Messianism and Marxism: Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch's dialectical theories of secularization

Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch mixed together Judeo-Christian Messianism and Marxism in their writings. It has been argued that Marxism is a secularization of Judeo-Christian Messianism. Benjamin and Bloch's mixture of Messianism and Marxism poses problems for traditional theories of secularization that are positivist in their progression from the sacred to the profane. As an alternative, Benjamin and Bloch have their own dialectical theories of secularization which express the contradictory aspects of the secularization process as a contradiction between the profane and the sacred.; The dissertation has three parts. The first part is an intellectual history that explains the mixture of Messianism and Marxism by these two German-Jewish intellectuals as a response to the historical crises of World War I, the German Revolution of 1918 and the rise of Nazism. The second part of the dissertation examines the dialectical theories of secularization contained in the thought of Benjamin and Bloch. These include a philosophy of language (theory of allegory), a social psychology (theory of dreams and experience), an aesthetic theory (the decline of aura) and a sociology of religion (the secularization of Judeo-Christian Messianism into Marxism). The final chapter is an analysis of Benjamin and Bloch's montage of Messianism and Marxism. Benjamin and Bloch's mixture of Messianism and Marxism is a result of their dialectical theories of secularization.