ABSTRACT
Actors around the "Western world" and its fringes are shown or quietly assumed to have been connected in spirit rather than tangibly. When scholars attempt to establish a tangible link between different national protest phenomena, they increasingly focus their attention on international icons or in the case of the New Left on alleged intellectual leaders. One of these leaders—in the eyes of many contemporaries, the most influential—was Herbert Marcuse. This chapter traces the relationship between Marcuse and the New Left focusing on the contexts of West Germany, France, and the United States. It identifies media narratives and imagery as the key mechanisms enlarging Marcuse's audience, while the journalistic claims made about the philosopher and his supposedly devout following also preconditioned his quickly decreasing popularity in the ensuing years. Finally, the chapter stakes out the limits of Marcuse's influence and popularity.
