Marcuse saw oppressive culture as historically contingent and surpassable

Evidence

We have isolated Marcuse’s analysis of the times [in the preceding report of his lecture]he himself presents it in a quasi-redemptive framework. This is given its most striking description in the hypothesis of a primordial father, who organizes and distributes the necessities of life for the primordial horde not on an egalitarian basis, but hierarchically. He symbolizes an arbitrary deterioration from libidinous culture, or the possibility of it, to a culture based on domination, which, Marcuse concludes, is capable of having a historical end, just as it had a historical beginning. The dialectic of progress has today made a non-repressive culture objectively possible, one which `can be made a reality tomorrow or the day after, if humanity would finally choose it’. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2320

Categorization

• DEFINE: Captures Marcuse’s quasi-redemptive framework: the primordial father myth as the origin of domination, a domination that history can end.
• XREF: Directly anticipates Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization and the thesis that non-repressive culture is objectively possible. — connects to: Marcuse used Freud’s metapsychology to argue a repression-free culture is conceivable.; Marcuse sought to reconcile historical necessity with the ethical value of freedom — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 420; Marcuse used Freud’s metapsychology to argue a non-repressive civilization is conceivable — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2132 (+1 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: Marcuse’s claim that a non-repressive culture is ‘objectively possible’ — that history both created repression and can end it — is a dense, foundational move worth sitting with for the reader’s critical-theory reference work.