Homeland and Marxism: Ernst Bloch's dialectics of utopia

This thesis seeks to rediscover some key dialectical thoughts of the German philosopher Ernst Bloch for a critical rethinking of Marxism. The study is mainly motivated by three questions: (1) whether Bloch is blind towards historical failures and evils to the extent that his philosophy represents a sort of naïve optimism about the nature of human beings and the future of society; (2) whether Bloch’s utopianism relies on the romanticism of the subject’s imagination and disregards the objective tendencies in the world; and (3) how Bloch reassesses ideology and uses it to reinterpret Marxist thinking in return. Through investigating the dialectical tendencies in Bloch’s ontology of Not-Yet, this thesis argues for Bloch’s resistance to naïve optimism, subjectivism and the banal criticism of ideology by vulgar Marxism.