Herbert Marcuse, noted member of the Frankfurt School and known as "the father of the New Left," contributed much to cultural criticism, Marxist aesthetics, political philosophy, and psychoanalytic theory. Together with Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, he was a major proponent of what became known as the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. He was perhaps the most discussed philosopher of the 1960s and an essential impetus for the counterculture in the U.S. and France during the late 1960s. Although his influence waned in the 1990s, he nonetheless had a profound influence on the evolution of literary and cultural criticism, and much of his work continues to be relevant.

The eldest of three children, Marcuse was born into an upper-middle-class Jewish family in Berlin on 19 July 1898. His father, Carl Marcuse, was a successful businessman who began in the textile trade, then moved into real estate. His mother...