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Negations By Herbert Marcuse Beacon, $7.50 The philosophy of pure terror abounds and the acts of violence continue. (I write this on the day of the funeral of Senator Robert F. Kennedy.) Ideas do have consequences. We did not need the fine researches of Richard Weaver to teach us that. But we can be grateful to him for increasing our awareness of what is after all a matter of observable fact and felt intuition. Thus when the Left creates an epistemology enthroning violence as virtue (Frantz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre); when it writes In Defense of Terror (Trotsky); when it elevates to a high moral commitment students’ attacks upon existing educational institutions to convert them into “counter-educational” seminaries for the teaching of revolution and destruction (“socially useful destructiveness”), as does Herbert Marcuse—then the consequences will be just those predicted and desired.

It is Marcuse’s notion that American society is irrational, mentally deranged. That is its norm, he argues, hence any aberration from the norm is sanity. The “alienated” and “outsiders” represent the healthy organisms in our midst, the sick ones are all the rest of us—from President to peanut-vendor, from senator to sea-scout, from leader to led. The entire fabric of our society is rotten to the core, incurable, unredeemable. At the same time the Establishment—the mass media, including the more refined journals of opinion, the foundations, the church, and the entire educational structure—is a fraud. Herbert Marcuse would put you and me in jail; would stop our mouths, close down our publishing ventures, and— if he could achieve it—foreclose our thinking, since he is the first censor on earth who would deprive us of the right to think by a process he describes as “pre-censorship.”

MG

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Max Geltman

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Negations By Herbert Marcuse Beacon, $7.50 The philosophy of pure terror abounds and the acts of violence continue. (I write this on the day of the funeral of Senator Robert F. Kennedy.) Ideas do have consequences. We did not need the fine researches of Richard Weaver to teach us that. But we can be grateful to him for increasing our awareness of what is after all a matter of observable fact and felt intuition. Thus when the Left creates an epistemology enthroning violence as virtue (Frantz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre); when it writes In Defense of Terror (Trotsky); when it elevates to a high moral commitment students’ attacks upon existing educational institutions to convert them into “counter-educational” seminaries for the teaching of revolution and destruction (“socially useful destructiveness”), as does Herbert Marcuse—then the consequences will be just those predicted and desired.

It is Marcuse’s notion that American society is irrational, mentally deranged. That is its norm, he argues, hence any aberration from the norm is sanity. The “alienated” and “outsiders” represent the healthy organisms in our midst, the sick ones are all the rest of us—from President to peanut-vendor, from senator to sea-scout, from leader to led. The entire fabric of our society is rotten to the core, incurable, unredeemable. At the same time the Establishment—the mass media, including the more refined journals of opinion, the foundations, the church, and the entire educational structure—is a fraud. Herbert Marcuse would put you and me in jail; would stop our mouths, close down our publishing ventures, and— if he could achieve it—foreclose our thinking, since he is the first censor on earth who would deprive us of the right to think by a process he describes as “pre-censorship.”