Books by Ernst Bloch

Ernst Bloch gives a striking account of materialism that traces emancipatory elements of modern thought to medieval Islamic philosophers' encounter with Aristotle. He argues that the great medieval Islamic philosopher Avicenna (Ibn Sina) planted the seeds of a radical materialism still relevant for critical theory today.

Traces, a masterwork of twentieth-century philosophy, is the most modest and beautiful proof of Bloch's utopian hermeneutics, taking as its source and its result the simplest, most familiar and yet most striking stories and anecdotes.

"The Spirit of Utopia", written mostly in 1915-16, published in its first version just after the First World War, republished five years later, 1923, in this version is presented for the first time in English translation.