This dissertation concerns the nature of hope for political progress in the contemporary world. Indeed, what is hope, and what role does it play in political thought? Despite the concept’s recent prevalence in popular politics and democratic theory alike, the problematic it presents remains hardly recognized. Hope is a paradoxical phenomenon: constitutively uncertain, demanding often improbable or even irrational belief in the possibility of a future not yet realized, yet at the same time a necessary condition for intentional action, a phenomenological human constant. Political hope presents a similar problem: engaged citizens enter the fray with at least the tacit hope that their participation will contribute to a more desirable world, albeit often without much ground. While it used to be that theorists could predicate their political hopes on eschatological philosophies of history, – Catholicism, Absolute Idealism, Historical Materialism, etc. – the loss of conviction in teleological metanarratives leaves post-Enlightenment thinkers with the question of how to comprehend hope without a metaphysical ground for progress. This dissertation investigates the problem posed by hope in social action, political theory and democracy by tracing an ongoing yet overlooked discussion in modern political thought.

I argue that two schematic perspectives have informed traditional approaches to hope, in line with the phenomenon’s presence in a state of dynamic uncertainty between subjective aspiration and objective possibility. On the one hand, hope has been justified by reference to an agent’s practical cognitive needs, and I call this conception “hope as will”; on the other hand, hope has been justified by reference to the objective constitution of reality itself, and I call this conception “hope as world.” The first chapter explicates Immanuel Kant’s arguments for the regulative assumption of historical progress as reflecting the former approach, drawing on his writings in practical philosophy, politics, anthropology and pedagogy. The second chapter takes up the work of Ernst Bloch as representative of the latter approach, arguing that despite introducing a materialist criterion for distinguishing sound from false political hopes, Bloch’s inability to countenance non-Marxist hopes effectively makes his revision of the Kantian problematic evade the central question of the subject’s potential as an agent of hope’s realization. The third chapter turns to the work of Charles S. Peirce and William James, showing how this dynamic between will and world is recapitulated in the political philosophy of early American Pragmatism, with equally unsatisfactory results. The fourth and final chapter argues that John Dewey’s democratic theory offers a way of navigating between the subjectivist tendency in hope as will and the objectivist tendency in hope as world. In contrast to Kant’s and James’s voluntarism and Bloch’s and Peirce’s absolutism, Dewey vests his political hope in democracy as a social formation attuned to bringing about the mutual reconstruction of a public and the institutions that mold it. As such, Dewey’s democratic hope offers a profound redescription of the Kantian problematic, shifting – as Kant himself intended in his later lectures on anthropology and pedagogy – away from hope’s justificatory ground and towards the soil in which an intelligent public grows. Democratic hope is not simply a matter of belief as a cognitive experience or of faith in the workings of History; instead, the bridge between subjective aspiration and objective possibility is built on experimentation with the institutions of public life.