Students looked to Marcuse for a concrete utopia he would not supply.

Evidence

Expectations were all the greater in that most of those present, apart from the theorists of the SDS, only knew Marcuse’s works superficially at best. But it was precisely the most active students who hoped that Marcuse would give answers to urgent questions that they themselves were not able to provide for the students they had mobilized. In an interview published in Der Spiegel immediately before the Marcuse event, Dutschke had declared that the most important task facing Critical Theory, particularly in the present extremely slow and complex period of transition, was to describe a concrete utopia. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2628

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Marcuse denied the student movement was revolutionary — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2629; Marcuse rejected students as the revolutionary subject despite championing them. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2629; Marcuse’s realism rests on the acknowledged possibility of utopia’s failure — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 231

Broader Connections

• Marcuse’s realism rests on the acknowledged possibility of utopia’s failure #expands (0.82) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 231