Stanford University Press Spirit of Utopia

I am. We are. That is enough. Now we have to start. These are the opening words of Ernst Bloch s first major work, The Spirit of Utopia, written mostly in 1915-16, published in its first version just after the First World War, republished five years later, 1923, in the version here presented for the first time in English translation. The Spirit of Utopia is one of the great historic books from the beginning of the century, but it is not an obsolete one. In its style of thinking, a peculiar amalgam of biblical, Marxist, and Expressionist turns, in its analytical skills deeply informed by Simmel, taking its information from both Hegel and Schopenhauer for the groundwork of its metaphysics of music but consistently interpreting the cultural legacy in the light of a certain Marxism, Bloch s Spirit of Utopia is a unique attempt to rethink the history of Western civilizations as a process of revolutionary disruptions and to reread the artworks, religions, and philosophies of this tradition as incentives to continue disrupting.