Ernst Bloch was one of a group of 20th-century Marxists who challenged the reductive materialism and dogmatic determinism of classical Marxism. He is best known for his utopianism. Bloch argued that reality (nature and persons) is "unfinished," characterized by potential and possibility (the "not-yet"). Nature is thus dynamic, and persons are desiring. His utopianism thus consists of the possibility of "reuniting" nature (the object) and persons (the subject).

Bloch's work pays little attention to the economic substructure and focuses instead on the superstructural categories of language and culture. Here, the idea of possibility is expressed in his notion of Hope. Hope is the anticipation of utopic possibilities: It brings into consciousness the "not-yet thought" and thus makes a utopian future realizable.

Bloch's major work, The Principle of Hope (1959), is an encyclopedic survey and analysis of hope and anticipation in the realms of both the mundane (for example, in daydreams and popular literature) and in philosophy, art, and religion. Bloch distinguishes between concrete and abstract utopias, the former being those utopic visions that are grounded in the social and economic reality of the historical age. Marx's own utopia in which exploitation is ended is just one, albeit the most important one, of the possible concrete utopias. In this way, Bloch retains his Marxist identity by insisting on the necessity for grounding, although not reducing, thought and ideals in the real circumstance of society and by characterizing history as a teleological process that ends beyond capitalism. Bloch's brand of Marxism is made distinct by his insistence on the dynamic nature of reality, history, and human thought and by his explicit rendering of the utopian aspects of Marxist theory. His drawing attention to the role of the subjective and his deep analysis of the subjective are perhaps his most important contribution to Marxist scholarship in the 20th century.

Bloch was born to Jewish parents in Ludwigshafen in Germany. His father was a railway official. He studied philosophy, physics, and music at the University of Munich, completed his doctorate in 1909, and moved to Heidelburg, where he met and worked with the aesthetician and Marxist Georg Lukacs. Lukacs was the most important influence on Bloch's own work. In 1933, Bloch left Germany because of the rise of Nazism and made his way to the United States, where he lived until after World War II. In 1948, he took a professorship at the University of Leipzig in what was then East Germany. His relations with the officials of the communist government grew steadily worse (he was prevented from publishing, and his work was condemned), and in 1961 he defected to West Germany. There he was appointed professor of philosophy at Tubingen. He died in 1977.

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