Slater’s ‘Missing Marcuse’ is a forceful intervention against the depoliticised rescripting of gentrification as benign urban improvement. The iconic idea is that displacement cannot be treated as an incidental or empirically elusive side effect; it is the defining moral and analytical problem through which gentrification must be understood. Its theoretical contribution is to restore Peter Marcuse’s conceptual clarity to a field increasingly distorted by policy optimism, middle-class boosterism and methodological narrowing. Methodologically, the article operates as a critique of knowledge production, examining how scholarship, journalism and planning discourse erase displacement by narrowing evidence and reframing class remaking as collective good. Its conceptual operation is disciplinary correction: the concept of gentrification is returned to its origin in class inequality. The bridge to the wider field connects urban studies, housing politics, critical methodology and social justice theory.