Instructor’s comment: Students were encouraged in all of their writing assignments to attempt a critical-comparative approach and to avoid repackaging the lecturer’s interpretations of the primary materials of the course. While some of the material seems dated, it still raises some profound questions that should be of interest to today’s university student.
An Essay on Liberation contains one of the most intelligent and scathing critiques of modern liberal civilization that you are likely to read. It is the richness and complexity of his work that attracted me, yet he remains relatively accessible throughout (especially compared to the rest of the Frankfurt School). While fundamentally Marxist in origin, Marcuse draws heavily from Weber and Freud. His book, An Essay on Liberation, was inspired by the international student resistance of the 1960s and is an excellent insight into some of the work of the Frankfurt School, a major source of highly intellectual social theory in the twentieth century. Rather than do a research paper that relied heavily upon secondary sources, I chose a single primary work and attempted to really make a connection with the author, Herbert Marcuse. Writer’s comment: I wrote this essay for my European Intellectual History class, 147C.
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