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.

Ernst Bloch was born in 1885 at Ludwigshafen, in the Palatinate, the son of a railway engineer of Jewish background. He studied philosophy under Theodor Lipps at Munich and Oswald Kulpe at Wurzburg, and took his doctorate in 1908. The first edition of Spirit of Utopia (Geist der Utopie) appeared in 1918, after he had spent the war years in Switzerland in the company of Hugo Ball, Walter Benjamin, and Georg Lukacs.

Forced into exile after 1933, he lived in Zurich, Vienna, Paris, and Prague before settling from 1938 to 1949 in the United States, where he wrote much of his masterwork. Returning to East Germany in 1949 he held the chair of philosophy at Leipzig, but his Marxist heterodoxy led to increasing pressure and, after the 1961 building of the Berlin Wall caught him on the western side, he settled in Tubingen. His major works include the three-volume Principle of Hope (Das Prinzip Hoffnung, 1954-1959), Atheism in Christianity, Natural Law and Human Dignity, and the early Thomas Munzer as Theologian of the Revolution.

Bloch's hermeneutic of hope identified the not-yet, the anticipatory consciousness embedded in fairy tales, alchemy, religion, music, and political utopia, as the humanizing reservoir of Marxist humanism. His writing shaped Jurgen Moltmann's theology of hope, the Frankfurt School's reception of utopian motifs, and recent discussions of religion and the secular. He died at Tubingen in August 1977.