Abstract
Narratives of hope are omnipresent in democratic life, but what can they tell us about the structure and orientation of politics? While common, they are often reduced to an all-compassing understanding that overlooks hope's various forms and implications. Democratic theory, however, lacks the theoretical language to attend to these distinctions. The aim of this essay is thus to define a collective and political account of hope and recover the normative basis of a democratic theory of hope. Drawing on the literature on hope and juxtaposing it with extracts from Harvey Milk's ‘The Hope Speech,’ I first distinguish its collective experience before turning to Hannah Arendt. While Arendt rejects a politics of hope that turns away from the world, exploring how she thinks with and against hope provides a theoretically fruitful approach that elevates the in-betweenness of its worldly expression. From that standpoint, I relate the work and experience of hoping with others to her notions of natality, action and promises. These three conceptual touchstones provide the normative basis of a democratic theory of hope and help situate a collective sense of possibility inherent in democratic politics.
Democratic politics, ideally, empowers people to talk, organize, deliberate and work with one another to imagine, decide on and move toward possible collective futures. Against these normative aspirations, however, are an array of factors that undermine future-regarding political action. Engaging with these futures relies thus on an explicit or implicit appeal to hope to sustain political practices, such as voting, protesting or even running for office. Nevertheless, hope can be ambiguous and elusive in politics. On the one hand, it can constitute a key future-oriented disposition of citizens and leaders to navigate the uncertainty and unpredictability of democratic politics. On the other hand, its language can be complacent, vague and fleeting in the face of ongoing social and political challenges that cloud collective horizons, such as the climate crisis. This ambiguity raises normative questions about the interaction between hope and democratic politics. As such, what can the former tell us about the latter?
Attending to this ambiguity proves difficult as democratic theory lacks the theoretical language to assess and distinguish the nature, kinds and political functions of hope. By overlooking hope as a political concept, democratic theory tends to reduce its various experiences to a unified phenomenon, often associated with a naïve optimism, rather than critically approaching its different implications. Doing so undermines our capacity to distinguish disempowering or misdirecting articulations of hope from ones that sustain collective agency and the sense of possibility that underlines democratic politics. However, as democratic politics implies collective actions that engage both present and future publics, how it relates to and acts toward future possibilities constitutes a growing topic of concern (e.g. MacKenzie, 2021). The difficulty of acting in future-regarding ways and engaging in long-term thinking in democracy is compounded, I argue, by a lack of attention to hope as a political concept.
The central claim of this essay is that we can recover a political principle of hope from (1) the work of hoping with others, the continuous activity of defining and re-defining possible collective futures in response to the actions we undertake with others, and (2) the experience and sense of possibility it generates across the collective. While different articulations of hope are woven into political life, this approach shifts the theoretical focus from individuals to the space between them as it understands hope as both a site and an object of politics. In doing so, I build upon and depart from existing theories of hope. These theories provide productive insights on the relationship between hope and political agency and explore its political implications by turning to its differentiated – and, at times, disempowering – experiences (e.g. Goldman, 2022; Huber, 2019; Lindroth and Sinevaara-Niskanen, 2019; Moellendorf, 2006, 2022; Stockdale, 2021; Warren, 2015). Yet, I argue that investigating hope from the standpoint of politics suggests a different line of inquiry.
Instead of relying on common figures in the scholarship, such as Immanuel Kant or Ernst Bloch, I suggest turning to an unlikely source: Hannah Arendt. Although Arendt was skeptical of the language of hope in politics and never provided a systematic account of it, her conception of politics suggests a sense of possibility and uncertainty that led her to discuss faith and hope as two ‘essential characteristics of human existence’ (1998: 247). I approach this tension by understanding Arendt as a fragmentary thinker in order to situate hope in relation to both the fragility and possibility of politics (see Benhabib, 2018a: chapter 3; Jurkevics, 2021). In doing so, I am not claiming that Arendt provides an all-encompassing defence of hope, but rather that her account of politics provides an opportunity to theorize hope differently.
I argue that juxtaposing expressions of hope in politics with Arendt's political insights can be theoretically fruitful. Her concern for the common world provides the necessary starting point to recover the contour of a political principle of hope. Therefore, despite rejecting a language of hope disconnected from the world, I recover the conditions ensuring its worldly experience, before identifying the conceptual touchstones defining this principle. Arendt's ambivalence allows me to explore more thoroughly how she thinks with and against hope as a worldly and political experience. As democratic politics navigates uncertainty by relying on people engaging with others to achieve collective futures, hope, as political principle, orients these future-regarding engagements without denying either the fragility or possibility of politics.
The argument unfolds as follows. First, I distinguish collective and individual articulations of hope by drawing on passages from Harvey Milk's speech ‘You’ve Got to Have Hope,’ which is known as ‘The Hope Speech’ (see 2013: 145–55). Second, I turn to Kantian and Blochian accounts of hope and the challenge of theorizing its in-betweenness. Third, I argue that Arendt can help address this challenge by recovering a worldly articulation of hope in her understanding of being in the world with others. Fourth, I juxtapose the collective mode of hope in Milk's speech and Arendt's political framework to identify the conceptual touchstones defining this principle and argue that (1) natality, (2) action and (3) promises provide the normative basis for a democratic theory of hope. Lastly, I argue that rather than suggesting specific hoped-for ends, this Arendtian principle of hope helps define the features that condition the collective and contingent work and experience of hoping with others in politics.
Harvey Milk's ‘The Hope Speech’
While the language of hope is common in political and social life, what can it tell us about democratic politics? I explore this question by first drawing on ‘The Hope Speech’ by the gay activist and elected official Harvey Milk. 1 However, saying that a political actor's rhetoric is grounded in the language of hope says little about its interaction with politics. Indeed, there are plenty of examples of vague language of change and a better tomorrow in democratic politics that are used to capture different (and often differing) individuals’ hopes. Their vagueness, however, often lead to unfulfilled promises and disillusionment (e.g. Drahos, 2004; Schlosser, 2013; Sleat, 2013). Therefore, what can this speech tell us about the work and experience of hope in politics? Without overlooking the strategic dimension in Milk's appeal to hope, his speech is revealing as it points to different ways in which hope can be experienced and structured in politics. More specifically, two accounts of hope co-habit in the speech. The first is mediated by and reflective of one's experience in the world, and the second is contingent on and grounded by its collective experience. While they are not mutually exclusive, I argue that they condition different types of political actions, with the latter being of specific interest for a democratic theory of hope.
Turning to the first mode of hope, Milk situates this passage against a tense political climate heightened by the killing of a gay man in San Francisco and a successful anti-gay political campaign in Dade County, Florida, in 1977. Within this fraught political context, he talks about a hope that emerges in times of crisis and helps individuals escape despair, I can’t forget the looks on faces of people who’ve lost hope […] I walked among the sad and the frustrated at City Hall in San Francisco and later that night as they lit candles on Castro Street and stood in silence, reaching out for some symbolic thing that would give them hope. These were strong people, whose faces I knew from the shop, the streets, meetings, and people who I never saw before but I knew. They were strong, but even they needed hope.
This account contrasts with another one later in the speech in which hope is then found between individuals, The only thing they [young gay people] have to look forward to is hope. And you [the gay community] have to give them hope. Hope for a better world, hope for a better tomorrow, hope for a better place to come to if the pressures at home are too great. Hope that all will be all right. Without hope, not only gays, but the blacks, the seniors, the handicapped, the us-es, the us-es will give up.
The extracts above illustrate how hope problematizes the ways people – either individually or collectively – navigate uncertainty and unpredictability. Milk's speech suggests that the work and experience of hope can relate differently to the various facets of democratic politics. Yet, generally understood, hope evokes a positive attitude toward possible yet uncertain futures (Huber, 2019). The accounts of hope discussed in Milk's speech elevate its situatedness as they cannot be dissociated from a situation of oppression that brings people to either ‘reach out for some symbolic thing that would give them hope’ or to turn to others. 2 While they express a critical stance toward the present, how they contribute to defining potential futures varies. Accordingly, the political character inherent to hoping with others provides important normative insights for democratic theory and the organization of collective capacities.
Weaving hopes into politics
Milk's speech illustrates different facets of hope that can be woven into political life. His first appeal to hope locates it within individual agents and can be understood as valuable to crafting political agency (Blöser et al., 2020: 4; Stahl, 2020). This mode of hope plays a key role in sustaining resolve to achieve a hoped-for object in the face of dire odds (e.g. Huber, 2023). Passages such as ‘reaching out for some symbolic thing that would give them hope’ and ‘[t]hey were strong, but even they needed hope’ emphasize its instrumentality. This understanding is common in democratic politics with phrases such as ‘you need to have hope’ and ‘do not lose hope,’ which capture this idea of sustaining one's political engagement and resisting despair, especially when the hoped-for objects are distant.
In contrast, the experience of hope presented in the second extract relates to individual and collective agency by signaling spaces in which people are connected to one another. Stockdale (2021: 170) defines collective hopes as being shared within a group, shaped by the collective actions undertaken by the group, and, in turn, generative of a positive feeling across the group. Building on that definition, I argue that we can also specify a type of collective hope as being not only shared but co-constituted by the members of the group as the language of co-constitution captures the sense of collective ownership and agency that sustain its collective work and experience. While individual hopes are bounded and defined by individual preferences, collective hopes are situated in these spaces where the necessary language and meanings used to make sense of both present and possible futures are being constantly challenged and co-constituted.
While democratic theory tends to overlook hope as a political concept, turning to theories of political hope contributes to refining our understanding of its interaction with politics. For instance, its association with political agency is an important dimension of our social and political life as it can motivate people to engage in pursuits of their choosing and turn to others to achieve these pre-defined goals (Huber, 2019; McGeer, 2004). This strand of hope emerges in response to the finitude of human agency and the uncertainty it engenders, two features of democratic politics. As a moment in the formation of political agency, hope contributes to countering a prevailing sense of despair or apathy associated with our limited capacity to exert change.
The association with agency can be found in Kantian accounts of hope in response to the agential and epistemic limits of human beings. 3 For instance, Kant asks in the Critique of Pure Reason ‘what may I hope?’. His answer is revealing for his insight on what makes hope rational, as shown by his reformulated question ‘If I do what I should, what may I then hope?’. Hope is not passive. It is defined and conditioned by one's action as political agency implies a ‘volatile mix of uncertainty, risk and conviction’ (Goldman, 2012: 505). Kant addresses the question by noting both its practical and theoretical component: ‘The practical leads like a clue to a reply to the theoretical question and, in its highest form, the speculative question’ (CPR A806/ B834). A political articulation provides a standpoint to approach and justify a specific mode of hope in Milk's speech. Recall the passage about people ‘reaching out for some symbolic thing that would give them hope’ in which Milk points to something that people are looking for when they are confronted with their own limits and dire odds. This hope – and the object it carries – is sustained by the beliefs and reasons that enable one to justify their actions. From a Kantian perspective, the rationality of this hope depends on our trust in the ‘fundamental structures of reality’ by which the hoped-for objects can be achieved (Blöser, 2022: 14). Therefore, looking ‘for some symbolic thing’ suggests looking for these beliefs and reasons that would allow one to maintain hope.
While Kant's hope has a transcendental aspect due to its reliance on faith, a secular interpretation of that regulative framework can also be recovered in its relation to moral and political progress as a postulate for practical reason (e.g. Goldman, 2012, 2022). The Kantian framework can help situate hope as a psychological means by which one identifies elements of faith that would justify their action despite difficult circumstances (Huber, 2019). Although it contributes to the formation of political agency, I argue that this account is limited to a type of hope located within the self rather than something contingent on and constituted by the community. Although others can be included in the pursuit of hope as they can help and be trusted to help with one's action (e.g. Huber, 2019), the individual-centric framework of this Kantian model is in tension with the uncertainty and contingency of being in the world with others.
The association between political hope and future-oriented agency can also be understood based on Bloch's Principle of Hope and the concept of the ‘not yet’ (1986). 4 In this account, hope relates to a form of political knowledge oriented toward the genuinely new that aims to transcend what is usually understood as possible (e.g. Duggan and Muñoz, 2009). Hope is thus associated with uncovering the ‘objectively real possible’ that is latent in societies. Accordingly, ‘educated hope’ provides resources to bridge the emancipatory potential of what has not yet been realized and create openings in the present. This potential and its association with cognitive processes relates to Bloch's discussion on the cold and warm streams of Marxism and his emphasis on the latter as a constitutive element of social change: ‘They are related to one another like that which cannot be deceived and that which cannot be disappointed, like acerbity and belief, each in its place and each employed toward the same goal’ (Bloch, 1986: 208). Hope is here grounded in these novel possibilities that point toward what may become possible.
Bloch's account of the relation between temporality and agency suggests a form of ‘militant optimism’ (1986: 198). This approach points to the kind of organizing work necessary for democratic politics and which can be seen as underlying the work of community building in Milk's speech. However, there is also a sense of inevitability in Bloch's writing about the not-yet realized potential of society and the normative constraints it engenders (Goldman, 2022; Stahl, 2020: 273). Although productive, this mode of hope is limited in theorizing the intersubjective political processes inherent to the political and unpredictable activity of hoping with others.
The literature on hope provides an array of theoretical frameworks that captures different elements and facets of hope in politics (for an overview, see Blöser et al., 2020; Stahl, 2020). 5 Yet, Milk's speech illustrates that its interaction with democratic politics also goes beyond the question of how one should hope by highlighting the political conditions that enable its collective experience. When he talks about the need for the community to ‘give them hope,’ he moves the burden of hope from the individuals themselves to what emerges between them as it is co-constituted and contingent on being in the world with others. This movement is captured by my proposed theoretical shift from hoping alongside others to hoping with others. It problematizes a collective expression of hope as, on the one hand, a form of political activity and, on the other, a political good that sustains the community. Hoping with others constitutes thus a site of politics as future possibilities are constantly challenged, co-constituted and pursued by the members of the community, but also an object of politics as it relates to the political possibilities that sustain collective action.
The Kantian and Blochian accounts of hope emphasize the value of hope in agency formation, but attending to the in-betweenness of collective experience of hope elevates the enabling – or limiting – character of politics in its relationship with uncertain collective futures. While some hopes happen to be shared with others or pertain to the collective, the focus on the in-between suggests a greater theoretical emphasis on the political work and experience of hoping with others. I argue in what follows that Arendt's political thought can contribute fruitfully to this specific mode of hope by centring the entangled relationships between hope as a site and object of a more participatory and deliberative conception of politics.
Worldly hope in Hannah Arendt
Why Arendt? Turning to a hope contingent on people acting in concert with others elevates the political problem of defining and sustaining its collectiveness. From that perspective, Arendt becomes an interesting interlocutor as following her thinking with and against hope fruitfully opens the tension, contingency and fragility of its political experience. 6 For instance, she notes in her biography on Rahel Varnhagen that hope seduces us ‘into peering about in the world for a tiny, infinitesimally tiny crack … which nevertheless would help to define, to organize, to provide a centre for the indefinite world,’ yet, it ends up leading ‘to despair when all one's searching discovers no such crack, no chance for happiness’ ([1957] 2022: 15). This passage hints toward a political problem as it emphasizes the contingencies of being in the world with others and the collectivist rather than individualistic underpinnings of the conditions that shape the work and experience of hope (Braithwaite, 2004: 132).
I argue that by turning to the possibilities and promises of politics, we can find the basis of a relational and collective hope oriented toward the world we create and share with others, a world that is imperfect, flawed and non-ideal. This reading echoes a tension in Arendt's work as she proposes both a ‘constructive’ and a ‘cautionary’ political theory (Berger, 2009). Recovering the contours of hope does not deny the fragility of politics, as shown, for instance, by her account of totalitarianism and her critique of modernity. On the contrary, elevating hope accentuates the uncertainty and indeterminacy that ground its worldly expression and justification. By thinking with Arendt against Arendt, it is thus possible to derive from the tensions in her writing the political conditions that sustain the sense of possibility inherent to this worldly orientation.
First, it helps to recognize that Arendt expresses her skepticism of the language of hope on many occasions throughout her work. Samantha Rose Hill (2021: 88) notes that Arendt describes hope as ‘dangerous’ since it prevents action and undermines ‘social ties and human relationships.’ There are many passages throughout Arendt's work that suggest a reading of hope as being, at best, apolitical and distracting and, at worst, anti-political and dangerous. For instance, in the preface to the first edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt ([1951] 1985: vii) rejects ‘desperate hope and desperate fear’ as the ‘two sides of the same medal’ as she argues that ‘the events of our time are not less effectively forgotten by those committed to a belief in an unavoidable doom, than by those who have given themselves up to reckless optimism’ ([1951] 1985: vii). She continues arguing that as we struggle to make sense of the present, ‘all efforts to escape from the grimness of the present into nostalgia for a still intact past, or into the anticipated oblivion of a better future, are vain’ ([1951] 1985: ix).
Arendt's skepticism is grounded in what she describes as the ‘shifting, unstable and disquieting’ characteristics of hope (1978: 35). She sees a danger when it incites individuals to turn away from the world and its reality. For instance, Arendt warns against the misdirection of hope in her discussion of the modern means of destruction as it can entail an anti-political strand aimed at curbing the uncertainty and unpredictability of politics (2005: 97). This critique echoes a long tradition that warns against the tendency of hope to misdirect political agency and cloud political judgement (e.g. Cairns, 2020). From this perspective, it can distort and undermine our capacity to make sense of the present. Hope can thus be detrimental for Arendt when it is turned toward an idealized conception of the future or a glorified image of the past that no longer holds.
Accordingly, there is something dangerous when it blinds people and creates a false sense of comfort by ‘overlap[ping] reality’ (Arendt, [1968] 1995: 6). Arendt warns that under dire circumstances, there is a strong temptation to ‘shift from the world and its public space […] in favor of an imaginary world “as it ought to be” or as it once upon a time had been’ ([1968] 1995: 19). The pitfalls that she associates with hope reflect a specific type of hope without groundings in the world and echoes Bloch's (1986) account of ‘fraudulent hope’ and concerns about ‘false hope’ and ‘wishful hope’ in the literature (e.g. Huber, 2023; McGeer, 2004; Schlosser, 2013; Stockdale, 2021). But what would hoping with others look like in democratic politics from an Arendtian perspective?
Recovering an account of hope in Arendt's writings requires situating it in relation to the world, given that she describes both ‘faith in and hope for the world’ as essential features of human existence ([1958] 1998: 247). While I address this specific association in further detail latter in the essay, I focus here on the orientation it provides. Arendt rejects politics as the domain of inevitability and predictability when she writes that ‘[i]f politics brings disaster, and if we cannot do away with politics, then all that is left is despair’ (2005: 109). Accordingly, politics entails an underlying sense that things can be otherwise, and it is this possibility that allows something else to happen (Schell, 2010). This possibility is not metaphysical or otherworldly but rather a feature of the plurality of the common world. For Arendt, freedom expresses this dimension of being in the world with others. She writes that it offers ‘an uncertain and flickering ray of hope in the otherwise rather dark and threatening prospects of the future’ (2018: 332). As such, this ‘ray of hope’ is not external but shares the worldliness of a freedom ‘tangible in words which can be heard, in deeds which can be seen, and in events which are talked about and turned into stories […]’ (2006a: 153). In sum, there is worldly hope that can be grounded in the space between people.
From that standpoint, it is by being and acting with others that people are ‘capable of achieving, and constantly do achieve, the improbable and the unpredictable’ (Arendt, 2005: 114). As alluded to above, hope for the world suggests a specific worldly orientation as it elevates the in-betweenness of being with others. In The Human Condition (HC), Arendt writes, to live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it; the world, like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time (Arendt, [1958] 1998: 52).
The artifice that structures the world allows human beings to gather in their plurality and supports the emergence of an intersubjective in-between that enables meanings and narratives to be constituted, resisted, contested, re-actualized and rejected through words and deeds (see Honig, 2017).
Against the contingency and uncertainty of politics, Arendt emphasizes a commitment and a concern for the world we share with others. This worldly orientation does not provide a moral foundation that guides action but rather an ethical one. Amor mundi, the love of the world, suggests an engagement with the world, understood as both the location and object of politics. In her reading with Arendt against Arendt, Myers (2013: 109) proposes that this worldly commitment elevates a world-centric democratic ethos contingent on the world as a ‘shared home’ and ‘mediating entity.’ 7 Attending to the world moves us beyond ourselves by centering the ‘sorrow and delight, remembrance and resistance’ inherent to a world layered with flaws, shortcomings and uncertainties (Galloway, 2021: 777). It entails a resistance that is visible in Arendt's description of Lessing as someone who ‘never made his peace with the world’ but who uses criticism for taking ‘sides for the world's sake’ (Arendt, 1995: 6–9).
This political orientation does not suggest specific actions, but rather a principle that guides political action amidst the uncertainty and indeterminacy of politics. Holding within it the fragility of politics, this worldly orientation entails a specific experience of hope. It reflects the possibility of something else – as ‘uncertain and flickering’ as it might be (Arendt, 2018: 332) – contingent on being actively engaged with the world and others. In turn, its connection to possibility suggests a more normative and open-ended object despite the flawed and non-ideal features of the world. This hope shares similarities with what has been defined as ‘basal’ hope as it is not oriented toward specific outcomes (Calhoun, 2018: 74). The worldly orientation recovered in Arendt's writing stands in contrast with narratives of progress by capturing the indeterminacy and contingency inherent in sharing the world and acting with others. 8
Natality, action and promises
By juxtaposing Milk's accounts of hope with Arendt's concern for the world, I argued that we can recover a worldly experience of hope. This orientation suggests a political principle that guides the collective work inherent in hoping with others. Doing so requires, however, an account of politics as an enabling – or limiting – framework. As such, I propose engaging with the in-betweenness of this account by drawing on three interrelated Arendtian concepts: natality, action and promises. These three concepts capture the work of hoping with others and constitute the conceptual touchstones of what I define as a democratic theory of hope.
Natality and the open-endedness of politics
Milk suggests a hope that is contingent on people entering a group and being able to both see others and be seen, echoing here Arendt's space of appearance. Natality introduces the idea that due to our condition of being born into the world, we have the capacity to start something new. By entering the world, each birth brings with it ‘something uniquely new’ (Arendt, [1958] 1998: 178). While it can be interpreted as the fact of birth, natality is defined in HC as a ‘second birth’ that takes place as we enter into the world with ‘word and deed’ (Arendt, [1958] 1998: 176). 9 It orients human existence by allowing a ‘who’ to come into being that is defined by ‘contingency and unpredictability’ (Birmingham, 2007: 766). Natality captures thus a political tension inherent in a worldly account of hope between what is and what could be, as the former must remain open to the latter. Indeed, Arendt (2006a: 189) writes in The Crisis of Education that our hope only ‘hangs on the new which every generation brings,’ and if we try to ‘control the new,’ we risk ‘destroy[ing] everything.’ Natality hence reflects a ‘creative energy’ (Berger, 2009) that allows, through its actualization, miracles understood as the capacity of generating something new.
Natality constitutes a key feature that connects the work of hoping with others to democratic politics. Its relationship with hope is what sustained a sense of possibility contingent on sharing the world with others. Indeed, it suggests an open-endedness enabled by these spaces of freedom in which we can begin something anew. Accordingly, it implies action and sustains the idea that by being in community, we can generate the unexpected and reconfigured, challenged or re-actualized the ways we engage with others. As Arendt ([1958] 1998: 247) writes in the HC: The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, ‘natural’ ruin is ultimately the fact of natality, in which the faculty of action is ontologically rooted … Only the full experience of this capacity can bestow upon human affairs faith and hope, those two essential characteristics of human existence which Greek antiquity ignored altogether, discounting the keeping of faith as very uncommon and not too important virtue and counting hope among the evils of illusion in Pandora's box. It is this faith in and hope for the world that found perhaps its most glorious and most succinct expression in the few words with which the Gospels announced their “glad tidings”: “A child has been born unto us.” [emphasis added]
An example of this expression of ‘faith in’ the world and the hope it enables can be found in Arendt's support of citizen councils as an alternative to party systems in her later work. As she argues, the council system provides a solution to the ‘lack of public spaces to which the people at large would have entrance’ (2006b: 269). Even though she saw the prospect of realizing this vision as ‘very low,’ it echoes the political principles guiding her faith in the plurality of the common world and her hope for people's capacity to act in concert with others (1972: 233). These principles suggest a different organization of politics that captures the worldliness of freedom and the ‘uncertain and flickering ray of hope’ inherent in these moments (Arendt, 2018: 332; Muldoon, 2011). This ‘faith in and hope for the world’ emphasizes a politics of renewal that actualizes the unpredictable nature of being with others in the world over time.
The temporality of natality connects present meanings with the possibilities of the not-yet by interrupting, challenging and re-interpreting webs of narratives (Birmingham, 2006; Diprose and Ziarek, 2019; O’Byrne, 2010). As the present is shaped by a constant tension between the past and future, it suggests iterative processes in which meanings are introduced, challenged and revised. While these processes can suggest an interruption of existing processes and structures (e.g. D’Entrèves, 1994), Patchen Markell (2006: 7) argues that it refers instead to a ‘stance of practical engagement with events.’ For Markell, natality captures a process by which a difference introduced by the happening of something new becomes meaningful. This account centers on the relations we have in and with the world. Therefore, it is not necessarily the new that matters, but the openness that this condition brings.
The event of natality constantly brings possibilities to ‘bend structures, to change the script, to negotiate new ones’ (Benhabib, 2018b: 26). As a result, the miracles it engenders strike us as a ‘shock of surprise,’ ‘no matter how well anticipated in fear or hope’ they are (Arendt, 2006a: 168). In contrast to more teleological formulations of hope, this point about anticipation and surprises speaks to the indeterminacy inherent in the work and experience of hoping with others (see Bryant and Knight, 2019). The capacity to anticipate an outcome or an event draws on past experiences to conceive and map out possibilities. However, the event of natality brings something different as the plural character of politics ushers new iterations, meanings and narratives. It situates hope in a space of indeterminacy and political open-endedness by rejecting the myth of total mastery in politics (Braithwaite, 2004). The resulting ‘miracles’ translate thus the impossibility of anticipating all possibilities.
Engaging with others is an inevitably uncertain exercise as it implies recognizing our agential and epistemic limits. This uncertainty allows the condition of natality to bring into the world a constant, yet potentially messy, politics of renewal that keeps politics open. Given the similarities between the language of hope and natality, readers of Arendt have often defined the former by the latter. However, I argue that natality alone does not fully capture the breadth of this worldly account of hope, as hoping for the possible is not enough by itself. Indeed, hoping with others suggests a world-building dimension reliant on our capacity to act in concert with others. I thus turn to action and promises to supplement this theoretical account.
The unpredictability of action
Action is ontologically rooted in natality (Arendt, [1958] 1998: 247). As natality brings new beginnings, it is from its actualization that we can expect the unexpected (D’Entrèves, 1994). This association highlights the second conceptual touchstone, which we can find in the passage in Milk's speech in which he suggests that the gay community must ‘give them [young gay people] hope.’ This passage implies an active dimension to this work and experience of hoping with others. Acting is a plural venture that is constitutive of the present and engaged in future-making activities. By being with others and ‘neither for nor against them’ ([1958] 1998: 180), there is a revelatory quality to action that allows people to disclose their intentions and define shared meanings (e.g. D’Entrèves, 1994). As such, being seen and seeing others is contingent on there being others and makes possible the constitution of relationships This emphasis leads. Arendt to elevates speech as it, alongside action, enables people to show who they are and ‘make their appearance in the common world’ ([1958] 1998: 179).
While action and speech unfold between people and are concerned with worldly matters that ‘relate and bind them together’ ([1958] 1998: 182), their revelatory quality weaves a non-tangible yet no less real ‘web’ of human relationship ([1958] 1998: 183). By engaging with others, people contribute to this web that constantly shapes the outcomes and meanings of actions. Arendt writes that one's words and deeds create the new conditions that make action and its following reaction unpredictable since they ‘never move in closed circle,’ ([1958] 1998: 190). It is this boundlessness that ensures for her that even ‘the smallest act in the most limited circumstances bears the seed of the same boundlessness, because one deed, and sometimes one word, suffices to change every constellation’ ([1958] 1998: 90). Therefore, the plural experience of the world ascertains the indeterminacy of action and stands in contrast with a means to an end paradigm. It is what leads Ronald Beiner (1992: 154) to write that hope is integral to the nature of human action in Arendt. While the impossibility of knowing with certainty what will happen captures, broadly speaking, a central tenet of any account of hope, the structure and orientation of the actions on which hope relies on differ.
The Arendtian understanding of action elevates the relational and discursive dimensions of being in the world with others. While hoping alongside others reflects an individual's desires and guides their actions, hoping with others is bound to the space that emerges between people and the narratives and meanings they create by being in relation with one another. At a collective level, there is a process of co-constitution that unfolds discursively as hope relates to what Arendt calls the ‘inter-est’ that ‘lies between people’ and ‘relate and bind them together’ ([1958] 1998: 182). The work of hope relies thus on defining, contesting and re-interpreting that in-between by developing the necessary language through which collective possible futures can be imagined and present conditions collectively assessed. In turn, this work supports the collective experience of hope, which allows and sustains this active engagement with the world and its possible futures.
The work of hoping with others entails a discursive dimension that allows people to disclose themselves and create the relational conditions by which they can collectively define and re-define present and future through their words and deeds. Drawing on Dan Degerman's (2019: 156) reinterpretation of emotions in Arendt's work, the ‘intersubjectivity of the public’ provides a certain ‘objective existence’ that goes beyond ‘subjective perception.’ A communicative understanding of Arendt's writing allows us to understand this collective mode of hope as it transcends the subjectivity of its individual experiences.
Navigating the different (and, at times, competing) perspectives engendered by being in the world with others suggests a reliance on persuasion and deliberation (e.g. Benhabib, 1990, 2003; D’Entrèves, 1994). From that standpoint, the plural nature of politics suggests an emphasis on the capacity to form collective opinions through public debate and engagements. Doing so relies on the capacity of ‘enlarged mentality.’ Without this capacity to think from the standpoint of someone else, ‘one will never meet him [the other]’ (1992: 74). Therefore, engaging communicatively aims at co-constituting this intersubjective reality that orients and guides the collective, although temporarily – hence the need to constantly actualize this intersubjective reality.
Echoing Katie Stockdale (2021), hoping with others differs from an aggregate of individual hopes as it transcends subjective experiences. Through interactions, members of the group develop shared understandings by engaging with a plurality of perspectives and imagining possible collective futures. In turn, these co-constituted aspirations assess the present and guide their actions. Collective hope is shaped by the intersubjective validity that emerges from this process. But while a collective hoped-for future might be identified, the unpredictability of political action constantly creates new avenues and goals contingent on the collective actions undertaken by the group. As such, hoping with others relies less on specific objectives than collectively determined principles that inspire new beginnings and allow ethical judgments (Cane, 2015; Muldoon, 2015). Its collective work implies thus navigating a plurality of perspectives to create intersubjective understandings by which present and future can be assessed, albeit temporarily. I now turn to Arendt's concept of promises to explore these moments and the capacity of people to act in concert across time.
Promises and the uncertainty of what could be
Milk's speech, lastly, alludes to the experience of ‘coming out’ that binds people together. The hope associated with this sense of community is presented as key in sustaining the former under conditions of marginalization and avoid that the ‘us-es will give up.' This point raises the uncertainty of acting with others (e.g. Blöser et al., 2020: 4; McGeer, 2008). Jakob Huber (2019: 15) proposes the concept of ‘democratic trust’ to capture the positive attitude that can foster our capacity to pursue collective goods in democracy. However, he also recognizes that hope alone cannot sustain this trust as it can be unavailable to many, undermined, or even broken in many social and political contexts. In these moments, distrust can constitute a similarly effective attitude for marginalized groups (e.g. Krishnamurthy, 2015; Stockdale, 2021). At a more systemic level, democracy institutionalizes distrust by holding open sites of accountability, but a generalized distrust can lead individuals to withdraw into ‘cynicism and alienated passivity’ (Warren, 2017: 35). The uncertainty of being with others problematizes these engagements with others and the world.
Amidst the uncertainty of political life and the uneasiness that the open-endedness of the future and the indeterminacy of politics can generate, hope relies on a capacity to ‘tame’ contingency without turning to certainty or predictability. While trust and distrust help us navigate the common world, collective experiences of hope rely on coordination between people. These moments of stability capture the third conceptual touchstone derived from Arendt, which is the capacity to make and keep promises. In its worldly orientation, hope cannot be dissociated from the plural and collective dimension of action that shapes how we engage with others and determine what is understood as possible. Yet, hoping with others loses its structuring dimension if the community stops acting in concert. Consequently, promise-making allows the power of collective action to be extended into the future (Aradau, 2014: 84–86). While trust and distrust are instrumental in structuring a group, promise-making shapes our interactions with others. It is the constant re-actualization of these relationships that hold a political community together. 11
Arendt writes that it is through ‘binding and promising’ that ‘power is kept in existence’ as it constitutes ‘a stable worldly structure to house, as it were, their combined power of action’ (2006b: 166). She ([1958] 1998: 244) warns that if promises lose their character as an ‘isolated island of certainty’ by imposing, for instance, a specific account of the future, they ‘lose their binding power.’ Promises structure, at a specific point in time and place, the spaces in which we appear to one another and through which we can expect the unexpected without seeking or imposing a definitive path. They introduce a degree of security amidst the uncertainty and unpredictability of politics. Bonnie Honig (1993: 85) argues that this capacity to make and keep promises is consistent with Arendt's notion of freedom as it provides ‘fragile stabilities’ reflective of the contingent nature of politics. These promises orient political communities and provide the necessary stability to imagine and pursue new possibilities. But their temporal nature hints toward the need to constantly revisit them and, as a result, constantly re-actualize the understandings and political structures that define the contours of a ‘we.’
This actualization is what allows collective hopes to sustain their collectiveness through time, as there is no guarantee that members of a group will continue to conceive of themselves as such over time (MacKenzie, 2021: 35). Promise-making reflects the temporality of our political engagement. It mitigates future uncertainties by structuring collective actions in the present. By this, I do not mean that promise-making isolates the present from the indeterminacy of politics, but rather, as argued by Melissa Orlie (1995: 350), it allows us to ‘forge a location in the world with others.’ The temporality of promises speaks to a political problem inherent in any collective experience of hope as it implies, on the one hand, a continuous re-assessment of the collective itself and, on the other, of what is understood as possible. The process of promise-making connects hoping with others and politics as it guides our interactions and sustains collective power.
Promise-making is future-regarding as it implies a temporal engagement with possible futures while being grounded in the present. It emerges from a specific point in time and space that contextualizes the work of hoping with others by locating the meanings produced by a community. As a result, it does not bring about certainty and predictability to politics but allows moments of stability through which a collective can assess the present and define possible futures. Going back to the example of Milk's ‘The Hope Speech,’ the tension between the present and the future is visible when Milk mentions the need to provide hope for the younger generation. The following promise of a better tomorrow holds the group together, creates a sense of stability in the present, and enables its members to conceive of possible futures. However, this promise only makes sense as long as the community is held together, and this togetherness must constantly be actualized.
Toward a democratic theory of hope
Political expressions of hope can take different forms and play different roles, as shown by how Milk weaved its language. Private expressions reflect one's assessment of the world and provide a motivating force that guides one's action. From a collective standpoint, hope entails a discursive dimension as it builds on an intersubjective reality deriving from people acting in concert with others. In turn, the narratives associated with this in-betweenness create meanings, challenge previous understandings, and expand what the collective understands as possible. What I have called the work and experience of hope captures thus a world-building process, which shapes how collectives orient themselves in the present and engage with futures.
Since democracy relies on a sense of possibility that empowers individuals to talk, mobilize and act in concert with others to pursue collectively defined goals and shape possible collective futures, its relationship with hope plays a guiding and structuring role. This point is often overlooked in democratic theory as hope is either taken for granted or seen as something naïve and disconnected from politics. Nevertheless, political engagements and the temporality of collective actions continue to carry a language of hope that problematizes its politics. Previously, I have recovered a worldly experience of hope and contended that attending to it from the standpoint of the political enables us to identify conceptual touchstones that shape and define its collective work. While each touchstone only reflects one of the facets of hoping with others, together they suggest the normative basis of a democratic theory of hope that reflects the plurality of political life and its future-regarding dimension. Rather than using Arendt to determine what ‘we’ can hope for, juxtaposing her political insights with how hope and politics interact with one another enables a conceptual framework that guides how people engage in future-making activities with others.
This framework suggests a political principle that contrasts with her conception of fear as an apolitical principle. Arendt notes that fear appears in response to a ‘general powerlessness’ and undermines our capacity to act in concert with others (2005: 68–69). Since hope and fear both relate to uncertainty, understanding the former as a political principle justifies a politics that holds open the spaces in which new possibilities become collectively meaningful. This decentres specific hoped-for ends in favour of the work and experience that allow collectives to engage in defining and re-actualizing shared imaginaries. Understanding hope as a political principle provides a framework to cultivate future-regarding action that holds and maintains open spaces in which people can act in concert with others. The work and experience it entails emphasize the conditions that shape and re-actualize the in-betweenness of politics. With the pressure of engaging in future-making activities and bind present and future publics, democracy requires groundings to mitigate the anxiety that its uncertainty and unpredictability can generate (see Warren, 1996). This Arendtian reading of hope shifts its ‘burden’ from the inner life of individuals to these political conditions that ground and guide people's engagement with others and the world.
Indeed, while what is considered possible is embedded in a specific temporal framework, it is also contingent on a structure that shapes how we interact with others. Although the temporality of hope is a constitutive feature of its interaction with politics, Ghassan Hage (2016: 466) notes that ‘there is always a mixture of the diachronic and the synchronic, the temporal and the spatial in the imaginary of hope.’ This mix of temporality and spatiality underlines the world-building dimension of hoping with others as it is concerned with the ongoing process of co-creating political structures and caring for worldly things that sustain political engagement and collective aspirations (see Myers, 2013). For example, Honig's account of public things includes spaces of contestation, participation and deliberation in which the meanings that define and sustain them evolve through the constant re-equilibrium of the community's commitments. In other words, she emphasizes the capacity of people to ‘imagine, build and tend to a common world collaboratively’ (2017: 38). This in-betweenness connects the past and the future and grounds a practice of ‘held hands’ rather than a reliance on ‘the courage of an individual’ (Honig, 2017: 82–83). This metaphor points to the role of spaces in enabling individuals to act in concert with others and collectively define their engagement with possible futures.
Attending to the world and its constitution grounds the temporal exercise of hoping with others. The worldly elements around which we come together shape our experience of the world. In ‘The Hope Speech,’ the fact that Milk was engaging with supporters and inviting people who did not see themselves in politics beforehand either at the San Francisco Gay Community Center or the steps of City Hall challenged existing narratives of exclusion and invisibility associated with existing sites of power. This collective experience of hope is contingent on the shared power that emerges between members of a group, which allows them, at a specific moment in time and space, to co-create the necessary language to imagine, conceive and move toward possible futures. Yet, these moments can be fragile as they depend on actions taken (or not) in the present and the environment in which they unfold. Being in the world with others reflects a certain messiness as it generates ‘innumerable, conflicting wills and intentions’ (Arendt, [1958] 1998: 184; see also Benhabib, 2003). Conflict is hence inherent to the political act of imagining, defining and collectively pursuing hoped-for futures. While competing viewpoints co-habit, the plural condition of the common world presents both a condition and a challenge as it raises the question of how to judge distinct and even divergent collective expressions of hope.
While Arendt does not suggest a blueprint for how to organize politics, she suggests principles that contribute to re-thinking democracy. As argued previously, the council system provides such an example (e.g. Disch, 2011; Muldoon, 2011, 2016). Her ‘faith in and hope for the world’ is bound to her belief in people's capacity to act in concert with others. How Arendt writes with and against hope provides a fruitful entry point to theorize a particular collective and worldly experience of hope located between people. By distinguishing the contours of a political principle of hope, this approach provides a basis to assess how hope pertains to politics. The deriving democratic theory of hope suggests a politics that holds open space in-between people, emphasizes the discursive structure of political action and engages with the temporal character of promise-making.
Conclusion
Democracy relies on a collective sense of possibility to empower people to talk, organize, mobilize and act with one another. The challenge, however, is that differentiating the messy and multifaceted experience of hope in politics requires a theoretical language that democratic theory is currently lacking. Focusing on a collective and worldly experience of hope grounded in the uncertainty and unpredictability of politics, I have developed the normative basis of a democratic theory of hope by turning to three interrelated facets of Arendt's political writing: the open-endedness of politics, the unpredictable, discursive and world-building features of action, and the collective power that promise-making sustains and actualizes.
My objective here has not been to propose a full defence of hope. Indeed, I recognize that expressions of hope can be, distracting and disempowering (e.g. Lindroth and Sinevaara-Niskanen, 2019; Warren, 2015). However, as hope is woven into politics in different ways, it matters to attend to the structure and conditions of their interaction (e.g. Stockdale, 2021). This essay aimed to explore the complex relationship between hoping with others and politics by identifying the political principle that guides how people relate and engage with the uncertainty and indeterminacy of being in the world with others. Peter Drahos (2004: 37) argues that ‘democracies that purport to take the hopes of their citizens seriously will have to find more direct and less manipulative forms of communication and dialogue.’ The effort to theorize the contours of a democratic theory of hope is a step in this direction.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my gratitude to Mark Warren, Anna Jurkevics, Afsoun Afsahi, Nazmul Sultan, Erik Severson, Joshua Santeusanio, Jordan Ouellette, Nojang Khatami and the participants of the Political Theory Colloquium at the University of British Columbia for the discussions and comments on earlier drafts of this essay. I also owe much to the two anonymous reviewers and the editors for engaging so productively, insightfully and encouragingly with my work.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
