Notes on Herbert Marcuse's "Repressive Tolerance"

The modern New Left, or as the people of the internet have put it, “Social Justice Warriors” or the “Woke”, are through their behaviors very closely following the views of one philosopher whether they realize it or not. Although some of these people have certainly never heard of or read Herbert Marcuse’s works, they are nonetheless influenced by his ideas. People on the right certainly have been influenced by Barry Goldwater’s ghostwritten Conscience of a Conservative, for instance, even though many have not read it. A bit of background about Marcuse is called for to understand where he is coming from. He was born in Berlin in 1898 to a Jewish family and in 1916 he was drafted into the German Army to fight in World War I. Marcuse subsequently participated in the Spartacist Uprising that accompanied the German Revolution of 1918-1919, a distinctly communist part of the movement suppressed by the German government and the Freikorps. In the years that followed, he studied philosophy and was a protégé of the famous Martin Heidegger. In 1932, Marcuse joined the Institute for Social Research, popularly known as the Frankfurt School. The Frankfurt School, for those not in the know, is prominently taught in the social sciences in many American universities (I became familiar with it through graduate school) and is Marxist (although not of the Leninist variety), Freudian, and Hegelian in outlook.