Volume 18, Number 12 · June 29, 1972
Neither Marx nor Moses
By J.M. Cameron
Man on His Own: Essays in the Philosophy of Religion
by Ernst Bloch, translated by E.B. Ashton
Herder and Herder, 240 pp., $5.50
On Karl Marx
by Ernst Bloch, translated by John Maxwell
Herder and Herder, 173 pp., $5.95
In his useful Foreword to Man on His Own Harvey Cox points to some of the difficulties the Anglo-American world will come across in trying to understand the work of Ernst Bloch and—though this too is a problem of understanding—still more in trying to 'place' it in relation to the work of Marcuse, Garaudy, Althusser, and other Marxists or neo-Marxists. The difficulty is brought out when we have to note that the Festschrift published for Bloch's eightieth birthday (in 1965) had among its contributors not only Marxists but many young European theologians. His major work, Das Prinzip Hoffnung (The Principle of Hope), was written in exile in the United States in the ten years after 1938, but it was not published in West Germany until 1959. After the war, Bloch lived in East Germany but he was too tempestuous a spirit for the regime; and one of the ironies of our times is that he should now live and work in Tübingen, as Marcuse does in California.
Review, 2868 words
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