At the risk of providing ammunition for Republican trolls, while I'm thinking about unconventional philosophers and before I get caught up in the details of the Bush administration's nefarious deeds, I thought I would mention this Web site on Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) maintained by his grandson Harold Marcuse, a history professor at the Univeristy of California-Santa Barbara.
Marcuse is one of the best-known representatives of the "Frankfurt School," of which Theodore Adorno, Walter Bejamin and Max Horkheimer were also part. The orignal Frankfurt School was, more preceisely, the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research in Germany, whose leading lights, including Marcuse, went into exile after Hitler's takeover in 1933.
I should note that among Trent Lott's friends at the White Citizen's Council and other neo-Confederate and similar far-right types, the Frankfurt School is still demonized as a key element of the Jewish Conspiracy to impose "political correctness" and to generally aggravate the White Race. See advertisement prominently displayed at the Citizen Council's Confederate-flag adorned Web site for a video from some neo-Nazi or similar sort for a video on the Frankfurt School.
But here in the real world, Marcuse was a student of the Christian existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger, who went on to specialize in Hegelian and Marxist thought. Marcuse achieved fame in the 1960s as a "New Left" thinker, both in Europe and the US, and was considered a prophet of sorts of the student movements. His actual influence was probably greater in Europe, and I'm guessing more of his admirers there actually read his books than in America. (I've read most of them; they're not exactly easy going.)
He was known as a "neo-Marxist," although I've never been clear what the "neo" part meant. Probably that he attempted to synthesize Freudian thought with Marxism, as Wilhelm Reich did in the 1920s and 1930s. His best-known and most influential works were Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry Into Freud (1955), One-Dimensional Man (1964) and "Repressive Tolerance," one of three essays from separate authors that made up the book A Critique of Pure Tolerance (1965). One measure of his influence was that Governor Ronald Reagan tried unsuccessfully to get him purged from a faculty position at the University of California.
Some of his admirers as well as his critics would probably be surprised that Marcuse worked for the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during the Second World War, one of the two organizations merged to form the CIA after the war. "Wild Bill" Donavan, who headed the OSS, wanted solid analysis from people who knew their stuff. And Marcuse was a very capable social analyst who had spent years studying social and politial movements in Germany.
Marcuse isn't exactly a household word in the US today, fans of crackpot neo-Confederate and anti-Semitic Web sites aside. But he still does have some influence among philosophers, theologians and social critics. He was a Marxist, and his criticisms of capitalism and imperialism (which he understood in a Leninist sense) are not in step with the zeitgeist of today's economic gloablism. But he was a perceptive social critic until the end of this life, and there is good reason that he is still remembered today.
In a passage that provides a small illustration how little reality fits to the bizarre demonizing of people like Marcuse by Republican zealots and neo-Confederates, Marcuse wrote in the preface to the first (1941) edition of his book on Hegel, Reason and Revolution, which was aimed at combatting the impression among many American intellectuals that Hegel was somehow a forerunner of fascism:
There is in Hegel a keen insight into the locale of progressive ideas and movements. He attributed to the American rational spirit a decisive role in the struggle for an adequate order of life, and spoke of the 'victory of some future and intensely vital rationality of the America[n] nation...' Knowing far better than his critics the forces that threatened freedom and reason, and recognizing these forces to have been bound up with the social system Europe had acquired, he once looked beyond that continent to this [North America] as the only 'land of the future.'
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