ABSTRACT
Together with Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse was a member of the first Frankfurt School. Almost entirely ignored by Jürgen Habermas, he is nonetheless an important thinker, one who thinks outside the square that endows Habermas' philosophy with its somewhat quotidian quality. He is also a generous thinker, someone who thinks well of the human capacity for love. For Marcuse, as for the first Frankfurt School in general, his experience in America convinced him that Marx had vastly underestimated industrial capitalism's capacity for self-preservation, so that its collapse was by no means inevitable. Borrowing the phrase from Horkheimer and Adorno, Marcuse sums up the diagnosis of the diseased condition of modernity by saying that the result of the application of reason to life has turned out to be 'irrational'. A central role in the colonization of the soul is performed by the 'mass media', the advertising, information, and entertainment industry.
