ABSTRACT
Herbert Marcuse studied philosophy under Martin Heidegger, embraced Marxist social analysis, and wrote his doctoral thesis on Georg W. F. Hegel. In Reason and Revolution, Marcuse described Hegel's work as a meditation on how human freedom advances through history, culminating in the "liberty, equality, and fraternity" of the French Revolution. In Eros and Civilization, Marcuse argued that Freud could help explain how a repressive social system manipulated human needs and prevented their fulfillment. Marcuse had become pessimistic a decade later in One-Dimensional Man, generally considered his most significant work. Instead of collapsing, Western capitalism appeared stronger than ever; even worse, it seemed to be making people happy. Rather than rethinking his Marxist assumptions, Marcuse took this as a sign that capitalism had become a "totalitarian" system much like its Cold War adversary, the Soviet Union. Marcuse developed the ideas in "Repressive Tolerance" and An Essay on Liberation.
