Politics Of Hope Research Articles

Disavowing history

If the secession of formerly colonized countries from large imperial units is a story of political hope, the central actors in Quinn Slobodian’s story perceive the opportunities provided by the proliferation of new jurisdictions following decolonization very differently. According to the “market radicals” of the late 20th and 21st centuries, the break-up of empire is not a story of the potential for the democratization of politics and history-writing. Their ideas do however offer critiques of modernity. In this commentary, I convene critics of modernity – anticolonial leaders, historians of decolonization and the aftermath of empire, Indigenous and tribal peoples and their historians, and decolonial thinkers – in conversation with the capitalist adventurers of Slobodian’s tale, via an exploration of the limits and possibilities of history-writing and the politics of historicist discourse.

The Self-Confrontation of Prayer: The Christian Right in James Baldwin’s Later Essays

Abstract: This article examines an under-theorized topic in James Baldwin’s later writings: his critique of the white evangelical Christian Right from the late 1970s until his death in 1987. By closely reading a handful of his later essays, it argues that Baldwin’s analysis of the Christian Right reinvigorates his earlier prophetic critique grounded in the tradition of the American jeremiad, as he continues to deploy a religious vocabulary that advances the Christian virtues of faith, hope, and love. Ultimately, Baldwin’s critical analysis of the Christian Right is an unexpected and still underappreciated site of political hope.

11Plastic Theory/Studies

Abstract While this year’s chapter on plastic theory/studies is relatively short, with only three texts reviewed, it is a harbinger of important texts in preparation that, next year, will broaden the field into dimensions as diverse as world literature and theology. Such an expansion is logical when we see that the texts published this year include: an important and practical textbook introduction as part of MIT Press’s Essential Knowledge series (Imari Walker-Franklin and Jenna Jambeck’s Plastics); a chapter in a book on flashpoint epistemologies (Ranjan Ghosh’s ‘Plastic Pedagogy: Rabindranath Tagore Revisited’); and a book that links plasticity to political thought (Fathali M. Moghaddam’s Political Plasticity). As this review will show, together these texts speak not only of the contemporary anxieties of a world enmeshed in climate and political catastrophes, but also of the pedagogical and political hopes of new generations of scholars and artists, who are thinking about plasticity and plastic theory—not only in texts but also in their practices and art—in relation to a future still in formation.

The power of hope? Powerlessness and strong democratic hope

ABSTRACT In this paper I discuss how and to what extent core elements of Beatrice Han-Pile’s account of a constitutive experience of powerlessness at the centre of hope can be fruitfully transferred to a collective political level. Despite its constitutive relation to uncertainty, we often talk about the power of hope as a motivating and activating force that helps us to cope with challenges, overcome obstacles and pursue plans. Hoping with an awareness of the limitations of one’s individual power can at the same time be a strong motivation for acting in concert and thereby establishing power as a collective practice. I will explore how democratic hope that is empowering participation can be distinguished from disempowering political hopes. Finally, I will argue that integrating experiences of relative powerlessness and reflecting them explicitly is constitutive for ‘strong democratic hope’, while the experience of powerlessness can remain pre-reflective on the individual psychological level. At the same time strong democratic hope is directed towards preventing experiences of radical powerlessness.

Ideological hope

ABSTRACT The hope for a better future can, and frequently does, motivate political action. Political hope is therefore often considered a positive force. However, not all forms of political hope are beneficial. Some scholars and activists claim that some kinds of hope also function as an ideology. I argue that we can give a precise meaning to the notion of ‘ideological hope,’ and I argue that to say of a given instance of hope that it is ‘ideological’ means more than that it is irrational or immoral. I distinguish two forms of ideological hope: forms where the ideological nature of hope derives from underlying ideological beliefs and judgments, and structural forms. The case of structurally ideological hope shows that even the rational hopes of political agents can undermine their purposes by binding them to distorted political self-understandings.

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.

Expectation and Demand: Paul Tillich and the Dialectics of Deep Hope

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.

Romantic Hope and “Black Despair”: A Brief History

Scholars coordinate the historical emergence of political hope with the French Revolution, Romanticism, and the secularization of inherited theological ideas. This essay argues that the conceptual development of political hope functioned as a technology of racialization. Drawing attention to how hope’s theological opposite, despair, had become synonymous with racial slavery in the late eighteenth-century British political imagination, it unpacks the figural logic of “black despair” and shows how this logic subtends the Romantic conception of political hope as a hereditary right of the white liberal subject.

‘Hai, Man! . . . We Don’t Have Democracy’! The Transport Crisis and Working-Class De-Citizenship in South Africa: Khayelitsha, Cape Town

Affordable and safe public transport underpins effective citizenship and freedom as well as work. Citizens expect the democratic state to be caring and reciprocal. Using in-depth interviews with residents and community leaders in Khayelitsha, we look at how worsening public and private transport – mainly mini-bus taxis – not only significantly extends the working day but also destroys political hopes – a process called de-citizenship. We show how mobilities are fundamentally rooted in radically bifurcated spaces of classed citizenship – a new class apartheid – in turn reflecting the structural contradictions of Cape Town and its class struggles.

Publisher Correction to: The principle of political hope: progress, action, and democracy in modern thought

Publisher Correction to: The principle of political hope: progress, action, and democracy in modern thought

Experimentation and the future(s) of political hope

Against pessimistic trends in social and political theory, this article argues for the indispensability of hope in conceptualizing the future. Such hope, however, does not need to be beholden to a unitary vision of the future, as with traditional metaphysical or Enlightenment notions of progress, but should instead accommodate a multiplicity of possible better worlds. Pluralizing the future links it to diverse nonsynchronous temporalities of past and present and emphasizes the roles of contingency, action and experimentation in concrete aspiration. Immanuel Kant and Ernst Bloch here offer philosophical foundations for this perspective.

The principle of political hope: progress, action, and democracy in modern thought

The principle of political hope: progress, action, and democracy in modern thought

Loren Goldman, The Principle of Political Hope. Progress, Action, and Democracy in Modern Thought

Loren Goldman, The Principle of Political Hope. Progress, Action, and Democracy in Modern Thought

In the Rubble of War, A Little Flower: How Thérèse Conquered the Oriental Heart of John C. H. Wu

Abstract This paper narrates the conversion story of the Chinese statesman and scholar John C. H. Wu at the beginning of the Second World War in Asia. Wu’s conversion to Catholicism was the culmination of a public intellectual’s struggle for peace and harmony in the violent and disturbing decades of the new Republic. Wu represented a Chinese humanist school of thought that desired some form of meaningful synthesis and integration between Chinese culture and western modernity for the salvation and reconstruction of their country. Though his political hopes were shattered by the war, he found inspiration through an encounter with Thérèse of Lisieux, who showed him the possibility of peace and reconciliation between East and West, between tradition and modernity, and between Chinese and Christian religions.

Tourism through the Iron Curtain. Travelling from West to East Germany

ABSTRACT In the early 1970s, East Germany opened its borders to visitors from West Germany and West Berlin. Soon after, East German authorities recorded several million entries from non-socialist countries each year. This article examines the intentions and obstacles to establishing a successful tourism business across the inner-German border. The author shows that the regime’s attempts to develop the GDR into an attractive travel destination were shaped by (I) poor starting conditions, which could not be overcome for financial reasons; (II) bureaucratic hurdles resulting from a mistrust of its own people as well as of West Germans; (III) inefficient structures, which could not be corrected for political reasons; (IV) the constant desire to impress West Germany; and (V) the need for foreign currency. However, while other socialist states gave priority to economic considerations, in the GDR political hopes, aspirations or concerns were uppermost in the mind of policymakers when it came to tourism from the Federal Republic. The article therefore argues that travelling from West to East Germany must be understood as ‘Cold War tourism,’ as the conflict greatly informed the conditions and experience of travel.

REPRESENTASI PEREMPUAN DI POLITIK

The political representation of women sticks out in the midst of domination and hegemony of patriarchal culture in various dimensions of life, especially in the political space. There is a kind of socio-political obstacle that forces women to double their capital and power, which must be spent more heavily and complicated than men when they enter politics. This study wants to see how far the role of women legislators in the NTT Provincial DPRD for the 2019-2024 period is in carrying Political parties and are in accordance with the interests of the categorization of women members of the legislature. The strategy for dividing positions for women is also quite diverse. Women have political hopes that are placed on increasing access power and opening up political opportunities to occupy strategic positions such as important positions or involvement in the decision-making process in political parties. The hope for increasing access is related to increasing the capacity of individual women and youth in political parties. Increasing women's access to strategic positions in political parties. This political hope emphasizes the importance of women and youth to have economic, social and political capacities. Economic capacity relates to financial resources, social capacity refers to social relations and networks, and political capacity relates to political knowledge and skills

Augustine’s Just War: Balancing Political Pessimism and Optimism

There is an age-old debate regarding Augustine’s pessimism which has garnered much attention in recent years: Does Augustine have any hope for temporal politics or not? The traditional interpretation holds him to be a political pessimist, while recent scholarship has mounted a counter-offensive rooted in an Augustinian hope for the political realm. This essay offers a new contribution to the debate by directly linking Augustine’s treatment of just war to these recent debates. The literature on Augustinian pessimism and optimism is impressive, but its treatment of war is often obscured by the long shadow of Reinhold Niebuhr’s Augustinian realism. My argument is that any account of pessimism in Augustine must grapple with the substantial emphasis he places on the themes of war and peace, especially his statements permitting warfare for Christians. With a proper understanding of Augustinian just war, we can better comprehend the value Augustine places on political participation. I argue that Augustine’s endorsement of certain just wars outlines a lower boundary of political action that Augustine’s pessimism never eliminates. However, because this type of participation involves killing, it is inherently sorrowful. I also analyze Augustine’s tragic rhetoric on war which limits the upper boundary of political hope.

A Kantian Account of Political Hopes as Fundamental Hopes

AbstractIn this article, I argue that the current literature on political hope overlooks its non-instrumental value. By proposing a Kant-inspired account of treating reasonable hopes as fundamental hopes, I argue that it is rational for people to hold certain political hopes not only because such hopes promote particular ends but also because they are constitutive of a person’s practical identity as a responsible political agent with limited power to make changes. This view reveals that victims of injustice face an affective injustice because the unjust social system forces them to face a double bind in upholding their fundamental political hopes.

Making Space for Justice: Social Movements, Collective Imagination, and Political Hope, Michele Moody-Adams (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022), 328 pp., cloth $120, paperback $28, eBook $27.99.

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An Analysis of Shakespeare’s Hamlet Through Terry Eagleton’s Conception of Tragedy

This paper offers a comprehensive analysis of William Shakespeare's Hamlet, employing Terry Eagleton's conception of tragedy from his book Sweet Violence. It examines how the play achieves excellence through wisdom, intellectual depth, and emotional maturity, exposing the sublimity of human effort in creating an enduring experience for the audience. The paper delves into the elements of sacrifice, the dilemma of the tragic hero, and the concept of tragedy as a genre with emotional impact, showcasing the influential nature of the play. Furthermore, it explores the intertwining of external accidents with the hero's struggles and the balance of universality and particularity in evoking sympathy and engagement within the audience. Additionally, it discusses Eagleton’s notion of tragedy as a means to offer political hope and belief in justice and redemption, even in the darkest of times. The analysis examines Hamlet's fit in both traditionalist and democratic perspectives and finally delves into the Greek concept of the pharmakos, highlighting why Hamlet's suffering leads to emotional cleansing or katharsis for the audience.