Ernst Bloch

Born 8 July 1885 in Germany, Bloch drew on Hegel and Marx but also on the wild edges - apocalyptic mystics like Thomas Müntzer, Paracelsus, Jacob Böhme - to build a philosophy where the future pulls harder than the past. He moved in the same circles as György Lukács, Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill, Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, part of that mid-century left intelligentsia trying to keep radicalism alive through two wars and exile. What set him apart was an insistence on optimism as method: history moving toward something, teleology with a heartbeat. He died 4 August 1977, the least cynical Marxist of his generation.