"We must believe in the Principle of Hope. A Marxist does not have the right to be a pessimist"

We cannot count Ernst Bloch as being among the central figures of the Frankfurt School. Indeed they maintained a distance from each other for many different reasons. However, Bloch was perhaps a figurative intellectual influence on many members of the Frankfurt School. Born in 1885 he was old enough to have already been a member of the Simmel and Weber circles before the first world war and went on – through the Weimar Republic, exile in the US under the Nazis, a return to East Germany in 1949 and flight to the west in 1961 where he died in Tübingen in 1977 – to publish 16 highly influential volumes of philosophical works. He was close friends with Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weil, Georgy Lukács and Adorno. The latter, for example, said that there was nothing that he had written that did not in some way refer back to Bloch's Spirit of Utopia published in 1918 and he was later to say that Bloch had restored honour to the concept of utopia.

Bloch's magnum opus was a three-volume compendium entitled The Principle of Hope in which he lays out the myriad ways in which hope and the human desire for liberation and fulfilment appear in our everyday lives. As we can see from the quote above he did not agree with Adorno's increasing cultural pessimism, never gave up on the idea of the transformative power of political action by the working class and the new social movements and was, as a result, even more of a darling of the 1968 movement than was Herbert Marcuse. However, Bloch did not approach hope and utopia from a naively optimistic standpoint. He was well aware of the problems that faced those who wish to negate the negation and move forward. His book on the rise of fascism in the 1930s, Heritage of Our Times, attacked both the orthodox Marxist left and his friends in the Frankfurt school for not realising that fascism was, in his words, a perverted religious movement which won people over with quasi-utopian ideas about the wonders of a future Reich. He pointed out that the very term Third Reich is taken from the works of Joachim da Fiore, who posited that it would only be attainable with the return of Christ.

In this way he differentiated himself from the Frankfurt school and indeed they distanced themselves from him because he was not prepared to take the standard Freudian line on the rise of fascism. He criticised Freud for his obsession with trauma and nightmares about a repressed past and instead maintained that actually what drives us on are our daydreams of a better and brighter world. Indeed, The Principle of Hope was originally to be called Dreams of a Better Life. It is an extraordinary book which deals with the ways in which we both hide and express our hopes in dreams and fairytales, sport, music, love and that all of these are expressions of hopes which cannot yet be realised. His central operator was precisely this idea of the Not Yet. He speaks of an "Ontology of Not-Yet Being" in which we are continually building a concrete utopia. He uses the word concrete here in its Hegelian sense as a con crescere, a growing together of tendencies and latencies within the relationship between material reality and human intervention which are always full with potential but which cannot be realised because the material conditions for their realisation is not yet complete.

However, he also pointed out that this process of attaining utopia was a self-generating one. As he put it: "processus cum figures, figurae in processu" (The process is made by those who are made by the process), so that he restored honour to the idea of utopia by seeing it not as a pre-existing programmatic state which had to be reached under wise and all-knowing leadership either of the party or the church, but as an autopoietic process driven by the labouring, creating and producing human being driven on by their material hunger as well as their dreams of overcoming that hunger. The society we ended up with would therefore be the product of the process of getting there. This turns on its head the traditional understanding of utopia as a Telos, a pre-existing ideal state. In this he agreed explicitly with Marx's rejection of utopian communism. Most importantly, perhaps his most significant impact on intellectual debate was the way in which he treated religious expression, though not its authoritarian structures – he pointed out for example that religion means re-ligio or binding back – as an essential part of the expression of the human desire for liberation. His book Atheism in Christianity is about religion as exodus and the transcending of real material conditions without the need for a transcendental realm outside of material reality. In this sense the death of God is an essential part of the religious experience.

For these reasons he maintained a belief in the Enlightenment and modernity as well as the enlightened religious impetus in human beings all as expressions of the human "invariant of direction" which would eventually carry us forward to a place, as he put it, where we had never yet been but would feel at home. Along the way we would be stripped of our belief in gods and reinvest that belief back into ourselves and only then could we fully realise our potential. The belief in gods and the transcendental, however, was not some sort of delusion or junk DNA but was an essential carrier of the utopian ideal for as long as the world was not yet ready for it. Indeed he maintained that the communist idea of the withering away of the state was merely a secular version of the idea of loving your neighbour and a putting into practice of the old religious phrase, adopted by Marx too, of "from each according to their ability and to each according to their needs".