Democracy among strangers: The necessity of hope

Abstract

In this paper I set out a conception of hope that is distinctively political and that makes hope for a just and democratic society reasonable, by showing how political hope can bridge the gap between an ideal of a just and democratic society and the obvious ways in which our actual world falls short of this ideal. Furthermore, I show how hope functions as a necessary epistemic support for reasons to aim for justice despite the distance prospect of its achievement. Political hope thus bridges both a normative and an epistemic gap, each of which threatens the legitimacy of democratic regimes. I identify three orders of political hope and make the argument that democratic hope, correctly understood, requires that any normative conception of democracy must contain, as a matter of analytical necessity, a corresponding conception of hope.