"Marcuse, Sartre, Colletti and Althusser were style-maestros of turgidity and never tried to rise to the flights of Marx and Engels in their inspired moments. Not one of them would choose a monosyllable if a longer word could be discovered or devised. Their Marxism, if not exactly pessimistic, was cramped and cautious. What is more, they were philosophers writing mainly for other philosophers. Only Marcuse became a genuine favourite of the thousands of students who rebelled in 1968 against ‘bourgeois society’ and university discipline, as well as the American war in Vietnam. He and his ideas were accorded a profile in Playboy magazine. (It is hard to imagine another Marxist theorist, except perhaps Marx himself, tolerating this without complaint.) Marcuse had grown popular because of the significance he attached to the students; it also did him no harm that he was willing to discuss the erotic as well as the socio-political."