ABSTRACT
For young radicals, the ideas in Herbert Marcuse's Eros and Civilization (1955) were the cornerstone of the revolution. Marcuse, a Jewish academic who fled to the United States from Nazi Germany in 1934, was a member of the Frankfurt school of critical theory. In the United States, he taught first at the New School for Social Research in New York, then at Brandeis and finally at the University of California at San Diego. For many years, Marcuse was regarded as just another longwinded philosophy professor. But over time, he acquired a vast following of eager young aspiring intellectuals who were attracted to his unique synthesis of Marx and Freud. By 1970, the New York Times could proclaim Herbert Marcuse "the most important philosopher alive."
