There are several dimensions to the Hegelian-Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse’s critical social theory that remain of great interest for the American experience going on a half-century after his death. Still among the most vital are his decades of theoretical investigations of the philosophical relationship between Hegel and Marx itself, especially when viewed in the U.S. context. The following passage is taken from Marcuse’s seminal study, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory, first published 85 years ago in the early years of World War Two:
“We can now see that the Marxian theory has developed a full contradiction to the basic conception of idealist philosophy. The idea of reason has been superseded by the idea of happiness. Historically, the first was interlaced into a society in which the intellectual forces of production were detached from the material ones. Within this framework of social and economic iniquities, the life of reason was a life of higher dignity. It [the framework] dictated individual sacrifice [in intellectual work] for the sake of some higher universal independent of the “base” impulses and drives of individuals.
“The idea of happiness, on the other hand, roots itself firmly in the demand for a social ordering that would set aside the class structure of society. Hegel had emphatically denied that the progress of reason would have anything to do with the satisfaction of individual happiness. Even the most advanced concepts of the Hegelian philosophy…preserved and in the last analysis condoned the negativity of the existing social system [the “framework”]. Reason could prevail even though the reality shrieked of individual frustration: idealist culture and the technological progress of civil society bear witness of that. Happiness could not. The demand that free individuals [either those of the “life of reason” or of civil society] attain satisfaction militated against the entire set-up of traditional culture. The Marxian theory consequently rejected even the advanced ideas of the Hegelian scheme. The category of happiness made manifest the positive content of materialism. Historical materialism appeared at first as a denunciation of the materialism prevalent in bourgeois society, and the materialist principle was in this respect a critical instrument of expose directed against a society that enslaved men to the blind mechanisms of material production [examine more closely, if so, it appears that, according to Marcuse, the very origins of historical materialism is tied up with the abolition of slavery]. The idea of the free and universal realization of individual happiness, per contra, denoted an affirmative materialism, that is to say, an affirmation of the material satisfaction of man.”
