The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (162 page)

 
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(1898–1979)
German philosopher. Member of the
Frankfurt School
of
critical theory
. Escaping Nazi persecution, he settled in the United States in 1934. As an enthusiastic supporter of the student and black movements of the 1960s, he became known as the ‘father of the New Left’. Arguing that ‘the task of theory’ was ‘to liberate practice’ (1928), he called for a reconstruction of Marxist social and historical theory. His work centred upon an attempted synthesis of
Hegel
, Marx , and Freud (his most significant text on the latter being
Eros and Civilization
(1955).
Marcuse repudiated economic determinism in favour of an affirmation of human potential. Being and consciousness were dialectical partners with neither having priority over the other. In changing the world, humans re-create themselves (what his mentor
Heidegger
termed ‘authentic existence’). Here Marcuse was a precursor of phenomenological writers such as Sartre and Merleau-Ponty .
One Dimensional Man
(1964) described how advanced technological society was able to contain the forces of revolution by co-opting the working class through consumerism, creating ‘false needs’, compounding alienation, and producing a system where people are enslaved but believe they have freedom (‘unreal freedom’). In
Repressive Tolerance
(1965), he argued that liberal democracy defined the parameters of political debate and so blocked any real criticism (although this could be argued to be an un falsifiable statement).
Marcuse acclaimed the New Left for its confrontational politics and its creation of a new sensibility. It would act as a catalyst both for working-class and Third World revolutionary struggles. He saw the events of 1968 as an instinctual act of liberation.
GS 

 
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A constituency in which the distribution of party support is relatively evenly balanced so that the incumbent party has a narrow majority and a small net movement of voters will lead to its changing hands. In many constituencies, the socioeconomic make-up of the electorate is such as to permanently skew support to one political party, and incumbents have substantial majorities which are normally unassailable by challengers. Such one-party ‘safe’ seats predominate in many political systems, in which case the outcomes of elections are decided in the ‘marginals’, the often small number of seats in which there are genuine prospects of partisan change. For this reason, the parties tend to concentrate their campaigning efforts on wooing voters in marginal constituencies, and the latter also attract especial attention from the opinion polls. It may be noted that seats can, of course, shift between the ‘marginal’ and ‘safe’ categories reflecting population movements, boundary changes, and political realignments.
ST 

 
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See
economic man
.

 
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The technique of studying economic change by examining any small rate of change of any one variable (e.g cost, revenue, consumer satisfaction) relative to another. Analytically powerful because it enables the rules of calculus to be directly applied to economic reasoning. Marginalism was imported into political thinking by economists who turned to politics. The benefit of marginalist thought is that it can dispel common fallacies, for instance ‘We have spent £K (where
K
is a large number) on Concorde so far and have got nothing to show for it; therefore we should spend the further £
K
' (where
K
' is a slightly smaller number) needed to complete the development, so as not to waste the money we have spent already'; or ‘If everybody shirked, no co-operative benefit, such as reducing pollution, would ever occur; therefore I should do my bit’. In each case, only the marginal cost of contributing another pound or another hour is relevant to evaluating the costs and benefits of acting. Some critics have accused marginalism of introducing a selfish orientation to thinking about politics ( see
economic man
).

 
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