Herbert Marcuse giving a lecture in Berlin, 1967.

“In May 1968, the neo-Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse visited Paris and Berlin at the height of the student movements that were making news around the world. The text presented here is the transcript of a two-hour talk about those events that Marcuse delivered on May 23, 1968, shortly after his return to the United States, while the outcome of the May movement in France was still very much in doubt. It offers unique insights into the way a thinker often credited with providing the European student movements of 1968 with much of their ideological energy viewed them as they unfolded. Marcuse had gone to Paris to participate in an academic conference on ‘The Role of Karl Marx in the Development of Contemporary Scientific Thought.’ By the time he arrived in Paris, the student movement was already under way and the French press…