The question of John Rawls and the Occupy Movement has already been asked.

I guess, now it’s Herbert Marcuse’s time.

Of the leading figures of the Frankfurt School, also known Critical Theory, Marcuse, like Theodor Adorno and Erich Fromm, wrote much of his most influential writing well after the group’s first gathering in the thirties. Indeed, it seems like only Walter Benjamin and Max Horkheimer peaked before the fifties – and Benjamin died in 1940 and Horkheimer was of a slightly earlier generation than the others.

Anyway, yes I was one of those college students who read One Dimensional Man with trembling awe. I devoured books by the Frankfurt School (and tried to understand them to the best of my ability) as a young, would be rebel (revolutionary?), but now I have mixed feelings about most of the original Critical Theorists, Adorno excepted.

With the exception of Adorno and, yes, including One Dimensional Man, there is something too facile about them. Too much polemics and too little critical philosophy. One Dimensional Man, like Fromm’s Escape from Freedom, seems too much written to appeal to the growing counter  culture movement. Trying to tie into the zeitgeist artificially, rather than organically. Or perhaps trying to latch onto it, rather than create or drive it.