Nation: The Revolution Never Came

• Share

(2 of 2)

To overturn this hypocritical society, Marcuse did not urge a revolt of the masses. He disdained the working class for its materialism. The common people, he lamented, we're "disinclined to risk their relative prosperity for abstract and Utopian ideas." Revolution, he believed, lay with a special elite he described as a "democratic educational dictatorship of free men" in his influential essay, Repressive Tolerance. And the Utopia they would create? Marcuse was rather hazy except to suggest that somehow people could continue to enjoy all the good things of life without having to pay the price for them.

His was an apocalyptic vision of humanity liberated from capitalist restraints and soaring into a splendid new world of unfettered pleasure.

Though his Utopia was not achieved, Marcuse lived pleasantly enough. He spent the half decade of student upheaval lecturing genially to packed halls in the sunny tranquillity of the University of California at San Diego. Tanned, fit, cheerful students mixed musings on revolution with sunning, surfing, downing beers. "You cannot have fun with fascism," Marcuse recently complained. Yet he seemed to have fun. Just three years ago, he married his third wife Erica (by his first marriage he had a son Peter).

He loved music, hiking, parties, endless philosophizing. "Everything was up for questioning every day," said a friend.

He reveled in man and beast alike. He was an avid lifetime member of the San Diego Zoo. If he was embittered at the failure of revolution and the waning of his own popularity, he did not show it. His own life—robust, naysaying, always provoking—was the best refutation of his theories. Tolerance never repressed him.