Introduction: the political philosophy of hope

ABSTRACT

Hope is in a twofold crises in Western societies: perceived as unavailable by some and as undesirable by others. Against this background, this introduction argues that there is a need to ask anew what (if anything) citizens should hope for. After some introductory remarks both about the current role of hope in the public arena and important developments in recent philosophical debates, I provide an overview of the contributions to the Special Issue. Through a variety of theoretical lenses and from a variety of theoretical backgrounds, the contributors systematically ask which hopes (if any) we should cultivate or whether it may sometimes be necessary to let go of certain hopes. While they agree that hope is indispensable as a way of dealing with our fragility and sustaining our resolve, it is not without dangers. What emerges is a profile of hope as a complex and ambivalent attitude that has so far received too little attention by political philosophers, despite its prominent and increasingly contested role in political practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Hope
• despair
• democracy
• pessimism
• passivity
• wishful thinking

Widely described as iconic, in 2008 a poster with a stylized stencil portrait and the simple word ‘hope’ on it came to represent the campaign of what would be the first African American president of the United States. It perfectly encapsulated the mesmerizing message of a young Senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, who time and again encouraged Americans to ‘see the future not as something out of our control, but as something we can shape for the better through concerted and collective effort’, in short, to ‘choose hope over fear’ (Obama, 2014). Hope was not only considered as an attitude about which ‘there has never been anything false’ (Obama, 2008), it also seemed to be one we have plenty of reasons to adopt.

Not even two decades later, this sentiment appears to represent the – maybe somewhat naïve – optimism of a long-gone era.¹ Our present day and age is, in many ways, more aptly described as one of hopelessness. On the one hand, political reality gives us little reason for hope. Long-standing conflicts from Ukraine to the Middle East are more prone to escalation than solution, the climate crisis confronts us with a threat to the very foundations of our planetary existence, democratic regressions around the world threaten to undo hard-fought political achievements, and ever more extreme levels of (affective and epistemic) polarization as well as inequality raise the question whether there remains any basis for even the most basic agreement on a shared vision of the future. There may be a sense in which the crisis of hope reflects the increasingly unpredictable complexity of our political world as such; it seems more difficult than ever simply to depict or envision what a better future might even look like.

Yet, it also more narrowly reflects a crisis of democracy itself: a democracy that in the eye of many is no longer able to live up to its promise to make us co-authors of our own future – or at least not equally for all citizens, for hope (and its absence) are by no means homogenously distributed both across and within societies. As Stockdale (2021) has shown, systems of privilege and oppression based on various features of social difference structure our lives in important ways and hence the availability of hope. For instance, while those living in the most affluent parts of the world may (still) have reasons hope that they will not be too seriously affected by climate change, many others are already in the midst of having their livelihoods destroyed, with the worst yet to come.

This, however, is only one of two dimensions of hope’s crisis. For at the same time, there is a backlash, particularly from within activist circles, against hope itself, a challenge to the idea that hope (even if it were to be available) can play a productive role in politics in the first place. The more radical parts of the climate movement in particular – from Greta Thunberg’s (2019) famous exclamation ‘I don’t want your hope, I want you to panic’ to Extinction Rebellion’s (2019) slogan ‘Hope Dies, Action Begins’ – worry that hope leads to passivity and wishful thinking. Alternative attitudes such as fear or panic, they suggest, are more appropriate to convey the urgency of the radical action required to at least attenuate the climate catastrophe.

In a similar vein, proponents in the fight against racial injustice worry that hope is an ideological tool to keep systemic discrimination in place. For instance, ‘Afropessimists’ such as Calvin Warren (2015) or Frank Wilderson (2020) have argued that we should embrace ‘black nihilism’, because a politics of hope preserves the metaphysical structures that sustain black suffering. Hope, on his account, is nothing but the illusion that we come incrementally closer to what is actually impossible, racial justice. Someone like Obama, who promises (and appears to himself embody) incremental progress toward a ‘post-racial era’, in fact masks the continued reality of racial inequality. In putting their hope in these charismatic figures, people of colour are distracted from the hard realities they continue to face in the contemporary US and ultimately led to affirm the oppressive structures that keep them in their predicament.

To sum up, the crisis of hope in Western democracies is twofold: hope is perceived as unavailable by some, and as undesirable by others. Against this background, the contributions of this Special Issue ask anew what (if anything) citizens should hope for. Through a variety of theoretical lenses and from a variety of theoretical backgrounds – from analytic moral and political philosophy to Frankfurt School Critical Theory – the contributors systematically investigate the role of hope in politics, attending to its significance as much as its pitfalls. They ask which hopes (if any) we should cultivate or whether it may sometimes be necessary to let go of certain hopes. An assumption shared by all contributions is that particularly in a complex world where teleological ideas of history as directional have been lost and individuals’ ability to make a difference is mediated on many levels, we do need affective ways of dealing with our fragility and sustain our resolve. Yet, hope is not without dangers; it can mislead us in various ways, impact the relation to our fellow citizens and is always on the verge of being disappointed. What emerges, then, is a profile of hope as a complex and ambivalent attitude that has so far received too little attention by political philosophers, despite its prominent and increasingly contested role in political practice.

Philosophical foundations

The philosophical reflection on hope reaches back a long way. The ancient Greek term Elpis connotes a state of uncertainty towards a future outcome, which however can be viewed as good or bad (see Cairns, 2020). Ancient authors such as Aristotle had reservations about hope, which they worried might make us gullible and insufficiently responsive to reality. Early Christian thinkers such as Augustin and Thomas Aquinas were the first to assign a central and primarily positive role to hope in our practical life, which (following St. Paul) they viewed as closely related to the two other ‘theological virtues’ faith and love. Modern authors from Descartes to Hobbes and Spinoza typically conceptualised hope as an emotion, affect or passion. Against this background, Immanuel Kant’s genuinely normative perspective asking for the rationality of hope must be considered as a paradigm shift. ‘What may I hope for?’ (Kant et al., 1998, A805/B833) is presented by Kant as one of the three basic questions of his philosophy, uniting the interests of both theoretical and practical reason.

Following this broadly Kantian strand, the contemporary analytic debate largely focuses on the nature and norms of hope (see Milona, 2020 for an overview). While there is no agreement whether hope can be defined in terms of sufficient and necessary criteria, many accounts start from the so-called standard theory, according to which hope consists of a desire that p and a belief that p is possible but not certain (originally, see Downie, 1963). As has frequently been noted, one problem with this account seems to be that it cannot distinguish hope from despair: two agents with the same desire and probability estimate may either hope or despair for an outcome. Against this background, a whole barrage of proposals has been offered for a possible third criterion that may complement the standard theory. Some argue that we must engage in a kind of ‘mental imaging’ (Bovens, 1999, p. 674) about the projected state of affairs or the way to reaching it (Kwong, 2018), others that we ‘orient our agential energies’ (McGeer, 2004; see also Martin, 2013, p. 69) towards its chance of occurring, that we resolve to act ‘as if the desired prospect is going to obtain’ (Pettit, 2004) or simply focus on the issue under the aspect of its possibility (Chignell, 2023).

There is a growing sense, however, that the project of finding a general and complete definition of hope that covers all instances and contexts may have reached an impasse. Hence, more recently a number of authors have instead turned their attention to the diversity of hope and its role in various contexts and domains. For instance, it has been prominently suggested that the propositional form of hope that p is not the only one. What is often called ‘fundamental’ or ‘basal’ hope is not directed at a specific object but described by its proponents as a ‘pre-intentional’ orientation or ‘existential feeling’ (Ratcliffe, 2013, p. 597), a kind of anticipatory stance that represents the future as ‘sufficiently hospitable to our agential efforts’ (Calhoun, 2018, p. 74). In contemporary debates, it is usually Lear (2006) who is credited with first conceptualizing a version of it that he labels ‘radical’. Lear describes how Chief Plenty Coup is able to lead his tribe, the Crow Nation, through a period of cultural devastation brought about by colonial subjugation by summoning a kind of hope that is directed ‘toward a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is’ (Lear, 2006, p. 103). Others like Ratcliffe view this type of hope not as something we summon when all other (propositional) hopes are lost, but as an ‘experiential backdrop’ (Ratcliffe, 2013, p. 74) that sits beneath all our specific hopes; only against the background of this general orientation or sense of how things are with the world do particular hopes become intelligible.

Another promising path forward is to focus on more genuinely normative (rather than purely conceptual) questions in relation to hope as they pertain to social and in particular political life (e.g. Goldman, 2023; Moellendorf, 2022; Stockdale, 2021). While this does require a basic understanding of hope’s nature, the focus here is particularly on the value, significance and potential pitfalls of hope for political agency, practices and institutions. It is this burgeoning theoretical project of a political philosophy of hope to which this Special Issue seeks to contribute. One question that is central to this endeavour and indeed at the heart of all contributions is what (if anything) distinguishes political hope from other (e.g. personal or religious) types of hope.

Most obviously (and trivially perhaps), political hopes can be characterised by their object. Hopes are political, that is to say, if they are directed towards political outcomes (e.g. Blöser et al., 2020). Arguably, though, political hope can be circumscribed even more narrowly. While there are certainly political hopes the realization of which is not predicated on our efforts (think of our hopes for the outcome of an election in a foreign country), at least paradigmatically political hopes involve us as agents: their object is not fully in our hand (otherwise we could simply bring it about), but does require our contribution. They are a subset of what is often called practical hope (Calhoun, 2018, p. 5). In contrast to many everyday kinds of ends we pursue, however, political goals are often distant and ambitious; their realization possibly transcends our lifetime (think of the hope to end global poverty, to prevent the climate catastrophe or to realize a fundamentally different socioeconomic order). Political hope, in other words, requires that we situate our agency in relation to historical time. This indicates that it needs to be theorised in relation to questions that are typically thought to be part of the philosophy of history; including concepts such as progress or utopia.

Moreover, the realization of political hope typically requires collective efforts. This raises the complex question whether hope itself can be collective and, if so, in which way. Is it possible to conceptualise a kind of hope that cannot be reduced to individuals hoping alongside one another yet does not commit us (implausibly perhaps) to some kind of collective mental state? Possibly, shared hope may itself play a collectivizing role in the sense that a relevant collective is first constituted by a particular hope that its members share. Social movements, for instance, often have little to feed on in terms of pre-existing commonalities but are first brought together by a common political issue and the shared vision of the future associated with it, i.e. by hoping collectively (Stockdale, 2021, pp. 169–176).

This suggests that, particularly in political contexts, the value of hope goes beyond its (frequently highlighted) instrumental or motivational function: some hopes may be constitutive of who we are as (individual and collective) agents. Blöser and Stahl (2017) in particular have highlighted that our practical identity, i.e. our self-understanding as agents, is partly constituted by the future we see ourselves in. For instance, ‘a cancer patient’s hope for a full recovery, a political activist’s hope for the end of world hunger, or a religious person’s hope for life after death’ are all examples of hopes that constitute particular practical identities because they ‘play a crucial role in how that person sees and interprets the world’ (Blöser and Stahl, 2017, p. 350). Potentially, the same applies to collective and political contexts: the self-understanding of a collective, to the extent that it thinks of itself as persisting across time and pursuing projects that transcend the lifetime of its current members, is importantly diachronic. Who we take ourselves to be as a political community is not only shaped by our memory of the past but also, more importantly perhaps, by our hopes for the future.

Finally, in political contexts it seems important to take into account the relation between hope as a subjective attitude, and the objective – in particular institutional – circumstances in which people find themselves and which shape the ability to conceive of and relate to the future in a particular way. Arguably, it makes little sense to think of hope as something institutions can (fail to) ‘distribute’ (Snow, 2018), such that it could be an immediate object of policy-making (Moellendorf, 2006, p. 429). However, political practices and institutional schemes differ in their ability to support citizens’ aspiration to envision a desirable future as something of their own making. On the other hand, we want to prevent institutions from leading citizens to mistakenly believe that certain avenues of action are open to them, thus creating ideological or deluded hopes. Reversely, hope themselves may affect political institutions. Sceptics in particular point out that hope can undermine political institutions (when people act irrationally so as to risk the success of collective endeavors) or strengthen unjust institutions (when skilled political leaders manipulate the hopes of the population to their own ends). On the other hand, hopes of the right kind can increase the legitimacy of just institutions or strengthen citizens’ attachment and loyalty to them.

Overview

These and related issues are explored from a variety of angles in the contributions to this Special Issue. In her article, Katharina Bauer reflects on the fact that hope is connected to uncertainty and can always be disappointed. To do so, she builds on Beatrice Han-Pile’s (2017) account of hope as involving an experience of powerlessness. According to Bauer, the capacity to integrate this experience into one’s agency is particularly significant at the collective and political level, for it can be a strong motivation to join forces and to establish power as ‘pouvoir-en-commun’. Specifically, what Bauer calls ‘strong democratic hope’ integrates experiences of relative powerlessness in a way that prevents experiences of radical powerlessness (which lead to ideological hopes). While the experience of powerlessness within hope can remain pre-reflective on the individual level, Bauer argues that it ought to be reflected and made explicit on the political level.

Claudia Bloeser’s contribution adopts a broadly Kantian perspective in order to reflect on the role of hope in relation to climate change. She notes that (as mentioned above) while climate activists voice scepticism about hope, it is generally well-regarded among philosophers working in the field of climate ethics. In order to resolve this disagreement, she suggests to leave behind a purely instrumental perspective on hope’s value. Drawing on Kant, she highlights that action is also a precondition of (rational) hope. She then focuses on the compatibility of happiness and morality as a particularly relevant object of hope in the context of the climate crisis. Blöser argues that we have an interest in maintaining this hope not (only) because it has valuable effects, but because it is central to our practical identity. She goes on to suggest that this hope is based on trust in the flexibility of our conception of happiness.

While much recent philosophical discussion has explored the political value of holding on to certain hopes, in her contribution Dana Howard considers whether there is correlative political value in letting go of certain hopes for our collective future or at least of publicly disavowing them. Drawing on two examples – the hope for a controversial climate-change mitigation strategy known as solar geoengineering and the hope for the development of a drug that would increase the growth of children with achondroplasia (dwarfism) – she defends both the political value of our own letting go of certain hopes and the reasonableness (in certain cases) of such demands made on others. According to Howard, there are not only circumstances where letting go of certain hopes is of political importance in itself, but also (more controversially perhaps) circumstances in which calling on others to let hopes die is a politically justifiable demand one can make of others.

Titus Stahl also takes issue with what he takes to be an overly celebratory view of hope in politics. Instead, he highlights that hope can also mislead people into denying or distorting their political agency. Specifically, Stahl provides a systematic account of this possibility by arguing that some political hopes can be ideological. While political hopes, like all other forms of hope, can be defective in terms of being based on epistemically inappropriate beliefs or normatively inappropriate desires, ideological hopes are defective in a distinctive way that does not reduce to the ideological nature of their component attitudes. Rather, agents entertain structurally ideological hopes if (a) they are collectively shared hopes and (b) these hopes structure their political agency in a self-undermining way based on an ideologically distorted perception of the reasons they have to constitute themselves as a collective agent of a specific type through their hoping. According to Stahl, this possibility of ideological hope provides a distinct normative standard for the evaluation of political hopes that has so far not yet been taken seriously by philosophers of hope.

In his paper, Loren Goldman, addresses two of the most widespread concerns against political hope brought forward particularly by proponents of a more pessimistic outlook: that it is naïve and unrealistic, and that it tacitly assumes a problematically metaphysical idea of historical progress, thus relieving humans of political responsibility and agency. Goldman embraces this critique but argues that these supposed vices are in fact virtues insofar as they frame hope as transcending the commonly-held limits of political possibility. In conversation with Ernst Bloch, Hannah Arendt, Václav Havel, and Walter Benjamin, he claims that political hope is ultimately about the active transformation of our very notion of realism in politics. Goldman argues that to appreciate this function of hope, we need to maintain (yet secularise) the religious language of transcendence, redemption, and the ‘miraculous’. This allows us to think of reality as dynamic and emergent rather than fixed and static and to recognise the power of (a necessarily utopian) hope as a force of transformation.

While Goldman explores the connection between hope and utopia, Lea Ypi focuses on another closely related notion, progress. She argues that the idea of progress – understood as the development of global social and political institutions that promote moral agency – is unavoidable for a particular justification of morality: Kantian constructivism. Specifically, the thought is that the reflexive vindication of reason (which is at the heart of the constructivist account) is to be understood as a collective, historical project. Ultimately, the bindingness of moral norms itself depends on their vindication of history as ‘purposive’. Hence, what we need is more than a mere hope for progress. What we need is a notion of history that examines specific historical episodes from a philosophical standpoint, as if we were looking at a normatively purposeful system integrating moral motives, practical actions and contingent events. Against critics, Ypi maintains that this position neither leads to teleological determinism nor to philosophical paternalism.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The author thanks the Volkswagen Foundation for a Freigeist Fellowship in the context of which the relevant research was done.

Notes on contributors

Jakob Huber

Jakob Huber is Principal Investigator of the Junior Research Group “Democratic Hope” at Freie Universität Berlin. In his current book project, he brings together a broader interest in Immanuel Kant’s practical philosophy, recent debates about the nature and norms of hope as well as ‘Frankfurt School‘ ideas about history and progress in order to develop a political philosophy of hope. Earlier work focused on questions of migration, membership and boundaries. In his first book (published 2022 with Oxford University Press), he developed a novel reading of Kant’s cosmopolitanism as spelling out the implications of the simple fact that a plurality of corporeal agents coinhabit the earth’s spherical surface.

Notes

1. There was of course backlash at the time. Recall, for instance, Sarah Palin’s sarcastic rejoinder at a 2010 Tea Party convention, ‘How’s that hopey, changey stuff working out?’ https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=123462728&t=1564204576533 [last accessed April 01, 2024].