Inside the Development of Marxist Humanism and Critical Theory: The Dunayevskaya–Marcuse Correspondence

Abstract

In this chapter, Rockwell argues that the Raya Dunayevskaya–Herbert Marcuse correspondence, primarily from its initiation in late 1954 through 1960, when studied together with Dunayevskaya’s and Marcuse’s key publications in this period (including Dunayevskaya’s Marxism and Freedom, for which Marcuse wrote a preface), suggests that Dunayevskaya’s theoretic work influenced Marcuse’s theory development in ways that he may never have acknowledged, and certainly, heretofore, have not been widely recognized. For example, for the first time in his already substantial body of work on Hegel and Marx, Marcuse in his preface to Marxism and Freedom quoted and discussed Marx’s Grundrisse (a work that only recently had become widely available) in response to Dunayevskaya’s analysis of that text in the body of Marxism and Freedom.