's utopia was self-defeating. By making solidarity universal, he increased the degree of alienation and reification, rather than overcoming them.
Which leads me to one final criticism of Marcuse. Marcuse thought that he could abolish the "performance principle", by which reality was shaped by norms of competition and acquisition, by making men and women equally feminine, and therefore androgynous.
Marcuse seems not to have adequately considered the way that women contribute to the drive to acquire material things. One of the reasons that men "perform" is to attract a wife. There are plenty of men who are kept hard at work to afford the renovations or the holidays or the house that their wife desires. Left to themselves, some of these men would most likely choose to live more simply. It is therefore unlikely that abolishing the masculine, if this were possible, would overcome the drive within human nature to be materially acquisitive.
And, to the extent that men do have a provider instinct, this is mostly a beneficial aspect of the masculine. A man might leverage some of his "aggression" to succeed in this role, but it is motivated by his love for, and commitment to, his family and it helps to create material comfort and security for his wife and children. To abolish the masculine would mean a loss of this provider instinct and the benefits to family life that go with it.
But, most importantly, the masculine cannot be reduced to these material functions. At its best, the masculine is able to discern the higher ordering within reality and then frame society in a way that is most conducive to human flourishing.
It is true that this creates a kind of hierarchy, as it involves a serious engagement with the vertical dimension of reality, where not all things are equal, but where we can aspire to higher things within our nature and within the nature of the reality we inhabit. It also requires a serious engagement with forms, with the essences of things, and therefore with their distinct natures and ends.
It is true, I think, that men need a certain type of receptivity, a quality identified as feminine by Marcuse, to best perform this highest of masculine tasks. In other words, if a man were entirely unreceptive he would find it difficult to discern "logos" - the ordering principles within reality. However, this is a refining of the masculine, rather than a turn to androgyny.
Men have largely been lacking in recent times in contributing this sort of masculine leadership. Perhaps part of the reason is that the New Left and second wave feminism, both influenced by Marcuse, managed to successfully malign the masculine, and to stamp it with negative associations, as being merely a social construct that unleashes aggression into society and that represses the life instinct.
It is time to move beyond Marcuse and the intellectual frame he helped to create.
