Of all the Frankfurt thinkers, Herbert Marcuse (1898 to 1979) had the greatest direct influence on politics. He stayed in the United States after the war, working for the US government during and after the war and then teaching at Brandeis University and, from 1965, at the University of California, San Diego. In the 1960s he became one of the best-known intellectuals of the student movements known as the New Left.

Eros and Civilization

In Eros and Civilization (1955), Marcuse combined Freud and Marx. Freud had argued that civilization requires people to repress their instincts. Marcuse agreed that some repression is necessary, but argued that modern societies impose surplus repression: more discipline and self-denial than is needed to keep society going, imposed to serve existing systems of domination. With modern technology able to meet basic needs, he believed, a far less repressive way of life had become possible.

One-Dimensional Man

Marcuse's most famous book, One-Dimensional Man (1964), argued that advanced industrial societies, both the capitalist West and the Soviet bloc, had found new ways to absorb opposition. Rather than relying mainly on force, they deliver comfort and consumer goods. People come to identify with their possessions and with the system that provides them.

Two ideas are central:

• False needs: needs that society imposes on people in the interest of existing powers, such as the need to keep up with consumer trends or to work and consume without end. Marcuse distinguished these from vital needs such as food, clothing and shelter.
• One-dimensional thought: thinking that can only operate within the terms the existing society provides. The “second dimension” of thought, the ability to imagine and judge from the standpoint of real alternatives, withers away. Criticism becomes something to be managed or sold rather than a real challenge.

Marcuse called this a comfortable, smooth and reasonable form of unfreedom. Hope, he suggested, lay with those outside the comfortable center: students, outsiders, persecuted minorities and liberation movements abroad, whose refusal to go along might open a crack in the system.

Repressive tolerance

Marcuse's most controversial essay is “Repressive Tolerance” (1965). He argued that in a deeply unequal society, tolerating all views equally does not produce a fair contest of ideas, because those with wealth and media power have far louder voices. Under those conditions, he said, pure tolerance in practice protects the status quo. He proposed instead what he called liberating tolerance, which would withdraw tolerance from movements he regarded as aggressive, militarist or discriminatory, particularly on the political right, while extending it to movements on the left.

Critics, including many on the left, saw this as deeply dangerous. Who decides which views are liberating? Any group given the power to suppress speech can turn that power on its opponents, and history offers many examples. Liberal defenders of free expression argue that the answer to unequal voice is more speech and fairer institutions, not selective suppression.

The New Left and its tensions

Marcuse's ideas spread through student movements in the United States, West Germany and France in the late 1960s. Yet the older Frankfurt thinkers were uneasy. Adorno, back in Frankfurt, criticized what he saw as the students' rush to action without theory, and in 1969 he called the police when students occupied the Institute. He died later that year. The episode shows that the Frankfurt School was never a unified political program, and that its members often disagreed sharply about how ideas should relate to action.

Worked example: a town debates a speaker

An invented town hall plans a public lecture by a speaker whose views many residents find offensive. A local group demands the event be cancelled. Consider how different positions would argue.

A Marcusean argument: The speaker is backed by a well-funded organization with wide media reach, while the communities he targets have little voice. Treating his lecture as one more opinion in a fair debate ignores this imbalance. Tolerating him in the name of neutrality, in practice, amplifies the already powerful. Withdrawing the platform is a way of correcting an unequal contest.

A liberal reply: Who decides which views are too harmful to hear? Today the group objecting may hold that power; tomorrow its opponents may. Free speech protections exist precisely because no authority can be trusted to sort good ideas from bad ones in advance. If voices are unequal, the remedy is to support more speakers, fund counter-events and reform media ownership, not to suppress views.

A middle position: Distinguish between banning speech by law, which should be very rare, and a particular institution's choice of whom to invite, which involves judgment about its own purposes. Hold counter-programming alongside the event.

Notice that Marcuse's argument rests on a factual claim (that voices are deeply unequal) and a value judgment (that some movements should not be tolerated). You can accept the first and reject the second. Separating these parts is the key to evaluating his essay fairly.