You might want to
check out the following
documentary about Herbert Marcuse. Personally, I am a great admirer of him and what he has accomplished as a provocative thinker and lifetime activist (along with other thinkers of the
Frankfurt School).
BIO: Herbert Marcuse was born in Berlin on July 19,1898. After completing his
Ph.D. thesis at the University of
Freiburg in 1922, he moved to Berlin, where he worked in the book trade. He returned to
Freiburg in 1929 to write a
habilitation (professor's dissertation) with Martin Heidegger. In 1933, since he would not be allowed to complete that project under the Nazis, Herbert began work at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, a Marxist-oriented think-tank (as we might say today).
He emigrated from Germany that same year, going first to Switzerland, then the United States, where he became a citizen in 1940. During World War II he worked for the US Office of Strategic Services (forerunner of the CIA), analyzing intelligence reports about Germany (1942-45-51). In 1952 Herbert began a university teaching career as a political theorist, first at Columbia and Harvard, then at Brandeis from 1954 to 1965, and finally (already retirement-age), at the University of California, San Diego.
Work: His critiques of capitalist society (especially his 1955 synthesis of Marx and Freud, Eros and Civilization, and his 1964 book One-Dimensional Man) resonated with the concerns of the leftist student movement in the 1960s. Because of his willingness to engage seriously with (and support) student protesters, Herbert soon became known as "the father of the new left" (a term he disliked and rejected). He had many speaking engagements in the US and Europe in the late 1960s and in the 1970s. He died on July 29, 1979, after suffering a stroke during a visit to Germany. (http://www.marcuse.org)
Further links:The below documentary is well worth a watch, though the narrator's voice can be annoying at times.
