Abstract

In Reason and Revolution, and even better in his essay on “A Study of Authority” (originally written for the Institut für Sozialforschung's monumental work Ueber Authorität und Familie in the middle 1930s), Marcuse traced out the process of the secularization of Christianity from Luther to Hegelian philosophy, and its eventual dissolution into sociology in the middle of the nineteenth century. Sociology was to be that collective self-consciousness whereby society would organize itself in the interest of human emancipation. But, as Marx readily pointed out, in a society split into conflicting classes, this collective self-consciousness degenerated into the ideology of the ruling class and, far from being a means of human emancipation, it became a tool of social control and apology for the existing status quo.