Occupy This: Is It Comeback Time for Herbert Marcuse?

By Dilip -

"At the end of every concrete philosophy stands the public act." : Herbert Marcuse
Bless the American university, that exemplar of pluralism. Was it a playful University of Pennsylvania scheduler who managed to assign to the same all-purpose Houston Hall over a few days in October both the annual good-vibes Penn Family Weekend and "Critical Refusals: The International Herbert Marcuse Society's Fourth Biennial Conference"?
Not a few Penn dads and moms headed to the first event after parking their oversized SUV's near hotel rooms going for sums that might reinvigorate Haiti. (Even the modestly accoutered Sheraton University City Hotel offered a "special rate" of only $309 a night.) On the Friday, options included the session "Caring From Afar: Helping Your Child Succeed at Penn," or drop-in "Classes With Your Student." Everyone from the LGBT Center to the Wharton School to the Leonard A. Lauder Career Center threw an Open House, and other offerings included facilities tours, a "Conversation With President Amy Gutmann," comedy and musical performances, and opportunities to make family videos and learn the latest Google technology.
Then again, if there had been a mention in the Family Weekend material that Marcuse mania was taking place a few yards away, parents might have wandered toward Bodek Lounge: a capacious meeting space filled with adults their own age in flannel shirts and mussy gray hair rather than J. Crew and sharp haircuts, as well as an impressive group of young folks castable in next year's sure-thing Hollywood film-ploitation of Occupy Wall Street (Michael Douglas as Mayor Bloomberg?). Bodek served as weekend home base for admirers, scholars, and ex-students of Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), the Frankfurt School philosopher who, in the backhanded language of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "endured a brief moment of notoriety in the 1960s, when his best-known book, One-Dimensional Man (1964), was taken up by the mass media as the bible of the student revolts which shook most Western countries in that decade." http://chronicle.com/article/Occupy-This-Is-It-Comeback/130028/

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