Marcuse v. Reich

Until recently, the chief moral authority for radical students was Herbert Marcuse, the septuagenarian Marx-influenced philosopher and author of One-Dimensional Man. He faces a hot new rival: Yale Law Professor Charles Reich, 42, author of The Greening of America. Though Reich acknowledges an intellectual debt to Marcuse, the old philosopher has now lit into Reich for missing the main point. Writing on the opposite-editorial page of the New York Times last week, Marcuse attacked Reich's view that a more humane America will be born as the nation is inherited by young subscribers to the anticapitalist hippie ethic of "Consciousness III" (TIME, Nov. 2).

As Marcuse sees it, Reich fails to realize that "the machine" responsible for "repression, misery and frustration" is run by "very definite, identifiable persons, groups, classes and interests." Changing them, Marcuse implies, will take "preparation, organization, mobilization." By shunning the necessities of power, Reich merely "transfigures social and political radicalism" into the toothless utopianism of "moral rearmament." Greening, declares Marcuse, should forthwith be dismissed as a cop-out--the "Establishment version of the great rebellion," not the real one.

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