Herbert Marcuse

Born in Berlin in 1898, Marcuse studied under Heidegger at Freiburg before joining the Institute for Social Research and its circle of critical theorists. Between 1943 and 1950 he worked for the Office of Strategic Services, the CIA's predecessor, writing a takedown of Soviet ideology that became Soviet Marxism: A Critical Analysis in 1958. By then he'd published Eros and Civilization in 1955, arguing that modern society repressed human freedom through new forms of control - not just political but technological and cultural. One-Dimensional Man followed in 1964, and the timing was perfect: students in West Germany, France, and the United States picked it up as a manual for what they were already feeling. He became the pre-eminent theorist of the New Left, the one philosopher the movements claimed as their own, and died in 1979 with a reputation larger in activist circles than his name ever became outside them.