A Study on Authority (Radical Thinkers)

116 Pages·2008·5.538 MB·English

by  Herbert Marcuse

MARCUSE
HERBERT
Vv
A STUDY
ON AUTHORITY
Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2022 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation
https://archive.org/details/studyonauthorityOO0OOmarc

RADICAL THINKERS
“A golden treasury of theory” Eric Banks, Bookforum
“Beautifully designed...a sophisticated blend of theory and thought” Ziauddin Sardar, New Statesman
SET 1 (512/26/$14can)
1_ MINIMA MORALIA THE POLITICS OF SEXUALITY IN THE FIELD
| Reflections on a Damaged Life FRIENDSHIP OF VISION
THEODOR ADORNO JACQUES DERRIDA JACQUELINE ROSE
ISBN-13: 978 1 84467 051 2 ISBN-13: 978 1 84467 054 3 ISBN-13: 978 1 84467 058 1
| FOR MARX THE FUNCTION OF THE INFORMATION BOMB
LOUIS ALTHUSSER CRITICISM PAUL VIRILIO
ISBN-13: 978 1 84467 0529 TERRY EAGLETON ISBN-13: 978 1 84467 059 8
ISBN-13: 978 1 84467 055 0
| THE SYSTEM OF OBJECTS CULTURE AND
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
SIGNS TAKEN FOR MATERIALISM
ISBN-13: 978 1 84467 053 6
WONDERS RAYMOND WILLIAMS
ISBN-13: 978 1 84467 060 4
LIBERALISM AND On the Sociology of Literary Forms
DEMOCRACY FRANCO MORETTI THE METASTASES OF
NORBERTO BOBBIO ISBN-13: 978 1 84467 056 7
ENJOYMENT
ISBN-13: 978 1 84467 062 8 THE RETURN OF THE On Women and Causality
POLITICAL SLAVO)J ZIZEK
CHANTAL MOUFFE ISBN-13: 978 1 84467 061 1
ISBN-13: 978 1 84467 057 4
| SET 2 (512.95/26.99/$17CAN)}
AESTHETICS AND POLITICS LOGICS OF DISINTEGRATION ON THE SHORES OF
THEODOR ADORNO, WALTER
Poststructuralist Thought and POLITICS
BENJAMIN, ERNST BLOCH, BERTOLT
the Claims of Critical Theory JACQUES RANCIERE
BRECHT, GEORG LUKACS
PETER DEWS ISBN-13: 978 1 84467 577 7
ISBN-13: 978 1 84467 570 8
ISBN-13: 978 1 84467 5746
STRATEGY OF DECEPTION
INFANCY AND HISTORY LATE MARXISM PAUL VIRILIO
On the Destruction of Adorno, Or, The Persistence of ISBN-13: 978 1 84467 578 4
Experience the Dialectic
GIORGIO AGAMBEN FREDRIC JAMESON POLITICS OF MODERNISM
ISBN-13: 978 1 84467 5715 ISBN-13: 978 1 84467 5753 Against the New Conformists
POLITICS AND HISTORY EMANCIPATION(S) RAYMOND WILLIAMS
Montesquieu, Rousseau, Marx ERNESTO LACLAU ISBN-13; 978 1 84467 580 7
LOUIS ALTHUSSER ISBN-13; 978 1 84467 576 0 THE INDIVISIBLE
ISBN-13: 978 1 84467 572 2
REMAINDER f,
THE POLITICAL DESCARTES
FRAGMENTS On Schelling and Related —
Reason, Ideology and the
tJIESABeNN -1B3A :U D9R7I8L LA1R 8D4 467 573 9 ABNoTuOrNgIeOo isN EGPRrIo ject SMLaAtVtOe)r sZ IZEK 7
ISBN-13: 978 18 4467 581 4
ISBN-13: 978 1 84467 582 1
Brow Ye COON PAU DEO REBY
Herbert Marcuse
Translated by Joris De Bres
VERSO
London « New York
This translation first published by NLB, 1972;
copyright © NLB, 1972.
First published as ‘Studien iiber Autoritaét und Familie’
by Librairie Félix Alcan, 1936;
copyright © Herbert Marcuse, 1936.
This edition published by Verso, 2008;
copyright © Verso 2008.
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author and translator have been asserted
13579108642
Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG
USA: 180 Varick Street, New York, NY 10014-4606
www.versobooks.com
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-209-7
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Printed and bound by ScandBook AB, Sweden -
Translator’s note : My thanks are due to Ben Fowkes for his careful checking
of the translation and for his invaluable assistance in finding the English-
language sources for the quotations.
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INTRODUCTION
The authority relationship, as understood in these analyses,
assumes two essential elements in the mental attitude of he who
is subject to authority: a certain measure of freedom (voluntari-
ness: recognition and affirmation of the bearer of authority, which
is not based purely on coercion) and conversely, submission, the
tying of will (indeed of thought and reason) to the authoritative
wiolfa nl Oth er. Thus in the authority relationship freedom and
unfreedom, autonomy and heteronomy, are yoked in the same
concept and united in the single person of he who is subject. The
recognition of authority as a basic force of social praxis attacks the
very roots of human freedom: it means (in a different sense in
each case) the surrender of autonomy (of thought, will, action),
the tying of the subject’s reason and will to pre-establish con-
tents, in such a way that these contents do not form the ‘material’
to be changed by the will of the individual but are taken over as
they stand as the obligatory norms for his reason and will. Yet
bourgeois philosophy put the autonomy of the person right at the
centre of its theory: Kant’s teachings on freedom are only the
clearest and highest expression of a tendency which has been in
operation since Luther’s essay on the freedom of the Christian man.
The concept of authority thus leads back to the concept of
freedom: it is the practical freedom of the individual, his social
freedom and its absence, which is at stake. The union of internal
autonomy and external heteronomy, the disintegrati om
in the direction of its opposite is the decisive characteristic of the
concept of freedom wdhicho hams inaboturgeeois dthe ory since
thRee formation. Bourgeois theory has taken very great pains to
justify these contradictions and antagonisms.
The individual cannot be simultaneously free and unfree,
autonomous and heteronomous, unless the being of the person is
conceived as divisible and belonging to various spheres. This is
quite possible once one ceases to hypostatize ‘sub-
stance’. But the decisive factor is the mode of this division. If it
is undertaken dualistically, the world is split in half: two relatively
self-enclosed spheres are set up and freedom and unfreedom as
totalities divided between them in such a way that one sphere is
wholly a realm of freedom and the other wholly a realm of un-
freedom. Secondly, whias inttern al to the person is claimed as the
realm of freedom: the person as member of the realm of Reason
or of God (as ‘Christian’, as ‘thing in itself’, as intelligible being) is
free. Meanwhile, the whole ‘external world’, the person as mem-
ber of a natural realm or, as the case may be, of a world of
concupiscence which has fallen away from God (as ‘man’, as
‘appearance’), becomes a place of unfreedom. The Christian con-
ception of man as ‘created being’ ‘between’ natura naturata and
natura naturans, with the unalterable inheritance of the Fall, still
remains the unshaken basis of the bourgeois concept of freedom
in German Idealism. a
But the realm of freedom and the realm of unfreedom are not
simply contiguous with or superimposed on each other. They are
founded together in a specific relation. For freedom — and we must
hold fast to this astonishing phrase despite its paradoxical nature —
is the condition of unfreedom. Only because and in so far as man
is free can he be unfree; precisely because he is ‘actually’ (as a
Christian, as a rational person) completely free must he ‘un-
actually’ (as a member of the ‘external’ wor!d) be unfree. For the
full freedom of man in the ‘external’ world as well would indeed
simultaneously denote his complete liberation from God, his
enslavement to the Devil. This thought reappears in a secularized
form in Kant: man’s freedom as a rational being can only be
‘saved’ if as a sensual being hae ibs enatirenly doneto ndatu ral
necessity. The Christian doctrine of freedom pushes the libera-
tion of man back until it pre-dates his actual history, which then,
as the history of his unfreedom, becomes an ‘eternal’ consequence
of this liberation. In fact, strictly speaking there is no liberation of
man in history according to this doctrine or, to put it more
precisely, Christian doctrine has good reasons for viewing sucha
liberati rimarily somethin ative and evil, namely the
partial liberation from God, the achievement of freedom to sin (as
symbolized in the Fall).