Marcuse drafted a lost 1940s manuscript against positivist one-dimensional thought
Evidence
Herbert Marcuse, “Some Social Implications of Modern Technology,” collected in Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt, The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (New York: Continuum, 1985), pp. 138–62. Marcuse indicates in letters from the 1940s that he was working on a large manuscript criticizing contemporary forms of thought such as positivism, behaviorism, and other forms of one-dimensional thought; see the discussion in Wiggershaus, Die Frankfurter Schule, and the collected letters from the period in the Marcuse Archive. Unfortunately, the manuscript has not yet turned up and may be lost. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 72
Categorization
- QUESTION: A lost manuscript criticizing positivism and behaviorism from the 1940s — worth wondering whether it resurfaced or whether its themes fed directly into One-Dimensional Man, given the reader’s own interest in where this book’s central thesis originates.
- SEED: Angle: the archaeology of a famous argument — a book whose core thesis may have been drafted a decade earlier in a lost manuscript, and the scholarly detective hunt to recover it.
- XREF: connects to: Marcuse’s unfinished yearbook article was an early draft of One-Dimensional Man — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1240
Broader Connections
- Marcuse’s unfinished yearbook article was an early draft of One-Dimensional Man
#qualifies(0.85) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1240