The miraculous end of political hope

ABSTRACT

Two common criticisms of hope in politics are that 1) it tacitly assumes an exploded metaphysical idea of historical progress and that 2) it thereby relieves humans of political responsibility and even robs them of agency altogether. The criticisms have a common source in hope’s religious and particularly Christian conceptual history in the West. This article argues for a secular understanding of political hope as empowering collective agency that retains the utopian impulse expressed in religion yet which neither holds a monological account of historical change nor a supernatural agent of its effectuation. It does so by reconstructing the notions of transcendence, impossibility, the miraculous, and redemption in a secular manner in light of the thought of Ernst Bloch, Hannah Arendt, Václav Havel, and Walter Benjamin, among others.

KEYWORDS:

• Hope
• philosophy of history
• temporality
• Bloch
• Arendt
• Havel
• Benjamin

Acknowledgments

For helpful comments or other assistance in improving this article, I thank Chris Chambers, Wout Cornelissen, Jakob Huber, Audrey Jaquiss, Antonin Lacelle-Webster, Robert Lamb, Matt Shafer, and an anonymous reviewer, as well as the participants in the July 2022 conference ‘The Political Philosophy of Hope’ at the Freie Universität Berlin. This essay is dedicated to my son Eden Hersch Kari Goldman, whose birth days before prevented my in-person attendance. It was well worth it.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. In broad strokes, see Ahmed (2004), Miyazaki (2004), Lear (2006), Goldman (2012), Thaler (2018), Stahl (2019), Thaler (2019), Huber (2021), Stockdale (2021), Moellendorf (2022), and Goldman (2023). For a survey of recent work, see Blöser et al. (2020).

2. See, e.g. Bossuet (1681/1976) and cf. Löwith (1949), pp. 137–144.

3. Turgot was most significant figure in this transition; see Turgot (1750/1973).

4. In like fashion, and in the same year, the anarchist William Godwin (1793/2013, p. 453) anticipated the coming perfection of humanity to entail – thanks to improvements in science – the end of mortality itself.

5. See, e.g. Hegel (1840/1975).

6. See Mill (1859/1989), p. 14, and fn. 9 in the present essay.

7. Rousseau (1750/1754/1992) and Smith (1763/1978) are notable examples of such early criticism.

8. See Graham (2015).

9. Postcolonial theorists, for example, have linked the infinite temporality of progress to the colonial imaginary of empty space, stressing its historical role in the hierarchical classification of humanity (Quijano, 2000; cf.; Dussel, 1993; Quijano, 2007; Chakrabarty, 2000; Allen, 2016). Whatever reasonable scruples one might voice about painting with a broad brush, a sober assessment must acknowledge the problematic consequences of the idea of progress – and, by extension, the hope bound up with it. Hegel (1840/1975, p. 197), for one, described history as a teleological process that occurs from East to West, culminating in modern Europe, ‘the absolute end of history’; Africa and indigenous America are relegated to the eternal now of prehistory, whose inhabitants can only achieve freedom if civilization is imposed upon them. In like fashion – albeit on a very different philosophical basis—Mill (1859/1989, p. 14), himself a British East India Company bureaucrat, denied rights to those in ‘backward states of society,’ and described despotism as ‘a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement.’ Judith Shklar, likewise a critic of utopia and progress (see Shklar, 1957/2020), gives a powerful account of banal cruelties normally ignored by grand theory in Ordinary Vices (Shklar, 1985).

10. As Wieland – likely Kant’s source – writes in his comic novel about the Abderites, ‘They spoke much, but always without thinking for a moment about what they wanted to say, or how they wanted to say it. The natural result of this was that they rarely opened their mouths without saying something daft’ (Wieland, 1796/1961, p. 10).

11. Hartog draws on Hans Jonas’s (1984) The Imperative of Responsibility, which was written as a direct response to Bloch’s The Principle of Hope, a fact more evident in the former’s German title, Das Prinzip Verantwortung (1979).

12. See Lacelle-Webster (2023) for a more expansive account of political hope from an Arendtian perspective.

13. Marcel (1998) provides a foundational modern account in this vein; another, more recent version can be found in Lear’s (2006) notion of ‘radical hope,’ which – for all its insight and merits – in his hands becomes difficult to distinguish from complacency, capitulation, and even collaboration; see Goldman (2024 for a critique).

Additional information

Funding

The author thanks the Democratic Hope Research Group at the Freie Universität Berlin for sponsoring the 2022 conference at which an earlier draft of this paper was first presented.

Notes on contributors

Loren Goldman

Loren Goldman is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. In addition to many scholarly journal articles and book chapters, he is author of The Principle of Political Hope (Oxford University Press, 2023) and co-translator of Ernst Bloch’s Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left (Columbia University Press, 2019).