Herbert Marcuse: "The End of the Utopia" in the 21st Century

This paper studies the concept of "utopia" in the work of Herbert Marcuse in order to understand his misconstrued and decontextualized proclamation of the end of the utopia in 1967. I will start with the distinction between utopia and ideology with the help of Mannheim and Ricoeur, and with the contextualization of Marcusian utopia in the Frankfurt School as well as in the concrete utopia (Bloch). From his early criticism of Mannheim, Marcuse is shown as a philosopher willing to restore the repressed dimensions of rationality as well as the free play of the faculties leading to a new anthropology. I value the Habermasian critique of utopia and I conclude presenting some crystallizations of the Marcusian utopia in the XXI century.