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Ontology)(Marcuse, 1987) and Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory
(Reason and Revolution) (Marcuse, 1999).
In the years leading up to publication of Reason and Revolution the expectation was that
Marcuse’s research would be central to the development of the Institute for Social Research
(ISR), founded in Germany in the late 1920s with the explicit intention to develop Marxist
critical social theory (Wiggershaus, 1994, 25-6). Marcuse tried to move the ISR even further to
the left after its exile from Nazi Germany, eventually to the U.S. in 1934
In the following I will argue that Marcuse’s assessments of the untapped potential of
Hegel’s dialectic for critical social theory changed significantly in the period (1932-1941) during
which he published two major books on Hegel. Comparisons of the two works suggest that the
tendency of these alterations was to render Marcuse’s social theory ultimately more compatible
with the pessimistic “one dimensional” thesis first fully developed by Horkheimer and Adorno
(Horkheimer and Adorno, 1988; Horkheimer, 1987). This thesis held that the post-liberal social
totality had become non-contradictory and hence was not internally susceptible to radical social
transformations. Moreover, even taking into account Marcuse’s two major close readings of
Hegel’s Science of Logic (Hegel, 1969), significant questions persist as to whether that work in
particular contains insights relevant to current attempts to develop critical social theory.
Recent developments from within the Critical Theory tradition also suggest the need to
reexamine Marcuse’s original research on Hegelian dialectic. Jürgen Habermas’s influential
efforts to overcome what he believed was the exhaustion of the Hegelian-Marxian approach to
understanding and changing society may have diverted new research away from important
aspects of Marcuse’s work altogether. The U.S.-based Critical Theorist Moishe Postone’s
“reinterpretation of Marx’s mature critical theory” includes as well novel perspectives on Marx’s
Convention