Herbert Marcuse - The neo-conservative critics of leftist critics of mass culture ridicule th

The neo-conservative critics of leftist critics of mass culture ridicule the protest against Bach as background music in the kitchen, against Plato and Hegel, Shelley and Baudelaire, Marx and Freud in the drugstore. Instead, they insist on recognition of the fact that the classics have left the mausoleum and come to life again, that people are just so much more educated. True, but coming to life as classics, they come to life as other than themselves; they are deprived of their antagonistic force, of the estrangement which was the very dimension of their truth.

- Herbert Marcuse

source: Herbert Marcuse (2013). “One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society”, p.67, Routledge

topic: Plato, Mass Culture, People, Baudelaire, Shelley, Hegel, Mausoleum, Background Music, Estrangement