Ernst Bloch 1885 – 1977

Ernst Bloch was a German Marxist philosopher and one of the most original utopian thinkers of the twentieth century. After early association with Lukacs and Walter Benjamin, he spent the Nazi years in exile in the United States, then returned in 1949 to East Germany, from which he eventually fled to the West after the 1961 erection of the Berlin Wall. His three-volume Principle of Hope is a vast meditation on daydreams, fairy tales, music, religion, and political imagination as carriers of the not-yet-realized possibility of human flourishing. His thought has shaped liberation theology and the wider tradition of utopian critical theory.