In the "Political Preface" that opens the work, Marcuse writes that the title Eros and Civilization expresses the optimistic view that the achievements of modern industrial society would make it possible to use society's resources to shape "man's world in accordance with the Life Instincts, in the concerted struggle against the purveyors of Death." He concludes the preface with the words, "Today the fight for life, the fight for Eros, is the political fight."[1] Marcuse questions the view of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, that "civilization is based on the permanent subjugation of the human instincts". He discusses the social meaning of biology — history seen not as a class struggle, but a fight against repression of our instincts. He argues that "advanced industrial society" (modern capitalism) is preventing us from reaching a non-repressive society "based on a fundamentally different experience of being, a fundamentally different relation between man and nature, and fundamentally different existential relations".[2]
Marcuse also discusses the views of the philosophers Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Schiller,[3] and criticizes the psychiatrist Carl Jung, whose psychology he describes as an "obscurantist neo-mythology". He also criticizes neo-Freudians like Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, Harry Stack Sullivan, and Clara Thompson.[4]
