I doubt the young man who killed Charlie Kirk was staying up late at night wading through Marcuse’s difficult philosophical works. But in many ways, Marcuse has won the culture. He certainly won the universities, which have been practicing “repressive tolerance” for decades.

Over the last few years, I have spent a good bit of time reading the early critical theorists, including Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, and Herbert Marcuse. And reflecting on Marcuse seems especially apropos in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Marcuse had made some striking statements on why the words and thoughts of more conservative and traditional folks should be disallowed. Marcuse was also clear that force might be needed to silence the words and prevent the thoughts of traditionalists or conservatives.

Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) was one of the early members of the school known as “critical theory” (the Frankfurt School), and one of the most significant philosophers of the so-called “new left” during the twentieth century. In the 1960s, he reached virtual rock-star status. 

He was an impressive thinker and no second-rate philosopher. He published works such as Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (1941), Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (1955), and One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (1964). He was likely the most prolific of the early critical theorists. 

For critical theorists, fascism was public enemy number one. They were preoccupied with the question: How is the next Hitler to be stopped? What can be done to stop fascism—and to stop it before it even begins to develop?

Theodor Adorno developed an “F-scale” (“fascist-scale”) personality test in his co-edited work The Authoritarian Personality (1950). It was based on a series of questions used to determine who was actually a “fascist” or who might be on the path toward becoming a fascist—who, in other words, had an “authoritarian personality.” If one supported the traditional family, or believed the husband was the head of the wife, or had more conservative or traditional political values, one would score higher on the “F-scale.”

While some of the critical theorists seemed generally happy to work at the theoretical level, Marcuse was much more open to violent and revolutionary activity. That tendency becomes explicit in his classic essay “Repressive Tolerance,” published in 1965 in A Critique of Pure Tolerance (which Marcuse co-edited).

In this widely read essay, Marcuse rejects liberal notions of free speech and argues that the use of physical force to stop the free expression of ideas can be justified: “Tolerance cannot be indiscriminate and equal with respect to the contents of expression, neither in word nor in deed; it cannot protect false words and wrong deeds which demonstrate that they contradict and counteract the possibilities of liberation.”

In an ideal society in which everyone adopts a progressive outlook, we can endorse free speech. But society falls short of that ideal.

Read More