As a graduate student at Yale in 1964, I enrolled in a course with Herbert Marcuse, the exiled German-Jewish Marxist philosopher. Although I was a member of Yale’s Party of the Right and Marcuse defended Fidel Castro and other Communist dictators, he became an intellectual role model for me, as I wrote in my memoir Encounters, thanks to his charisma and erudition. The same year I met him, Marcuse published his most famous book, One-Dimensional Man. Later that decade, he became a hero and inspiration to the New Left student movement, including its most violent revolutionary factions. Unsurprisingly, the American right has taken a broadly negative view of Marcuse and the group of intellectuals he belonged to, the Frankfurt School. I share that assessment, but only in part.
“The American right has taken a broadly negative view of Marcuse.”
Conservatives regularly cite the influence of Marcuse and his colleagues as a source of the ideological excesses of progressive institutions and broader cultural trends. These charges are the subject of A.J.A. Woods’s new book The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West, a monograph recently reviewed in these pages by Geoff Shullenberger. Meanwhile, on the far left, a new book by the philosopher Gabriel Rockhill claims roughly the opposite: that the Frankfurt School was a CIA-funded cutout deployed to counter Soviet influence in the West (which the neo-Stalinist Rockhill regards as lamentable).