Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud is a 1955 book by the German philosopher and social critic Herbert Marcuse, in which he proposes a non-repressive society and attempts a synthesis of the theories of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. One of Marcuse's best known works, its title alludes to Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). Eros and Civilization has been compared to Norman O.