ABSTRACT

The emphasis Marcuse gives to a positive idea of freedom, as opposed to alienation or exploitation, is unusual for a marxist author. Freedom is mentioned in virtually every one of his works. It generally plays a central role in the exposition of his thought; it is the key term in Eros and Civilization, Reason and Revolution and the essays of the thirties. The new theory denotes an idea of freedom sufficiently flexible not to preempt freedom of action of the “associated producers” and yet precise enough to be able to point to essential features of the proposed good society. The dialectical method therefore seeks to re-estab-lish the underlying connections between apparently disjointed or opposite facets of reality, replacing them within a larger whole, which in turn is related to another similar “totality” so as to show a yet more global totality. The dialectic moves through the familiar marxist stages, from primitive community to antiquity, and from feudalism to capitalism.