Art as architecture of a free society. Some notes from the aesthetics of Herbert Marcuse

Abstract

The article provides the essential and differentiating features of Herbert Marcuse's aesthetic theory. This brilliant intellectual, from a young age showed enormous concern for aesthetic problems, but in his stage of maturity he trusted in the liberating and radical role of art as the last link that connects the present with the hope of the future. Marcuse was one of the few Marxist intellectuals who understood that the function of art is to become a determining factor in the reconstruction of nature and society, that is, in the architecture of a free society.