ERNST BLOCH (1885-1977) was a German Marxist philosopher and one of the great political intellectuals of 20th century Germany.  His work was influenced by Hegel and Marx, as well as by apocalyptic and religious thinkers such as Thomas Müntzer, Paracelsus, and Jacob Boehme.  He established friendships with György Lukács, Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno.

He gained his fame as a humanistic interpreter of Marxist thought, explaining the thrust of Marx's historical materialism in terms of a tendency on the part of all things to become more and better than they are.  Adorno said that there was nothing that he had written that did not in some way refer back to Bloch's SPIRIT OF UTOPIA (1918) -- a peculiar amalgam of biblical, Marxist, and Expressionist turns -- and he was later to say that Bloch had restored honour to the concept of utopia.  The book is a unique attempt to rethink the history of Western civilizations as a process of revolutionary disruptions and to reread the artworks, religions, and philosophies of this tradition as incentives to continue disrupting.

Bloch's magnum opus, the three-volume PRINCIPLE OF HOPE (1938-1947), lays out the myriad ways in which hope and the human desire for liberation and fulfilment appear in our everyday lives.  It deals with the ways in which we both hide and express our hopes in dreams and fairytales, sport, music, love and that all of these are expressions of hopes which cannot yet be realised.  His book on the rise of fascism in the 1930s, HERITAGE OF OUR TIMES (1935), attacked both the orthodox Marxist left and his friends in the Frankfurt School for not realising that fascism was, in his words, a perverted religious movement which won people over with quasi-utopian ideas about the wonders of a future Reich.

Perhaps his most significant impact on intellectual debate was the way in which he treated religious expression as an essential part of the expression of the human desire for liberation.  His book ATHEISM IN CHRISTIANITY (1968) is about religion as exodus and the transcending of real material conditions without the need for a transcendental realm outside of material reality.  In this sense the death of God is an essential part of the religious experience.


The following books are in PDF format unless otherwise indicated:

* Aesthetics and Politics (Verso, 1980).  With Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, and Georg Lukacs. -- PDF + ePUB

* Atheism in Christianity: The Religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom (Herder & Herder, 1972).  Translated by J. T. Swann.

* Essays on the Philosophy of Music (Cambridge, 1985).  Translated by Peter Palmer.

* Heritage of Our Times (California, 1991).  Translated by Neville and Stephen Plaice. -- PDF + ePUB

* On Karl Marx (Herder & Herder, 1971 / Verso, 2018).  Translated by John Maxwell. -- PDF + ePUB

* Philosophy of the Future, A (Herder & Herder, 1970).  Translated by John Cumming.

* Principle of Hope, The (MIT, 1986).  3 volumes.  Translated by Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight.

* Spirit of Utopia, The (Stanford, 2000).  Translated by Anthony A. Nassar.

* Traces (Stanford, 2006).  Translated by Anthony A. Nassar.

* Utopian Function of Art and Literature, The (MIT, 1989).  Translated by Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg.

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