Quotes from book
The Principle of Hope

Name: The Principle of Hope
Author: Ernst Bloch

Ernst BlochOriginal title Das Prinzip Hoffnung (German, 1959)

The Principle of Hope is a book by the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch, published in three volumes in 1954, 1955, and 1959, in which the author explores utopianism, studying the utopian impulses present in art, literature, religion and other forms of cultural expression, and envisages a future state of absolute perfection. The Principle of Hope has become fundamental to dialogue between Christians and Marxists.

“On bourgeois ground … change is impossible anyway even if it were desired. In fact, bourgeois interest would like to draw every other interest opposed to it into its own failure; so, in order to drain the new life, it makes its own agony apparently fundamental, apparently ontological. The futility of bourgeois existence is extended to be that of the human situation in general, of existence per se.”

Ernst Bloch book The Principle of Hope

The Principle of Hope (1959), N. Plaice, trans. (1986), p. 4