To undertake an incisive critical interpretation of Herbert Marcuse's thought, Sidney Lipshires inquires into the consistency of Marcuse's proposals with the thinking of Marx and Freud. For the most part the author, a historian, focuses on the chronological development of Marcuse's revolutionary utopianism and its relation to Freud's realism. In the course of Lipshires' analysis of this development he argues that Marcuse's extrapolation of Freud's theory is unsuccessful because it rejects Freudian constructs without a careful consideration of their meaning.

Marcuse came to Marxian theory from the perspective of a wellfounded understanding of Kant and Hegel; thus it was natural that