Critical Theory_A Very Short Introduction by Stephen Eric Bronner

Author:Stephen Eric Bronner [Bronner, Stephen Eric]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy, Sociology, History
ISBN: 9780199730070
Amazon: 0190692677
Goodreads: 9486433
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2011-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Anticipating utopia

Ernst Bloch liked to quote those words. But he believed that utopia requires a more robust political and philosophical underpinning—and he sought to provide just that in his lifelong preoccupation with the “dream of the better life.” Attempts to demonstrate its content led to disquisitions on everything from reincarnation to alchemy. But he also offered a material foundation for utopia in the failed uprisings, forgotten experiments, and unrealized ideas that comprise the underground history of the revolution. All of them provide intimations of a world built on equality, justice, and freedom. Bloch’s writings thus reinvigorate an idea as old as humanity itself. Their unfinished, free-flowing, and associative character complements their classical erudition, expressionist literary style, and apocalyptic visions. Anticipatory fantasy mixes with a critical use of memory. Impulses for political emancipation are gleaned from the workers’ councils of his time back over to the free towns of Europe, the theology of forgotten Protestant revolutionaries like Thomas Munzer, the origins of natural right, and the sacred texts of the most varied religions.

Admittedly: the claims made by Bloch were too often asserted rather than argued; his interpretive criteria were sometimes vague; and he often blurred the line between fantasy and logic. Yet, his desire was to make utopia concrete. The best life contests every currently alienated moment of the totality. It projects a unity between subject and object that turns the world into an experiment for the most diverse practices of individuality. The purpose animating this vast enterprise crystallizes in the closing lines of Bloch’s three-volume The Principle of Hope:

…. man everywhere is still living in prehistory, indeed all and everything still stands before the creation of the world, of a right world. True genesis is not at the beginning but at the end, and it starts to begin only when society and existence become radical, i.e., grasp their roots. But the root of history is the working, creating human being who reshapes and overhauls the given facts. Once he has grasped himself and re-established what is his, without expropriation and alienation, in real democracy, there arises in the world something which shines into the childhood of all and in which no one has yet been: a homeland.

Ernst Bloch subscribed to a version of this position throughout his long life. His Subject-Object (1949) and the famous conclusion to Spirit of Utopia (1918), “Karl Marx, Death and the Apocalypse,” evince roughly the same vision. A mainstay of the German avant-garde, a maverick Marxist who ultimately endorsed Stalinism in the 1930s, Bloch became a professor at the University of Leipzig after World War II, emigrated to the West when the Berlin Wall was erected in 1961, and taught at the University of Tübingen until his death. In the years before World War I, he and Lukács were best friends. They became Marxists together, and their work reflected the ambitions and hopes associated with the heroic years of the Russian Revolution. They were always together in the cafes and attending events—so much so that

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