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.It also involvedseeing virtually all other forms of theory or knowledge as favouring theexisting system of domination.The School was committed to a revolu-tionary transformation of society by means of changing consciousness,rather than awaiting capitalism s collapse through the working out of itsown contradictions.Positivism was the particular bugbear of the Frankfurt School.Positivist philosophy claimed for science a monopoly of knowledge,thereby marginalising any reasoning to do with values and moralpurposes.The School insisted that the essence of science was not thepursuit of knowledge but the domination of nature.Science and posi-tivist philosophy tended to reduce everything in nature, includinghuman beings, to objects governed by mathematical relationships.Thistendency was reinforced by capitalism, which tended to reduce every-thing, including human attributes, to commodities with the commonmeasure of value in money terms.Ultimately this would lead to thedestruction of individuality and civilisation, and to the triumph of totali-tarianism.Furthermore, since scientific reasoning was only concernedwith observed regularities, all science served to reinforce the status quoand close off any discussion of how the world could be better.Positivism was also held responsible for the permeation of society bythe kind of instrumental reasoning that technology represented, as strictlyconcerned with the most efficient means of control and manipulation.Their fears were strongly influenced by those of Max Weber, who sawthe rationalisation and bureaucratisation of society as dominating socialand economic life to such an extent as to threaten to crush all freedomand individuality, a process he referred to as the iron cage of modernity.Unlike Weber, however, the Frankfurt School saw capitalism as at theroot of the process, forever extending its control of society.This analysis of science and positivism culminated in Dialectic ofEnlightenment (1947), by Horkheimer and Adorno, in which they arguedthat the eighteenth-century Enlightenment s aspiration to create a world208 HERBERT MARCUSEof universal freedom and happiness through reason had in fact resultedin its opposite: a world dominated by totalitarian oppression.Inevitably,the rise of the Nazis was a major subject for the Frankfurt School, withseveral accounts of the authoritarian personality and related themes; theSchool initially saw it as a necessary consequence of the developmentof capitalism.Humanity was there to be dominated and manipulated,which taken to its logical conclusion led to fascism.However, even if the overt oppression of fascism had been defeated,the prosperous West nevertheless kept the working class in comfortableslavery, deprived of the will to change the world.So complete didthis seem to be becoming in the post-war world, that Horkheimerand Adorno despaired of any possibility of revolution.Of the leadingFrankfurt School figures, only Marcuse was able to find renewed revo-lutionary hope in new theoretical developments and fresh sources ofactivism.Marcuse turned first to psychoanalysis.In Eros and Civilization(1955), he attempted to fuse Marxism with Freudian ideas indeed,Freud rather eclipses Marx in the book.Using Freud was not new tothe Frankfurt School (Eric Fromm and others had used Freudian ideas,especially in trying to demonstrate the social psychology of fascism), butnothing as thoroughgoing as Marcuse s attempted absorption had beenattempted.What Marcuse sought to do was to rewrite Freud s theory ofthe relationship between civilisation and sexual repression.Freud hadargued, in Civilization and its Discontents and elsewhere, that the powerfulinstinctual drives that human beings possess, especially the sexual, have tobe repressed in order that civilisation institutions, businesses, states andempires, high art can be created.Sexual energy has to be rechannelledto make it available for other purposes.The greater the level of civili-sation, the greater the level of repression there must be.Thus, civilisationcomes at a heavy price in terms of widespread individual unhappinessand a high incidence of mental illness.Freud s bleak conclusion was thatthere was no answer to this relationship between civilisation and unhap-piness.Repression was an inescapable accompaniment of any kind ofadvanced human society.Marcuse, however, disagreed.Marcuse argued that the need to redirect sexual energy to build civi-lisation was only true of times of scarcity, including most of humanhistory, but that in a time of abundance, like the present in the West,the repression was no longer necessary.It becomes surplus repression(echoing Marx s surplus value ), which is used to maintain the existingsocio-economic system rather than creating more civilisation
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