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Ernst Bloch (1885–1977) was a German-Jewish Marxist political philosopher. His work can appear overly esoteric at times, infused as it is with what may be called a “messianic” political theology that sits uncomfortably with standard versions of Marxism and their dismissal of such “idealist” utopian dreaming. For Bloch, however, the limitless scope of the human imagination is the very keynote of human beings’ continual striving to reshape and remake the world as it is into what it might yet be.

Bloch lived through the most tumultuous and bloody decades of the twentieth century, over the course of which he produced a vast body of work that has reached an arguably smaller readership than is deserved. His magnum opus and most famous work, the monumental three-volume study, The Principle of Hope (1954–1959), brings together a dizzying array of conceptual and thematic motifs discernible throughout the rest of his writings. Bloch’s political philosophy can be broadly described as nondoctrinaire, thoroughly heterodox Marxism, but one richly textured by a messianic consciousness that absorbs and refines the apparently utopian possibilities glimpsed in the most everyday phenomena and the political conclusions that can be drawn from them.

Bloch’s unorthodox and reflexive philosophy had a not unproblematic reception during his own lifetime. It was curiously and somewhat incongruously accommodated—temporarily at least—by the official state wisdom of East Germany. Bloch’s actual political decisions sometimes were inconsistent as well, the most notorious of these being his defense of the Moscow Show Trials of 1937 (a series of staged trials of political opponents of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin) after his return from exile in the United States. In 1961 Bloch finally fell out with the German Democratic Republic for good, remaining in West Germany for the rest of his life.

Central to Bloch’s political philosophy is his theory of the “not yet” (noch-nicht); that is, the persistent and recurrent critical consciousness that indicts its own time as falling short of the possibilities both real and imagined that could yet come into being. This emancipatory demand of the “notyet-become,” so frequently and easily dismissed as wishful thinking, is for Bloch an inescapable and elemental force throughout human history. In this and other regards Bloch shares a distinct affinity with German cultural critic Walter Benjamin’s no less elusive messianic philosophy of hope. The time of the “not yet” is for Bloch anterior to the present; an advanced state of perceiving a future world yet to come while recognizing the existing shape of things to be neither infinite nor unchangeable. Such a total critique of existing society—indeed reality—cannot obviously be set out by or co-opted into any standard political program. Instead it can be expressed in theoretical reflection and culture on the one hand and popular social movements seeking to inaugurate widespread social and political change on the other.

Bloch offers a rich body of work linking seemingly disparate cultural and political fragments together into a unifying and consistent (but never doctrinaire) whole. Removed from the false certainties of orthodox Marxism, his philosophy of hope remains noncontemporaneous with both his time and the present day, and yet in spite of this—or indeed perhaps because of it—it is more illuminating than ever.

Bibliography:

Bronner, Stephen. “Utopian Projections: In Memory of Ernst Bloch.” In Not Yet: Reconsidering Ernst Bloch, edited by Jamie Owen Daniel and Tom Moylan, 165–174. London:Verso, 1997.
Daniel, Jamie Owen, and Tom Moylan, eds. Not Yet: Reconsidering Ernst Bloch. London:Verso, 1997.
Hudson,Wayne. The Marxist Philosophy of Ernst Bloch. London: Macmillan, 1982.
Kellner, Douglas. “Ernst Bloch, Utopia, and Ideology Critique.” Illuminations—The Critical Theory Project, 1997, www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/Illumina%20Folder/ke111.htm.