Eros and Revolution: The Critical Philosophy of Herbert Marcuse
(New title from BRILL)
Javier Sethness Castro
Brill at the 2016 Pacific
Sociological Association meeting.
To read more about
BRILL, click here.
Library of Social Science—throughout 2016—will feature and promote selected titles through our LSS Newsletter, which reaches 40,000 scholars, professionals and students around the world.

BRILL has recently released what appears to be the definitive study of the life and work of Herbert Marcuse, a scholar whose ideas shaped the Sixties—and beyond. This exciting volume tells the full story.

We urge you to order this book for yourself, or to ask your library to obtain a copy of this important work.

PS: By coincidence, this book’s author has written a substantial review of Nations Have the Right to Kill (authored by Richard Koenigsberg, Director of LSS). Please click here to read it.


Eros and Revolution:
The Critical Philosophy of Herbert Marcuse
Psychoanalytic Psychology

Javier Sethness Castro

Paperback: 410 pages
Publisher: Brill, 2016
Language: English
Format: Harback/E-Book
ISBN-13: 9789004308695
E-ISBN: 9789004308701

For information on ordering,
please click here.
Book Description

In Eros and Revolution, Javier Sethness Castro presents a comprehensive intellectual and political biography of the world-renowned critical theorist Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979). The author investigates the origins and development of Marcuse's dialectical approach vis-à-vis Hegel, Marx, Fourier, Heidegger, and Freud—as well as the central figures of the Frankfurt School—Horkheimer, Adorno, Neumann, Fromm, and Benjamin.

Sethness Castro chronicles the radical philosopher's lifelong activism in favor of anti-capitalism, anti-fascism, and anti-authoritarianism together with Marcuse's defiant revindication of global libertarian-socialist revolution as the precondition for the realization of reason, freedom, and human happiness. Beyond examining Marcuse's revolutionary life and contributions,  the author contemplates the philosopher's relevance to contemporary struggle, especially with regard to ecology, feminism, anarchism, and the general cause of worldwide social transformation.


Readership

All those interested in Critical Theory, Marxism, anarchism, social and political psychology, radical philosophy, existentialism, Romanticism, feminism, ecology, anti-militarism, and revolutionism: academic and public libraries, specialists, undergraduate and graduate students.


Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

1. Introduction: Marcuse, the Utopian

  • Idealism, Materialism, Romanticism, and Judaism
  • Marcuse's Importance for Radical Politics Today

PART I: MARCUSE'S LIFE, 1898-1979

2. Early Years: Childhood and Youth, War and Revolution, Romanticism, Utopian Socialism, Hegel, Marx, and Heidegger

  • Childhood and Youth, War and Revolution
  • Post-War Investigations: Aesthetics, German Romanticism, and Hegel
  • Friedrich Schiller and Charles Fourier: Utopian Socialism
  • Marcuse's Torturous Relationship with Heidegger
  • Heideggerian Marxism
  • Hegel's Ontology and the Theory of Historicity (1932)
  • Hitler's Accession and Flight of the Marcuse Family and the Frankfurt School

3. Militant Theorizing in Resistance to Fascism, 1933-1945

  • Negations (1934-1938)
  • Studies on Authority and Family
  • Marcuse's Direct Investigations of Nazism
  • Early Theories of Social Change
  • The Progression of Marcuse's Thought on Art's Functions Under Fascism
  • Reason and Revolution (1941)

4. State, Freud, and Orphic Marxism: 1945-1960

  • Post-War Studies: “33 Theses,” Francis Bacon, Lukács, Goethe, Friedrich Hölderin, and Erasmus
  • Continued Investigations of Historical Progress, Russian Studies, and the Trajectory of Communism and Reason during the Early Cold War
  • Communism and Reason during the Early Cold War
  • On Sartre's Existentialism
  • Orphic Marxism and the Struggle of Eros against Thanatos
  • Lectures on Freedom and Progress in Freud's Theory of the Instincts
  • Marcuse's Debate with Fromm on Freud, Therapy, and Adjustment
  • Soviet Marxism: A Critical Analysis (1958)
  • The Ideology of Death

5. Radical Struggle in the 1960s

  • Marcuse on Cuba
  • Continued Engagement with Critical Theorists and Lecture on Weber
  • Humanism, Feminism, and Revolution
  • Critical Reflections on Science and Technology
  • One-Dimensional Humanity: Diagnosis, Reflections, and Recommendations
  • Marcuse on Marx, Louis Napoleon, and Benjamin
  • Justification of Revolutionary Praxis: “Repressive Tolerance,” “Ethics and Revolution,” Guerrilla Warfare, “The Question of Revolution,” and “Thoughts on the Defense of Gracchus Babeuf”
  • Psychoanalytical Interventions
  • Activism against the Vietnam War
  • Summer 1967 Lectures before the German SDS and Congress of the Dialectics of Liberation: On Utopia, Radical Opposition, and Violence
  • 1968: A New Dawn for Humanity?
    An Essay on Liberation (1969)
  • Other Interventions from 1969: On Student Protest, “The Relevance of Reality,” Qualitative Change, and Self-Determination
  • The 1969 Debate with Adorno on Theory and Praxis
  • Revisiting “Repressive Tolerance” and Civil Rights with the ACLU and Fred Schwarz of the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade
  • “Marxism and the New Humanity: An Unfinished Revolution”
  • “Freedom and the Historical Imperative”

6. Marcuse's Final Decade: Continuities, Discontinuities, and Intensification (1970-1979)

  • Marcuse's Assessment of the State of the Radical Opposition in the Early 1970s: “Cultural Revolution,” “The Movement in a New Age of Repression,” and “A Revolution in Values”
  • Revolution or Reform? Marcuse's Debate with Popper
  • Counterrevolution and Revolt (1972)
  • Marcuse's Late Championing of Feminism
  • International Relations: Vietnam and Israel/Palestine
  • Continued Engagement with Aesthetics
  • “It is Right to Revolt” and “Theory and Politics”: Late Discussions with Sartre and Habermas
  • Marcuse's Final Interventions in Life: On Political Violence, the New Left, the U.S.Bicentennial, “The Reification of the Proletariat,” Rudolf Bahro, Technology, and Ecology
  • The Aesthetic Dimension (1978)

PART II: REFLECTIONS ON MARCUSE

7. Nature and Revolution

  • Nature, Evolution, and Morality
  • “Repressive Tolerance” and Radical Struggle for Animal and Earth Liberation Today
  • Conclusion

8. Critique of Marcuse

  • The Limits to Integration
  • The Problem of Sources: Political Philosophy and Empirics
  • Marcuse the Edelkommunist
  • Marcuse the Zionist?
  • Feminism, Gender, Eros
  • Conflicts with Poststructuralism and Postmodernism
  • Marcuse on Authority and the Transition: Between Jacobinism and Anarchism

PART III: CONCLUSION

9. Marcusean Politics in the Twenty-First Century Radical Ecological Politics

  • Feminist Socialism and Anarcha-Feminism
  • The “World Mind” in International Relations: Global Anti-Authoritarianism
    Means and Ends: The Question of Counter-Violence
  • Close: Eros and Revolution

References
Index