Abstract

Since his death in 1979, Herbert M arcuse's influence has been steadily waning. The extent to which his work is ignored in progressive circles is curious, as M arcuse was one of the most influential radical theorists of the day during the 1960s and his work continued to be a topic of interest and controversy during the 1970s. While the waning of the revolutionary movements with which he was involved helps explain M arcuse's eclipse in popularity, the lack of new texts and publications has also contributed. For while there have been a large number of new translations of works by Benjamin, Adorno, and Habermas during the past decade, few new publications of untranslated or uncollected material by M arcuse have appeared, although there have been a steady stream of books on M arcuse.1 In addition, while there has been great interest in the writings of Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard, Lyotard, and other French "postmodern," or "poststructuralist," theorists, M arcuse did not fit into the fashionable debates concerning modern and postmodern thought.2 Unlike Adorno, M arcuse did not anticipate the postmodern attacks on reason and his dialectics were not "negative." Rather he subscribed to the project of reconstructing reason and of positing utopian alternatives to the existing society -- a dialectical imagination that has fallen out of favor in an era that rejects totalizing thought and grand visions of liberation and social reconstruction.