ABSTRACT
It is worth reflecting on Bloch’s sheer longevity. He died in 1977 aged 92. His death locates him in the contemporary world (he died, after all, only six years before Michel Foucault), yet his birth occurred in the distant world of late nineteenth-century Imperial Germany. He was well into his sixties before the bulk of the work for which he is best known was published, and much of that appeared in his seventies and eighties. A lifetime’s experience of the turbulence of the century was already behind him. He was in his thirties at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, in his late forties when Hitler came to power and in his sixties when he ended his period of American exile and embarked on his first academic post in East Germany. Still to come was the decision in his seventies, precipitated by the building of the Berlin Wall, to make his home in West Germany. He encountered all of this as a left-wing, Central-European Jew; politics, geography and culture conspiring to place him at the storm-centre of the modern era. There was much involuntary wandering - flight from the war fever of First World War Germany, flight from the terror of the Nazis and flight from the tyranny of the GDR. Hard political decisions had to be made, particularly over the question of support for the Soviet Union. Bloch nailed his colours to the new Soviet experiment, a decision that was to have momentous consequences for both his life and thought. Throughout, his monumental theoretical system was developing. There is an enduring visionary and messianic dimension in his work - an almost visceral yearning for the utopian and the eschatological. Alongside this, however, is
the desire to be hard-headed in the ways of the world, not to succumb to sentimental fancies or naive strategies and tactics. His own life testifies to the strains of this tension.
