ABSTRACT
HERBERT MARCUSE was 81 when he died in July of 1979. I never met him. But I heard him lecture often, and I was among those who were profoundly affected by his thought. Even now, roughly two decades after the events of 1968, it is difficult to describe the character of his influence. His background was so different from what was familiar to American radicals. Even his critics recognized the erudition of this man, so steeped in classical European culture, who seemed to possess the key to the dialectic. The most tumultuous events of the century seemed etched on his face: World War I, the Russian Revolution, the German Revolution of 1918, Weimar, Nazism, Stalinism, World War II. Marcuse had participated in the Berlin Workers Council of 1919, he had studied with Martin Heidegger, and had become part of the "inner circle" in what we then only vaguely knew as the "Frankfurt School." He was a product of what Stefan Zweig termed "the world of yesterday."
