About
This digital exhibit revolves around critical theorist Herbert Marcuse’s relationships with New Left activists during the long 1960s, particularly in the period surrounding the global uprisings of 1968. His concepts of the one-dimensional society, the great refusal, and repressive tolerance influenced and were influenced by these movements, from the ideologically fractured Students for a Democratic Society to burgeoning Marxist feminist movements. As my network analysis shows, his theory and praxis made a particular impact on his students and intellectuals within Students for a Democratic Society, the later Marxist organization New American movement, and the Gay Liberation Front. My primary sources include photos of Marcuse from the Harry Crosby photo collection at UC San Diego and photos of Angela Davis from the Los Angeles Times photograph collection. Today’s scholar activists and militant students are living through revolutionary turmoil, uprisings, and state repression. While knowledge flows organically out of social movements, I believe we can still learn much from Marcuse today.
About Julia:
Julia Tanenbaum is an archivist at the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives. Her academic interests include community-based archives, social movement history, and critical carceral studies. You can view her website at https://jmtanenbaum.github.io/welcome/
Data Critique:
I constructed my data set from scratch, primarily using the Marcuse website maintained by Herbert’s grandchildren’s list of “scholars and activists”, books from the 1970s like Critical Interruptions: New Left Perspectives on Herbert Marcuse, The Critical Spirt: Essays in Honor of Herbert Marcuse, and the more recent The Great Refusal: Herbert Marcuse and Contemporary Social Movements to find relevant individuals. If I could not find out what organizations they were involved with from their author biography or a secondary source, which was easy for more well known individuals like Doug Ireland, I often tracked down their personal websites for more information. In other cases, secondary sources on organizations like the New American movement provided names of participants. Despite my focus on organizations, splitting up the data this way did not make a very legible network graph because of both the very small dataset (a result of doing it by hand instead of some more automated way and my focus on the U.S) and variety of organizations, most of which had one or two participants. I also couldn’t get organizations to show up in the tool tip in my final embedded graph, so I decided to nix this category in the graph and instead mention individual organizations in the narrative. My other problem was how to categorize student anti-Vietnam war activists and members of Students for a Democratic Society. While the group initially focused primarily on ending the war, their efforts extended far beyond that. However, I usually lacked information on the specific roles individuals played in SDS so I categorized them as part of the “student movement.” In my dataset, this also means the peace movement. Each node (or individual) is connected to a movement, which consists of multiple organizations that were at least somewhat ideologically and strategically aligned. For instance, I combined the Congress on Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee under “Civil Rights.” You can view the data on github here. The edges indicated their relationship to Marcuse. The categories were straightforward except for “influenced,” which generally means they cited his work or appeared in one of the aforementioned anthologies. I did not include individuals who spoke alongside him at rallies because ephemera is more difficult to track down. I did not have time to write descriptions for the photos, and included them primarily to humanize their subjects instead of depicting them as data points.
Bibliography for both data and written copy
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- Refusal and Liberation: Marcuse and the New Left Julia M Tanenbaum