ART AND UTOPIA
THE UTOPIAN FUNCTION OF ART AND LITERATURE:
SELECTED ESSAYS. By Ernest Bloch. Translated by Jack Zipes and
Frank Mecklenburg. M.l.T Press. $25.00.
Ernest Bloch inhabited the intellectual milieu of George Lukacs,
Theodore Adorno, and Bertolt Brecht, among others. He had been a student
in a seminar given by George Simmel, where he met Georg Lukacs. Lukacs
and he became friends and later philosophical adversaries. Like many of his
German-Jewish intellectual contemporaries, he was a refugee from Nazism,
first in England and then in the United States. Unlike Adorno and Max
Horkheimer, the leading figures of the Frankfort School, Bloch never found
regular employment until late in life. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, he was
able to compose
The Principle of Hope
and
Subjekt-Objekt
in Widener Li–
brary, while his wife supported him, working first as a domestic and later in a
Boston architect's office. in 1948, Bloch at the age of sixty-three was offered
the chair of philosophy at the University of Leipzig in East Germany, the
first teaching post he had ever held. While he was on vacation in West
Germany in 1961 , the East Germans put up the Berlin Wall. Bloch decided
not to return to East Germany. He died in 1977 at the age of ninety-two.
Bloch's affinities with the Frankfort School were profound but uneasy.
The opening essay of this collection contains a discussion between Bloch and
Adorno on "the contradictions of utopian longing," which makes them sound
like alter egos. There is scarcely a difference of view between them. Yet he
was ostracized by Adorno's colleague, Max Horkheimer, for his Stalinist de–
fense of the Soviet Union. Bloch had defended the Soviet regime in its con–
duct of the show trials of 1936, and he continued to justify police measures in
the Soviet Union and East Germany on the familiar theory of imperialist
encirclement. But Bloch's defense of the Soviet Union represents only one
side of his political and intellectual personality. Another side shows him to be
a critic of Stalinism, an advocate of aesthetic and intellectual freedom , though
the criticism and advocacy occurred within a context of loyalty to the Soviet
Union. It is clear from this collection of essays and from his other works (he
was the author of seventeen books) that Bloch is a writer of extraordinary
complexity, whose philosophical achievement is not to be reduced to Stalinist
politics. Of all the significant anti-Nazi German thinkers in the Marxist and
Hegelian tradition, he is perhaps the least known and the least understood.
Consider, for example, the anomaly of a Marxian utopian with Stalinist
