ABSTRACT
This final chapter deals with three perennial themes in Bloch’s work. The first of these, natural law, is not one normally associated with the Marxist tradition, and its long-standing strictures on ‘bourgeois’ rights. For Bloch, however, the natural law tradition was rich in humanist values, and was therefore a far from spent force. Its central concern with human dignity placed it at the forefront of the struggle for a genuine socialism, and Bloch’s own experience of the indignities of the ‘socialism’ of the GDR certainly reinforced this conviction. The concern of utopianism is with human happiness. Bloch’s entire philosophy is utopian, but it is worth examining his specific analyses of the various forms of utopianism. For example, in The Principle of Hope, Bloch develops a vast taxonomy of manifestations of the utopian, encompassing a quite extraordinary range of phenomena. Alongside the exuberant open-endedness of this approach, one can also detect the desire to discipline the utopian in an attempt to develop a politically realistic utopianism. This said, Bloch was not always successful in avoiding an authoritarian utopianism. Finally, we shall consider Bloch’s thoughts on nature. In a sense, this will bring the study full circle, for Bloch’s philosophical starting point is the dynamic creativity of the material. It was his conviction that the adventure of this material universe had only just begun, and that the production of humanity, though nature’s most spectacular feat to date, was by no means its last. It is therefore appropriate to finish with Bloch’s spectacular cosmological speculations.
