MUSIC PLAYED A CENTRAL PART in the utopian thinking of Ernst Bloch. The trumpet call in Beethoven's Fidelio that announces the arrival of the minister and thus the end of all trials and tribulations serves as Bloch's most powerful example of a work of art anticipating how utopian hope can ultimately be fulfilled.

Musicological engagement with Bloch has often focused on what kind of knowledge Bloch had about music, what he had read, what his limitations were, and how he got certain details wrong. Geist der Utopie (The Spirit of Utopia, first version 1918; second, significantly revised version 1923) has hitherto been the focal point of scholarship, as it engages with music in more detail than Das Prinzip Hoffnung (The Principle of Hope, written 1938−47, published 1959). However, this essay will look at music's role within Bloch's political and philosophical thinking, with particular reference to Das Prinzip Hoffnung. It will consider the following questions: Why did Bloch associate music with such a high degree of agency when it comes to evoking or sustaining utopian hope? What is its special potential compared to all the other arts and activities he analyzes? And what does utopian hope as a political and societal concept have to offer in the early twenty-first century? In intellectual circles the proclamation of the end of grand narratives seems to have killed off utopian concepts, while utopian worlds appear to have migrated to the digital universe where they can be accessed individually by role players via avatars. The age of post-truth with its often dangerously nostalgic retro-utopias (“Make America great again!”) could benefit from reengaging with Bloch's more positive, future-oriented hope.

Over the following pages I will first give an outline of Bloch's thinking with regard to music, hope, and utopia before discussing Rita Felski's assessment of critical theory as a “hermeneutics of suspicion” (borrowing Paul Ricoeur's term) which turns out to be a much more influential yet also more pessimistic epistemological approach. In a final step I will argue that much of Felski's thinking can be applied equally to post-structuralism or postmodernism, which in turn has fueled the post-truth ideology that poses probably the most dangerous challenge to our political and societal structures right now.