German-American philosopher, Frankfurt School émigré, and — improbably, given his dense Hegelian prose — the intellectual hero of the 1960s New Left. Marcuse fused Hegel, Marx, and Freud into a sustained critique of advanced industrial society, arguing that consumer capitalism maintains itself less through coercion than by satisfying and manufacturing needs that reconcile the population to its own domination.
Eros and Civilization (1955) reread Freud against the grain, arguing that much of what Freud regarded as the eternal cost of civilization — the sacrifice of erotic energy to productive labor — was in fact the historically specific cost of this kind of civilization, and that a less repressive society was technologically feasible. One-Dimensional Man (1964) delivered the argument that made him famous: a society of abundance, mass media, and political integration absorbs dissent by making it unthinkable, producing a "one-dimensional" culture in which alternatives to the given order disappear from view. The working class, once the revolutionary subject, has been bought off; the hope for opposition lies at the margins — with students, racial minorities, the Third World.
This thesis, right or wrong, gave the 1960s New Left a vocabulary. Marcuse in his seventies was photographed with students at the Sorbonne. His "repressive tolerance" essay (1965) remains controversial for arguing that formally equal toleration of all views in conditions of deep power inequality effectively entrenches dominant positions — an argument that continues to echo in contemporary debates about speech and platforming.