Introduction: Marcuse, Arendt, and the Idea of Politics
Chapter One: Marcuse’s Critique and Reformulation of the Philosophical Concept of Essence
- Culture and Bourgeois Freedom
- Critical Theory and the Ethical Imperative: Happiness-Reason-Freedom
- Hegel and the Dialectic of Negativity
- Essence and the Dialectic of Labour
Chapter Two: The Dialectic of Instinctual Liberation: Essence and Non-Repressive Sublimation
- The Problem of Repression: Individual and Social, Basic and Surplus
- The Affirmation of Sensuousness: Primary Narcissism and Non-Repressive Sublimation
- Non-Repressive Sublimation and Non-Alienated Labour
Chapter Three: The Problem of Politics
- Marx’s Political Ambiguity
- The Limits of Western Marxism
- Marcuse’s Reproduction of the Marxian Anti-Politics
- Administration as Domination and Liberation
Chapter Four: Hannah Arendt’s Theory of Public Freedom
- Performativity and Essence: The Need for Radical Creation
- The Subject of Radical Creation: Politics and the We
- Agonism, Democracy, and Political Objectification
- Arendt and Revolutionary History
- The Institutionalization of the Revolutionary Impulse: The Council Tradition
Chapter Five: Marcuse Contra Arendt: Dialectics, Destiny, Distinction
- Questioning Distinction: the Vita Activa and Marx’s Ontology of Labour
- Arendt’s Critique of the Dialectic: On the Need for Distinction
- Marcuse’s Critique of Non-Dialectical Dialectics
Chapter Six: Marcuse: Reconsidering the Political
- The Theory of the Radical Act
- The Affirmation of Socialist Nature
- Politics and the New Left
- Spontaneity and the Council Tradition
Conclusion: From the New Left to Global Justice and from the Councils to
Cochabamba
Works Cited
