Refusal and Utopia
This discussion has focused on only a few areas of Marcuse’s thought ,chosen for their possible relation to public administration theory.It is heady stuff, surprising in the way radical leftist thought of the l 940s through 1 970s connects to,explains,and suggests ways to address the current situation.It can be difficult to hear, in part because it requires setting aside contemporary aversion to metanarrative and broad social theory, and in part because Marcuse may be right:we are increasingly closed off to alternatives as one—dimensional thinking becomes the norm.
Marcuse was pleased at the social resistance among students and intellectuals in the 1960s and 1970s.Though he did not think it sufficient to cause much change,he hoped it might in the long term build toward some thing more significant.He thought change,because of the nature of the current society,would have to take place as a“determinate negation"’in a break with the present(Marcuse,1970,P.76).One way people could express their disapproval of present conditions is the Great Refusal, in which people refuse to participate in much of what modem society offers and requires.This is not a call to a collective social movement.but the withdrawal of individuals from society in the interest of a“pacified existence,”with human qualities that now seem asocial and unpatriotic---qualities such as me refusal of all toughness,togetherness,and brutality:disobedience to the tyranny of the majority;profession of fear and weakness(the most rational reaction to this society!);a sensitive intelligence sickened by that which is being perpetrated;the commitment to the feeble and ridiculed actions of protest and refusal.These expressions of humanity, too.will be marred by necessary compromise—by the need to cover oneself, to be capable of cheating the cheaters, and to live and think in spite of them.(Marcuse,1964,pp.242-243)