MacIntyre on Marcuse

reregholdsworth

Has anybody read this book - It was published as part of the Fontana Modern Masters Series?

I am reading it at the moment. I have read a few of MacIntyre's works and some of Marcuse's.

I am still considering my opinion of it. At the moment I would say that I consider it to be superior to After Virtue and Whose Justice? Which Rationality?

Does anyone agree?

Should this go in the political theory forum instead?

DadaKopf

I read Marcuse back in the day. Read some McIntyre. While Marcuse comes out with some grand ideas, I think he lacks the rigour, elegance and subtlety of his colleagues like Horkheimer, Adorno, Habermas. A lot of Marcuse's stuff feels clumsy and obvious. Which a lot of obscuritanist philosophy is anyway. At least he popularised a lot of critical Marxian ideas, becoming the 1960s counterculture poster-boy.

hivizman

DadaKopf wrote: »

I read Marcuse back in the day. Read some McIntyre. While Marcuse comes out with some grand ideas, I think he lacks the rigour, elegance and subtlety of his colleagues like Horkheimer, Adorno, Habermas. A lot of Marcuse's stuff feels clumsy and obvious. Which a lot of obscuritanist philosophy is anyway. At least he popularised a lot of critical Marxian ideas, becoming the 1960s counterculture poster-boy.

I think I read the MacIntyre (n.b. spelling!) book on Marcuse many years ago, and I also read, or at least had copies of, Marcuse's Eros and Civilization and One Dimensional Man. As you note, he was rather fashionable in the 1960s and this continued into the 1970s.

I agree that other members of the "Frankfurt School" are more rigorous than Marcuse. I don't think, though, that it is technically correct to describe Habermas as a "colleague" of Marcuse, because Marcuse left Germany in 1933, when Habermas was only four years old, and didn't return there. Habermas certainly studied under Horkheimer and Adorno in Frankfurt, but he fell out with them, and finished his studies at Marburg. Although Habermas was influenced by the "Frankfurt School", and later in his career took over Horkheimer's chair at Frankfurt, I wouldn't see him as a member of the "Frankfurt School".