第二次世界大战之后，德国仅出现过四部1000页以上的哲学巨著，即马丁•海德格尔的两卷本《尼采》（1961）、尼古莱•哈特曼的《自然哲学》、卡尔•雅斯贝斯的《论真理》（1947）和恩斯特•布洛赫的《希望的原理》（1959）。在流 亡美国期间（1938-1947），布洛赫十年磨一剑，撰写了三卷本《希望的原理》，表达了他对一个没有剥削、压迫和异化的世界的希望。《希望的原理》一书的主旨是，阐明人类精神史的中心在于预先推定一个更美好生活的梦，即一个没有剥削、贫困和压迫的社会制度，而作为人类学-存在论范畴的“希望”（Hoffnung）集中体现了人类走向更美好未来的意图。 《希望的原理》一书的价值在于，它不仅是一部关于人类梦想和希望的百科全书，也是一部马克思主义传统的创新之作，极大地丰富了20世纪唯物主义思想，拓宽了马克思主义的“人性”研究领域。

I am. We are. That is enough. Now we have to start. These are the opening words of Ernst Bloch's first major work, 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 the version here presented for the first time in English translation. The Spirit of Utopia is one of the great historic books from the beginning of the century, but it is not an obsolete one. In its style of thinking, a peculiar amalgam of biblical, Marxist, and Expressionist turns, in its analytical skills deeply informed by Simmel, taking its information from both Hegel and Schopenhauer for the groundwork of its metaphysics of music but consistently interpreting the cultural legacy in the light of a certain Marxism, Bloch's Spirit of Utopia is a unique attempt to rethink the history of Western civilizations as a process of revolutionary disruptions and to reread the artworks, religions, and philosophies of this tradition as incentives to continue disrupting. The alliance between messianism and Marxism, which was proclaimed in this book for the first time with epic breadth, has met with more critique than acclaim. The expressive and baroque diction of the book was considered as offensive as its stubborn disregard for the limits of "disciplines." Yet there is hardly a "discipline" that didn't adopt, however unknowingly, some of Bloch's insights, and his provocative associations often proved more productive than the statistical account of social shifts. The first part of this philosophical meditation—which is also a narrative, an analysis, a rhapsody, and a manifesto—concerns a mode of "self-encounter" that presents itself in the history of music from Mozart through Mahler as an encounter with the problem of a community to come. This "we-problem" is worked out by Bloch in terms of a philosophy of the history of music. The "self-encounter," however, has to be conceived as "self-invention," as the active, affirmative fight for freedom and social justice, under the sign of Marx. The second part of the book is entitled "Karl Marx, Death and the Apocalypse." I am. We are. That's hardly anything. But enough to start.