Heideggerian Marxism

Preface

Kim — University of Nebraska Press / Page ix / / Heideggerian Marxism / Herbert Marcuse 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 [-9], (9) Lines: 266 to 291 ——— 13.5pt PgVar ——— Normal Page * PgEnds: Eject [-9], (9) Preface The idea for this volume evolved from a remarkable 1998 conference held at the University of California, Berkeley, and organized by John Abromeit and W. Mark Cobb in honor of Herbert Marcuse’s centennial. For the 1960s generation, Marcuse was a towering figure—living proof that the so-called generation gap was, in large measure, a mass media fabrication. Unlike his Frankfurter School compagnons de route, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Marcuse remained remarkably open and receptive to contemporary political developments. Horkheimer and Adorno’s skepticism vis-àvis the student movement resulted from their critical assessment of Bolshevism as a potent and insidious form of political domination. Their assessment was consistent with the criticisms of the so-called left communists such as Anton Pannekoek, Hermann Görter, and Rosa Luxemburg. But their views were also conditioned by Germany’s vulnerable geopolitical position on the front lines of the cold war. Marcuse, conversely, had witnessed firsthand the political evils of McCarthyism, followed by America’s grotesque military build-up in Vietnam, in which the horrors of modern war—napalm and massive, indiscriminate aerial bombardment—seemingly knew no bounds. At the Berkeley conference, it was clear that John Abromeit and I shared a profound interest in German philosophy of the 1920s, whose high points were undoubtedly Georg Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness (1923) and Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927). What made Marcuse’s intellectual itinerary so unique was that, at a remarkably young age, he attempted a landmark synthesis of both traditions: Hegelian Marxism and existential ontology. Moreover, both John and I felt strongly that Marcuse’s contributions were not of merely “historical” value. Instead, we believed that his efforts to combine these two orientations helped to shed important light on problems of the philosophical-political present. Kim — University of Nebraska Press / Page x / / Heideggerian Marxism / Herbert Marcuse x Preface 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 [-10], (10) Lines: 291 to 315 ——— * 48.0pt PgVar ——— Normal Page * PgEnds: PageBreak [-10], (10) The volume took longer than anticipated to bring to completion. During the late 1920s and 1930s, Marcuse adopted a hybrid, existential Marxist idiom that places peculiar demands on English-speaking readers. Consequently, we felt that our primary responsibility was to ensure that the texts in question appeared in a lucid and accessible English, while at the same time preserving the conceptual rigor of Marcuse’s philosophical and theoretical arguments. Publication of Heideggerian Marxism would not have been possible were it not for the solidarity and assistance of a number of individuals. Above all, we would like to thank Herbert Marcuse’s son, Peter, for his willingness to grant rights and permissions in his capacity as executor of his father’s literary estate. We would also like to publicly acknowledge the efforts of the translators: Ron Haas, Eric Oberle, Matthew Erlin, and John Abromeit. Without their dedication and tenacity, the volume would never have come to fruition. We would also like to thank our editor at the University of Nebraska Press, M. J. Devaney for her keen editorial discernment and consistent enthusiasm for the project. Allow me to conclude on a personal note. During the 1970s, I had the good fortune to meet Herbert Marcuse on several occasions—in San Diego, Toronto, and Berkeley. No one who met him could fail to be impressed by his humanity, his playfulness, and his generosity of spirit. In so many respects, he was a modern embodiment of the proverbial Aristotelian “great-souled individual.” Our conversations—though they were few—remain permanently etched in my memory. Publishing this collection of his early philosophical writings is a modest way of acknowledging an intellectual and personal debt that I could never hope to repay in full. Lastly, John Abromeit and I would like to dedicate this volume to the man who has perhaps done more than anyone else to promote international interest in the Frankfurt School legacy: Martin Jay...