Ерос і цивілізація

Маркузе обговорює суспільство, як прояв біологічної природи людини. Він розглядає історію не як результат класової боротьби, а радше як боротьби проти придушування інстинктів. Він стверджує, що "передове індустріальне суспільство" (сучасного капіталізму) заважає нам досягнути нерепресивного суспільства "побудованого на фундаментально іншому досвіді буття, фундаментально інших відносинах між людиною та природою, фундаментально інших екзистенціальних відносинах[2]. Маркузе наполягає на помилковості думки Фрейда, що придушення допомагає цивілізації вижити. Натомість він стверджує, що Ерос звільняє і є основою творчості.

Маркузе починає з конфлікту, що його Фрейд описує в Невдоволенні культурою - боротьби між людськими інстинктами і свідомістю придушування (суперего), що придушує саме себе, намагаючись дотримуватись звичаїв та норм сусспільства.[3] Фрейд ствердив, що сутичка між еросом і цивілізацією results in the history of humanity being one of his repression: 'Our civilization is, generally speaking, founded on the suppression of instincts.'[3] Sex produces the energy, and it is repressed so the energy can be channeled into progress - but the price of progress is the prevalence of guilt instead of happiness.[3] "Progress", for Marcuse, is a concept that provides the explanation and excuse of why the system has to continue; it is the reason the happiness of people is sacrificed (see also pleasure principle).

Marcuse argues that 'the irreconcilable conflict is not between work (reality principle - life without leisure) and Eros (pleasure principle - leisure and pleasure), but between alienated labour (performance principle - economic stratification) and Eros.'[3] Sex is allowed for 'the betters' (capitalists...), and for workers only when not disturbing performance. Marcuse believes that a socialist society could be a society without needing the performance of the 'poor' and without as strong a suppression of our sexual drives: it could replace 'alienated labor' with "non-alienated libidinal work" resulting in "a non-repressive civilization based on 'non-repressive sublimation'".[3]

Marcuse's argument depends on the assumption that інстинктs can be shaped by historical phenomena such as repression.[3] Marcuse concludes that our society's troubles result not from biological repression itself but from its increase due to "surplus repression" which is the result of contemporary society.[3]

Eros and Civilization has been compared to works such as Norman O. Brown's Life Against Death (1959), Philip Rieff's Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (1959), Paul Goodman's Growing Up Absurd (1960), Поль Рікер's Freud and Philosophy (1965), and Юрґен Габермас's Knowledge and Human Interests (1968).[4][5] Brown, a classicist, paid homage to Eros and Civilization in Life Against Death, calling it "the first book, after Вільгельм Райх's ill-fated adventures, to reopen the possibility of the abolition of repression."[6] Robert Young, in a 1969 New Statesman review, called Marcuse's philosophy a merger of Freud and Marx, and wrote that it provided an "eroticized Marx."[3]

Others took a more negative view of the work.[7][8] Psychoanalyst Еріх Фромм criticized Eros and Civilization as an incompetent distortion of Freud.[7] Literary critic Frederick Crews argued that Marcuse's proposed liberation of instinct was not a real challenge to the status quo, since by taking the position that such a liberation could only be attempted "after culture has done its work and created the mankind and the world that could be free", Marcuse was accommodating society's institutions. Crews found Marcuse to be guilty of sentimentalism.[8]

Psychoanalyst Joel Kovel, who notes that Marcuse studied with Martin Heidegger but later broke with him for political reasons, believes that Marcuse's Heideggerian side, which had been in eclipse during Marcuse's most active period with the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, reemerged, displaced onto Freud, in Eros and Civilization.[9]

• Table of contents, with links to full texts of preface, 1966 preface, introduction, chapter 1, epilog, and index (at marcuse.org)
• Citations of numerous reviews in 6 languages, with links to on-line texts
• 1956 review by Paul Mattick in Western Socialism, archived at marxists.org
• Bernard Stiegler, Spirit, Capitalism and Superego