Abstract
ABSTRACT Paul Tillich's early political thought centers on a dialectic of expectation and demand. This essay interprets these paired concepts in terms of Tillich's realistic yet hopeful attitude regarding the fulfillment of justice in history. It likens Tillich's hopefulness to what the philosopher of religion Andre Willis terms “deep hope” and to the “infinite hope” of Martin Luther King Jr. The essay thus focuses on a form of political hope that faces up to despair without succumbing to it. Tillich's dialectic of expectation and demand is then applied therapeutically to diagnose pathologies of hope and hopelessness in the contemporary theo–political imagination as manifest in recent, popular works by Rutger Bregman, Chris Hedges, and Srećko Horvat. Finally, the essay suggests some provisional, Tillichian medicine consisting in devotion to the encountered other, the source of both the demand to make justice real and the heartening call to expect what is seemingly impossible.
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