Utopia and Marxism in Ernst Bloch

Ernst Bloch celebrated his 90th birthday in Summer of 1975 and was acclaimed throughout Europe as of most important philosophers of our epoch.I He was awarded honorary degrees from Universities in Paris, Prague and Tiibingen, and received glowing eulogies in mass media. This widespread commemoration for a self-proclaimed Marxist by a variety of sources spanning ideological spectrum might strike one as surprising. More startling is wildly variant interpretations of Bloch's work. On Left, he was appraised an exemplary Marxist, 2 German philosopher of October Revolution.3 A New Left Festschrift for Bloch in Germany bluntly claimed: From no other Marxist theoretician can one learn so much as from Ernst Bloch.4 In Der Spiegel, Gershom Scholem said of Bloch: the ninety-year old has become a blind visionary, a master who has survived fight with dragons that he has waged for forty years and has become a wise man in sense of old Jewish definition of an 'old man' as one who 'has conquered wisdom'.5 A reviewer of his latest work describes him as a mystic,6 and Bloch was acclaimed by theologians as one of foremost influences on fashionable theology of hope. A recent biographer of Bloch claimed: It is between three poles of Marxism, mysticism, and Karl May that life and thought of philosopher Ernst Bloch has taken place.7 An important Festschrift put out by Suhrkamp Press contains a collection of reviews of Bloch's major works and personal testimonies by Hermann Hesse, Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, and others who call attentiotn to astonishing range of Bloch's work.8 Hans Mayer summed up conflicting interpretations by describing Bloch as philosopher, aesthetician and political theorist whose philosophy is saturated with experienced