The Spirit of Utopia

In the summer of 1918 the world is knee-deep in blood: the war has already claimed millions of victims, the Spanish influenza is spreading, in Russia the revolution is turning into a civil war. The old order of Europe is teetering and about to fall. A whole generation – the Generation Y of the last century – is standing on its shattered remains and gazing into an uncertain future.

In the summer of 1918 the publishing house Duncker & Humblot releases a young man’s book that causes a sensation: Ernst Bloch’s The Spirit of Utopia. In the face of the horror, inspired by the philosophical currents of the turn of the century and animated by the alternative life visions of the reformers and anarchists of Monte Verità, Bloch describes the human being as possessing a radical talent capable of Utopia. 

It is a work that captures his time incomparably in thought and words, unrestrained and rigorous, socialist and messianic, dark and full of hope. The time is ripe for its rediscovery.

»In German intellectual history, there are not many first books that caused such a great stir as The Spirit of Utopia.« Neue Zürcher Zeitung

»When this book was first published, it had a profound effect on major thinkers and artists in Weimar Germany. A poetical philosophical treatise with unusual insights into culture and political commentary, Bloch’s book laid the groundwork for thinkers like Adorno and Benjamin.« Jack Zipes, University of Minnesota

»The book remains stimulating and provocative today« Süddeutsche Zeitung

»With a dazzling philosophical construction the young philosopher overlays the darkness of our experience-of-self with the darkness of the future, and causes a glowing synthesis to spring forth and carry philosophy forward like a rocket, a philosophy which during the bleakest of times will be given wings by the longing to see, at last, the human face, the one for which we continue to wait.« Die literarische Welt

»The Spirit of Utopia is a metaphysical book; it reflects ideas of apocalypse and worlds to come, and how these ideas were moved by German philosophers before the war.« Deutschlandfunk