Part 1940s period piece, part stimulus to ongoing thought on the
social impact of technology, this first in a projected six volumes
of Marcuse's papers, many of them previously unpublished, merits
the attention of critical theorists and general readers alike. Ably
edited and annotated by former Marcuse student Kellner
(Philosophy/Univ. of Texas, Austin), volume one collects papers and
several letters (to Max Horkheimer and Martin Heidegger) from the
period when Marcuse was moving from theoretical work for his
beloved Institute of Social Research (ISR) to more practical
studies for the US Office of War Information. The ISR, under
Horkheimer's direction, continued in the Frankfurt School's
tradition of Marxist-inspired social critique. The German concept
of critique descends from Kant, who saw himself rescuing reason
from its terrible proneness to self-deception. Critical theory in
the Frankfurt School shifted the locus of deception from within the
human mind outward, to social forces that inevitably transformed,
dialectically, into the opposite of what they appeared to be.
Marcuse's critique of technology is that, having emerged out of
moral human reason, it soon makes reason conform to its own amoral
obsession with efficiency and means, regardless of ends. The
resulting "technical reason" is a Frankenstein monster that, for
Marcuse, explains what the War Office hired him to analyze and
propagandize against: Nazi Germany. As new analyses of what Germans
call the "Nazi time" continue to appear, Marcuse's reduction of
Naziism to technical reason run amok - an excrescence of
capitalism, wholly discontinuous with classical German culture -
provides a sober alternative to more inflammatory theories of
inbred German anti-Semitism. Any German intellectual selected at
random opens up onto that vast, uniquely integrated tradition of
thought, bounded by Kant and Heidegger, that partially defines
German culture. For the general reader, Marcuse's early essays
provide one entree to that world; for the specialist, they provide
backdrop to Marcuse's more famous published books. (Kirkus Reviews)
Herbert Marcuse is one of the most influential thinkers of our time. Born in Berlin, Marcuse studied philosophy with Husserl and Heidegger at the Universities of Freiburg and Berlin. Marcuse's critical social theory ingeniously fuses phenomenology, Freudian thought and Marxist theory; and provides a solid ground for his reputation as the most crucial figure inspiring the social activism and New Left politics of the 1960s and 1970s. The largely unpublished work collected in this volume makes clear the continuing relevance of Marcuse's thought to contemporary issues. The texts published here, dealing with concerns during the period 1942-1951, exhibit penetrating critiques of technology and analyses of the ways that modern technology produces novel forms of society and culture with new modes of social control. The material collected in
Technology, War and Facism provides exemplary attempts to link theory with practice, to develop ideas that can be used to grasp and transform existing social reality.
Technology, War and Fascism is the first of six volumes of Herbert Marcuse's Collected Papers to be edited by Douglas Kellner. Each volume is a collection of previously un-published or uncollected essays, unfinished manuscripts and letters by one of the greatest thinkers of our time.
eBook available with sample pages: 0203208315
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