Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud.

A PRESENTATION COPY.

First edition. 8vo (215 x 145mm). xii, 277, [1] pp. Original turquoise cloth, spine lettered in black, publishers device in black to front board, dust jacket (jacket slightly edge worn, otherwise a near fine copy). Boston, Beacon Press.

A presentation copy, inscribed by the author "To Dr. Abram L. Sachar With sincere regards, Herbert Marcuse November 1955" in blue ink to the front free endpaper. Abram L. Sachar (1899-1993) was the founding president of Brandeis University, where Marcuse held a professorship from 1954 to 1965, lecturing on the history of ideas, politics, social science, and philosophy, during which he published his two most important works - Eros and Civilization and One-Dimensional Man (1964). Marcuse's eleven years at Brandeis, and his relationship with Sachar, would end somewhat acrimoniously, in part due to Marcuse's public reactions to the foreign policies of the Johnson administration, which "undoubtedly blunted Sachar’s enthusiasm for retaining on the Brandeis faculty an irritant who—quite conveniently—was approaching retirement age" (Whitfield, A Radical in Academe, p. 109).  

One of the most influential products of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, Eros and Civilization formulated a philosophical system blending Hegelian logic with aspects of Marxist revolutionary praxis, along with an inversion of the concept of sublimation in Freudian psychoanalytic theory in which the dialectical progression of history is expression as a struggle against the repression of human desire.

Stock Code: 231213