ABSTRACT
Ernst Bloch is an exhilarating thinker. There is an intellectual excitement in his work which is to be found in relatively few other twentieth-century philosophers or social theorists. This is partly due to the range of Bloch’s concerns. He ignores traditional scholarly divisions of labour, and instead chooses to roam across specialist disciplines and to investigate whatever is of relevance to his central concerns, wherever they might arise. Within one single text, biblical exegesis and theological speculation may rub shoulders with literary criticism, modern physics, historical analysis, philosophical clarification and political polemic. With a breathtaking elan Bloch can combine fairy-tales with sophisticated conceptual development, utopian hopes with modern theoretical physics. This imparts a richness of content to his work. He constantly draws out connections between disparate phenomena, establishing, for example, links between ancient Greek myths and contemporary detective stories, and between endurance dancing competitions and the Third Reich. Throughout, one is aware of the innovatory nature of his enterprise: he seeks to subvert the given, and totally reconstruct conceptions of reality. To this end, he develops his own systematic metaphysics and ontology, which in turn feeds into distinctive analyses of culture, religion, society and the like. The effect is to usher us into a world made new, in which many of the old familiar landmarks are gone; a unique Blochian world with its own topography, systems and processes. There is also the great imaginative sweep of his work. As befits the strong utopian impulse in all of his endeavours, there is a sustained visionary dimension in his writing, and a highly nuanced one. He is both a scholar and a practitioner of utopia. His work is
undoubtedly insightful, and on occasions achieves genuine profundity. This study is therefore motivated by a belief that Bloch is indeed worth reading: not simply as an historical curio nor a mere arcane footnote in the history of Marxism, but as an important writer and thinker, who combines an ingenious, subtle and imaginative investigation of utopias and utopianism with a comprehensive and often penetrating analysis of western culture, politics and society.
