Marcuse rejected students as the revolutionary subject despite championing them.

Evidence

But Marcuse, too, disappointed the students. He told them unequivocally that they were not the subject of radical historical change. He denied that they were an oppressed minority, and denied further that they were a directly revolutionary force. He made it clear that hopes could only be pinned on a variety of splintered forces. In contrast to Habermas, Marcuse saw the connection between student opposition in the capital cities and the liberation struggles of the Third World, which was so important to the students’ view of themselves, as not merely a matter of breaking through false definitions and correcting biased reporting, but something much more fundamental. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2629

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Habermas’s contrasting view and to Marcuse’s ‘aesthetic and erotic dimension’ concept; also resonates with the later New Left debates over the revolutionary subject. — connects to: Marcuse denied the student movement was revolutionary — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2629; Students looked to Marcuse for a concrete utopia he would not supply. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2628; Marcuse rejected total mystical fusion, retaining Hegel’s subject-object tension. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 1199

Broader Connections

• Students looked to Marcuse for a concrete utopia he would not supply. #exemplifies (0.85) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2628
• Marcuse rejected total mystical fusion, retaining Hegel’s subject-object tension. #complicates (0.75) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 1199