Marcuse’s violent-sounding language needlessly misrepresented nonviolent civil disobedience

Evidence

But why should he use pernicious concepts like pre-censorship or counter-censorship, when what was at stake was not anything pernicious, but simply more democracy and more freedom? Why should he speak of violence in general terms, when non-violent forms of civil disobedience were also implied in the termforms of passive resistance, occupying squares or buildings, and other non-injurious actions? It may have been common among lawyers, politicians and wide sections of the public to describe these actions as violent, in so far as they did not accept the goals they were being used to pursue. But in a philosopher of the opposition in the highly industrialized societies of the West, was it not bound to give rise to misunderstandings? — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2596

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: how a theorist’s rhetorical imprecision can sabotage reception of an essentially democratic position — Marcuse’s ‘pre-censorship’ framing becoming the thing his allies denounced.
• XREF: Connects to the earlier chapter on Adorno and Horkheimer suppressing Soviet criticism (ch24) and to the repressive-tolerance debate broadly. — connects to: Marcuse justified oppressed violence on historical-function not ethical grounds; Adorno and Marcuse broke partly over secondhand misreadings of Marcuse’s positions — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2596

Broader Connections

• Adorno and Marcuse broke partly over secondhand misreadings of Marcuse’s positions #complicates (0.80) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2596