Introduction: Necessity and Freedom in the Origins of Hegelian Marxism in the United States

Abstract

In the introduction, Rockwell outlines the different trajectories of Raya Dunayevskaya and Herbert Marcuse’s necessity and freedom dialectic, which shaped Hegelian Marxism. Their divergent pathways crystallized into, on the one hand Marxist Humanism, and on the other, Critical Theory. Rockwell shows the reciprocity of the historical events and the emergent theories—the historical and theoretical context of the years just prior to and including World War II and its long aftermath. Reason and Revolution, which Marcuse researched in the 1930s during the initial decade after his emigration to the United States from Germany, is a key source, since it remained the principal document of Marcuse’s Hegelian Marxism, which immediately led to Dunayevskaya’s assimilation of Marx’s humanism, and was influential for her political appropriations of Hegel’s texts.