It is not a sign of disrespect to any major thinker if his thought is considered a symptom of wider phenomena that belong to whole social or cultural movements. In the case of Herbert Marcuse, in fact, such a treatment seems especially warranted. The chief interest of Marcuse's thought, accentuated by the writer's depth, erudition, and sophistication as a philosophical synthesizer, is that it exhibits in a curious and dramatic way the strains and stresses characterizing “New Left” radical thought as a whole in advanced industrial society. Marcuse's thought is situated almost exactly at the center point along the New Left spectrum, poised between and sharing in two related but diverging tendencies. The New Left, to put it briefly, is an uneasy amalgam of two movements, two large, basic issues of protest and dissatisfaction. One has a global basis and gains expression in demands to achieve peace, prosperity, and freedom, with particular reference to the poor, ex-colonial part of the world. The other has a parochial basis and is articulated as the demand to improve the quality of life in advanced and affluent societies. It has been argued (by Marcuse and others) that these two radical concerns simply dovetail into each other, or even that they are necessarily “presupposed” by each other. But the claim, to say the least, is highly problematic, and the more one tries to comprehend the nature of these two tendencies in theoretical terms, the more aware one becomes of the difficulties.