Background
Bloch, Ernst was born in 1885 in Ludwigshofen, Germany.
Bloch, Ernst was born in 1885 in Ludwigshofen, Germany.
Main publications:
(1959) Gesamtausgabe, 16 vols, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp (includes the three following):
(1918) Geist der Utopie [Spirit of Utopia].
(1921) Thomas Munier als Theologe der Revolution [Thomas Munzer as Theologian of the Revolution],
(1959) Das Prinzip Hoffnung [The Principle of Hope], 3 vols.
(1971) On Karl Marx, New York: Herder & Herder.
Secondary literature:
Hudson, Wayne (1982) The Marxist Philosophy of Ernst Bloch. London: Macmillan.
Kolakowski, Leszek (1978) Main Currents of Marxism, vol. 3, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Alter spending the First World War in Switzerland, started his teaching career in Leipzig i
1918. before working as a freelance writer in the 1920s. With the rise of the Nazis he left Germany,n 1933, moving ultimately to the USA where he started work on his magnum opus. Das Prinzip Hoffnung (1959).
He returned to Leipzig in 1948 I® teach philosophy, and in 1955 won the Nationalpreis of the German Democratic Repub. > but the government found his ideas increas- •ngly heterodox, his works were condemned and be was forbidden to publish. In 1961 he defected *° !be West, becoming a Professor at Tübingen.
Nis final years were spent lecturing and writing, to tee acclaim of a number of thinkers in the West. Although standardly classified as Marxist, loch s thinking share little with orthodox Marxlsm,n terms of concepts, methods, interests or even style. With Marx and ‘scientific socialism’ as °uly one influence among many on his thought, loch was an avowed supporter of utopianism, which he sets in a very specific epistemological and metaphysical context.
Reality is not a fixed, stable system but is essentially teleological, the process a'ming at and culminating in utopia. This transformation, however, is not brought about y the operation of impersonal objective laws of 'storical development, but by a transformation l^hin the mind of each individual, a transformalon Produced by the individual’s understanding 0 the unfolding movement towards the utopian jteal. Unsurprisingly. Marxist theoreticians have ound such views idealist, unscientific and unarxist, but in fields of study beyond Marxism, such as radical theology, he has been much more 'n uential and highly regarded.