Eros and Civilization
Cover of the first edition
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| Author | Herbert Marcuse |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Sigmund Freud |
| Published | 1955 (Beacon Press) |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover and Paperback) |
| Pages | 277 (Beacon Press paperback edition) |
| ISBN | |
Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (1955; second edition 1966) is a book by the German philosopher and social critic Herbert Marcuse, in which Marcuse proposes a non-repressive society and attempts a synthesis of the theories of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud; it has been suggested that the work also reveals the influence of Martin Heidegger. The title of Eros and Civilization alludes to Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). One of Marcuse's best known works, and the book with which he achieved international fame, Eros and Civilization has been compared to books such as Norman O. Brown's Life Against Death (1959). Eros and Civilization helped shape the subcultures of the 1960s. The 1966 edition has an added "political preface".
Marcuse discusses the social meaning of biology - history seen not as a class struggle, but a fight against repression of our instincts. He argues that "advanced industrial society" (modern capitalism) is preventing us from reaching a non-repressive society "based on a fundamentally different experience of being, a fundamentally different relation between man and nature, and fundamentally different existential relations". He contends that Freud's argument that repression is needed by civilization to persist is mistaken, as Eros is liberating and constructive.
Marcuse starts with the conflict described by Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents - the struggle between human instincts and the conscience of repression (superego), which is self-repressing trying to follow the society's mores and norms. Freud claimed that a clash between Eros and civilization results in the history of Man being one of his repression: 'Our civilization is, generally speaking, founded on the suppression of instincts.' Sex produces the energy, and it is repressed so the energy can be channeled into progress - but the price of progress is the prevalence of guilt instead of happiness. "Progress", for Marcuse, is a concept that provides the explanation and excuse of why the system has to continue; it is the reason the happiness of people is sacrificed (see also pleasure principle).
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