Abstract

This article offers a defense of Herbert Marcuse’s philosophy of science and technology against pragmatic tendencies prevalent in Marcusean scholarship and critical theory today. These tendencies, exemplified in the work of Andrew Feenberg, himself a former student of Marcuse, commonly include the rejection of Marcuse’s romanticism, utopianism, and metapsychology. I argue that these aspects of Marcuse’s thought should be reevaluated and taken as essential to his overall project. This apologia for Marcuse’s philosophy and vision of radical change is particularized in a sustained examination of the cognitive priority of imagination and the superior objectivity of marginalized experience as working together to provide plausible criteria for science and technology.