Marcuse writes that the western world has reached a new stage of development, in which "the defense of the capitalist system requires the organization of counterrevolution at home and abroad."

He accuses the west of "practicing the horrors of the Nazi regime", and of helping to launch massacres in Indochina, Indonesia, the Congo, Nigeria, Pakistan, and the Sudan.

He cites Arthur Schopenhauer's observation, in The World as Will and Representation (1818), that music "gives the innermost kernel preceding all form, or the heart of things".

[5] In Theory & Society, the intellectual historian Martin Jay called Counterrevolution and Revolt one of Marcuse's "major works".

[6] Brian Easlea described Marcuse's view that "Marx's notion of a human appropriation of nature is not altogether free from the hubris of domination" as courageous.