About

Loren Goldman is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on political science, with particular emphasis on international relations and comparative politics. As a faculty member at the Ronald O. Perelman Center for Political Science and Economics, he contributes to the academic community through teaching and scholarly activities. Specific details about his background, research contributions, and key areas of expertise are not provided in the page text.

Research topics

• Philosophy
• Epistemology
• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law
• History
• Psychology
• Psychoanalysis
• Theology

Selected publications

• Excerpts from <i>Thomas Müntzer as Theologian of Revolution</i>

  History of the Present · 2025-04-01 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author

  We always want to only be with ourselves.So even here we are by no means looking backward. Rather, we mix ourselves in vividly. And the others also return transformed in it, the dead come back, their actions want to happen again with us. Müntzer broke off most abruptly and yet he wanted the furthest. The person actively considering him thus has the present and the unconditioned within it more contained, more synoptic than all-too fleeting experience does, yet it is just as undampened. Müntzer above all is history in the fertile sense; he and his and everything in the past that is worth being recorded is there to oblige us, inspire us, and to support us ever more broadly in what is constantly intended for us.▪ ▪ ▪At the very least, these pages aim to conceptualize such relations. Into the present and coming days they mix early movements, half-forgotten, of which we are only still dimly aware. Of course, this work, despite its empirical foundations, is self-evidently essentially one of philosophy of history and religion. Accordingly, not only our life, but also everything it embraces continues to churn and thus does not remain defined within its own time or within history at all, but instead as a figure that bears witness to a field transcending history. As in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s tale, Ritter Gluck returns again and again to his room to play Armida more passionately; and Herder not only speaks of Shakespeare, but Shakespeare also speaks of Herder, of Sturm und Drang, musicality, and Romanticism. Consequently, history cannot be brought into being by memory alone; add to the categories of efficacy or the historical value relationships the lasting legacy, the final impact on self and everything, the most authentic “reprint,” the productive schema of recollection [Eingedenken]: as undeceiving, essential conscience for all that has not occurred, what is eternally meant for us, the untrodden, yet which historico-philosophically is likely to be trodden within what has already occurred, in the meaningless-meaningful mixture, in the chaotic crisscrossing and paradoxical guiding sum of our fate. The dead return again, in new activities as well as in new contexts of meaning, and history that is grasped, placed under perpetually potent revolutionary concepts, driven to legend and thereby illuminated, becomes, in the richness of their bearing witness related to revolution and apocalypse, an inescapable function. History is in no way, as in Spengler, a decaying sequence of images, nor is it in any way, as in secularized Augustinianism, a stable epic of progress and providential economy of salvation, but rather a hard, dangerous journey, a suffering, a rambling, a confusion, a search for a hidden home, full of tragic failures, of scalding, bursting fissures and eruptions, forsaken promises, intermittently charged with the conscience of light. So much in history that ruled and that raised high complaints was in truth, as Sebastian Franck recognized: laughter, fable, and carnival play, if not the devil’s work to the public, certainly so in the eyes of God; but the defeated, Thomas Müntzer and all that his perspective teaches us to say, already belong in themselves to the philosophy of history, or perhaps even transcend history altogether; a palimpsest superimposed with the outlines of the Peasants’ War, with the reflections of a different world as its foundation. So, appear to us—for the state is the devil, but the freedom of the children of God is the substance—, illuminate us and affirm us the rebel in Christ, Thomas Müntzer.▪ ▪ ▪That is where we are heading, leaving the dead behind.Nothing keeps us any longer where the feast is finished; we leave, we dream ourselves over. The enormously increasing vital urge of this moment feeds itself from new sources, its unquestionability poses a secret, still hidden faith.Even if strong forces move against it, the human being still pushes away from the ground and over. We strive to no longer feel our outer life, we step out of it, which is increasingly subject to the machine and to domination, to the ultimately unburdening domination of the inessential. And the very same force that created the machine and that with a change of will drives it toward socialism also poses that secret, still latent aspect in socialism that Marx overlooked, had to overlook, if he sought to finally put an end to misery and chance, but which in Müntzer’s Germany and in Russia unavoidably holds onto its revolutionary-religious hereditary memory. Certainly, however, the enemy remains visible, recently entrenched in the solid complex of industrial power, and still in militarism, but not only with its ideology in ruins; rather, it will also be easier and more rational to expel him from this, his last patriciate, than from the old, disconnected corporatist petit bourgeoisie and feudalism on which the revolutionary momentum of Baptism shattered. But now the economic-political world of power around us—so insidious and hostile to value, long so deceptively illuminated by “culture” as the insubstantial luxury atmosphere of the dominant class—has become broken, unstable, and without purpose for all who belonged to it and up until now ideologized what is. Indeed, it is finally charged with an immanent dynamism toward its abyss, toward the open constructive horizon for everything suppressed, betrayed since the time of the Peasant Wars and the Late Gothic era, for all the unconditionalities of the will to the universal.Thus the course of the external world cannot block virtue much longer and delay what is right and well anticipated. Rather, the centrifugal force of the same liberating movement is creative here, slinging the effervescent human race away from the ground and into its true space, where the immense higher worlds of premonition and of conscience, the half of the kingdom, expand. The time is returning, the proletarian impetus from the West will bring it back, it will culminate in Germany and Russia: there the peoples feel the presence of a light that dissolves the darkest of shadows, which suddenly shifts that which was overlooked, the heavenly subterranean, into the glaring center, which finally elevates the secret of heresy into the most powerful public display, into the pole and predominant principle of society. The underground history of the revolution that has already begun in the upright gait still waits to be heard; but the Brothers of the Valley,1 the Cathars, the Waldensian Albigensians, Abbot Joachim of Fiore, the Brothers of the Good Will, of the Common Life, of the Full Spirit, of the Free Spirit, Meister Eckhart, the Hussites, Müntzer and the Anabaptists, Sebastian Franck, the Illuminati, Rousseau and Kant’s humanist mysticism, Wilhelm Weitling, Franz von Baader, Leo Tolstoy—they all unite, and the conscience of this enormous tradition is pounding again at the door to put an end to fear, the state, unbelief, and everything else in the establishment in which the human being does not come to the fore. Now the spark shines, biding time no longer, in accordance with the Bible’s surest demand: we have no lasting place here, but we seek the one to come; a messianic disposition is preparing to dawn anew, familiar at last with journeying and the undeceiving power of homeward longing: not toward the silence of the soil, of works that have become ossified, of false cathedrals, of annealed transcendence, with no more fresh sources, but instead toward the clearing of our own lived instant itself, toward the adequation of our wonder, our premonition, our persistent and deepest dream of bliss, truth, disenchantment of ourselves, of secret divinity and glory. The world would never be so dark above us if absolute storm, central light did not stand ever so immediately before us: by the same token, our beyond has already been named and heard, still hidden behind a thin, cracking wall; the innermost name, Princess Sabbath, not less superior to all the gods who abandoned us on earth with only the palliative of a sobbing miracle that bursts in furiously. The spirit of genuine utopia shines high above the rubble and shattered cultural spheres of this world, assured for the first time of its pole in the innermost Ophir, Atlantis, Orplid,2 in the house of its manifestation as the absolute We. In this way, Marxism and the dream of the absolute thus unite in the end on the same path and strategy; as the power of the journey and the end of every environment in which the human was an oppressed, a despised, a missing being; as a rebuilding of the star of earth and the calling, creation, and compelling of the kingdom; with all chiliasts, Müntzer keeps calling us on this tempestuous pilgrimage. And not only new life is dawning in the old reality, but every excess has become open, the world and eternity lie open, the new world of warmth and of breakthrough, of the light that rushes broadly out of the inner human being; now must become the time of the kingdom, our spirit that never forsakes and never disappoints shines toward it. We have had enough world history, there was also enough, too much, far too much form, polis, work, illusion, cordoning off through culture: a different life, an irresistible life is openly stirring, the narrow background of the theater of history, the theater of the polis, the theater of culture is disappearing; soul, depth, a sky of our dreams that expands over everything, starry from ground to crown, shines in, the true firmaments unfurl themselves, and our path of destiny leads irresistibly to that secret symbol toward which the dark, searching, difficult earth has been moving since the beginning of time.Excerpts from Ernst Bloch, Thomas Müntzer as Theologian of Revolution, Gesamtausgabe 2. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1969, pp. 9–15, 227–29.

  PublisherDOI

• Matter, Music, and Ecology in Ernst Bloch and George Crumb

  Perspectives of New Music · 2023-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Future Is Now: ChatGPT Confessions of a Blochhead

  New Political Science · 2023-08-24 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract The consequences of Al for political science, let alone democracy, remain obscure. Scholars would do best not to parrot either the hand-wringing despair or pollyannish enthusiasm of popular perspectives, but to instead soberly approach the advent of new technologies. Given its significant limitations, ChatGPT in particular does not (yet) appear to be the world-historical invention initial assessments perceived, as evidenced by the test case of Ernst Bloch.

  PublisherDOI

• The Matter of Bloch’s Philosophy of Nature in the Shadow of Idealism

  BRILL eBooks · 2023 · 10 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Philosophy
  • Epistemology
  • Psychoanalysis
  PublisherDOI

• Epigraph

  2022-11-17

  other1st authorCorresponding

  Extract Politics without hope is impossible . . . it is hope that makes involvement in direct forms of political activism enjoyable; the sense that “gathering together” is about opening up the world . . . . Hope is crucial to the act of protest: hope is what allows us to feel that what angers us is not inevitable, even if transformation can sometimes feel impossible. Indeed, anger without hope can lead to despair or a sense of tiredness produced by the “inevitability” of the repetition of that which one is against.But hope is not simple about the possibilities of the future implicit in the failure of repetition . . . hope involves a relationship to the present, and to the present as affected by its imperfect translation of the past . . . The moment of hope is when the “not yet” impresses upon us in the present, such that we must act, politically, to make it our future.—Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion

  PublisherDOI

• Conclusion: Hope and the Production of a Transformable World

  2022-11-17

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This final chapter reprises the argument of the book and then examines the idea of a democratic experiment. It offers three concepts of experimentation: a laboratory model drawn from science, the idea of experiments in living drawn from John Stuart Mill, and the idea of an experimentum mundi drawn from theatre. It argues that political theory largely favors the first model at the expense of the second two, yet that hopeful political practice requires a shift in perspective that privileges experiments in living and performative experiments as the foundation of any possible progress. It concludes with an appeal to the prefigurative and aesthetic politics of Vaclav Havel.

  PublisherDOI

• Bloch and Latent Utopia

  2022-11-17

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter examines Ernst Bloch as a theorist of political hope. It presents Bloch in light of his respective engagements with Kant, Hegel, and Marx, and proceeds methodically through his borrowings from each thinker. It argues that Bloch’s famous notion of concrete utopia is predicated on an idiosyncratic vital materialist ontology, such that the not-yet that is central to his work is oriented toward the emergence of novel possibilities that are always already latent in the world. As such, it argues that Bloch aims to overcome what he perceives to be the shortcomings of Kant’s overly subjective account of hope, yet strays toward an equally problematic postulate of natural teleology in the process.

  PublisherDOI

• The Principle of Political Hope

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2022 · 29 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Epistemology

  Abstract This book provides an action-theoretic view of political hope that draws on German idealism, critical theory, and American pragmatism. It offers an alternative to standard perspectives that reduce hope to either a subjective element of individual psychology or to the passive anticipation of the supposedly objective tendencies of the world itself. Featuring chapters on Immanuel Kant, Ernst Bloch, Charles Peirce, and William James, it presents hope instead as a practice of political action that both buttresses and promotes democratic experimentation. By reconstructing hope as a necessary condition for social and political engagement, it furthermore argues for the centrality of utopian thinking for practical action.

  PublisherDOI

• Copyright Page

  2022-11-17

  other1st authorCorresponding

  Extract Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2023 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form

  PublisherDOI

• Notes

  2022-11-17

  other1st authorCorresponding

  Subject Politics Political Theory Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Leonard J. Waks

  6 shared

• Andrea R. English

  University of Edinburgh

  2 shared

• Terri S. Wilson

  1 shared

• Sarah M. Stitzlein

  1 shared

• Doris A. Santoro

  Bowdoin College

  1 shared

• Steven Fesmire

  1 shared

• Brian E. Butler

  1 shared

• Kathleen Knight Abowitz

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Henry Teune Award for excellence in undergraduate teaching (…