Herbert Marcuse and Environmentalism

Charles Reitz has written two previous books on Herbert Marcuse, Philosophy and Critical Pedagogy (2016) and Art, Alienation, and the Humanities (2000). In this volume he turns to Marcuse’s writing on ecology, noting that Marcuse stood out among the New Left of the 1970s in recognizing environmental campaigning as an element within a wider movement for radical social change. Marcuse wrote two papers on ecology: “Ecology and Revolution,” from a conference paper given in France in 1972; and “Ecology and the Critique of Modern Society,” from a lecture to a wilderness group in California in1979. Both align environmental destruction with consumer capitalism and what Marcuse called the warfare state. Both papers are included in Marcuse’s Collected Papers (vols. 3 and 5, respectively), but Reitz adds his own reading of five papers from the Marcuse archive at Frankfurt University, all unpublished until 2017, to contextualize the two ecology papers in terms...