The article situates Marcuse in today’s context of austerity rather than the context of rising affluence the “one-dimensional” “happy consciousness” was said to inhabit. Both have produced polemical texts on liberal tolerance and the need for revolutionary violence, and both have invoked the idea of utopia against the ideology of there is no alternative to the market.
Both have developed their critical theories through Marxist materialism, Hegelian idealism, and psychoanalytical theory of the subject. Herbert Marcuse’s influence on students and intellectuals in the Sixties is comparable to the influence that Slavoj Žižek enjoys today.
