Marcuse argued individual happiness requires the universal attainment of positive freedom

Evidence

Whatever the means to achieve true happiness might he, it could only be reached when freedom was also universally attained. “The reality of happiness,” Marcuse wrote, “is the reality of freedom as the self-determination of liberated humanity in its common struggle with nature.” And since freedom was synonymous with the realization of rationality, “in their completed form both, happiness and reason, coincide.” 60 What Marcuse was advocating here was that con vergence of particular and general interests usually known as “positive freedom.” 81 Individual happiness was one moment in the totality of positive freedom; reason was the other. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 238

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces ‘positive freedom’ as the Frankfurt School’s concept of happiness as convergence of individual and universal reason.
• XREF: The positive-freedom concept contrasts with Berlin’s negative freedom and connects to Habermas’s later emancipatory interest. — connects to: Bourgeois renunciation means surviving only by sacrificing full happiness — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 63; Marcuse argued bourgeois notions of freedom actually sanctioned existing authority — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 424; Individual freedom is achieved only through the freedom of others — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 144 (+13 more)

Broader Connections

• Marcuse argued bourgeois notions of freedom actually sanctioned existing authority #qualifies (0.85) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 424
• Positive freedom means self-mastery, negative freedom means absence of restraint #expands (0.82)
• Individual freedom is achieved only through the freedom of others #expands (0.80) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 144
• For social individuals, freedom is a positive relation to the environment #expands (0.80) — Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 3668
• Freedom requires choosing one’s own essence, not merely one’s acts #expands (0.78) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1126
• Mass diversion was devised to compensate for repressing genuine individual happiness #complicates (0.75) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 231
• Freedom depends on overcoming negativity and constraint #expands (0.75) — Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society, 147
• Freedom is meaningful only as engaged by free choice of ends #expands (0.75)
• Freedom, not happiness, is the measure of human possibility #contradicts (0.72) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 64
• True happiness requires a freedom neither gender currently possesses #qualifies (0.70)
• Beauvoir holds that individual freedom is realized only through being directed at other existences #corroborates (0.70) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 659