Product Description

This three-volume text is a critical history of the utopian vision and an exploration of the possible reality of utopia. Even as the world has rejected the doctrine on which Bloch sought to base his utopia, his work still challenges us to think more insightfully about our own visions of a better world. Volume one lays the foundations of the philosophy of process and introduces the idea of the "not-yet-conscious" - the anticipatory element that Bloch sees as central to human thought. It also contains an account of the aesthetic interpretations of utopian "wishful images" in fairy tales, popular fiction, travel, theatre, dance and the cinema. Volume two presents "the outlines of a better world." It examines the utopian systems that progressive thinkers have developed in the fields of medicine, painting, opera, poetry, and ultimately, philosophy. It is an account of utopian thought from the Greeks to the present. Volume three offers a prescription for ways in which humans can reach their proper "homeland," where social justice is coupled with an openness to change and to the future.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1638951 in Books
• Published on: 1995-07-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 3
• Binding: Paperback
• 1480 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Ernst Bloch, the great utopian Marxist philosopher and author of The Principle of Hope, developed a method of criticism that expands, and goes beyond, conventional approaches to culture and ideology. In doing so he provides one of the richest compendiums for the critique of ideology and the deconstruction and unpacking of the "cultural" to be found in Western Philosophy. His huge, awe-inspiring and peerless magnus opus The Principle of Hope (available here as a three-volume set or individually as Vol 1, Vol 2 and Vol 3) is a massive testament to the mature philosophy of a man who inspired Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer and who stands in a tradition of greats including Walter Benjamin and Georg Lukacs. Coming to grips with Bloch isn't easy: The Principle of Hope is over 1400 pages long, contains three volumes (according to Douglas Kellner, "roughly correspond[ing] to Hegel's division of his system into interrogations of subjective, objective and absolute spirit"), and is divided into five parts including all-told 55 chapters.

For Bloch, hope (utopia, human emancipation) permeates everything everywhere. As incomplete beings we seek for the Utopian to complete and fulfil us, and the Utopian is in everything (i.e., in cultural forms such as film, fairy tales, philosophy). The Principle of Hope is Bloch's systematic interrogation of how myths, movies, theatre, art, religion and so on, all contain emancipatory moments that question everything and hint at a fuller and fully human life.

Bloch is magnificent and truly worth the challenge. If The Principle of Hope is too formidable then perhaps the essays of The Utopian Function of Art would be a useful starter. But be prepared: they will only make you hungry for the whopping meal to come. --Mark Thwaite

Review
""The Principle of Hope" is one of those all-about-everything books characteristic of German culture during the last 150 years. But unlike its direct predecessor, Oswald Spengler's "The Decline of the West," Bloch's magnum opus. . . reverses Spengler's world-historical scheme by turning "Weltangst" . . . into hope.' In this placing of hope' at the center of a history, an anthropology, and a phenomenology of mankind lies the originality of Bloch's undertaking." --J. P. Stern, The New Republic