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The Principle of Political Hope
The Principle
of Political Hope
Progress, Action, and Democracy
in Modern Thought
L O R E N G O L DM A N
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You must not circulate this work in any other form

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Goldman, Loren, author.
Title: The principle of political hope : progress, action, and democracy in modern thought /
Loren Goldman.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2023. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022030134 (print) | LCCN 2022030135 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780197675823 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197675830 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Political sociology. | Hope—Political aspects. |
Idealism. | Utopias. | Kant, Immanuel, 1724–1804—Political and social views. |
Bloch, Ernest, 1880–1959—Political and social views. |
Peirce, Charles S. (Charles Sanders), 1839–1914—Political and social views. |
James, William 1842–1910—Political and social views.
Classification: LCC JA76 .G566 2023 (print) | LCC JA76 (ebook) |
DDC 306.2—dc23/eng/20220816
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022030134
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022030135
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197675823.001.0001
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America
Politics without hope is impossible . . . it is hope that makes involve-
ment in direct forms of political activism enjoyable; the sense that
“gathering together” is about opening up the world . . . . Hope is
crucial to the act of protest: hope is what allows us to feel that what
angers us is not inevitable, even if transformation can sometimes
feel impossible. Indeed, anger without hope can lead to despair or a
sense of tiredness produced by the “inevitability” of the repetition of
that which one is against.
But hope is not simple about the possibilities of the future implicit
in the failure of repetition . . . hope involves a relationship to the pre-
sent, and to the present as affected by its imperfect translation of the
past . . . The moment of hope is when the “not yet” impresses upon
us in the present, such that we must act, politically, to make it our
future.
—Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion
Look, I don’t have a lot of hope for this world. In the face of the cli-
mate change emergency, the kinds of people that are in the major
power positions in our universe . . . the rise of right-wing forces, the
miserable corruption and deprivation that neoliberalism has con-
tributed to much of the postcolonial world, the massive pile up of
humanity in global slums, and the seeming endurance of capitalism
beyond, beyond, so far beyond when it should have given way to
something else, it’s hard to have hope. I think we need grit, responsi-
bility and determination instead of hope.
—Wendy Brown, “Where the Fires Are”
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1. Kant, Practical Belief, and the Regulative Idea of Progress 20
2. Bloch and Latent Utopia 62
3. The Logic and Vitality of Ends in Peirce and James 86
4. Dewey and Democratic Experimentation 119
Conclusion: Hope and the Production of a Transformable World 150
Notes 159
Works Cited 205
Index 227
Acknowledgments
I have racked up many intellectual debts in the course of writing this book.
It began as a dissertation at the University of Chicago, where I had the good
fortune of working under the supervision of Patchen Markell, Bob Gooding-
Williams, John P. McCormick, and Robert Pippin. Early versions of its claims
were vetted in that vigorous intellectual community; I thank Julie Cooper,
Wout Cornelissen, John Dobard, Joe Fischel, Thomas Fossen, Andreas
Glaeser, W. David Hall, Yusuf Has, Gary Herrigel, Hans Joas, Jonathan Lear,
Jennifer London, J.J. McFadden, Chris Meckstroth, Justin Modica, Glenn
Most, Sankar Muthu, Jennifer Pitts, Shalini Satkunanandan, Jade Schiff, Bill
Sewell, Joshua Sellers, Lisa Wedeen, and Linda Zerilli. As a junior fellow at the
Martin Marty Center for the Public Understanding of Religion, I learned the
value of transcending even without heavenly transcendence; special thanks
are due to William Schweiker and Slava Jakelić. Conversations with friends
and colleagues elsewhere further informed my perspective; I thank Philip
Deen, Steve Fishman, Pauline Kleingeld, Michael Lamb, Daniel Lee, Alex
Livingston, Inder Marwah, Lucille McCarthy, and Marc Stears. Even fur-
ther back, at Yale, Frankfurt, and Oxford, where its seeds were first planted,
I thank Erik Butler, Duncan Chesney, Jerry Cohen (RIP), Michael Freeden,
Axel Honneth, Rahel Jaeggi, Boris Kapustin, Owen McLeod, Gillian Peele,
Mark Philp, Michael Rosen, Alan Ryan, Martin Saar, Michael Schmelzle,
Howard Stern, Kirk Wetters, Andrew Williams, and Allen Wood.
The work was significantly revised and expanded during postdoctoral
fellowships at Rutgers University’s Center for Cultural Analysis and the
University of California at Berkeley’s Department of Rhetoric, both sites
of amazingly fruitful interdisciplinarity. At Rutgers, I thank Steve Bronner,
Laura Brown, Richard Dub, Chris D’Addario, Ann Fabian, Jonathan Farina,
Jonathan Kramnik, William Galperin, Andy Murphy, Louis Sass, Derek
Schilling, and Emily Van Buskirk. At Berkeley, I thank Chris Ansell, David
Bates, Mark Bevir, Ari Bryen, Greg Castillo, Marianne Constable, Felipe
Gutterriez, Jake Kosek, Leslie Kurke, Su Lin Lewis, Ramona Martinez,
Paul Rabinow, Mark Sandberg, Jonathan Simon, Michael Wintroub, and
the Townsend Center for the Humanities. At Ohio University, where
x Acknowledgments
I subsequently spent three years as a visiting professor, I thank Sami

Abdelkarim, Alyssa Bernstein, Judith Grant, Kyle Jones, Nicole Kaufman
(whose intellectual generosity is infinite), Brandon Kendhammer, Tehama
Lopez, Andrew Ross, Caitlin Ryan, Kathleen Sullivan, and Julie White.
At the University of Pennsylvania, an earlier version of the book was
workshopped with Amy Allen, Joshua Dienstag, and George Shulman,
whose questions, objections, and suggestions helped shape its final form.
My colleagues in political theory are an extraordinary group, full of schol-
arly brio and critical cheer, and it has been a joy to work alongside Roxanne
Euben, Jeff Green, Nancy Hirschmann, Ellen Kennedy, Anne Norton, Adolph
Reed, and Rogers Smith; Jeff, Anne, and Roxanne each read and commented
on this book’s complete penultimate draft. Two graduate students deserve
special thanks: Troels Skaudhauge acted as the book workshop’s amanu-
ensis and Rosie DuBrin compiled the index; both are formidable minds
and regular interlocutors. Thank you also to my other colleagues in polit-
ical science, especially departmental chairs past and present, Anne Norton,
Nicholas Sambanis, and Michael Jones-Correa, as well as Osman Balkan,
Warren Breckman, Audrey Jaquiss, Greg Koutnik, Carlin Romano, Sophia
Rosenfeld, and Gabe Salgado. It has been humbling to have Bruce Kuklick
take me under his wing in pragmatist matters, let alone enthusiastically read
and comment on this and other manuscripts. A Fall 2019 visiting fellow-
ship at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin allowed me to put the finishing
touches on the book; thank you to Rahel Jaeggi for the invitation. Matt Shafer
is a Covid-era colleague whose presence at Penn, even if mainly virtual,
added much to my scholarly life.
Earlier versions of parts of this work were presented at workshops
at University of California at Berkeley, Bryn Mawr College, University
of Chicago, Leiden University, Ohio State University, Ohio University,
University of Pennsylvania, Rutgers University, and University of California
at Santa Cruz. Earlier versions of parts were also presented at meetings of
the American Political Science Association, Western Political Science
Association, Midwest Political Science Association, Association for Political
Theory, and the American Philosophical Association, as well as at con-
ferences at the Buffalo Center for Inquiry, Freiburg University, Leiden
University, Northwestern University, Penn State University, Princeton
University, the University of Cambridge, the University of Massachusetts at
Amherst, the University of Oregon, the University of Wales at Newport, and
Acknowledgments xi
the University of Warsaw. The interlocutors I encountered strengthened this

work immensely.
A good deal of chapter 1 was previously published as “In Defense of
Blinders: On Kant, Political Hope, and the Need for Practical Belief,”
Political Theory 40:4 (May 2012), 497–523. Smaller parts of other chapters
have previously appeared in my articles “John Dewey’s Pragmatism from
an Anthropological Point of View,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce
Society 48:1 (Winter 2012), 1–30; “Another Side of William James: Radical
Appropriations of a ‘Liberal’ Philosopher,” William James Studies 8 (2012),
34–64; “Left Hegelian Variations: on the Matter of Revolution in Marx, Bloch,
and Althusser,” Praktyka Teoretyczna 35:1 (April 2020), 51–74; and “Reading
Wendy Brown in Ludwigshafen: Nonsynchronicity and the Exhaustion of
Progress,” in Power, Neoliberalism, and the Reinvention of Politics, ed. Amy
Allen and Eduardo Mendieta (Penn State, 2022). I thank the editors for per-
mission to reprint parts of those essays.
Finally, my deepest gratitude goes to Susanna Loewy, who read manu-
script draft upon draft, suffered through endless queries about phrasing, al-
ways had a wise suggestion just as I was about to hit send, and has been an
unceasingly supportive and loving partner for years. Hope springs eternal;
this book is dedicated to our sons Asher Sphere and Eden Hersch.
Introduction
In 1916, the American philosopher John Dewey confessed to having held a

“childish and irresponsible” faith in historical progress. His generation, he
writes,
confused rapidity of change with advance, and we took certain gains in

our own comfort and ease as signs that cosmic forces were working inev-
itably to improve the whole state of human affairs. Having reaped where
we had not sown, our undisciplined imaginations installed in the heart of
history forces which were to carry on progress whether or no, and whose
advantages we were progressively to enjoy.1
Reflecting on the political upheavals of Progressive era America and the

avoidable Great War in Europe, he allows that nowadays “never was pes-
simism easier . . . There is indeed every cause for discouragement.”2 This
belated realization of inhabiting a fool’s paradise of automatic and uninter-
rupted historical progress need not lead to despair, however. The rapid social
transformations Dewey had taken for progress were real, after all; changing
conditions meant that the conditions for change were at hand. We may main-
tain hope if we choose to understand the idea of progress “as a responsibility
and not as an endowment,”3 as a living ideal, an invitation to act, rather than
a resignation to drift. For Dewey, as we shall see, this responsibility to the
future is inseparable from the ideal of democracy, a utopian vision of an eq-
uitable, open, and decent world in which our political hopes are buttressed
not by God, Progress, History, or any other laundered remnant of Geist, but
by intelligent and often radical experimentation with the institutions and
practices of social power.
Following Dewey, this study is written in a pragmatic spirit to give an ac-
count of hope as a principle of political action distinct from the facile ex-
pectation of optimism and independent of grand notions of progress, for
today we find ourselves in a similar predicament. Thirty years ago, watching
the political disintegration of the Eastern Bloc, Francis Fukuyama famously
The Principle of Political Hope. Loren Goldman, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197675823.003.0001
2 The Principle of Political Hope
heralded the “end of history,” a culmination marked by the universal ac-

ceptance of liberal democracy and the exhaustion of all other possibilities.4
Controversial in its own moment, Fukuyama’s claim has aged poorly. While
politicians are still wont to invoke the “right side” of history, while hope has
been a particular mainstay of American public rhetoric,5 and while there re-
main occasional cheerleaders for the actuality of Enlightenment progress,6
the present moment is one of palpable crisis. The recent success of right-wing
populists in the United States and across the globe has spelled a retreat from
democratic norms and a reversal of gains made toward more open, equi-
table, and pluralistic societies; at the same time, the continued consolidation
of oligarchic and plutocratic rule threatens to turn incomplete democra-
cies into complete Potemkin republics. The failure of nation-states to ade-
quately address the still raging COVID-19 pandemic as well as movements
for economic, racial, and sexual justice, not to mention the ongoing climate
catastrophe, raise doubts about the very possibility of effective, let alone
transformative, political action.
My primary interlocutors are the German Enlightenment philosopher
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), the German critical theorist Ernst Bloch
(1885–1977), and three canonical figures of American pragmatism, Charles
Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), William James (1842–1910), and John Dewey
(1859–1952). For these thinkers, hope is not an idle, passive affair, akin to the
Pollyannish optimism that the world will improve; rather, hope provides a
foundation and impetus for social action in the shadow of uncertainty. Kant
plays a leading role not only because the subsequent thinkers all wrestle with
the consequences of his turning of philosophy inward, away from the objec-
tive world and toward the subject’s experience, but also because he makes
hope an indispensable aspect of moral and political agency. While rejecting
Kant’s metaphysical dualism and his specific understanding of history, Bloch,
Peirce, James, and Dewey recast and refine Kant’s basic insights. Bloch, an ex-
uberant critical theorist whose work revolves around hope, centers his sights
on the world’s latent utopian tendencies; Peirce historicizes and (metaphor-
ically) democratizes the creation of knowledge, tethering inquiry to hope;
James exhorts the creation of new realities through hopeful action; Dewey, fi-
nally, asserts and exemplifies democratic hope, an experiment in the practical
belief that individuals have the capacity to collectively govern themselves.
In presenting political hope as an orientation for action, these thinkers re-
cast the fraught idea of progress, which we now understandably approach
with justified caution, conjuring up as it does specters of epistemological
Introduction 3
presumption, triumphant developmentalism, and paternalistic domination.7

Despite its purveyors’ claims to universality, moreover, the idea of infinite
historical progress is largely an invention of the European Enlightenment.
While there is more diversity of thought among its proponents than cur-
rent critics often allow, there is also no shortage of thinkers in this period
who wax enthusiastic over the coming perfection of humanity.8 It is there-
fore the product of a cultural field seeded with Christianity’s eschatological
time, primed for a messianic rupture with the past, and confronted with un-
precedented transformations in material, political, and economic power. In
political thought, the idea of progress was double-edged: on the one hand,
it provided a scientific cudgel against traditional religious and absolutist
authority; on the other, it offered a discursive justification for paternalism,
discrimination, imperialism, and repression, not to mention the everyday
cruelties of snobbery and elitism.9 Indeed, Anibal Quijano, Enrique Dussel,
and others have argued that the infinite temporality of the Enlightenment
myth of progress is inseparable from the colonial imaginary of empty
space, a tempus nullius arising out of the false presumption of terra nullius,
thereby implicating the linear and unidirectional idea of progress in the hi-
erarchical spatial and racial classification of the world’s population.10 Georg
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Fukuyama’s inspiration, describes history as the
gradual development of metaphysical spirit as freedom in reality, a pro-
cess that transpires from East to West, reaching its culmination in modern,
Christian Europe, “the absolute end of Universal History”; Africa, indige-
nous America, and the Orient are relegated to an eternal now of prehistory,
whose inhabitants can only acquire freedom if civilization is imposed upon
them.11 John Stuart Mill, who worked as a British East India Company offi-
cial for twenty-five years, from 1823 (aged seventeen) until its dissolution in
1858, is equally emphatic about progress, denying liberal rights to members
of “backward states of society” and notoriously describing despotism as “a
legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end
be their improvement.”12 In short, a linear, unidirectional notion of history,
an understanding of the future as a rupture with the past, new technological
abilities and productive capacities, philosophical rationalism, and a cosmo-
politan perspective enabled by Europe’s global political domination all con-
spired to create a particular image of progress that should be jettisoned.
Within academic political thought, the pendulum of expectation has
swung in the opposite direction, with recent scholars highlighting pessi-
mistic responses to progress and the meliorability of the human condition.13
As Joshua Dienstag explains, pessimism does not necessarily deny the line-
arity of time, but the presumption of an upward trajectory: “Change occurs,
human nature and society may be profoundly altered over time, just not per-
manently for the better.”14 Dienstag’s rich study of the topic draws on Jean-
Jacques Rousseau, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund
Freud, and Miguel de Unamuno, among others, who deny the premise shared
by liberalism, socialism, and pragmatism alike, “that the application of reason
to human social and political conditions will ultimately result in the melio-
ration of these conditions.”15 Using a similar cast of characters along with
Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger, and Hannah Arendt, Tracy
Strong writes approvingly of what he calls “politics without vision,” linking
the acknowledgment of human limitation and fragility to relinquishing
hope of creating a better world.16 In an invaluable study of despair in Hegel,
Søren Kierkegaard, Theodor Adorno, Frantz Fanon, and Georges Bataille,
Robyn Marasco explores what happens when we assume that “there is no
end to or exit from the conditions of existence, and no rational hope that
a brighter future will repay patient struggle in the present.”17 Following in
Michel Foucault’s wake, Wendy Brown writes trenchantly of the “ubiquitous,
if unavowed, exhaustion and despair in Western civilization,” in which “most
have ceased to believe in the human capacity to craft and sustain a world
that is humane, free, sustainable, and above all, modestly under human con-
trol.”18 No room remains for those who seek “collaborative and contestatory
human decision making, control over the conditions of existence, planning
for the future . . . deliberate constructions of existence through democratic
discussion, law policy . . . [and] the human knowledge, deliberation, judg-
ment, and action classically associated with homo politicus.”19 Brown closes
her Undoing the Demos with a gesture toward a hope rooted in the prospect
of three distinct types of “work”: combatting neoliberalist ideology, offering
an alternative to capitalist globalization, and countering this civilizational
despair.20 More recently, Brown states in an interview (cited earlier as an
epigraph) that “we need grit, responsibility, and determination instead of
hope.”21
Pessimism and despair are an understandable reactions to the complici-
ties, rationalizations, and apathies of the blithe optimism in much modern
Western thought. To have downcast eyes is not to be blind, however, and
we should not conflate the loss of traditional banisters for thinking with
the loss of vision altogether. As Marasco writes, despair is a “dialectical pas-
sion . . . at odds with itself ”; it is “no simple absence,” but one that “conserves
Introduction 5
and preserves the possibility of what it also denies,”22 defined by what it fails
to achieve—a point clear in its etymology, de-sperare, or down from-hope.
Despair does not necessarily lead to resignation; on the contrary, it can steel
against starry-eyed enthusiasm, hence Brown’s gesture of hope in the con-
cluding pages of Undoing the Demos. The danger, however, is that it may
numb us to the live possibility of the world being other than it is; as Dienstag
confesses, “although pessimism does not issue from black moods, it could
indeed inspire them.”23 In 1931, Walter Benjamin described one result of
this collapse of historical hopes as “left-wing melancholy,” an attitude of rad-
icalism “to which there is no longer in general any corresponding political
action.”24
My concern in writing this book is that the loss of progress and the temp-
tation toward historical melancholy does not rob our political imaginations
of the possibility of a better future, especially insofar as the significance
of any moment in the sweep of passing time changes as it recedes into the
past. Indeed, it need not: events are always subject to reinterpretation—
contemporaries hold the present in wildly different lights, and each schol-
arly generation writes new histories of previous generations.25 Moreover,
as Arthur Danto argued decades ago, if there is any meaning or direction
to history, it could be only be ascertained at the end—everything else, so to
speak, might just be a prelude.26 Until then, we must plod along with the
provisions of narratives we tell ourselves.27 More mundanely, the passing of
time in everyday life recursively shapes the past’s meaning in terms of the
present’s forward trajectory.28 Bloch writes of “the non-synchronicity of the
synchronous” in time, the coexistence of realities from different moments of
history whose interaction and conflict generate novel possibilities and reali-
ties.29 The rejection of grand narratives of progress does not need to foreclose
the possibility of a brighter future.
Pessimism risks lending itself to what historian François Hartog terms
a “presentist” understanding of history, which sees “the extension, ad infi-
nitum, of an automatic present that is emptied of its contents and sheared
from its roots and possibilities.”30 In the presentist frame, a heuristics of
fear dominates: the future is seen with foreboding, ethical life is guided by
an “imperative of responsibility” that upholds the status quo, and political
imagination is stunted by a principle of precaution.31 Presentism and pessi-
mism alike render the world devoid of prognostic structure.32 If history has
no “visible, thinkable, or imaginable future,” historian Enzo Traverso writes,
we are left fixated on memory, with the past as present, for “a world without
utopias inevitably looks back.”33 Emancipatory aspirations are replaced by

nostalgic fantasies. Pace these presentist pessimists, the thinkers in this study
subscribe to a view of history in which different futures remain live and vital
possibilities. They are not, however, guaranteed. Their prospects depend on a
host of factors, most of which are beyond human (let alone rational) control,
but for which, as pragmatists insist, intelligent inquiry, action, and experi-
mentation are nonetheless indispensable.
The hope entertained in this study is thus not optimism, the standard an-
tonym for pessimism. This distinction is important to emphasize because the
two are often confused, and much of the derision aimed at hope mistakes its
target for optimism. As its name implies, optimism is (strictly speaking) the
conviction that this is the best of all possible worlds, a secular theodicy that
translates into the historical inevitability of progress. For the optimist, the
future is assured, and there is ever the temptation to take what James calls a
“moral holiday,” “to let the world wag in its own way, feeling that its issues are
in better hands than ours and are none of our business.”34 Hope, by contrast,
is characterized by uncertainty, haunted by the possibility of failure, working
to overcome despair. I use “working” intentionally, for one of the key threads
of the post-Kantian line of thinking presented here is that social hope does
not afford moral holidays precisely because its justification is inseparable
from the action it underwrites.
Finally, concerning the relationship between the pessimistic outlooks
of Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Fanon, and others, and the hopeful visions
of the thinkers I employ, it is useful to draw an analogy to Bloch’s distinc-
tion between a “cold stream” and “warm stream” of Marxism, the first so-
berly explicating society’s objective dynamics, the second orientated toward
“prospect-exploration,” of breaking out of the spell of what is assumed to be
possible. For Bloch, neither coldness nor warmth can or should dominate,
but stand in productive tension, energizing discussion and pushing it for-
ward.35 With much the same intent, James distinguishes “tender-minded”
from “tough-minded” thinkers, the former rationalistic, idealistic, opti-
mistic, and dogmatical, the latter empiricist, materialistic, pessimistic, and
skeptical.36 My interlocutors all fall on the warm and tender-minded sides
of these divides, each insisting on the generative function of ideals in human
action. Having a warm temperament does not mean one ignores the cold
facts of reality, but that one entertains the possibility that the world is not yet
entirely baked. The eventual future arises, however, out of the intersection
of both currents. Marasco, Dienstag, Strong, Brown, and many others have
Introduction 7
done invaluable work explicating the cold limits of politics as a response to

the failure of univocal progressive history. The present study aims to comple-
ment (and complicate) their narratives with a warm account of political hope
as an active principle that disentangles it from metaphysical historical prog-
ress and psychological optimism alike, one that reckons with human fragility
and finitude while nonetheless looking toward a better future, taking the ho-
rizon as a threshold rather than a limit. Montesquieu defines a principle as an
animating passion that makes one act; following him, Arendt notes its ety-
mological derivation from principium, or beginning.37 As a principle, hope is
thus a fundamental basis for both inquiry and action, motivating our vision
and inspiring our deeds.
The Varieties of Hopeful Experience
The historical specificity of contemporary critics of the idea of progress not-

withstanding, wariness of hope has a well-documented provenance dating
to the early ancient Greeks. Indeed, it is often forgotten that hope first
appears in Western literature as an evil, in Hesiod’s setting of the Pandora
myth in Works and Days, roughly contemporaneous with The Odyssey. The
word elpis (ἐλπίς) does not—in pre-Christian authors, at least—necessarily
convey desire, but refers instead to any orientation toward the future,
good or bad (“anticipation” is perhaps better38). Later in the same poem,
upbraiding his profligate brother, Hesiod voices the familiar opposition be-
tween work and hope, which is “not good at providing for a man in need.”39
Elpis also misleads in politics; the poet Pindar, in an ode celebrating a newly
installed city councilor on the island of Tenedos, warns against ambitious
civic projects born in thrall of “shameless hope.”40 While not all ancient
Greek accounts paint elpis in a purely negative light—Heraclitus enticingly
writes that “If one does not hope, one will not find the unhoped-for, since
there is no trail leading to it and no path,”41 and the fable writer Babrius
makes hope a blessing in his later setting of the Pandora myth—but there
are exceedingly few rosy assessments, and its commonly associated epithets
are “empty” and “blind.”42
Hope for historical progress was not yet on the docket, however. As nu-
merous scholars have noted, ancient Greek thinkers (for the most part) held
a cyclical notion of history, and the idea of a fundamental break with the past
was barely entertained.43 Christianity displaced this cyclical historiography
in favor of a linear one looking toward the coming moment of messianic

rupture.44 A break with the past not only becomes fathomable but central to
Christianity; Paul names elpis alongside faith and love as a theological virtue,
celebrating the very unworldliness that troubled pre-Christian Greeks.45 Paul
expected the second coming of Christ to happen in his own lifetime,46 while
subsequent generations of Christians came to accept an indefinite deferral of
this messianic break. By early modernity the focus on being plucked out of
worldly time gave way to providential writers like Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet,
who saw in empirical history exhaustive evidence of humanity’s participa-
tion in a divine Christian plan. Enlightenment ideologists of progress secu-
larized this vision while stretching it out infinitely, asymptotically, toward a
telos of the moral and scientific perfection of humankind. Many factors fed
this transformation, from the previously mentioned advances in scientific
and technological knowledge and the growth of Europe as a global hegemon,
to the rationalization of time in everyday life in response to the imperatives of
proto-capitalist production.47 In any event, the shaky consensus on the actu-
ality or even desirability of historical progress was not long for the world, and
critics were already calling in the nineteenth century for a rejection of pro-
gressive temporality in favor of a notional eternal now (in Schopenhauer), or
a reprise of ancient cyclicality (in Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence),
a position also reached by the influential twentieth-century philosopher of
history Karl Löwith,48 and which lurks to varying degrees in the writings of
recent pessimists.
With such an accretion of meanings and temporalities in hope over its
long history, the concept operates in numerous contexts. While Kant,
Bloch, and the American pragmatists write in the shadow of Christian
hope, they nonetheless push back against its monological and otherworldly
foundations; like the Greeks, they emphasize its complex practical import
for the present. Before discussing political hope in detail, it will be useful
to give some provisional bearings in light of the contemporary intellec-
tual landscape. Hope has been addressed from an array of perspectives, in-
cluding philosophy, psychology, medicine, history, theology, anthropology,
literature, aesthetics, African American studies, and journalistic reportage,
each of which inflects it differently.49 It therefore has no single definition,
just as there is no single way hope is experienced or felt. As we shall see, de-
spite discussing hope in different ways depending on personal temperament
and specific context, the thinkers in this study stress hope’s practical and
performative qualities.
Introduction 9
In analytic philosophy, hope has conventionally been defined in terms

taken from British empiricism as “a combination of the desire for an out-
come and the belief that the outcome is possible but not certain,” in the words
of philosopher Adrienne Martin.50 Strictly speaking, this definition is not
future-oriented, and in everyday life there are uses of “hope” that regard
past events (i.e., hoping that a visitor’s flight arrived on time or hoping that
a long-lost pet found a good home). In such cases—as with future-oriented
hope—the uncertainty is crucial; one can assume a bad outcome (say, in the
pet case) and hope for a good one nonetheless precisely because certainty is
unavailable; the hope ends once the outcome becomes known. This is also the
case with hope for the future: one does not hope for something one knows
will happen.51 I belabor the point of uncertainty—already noted earlier when
discussing optimism—because of how common it is to underplay it. Jayne
Waterworth observes, for example, that the Oxford English Dictionary defines
hope as “desire combined with expectation,” which conveys more confidence
than the analytical definition allows, and argues that “anticipation” is more
appropriate, more directly conveying not only uncertainty but also hope’s
conative aspect insofar as it derives from the Latin anticipare, “to seize or
take possession of beforehand.”52 We can also distinguish between hoping,
as a phenomenon concerning possibility, and wishing, concerned with im-
possibility; voicing a wish to sprout wings is perfectly fine, but expressing a
hope to do the same is to engage in magical thinking. In this example, the line
between possibility and impossibility is clear: humans cannot spontaneously
sprout wings. For the thinkers in this study, the human capacity for creation
means that new possibilities can emerge, but not that just any wish can come
true. Finally, philosophers have introduced a number of categories to refine
and apply the orthodox definition in practice. Among the most salient for
social hope are objective and agent: the first is the anticipated future state of
affairs, the second its orchestrator.53 Hope, of course, has practically limitless
imaginable objectives, as it does practically limitless imaginable agents; put
in analytical terms, however, political hope concerns the exercise of public
power, and democratic hope concerns the exercise of public power mutually
orchestrated with others.
While the orthodox definition captures a large swath of what is under-
stood as hope, it appears inadequate to express other important qualities
associated with it. For one, it does not seem to reflect the phenomenology
of hoping against hope, when the outcome is extremely unlikely, nor does
it capture the unique sustaining power hope often conveys.54 Furthermore,
hope’s affective and phenomenological textures fall by the wayside. For the
Christian existentialist Gabriel Marcel, if we approach hope only from an an-
alytical perspective, we “make it unreal and impoverish it.”55 In experience,
hope involves “a fundamental relationship of consciousness to time,”56 and
thus cannot be reduced to desiderative-calculative objectives. Hope keeps
the future open, holding the promise that the world is not yet final: “piercing
through time,” it allows the “weaving of experience now in process . . . in[to]
an adventure now going forward.”57 As a mood of possibility, hope enables
agency, becoming “a vital aspect of the very process by which an act of cre-
ation is accomplished.”58 The philosopher and psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear
describes what he calls “radical hope” similarly. What makes hope radical,
Lear writes, “is that it is directed towards a future goodness that transcends
the current ability to understand what it is. Radical hope anticipates a good
for which those who have the hope as yet lack the appropriate concepts with
which to understand it.”59 As such, Lear presents radical hope as an indis-
pensable tool for sustaining ourselves as moral beings, living with others,
during moments of deep cultural disruption, when traditional frameworks
of meaning no longer hold. While in practice radical hope can admittedly
be difficult to distinguish from resignation, capitulation, and even collabo-
ration, the important thing is that it acts for its bearer as its own pragmatic
justification. In other words, if I believe my radical hope is justified, and it
thereby sustains my ability to ethically persevere in a world with others, it is
justified.
Philosophical accounts often treat hope as a mental phenomenon of indi-
vidual psychology. Scholars in other fields have rendered hope as a common
affair, something anchored in the individual self, but which takes living shape
only through social performance and interaction. Anthropologist Hirokazu
Miyazaki, for example, understands hope as a method of collaborative knowl
edge formation, “an effort to preserve the prospective momentum of the pre-
sent” that is “predicated on the inheritance of past hope and its performative
replication in the present.”60 From fieldwork among the colonially displaced
Suvavou people of Fiji, Miyazaki argues that hope for the recovery of ances-
tral lands both produces and is reproduced through the specific practices of
Suva (Christian) religious ritual, its social power structure, and its political
self-identity, reflected in its repeated appeals to the Fijian government for
redress since soon after expropriation. In Miyazaki’s account, inspired in
part by Bloch, the not-yet is the central category of Suva self-understanding
Introduction 11
insofar as their political agency revolves around extrapolating an unfulfilled

hope in the past and replicating it as hope in the present.61 Importantly, how-
ever, because this hope is an “ontological condition” it is inseparable from
action; as Miyazaki writes, “it cannot be argued for or explained; it can only
be replicated.”62
In related fashion, theater scholar Jill Dolan and cultural theorist Sara
Ahmed emphasize hope’s affective, performative, and political aspects in
concrete practice. Echoing Bloch and his friend the playwright and poet
Bertolt Brecht, Dolan describes the instantiation of hope in live perfor-
mance, which
provides a place where people come together, embodied and passionate, to

share experiences of meaning making and imagination that can describe
or capture fleeting intimations of a better world . . . Different kinds of per-
formance [can] inspire moments in which audiences feel themselves allied
with each other, and with a broader, more capacious sense of a public, in
which social discourse articulates the possible, rather than the insurmount-
able obstacles to human potential.63
The glimpses of utopia Dolan discovers in theater are rends in the fabric of
the present, at once a metaphor for and the prefiguration of a better future,
pointing toward a radical democratic politics. Ahmed describes hope sim-
ilarly, drawing special attention to its visceral and somatic qualities. In the
fuller passage cited earlier as an epigraph, Ahmed writes that hope
makes involvement in direct forms of political activism enjoyable; the sense

that “gathering together” is about opening up the world, claiming space
through “affective bonds.”64 . . . Hope is what allows us to feel that what
angers us is not inevitable, even if transformation can sometimes feel im-
possible. Indeed, anger without hope can lead to despair or a sense of tired-
ness produced by the “inevitability” of the repetition of that which one is
against . . . hope involves a relationship to the present, and to the present as
affected by its imperfect translation of the past. It is in the present that the
bodies of subjects shudder with an expectation of what is otherwise; it is in
the unfolding of the past in the present. The moment of hope is when the
“not yet” impresses upon us in the present, such that we must act, politi-
cally, to make it our future.65
For Ahmed, Dolan, and Miyazaki, hope is both a precondition and result of
public performance and collaborative activity. Its desiderative and rational
qualities are nested within multiple shifting layers of affect, temporalities,
political imaginaries, and collective experience.
Although speaking a different conceptual language, Kant, Bloch, and the
pragmatists likewise emphasize hope’s creative, generative, and performa-
tive qualities leading toward moral personality, concrete utopia, or a genu-
inely democratic public. The stage is set by Kant’s description of hope as an
orientation underpinning “practical belief ” in historical progress. A belief
is practical if it is entertained not because of compelling theoretical proof
but because it is essential for normativity: while we have no incontrovertible
evidence that the will is free, for example, Kant holds we may nonetheless
act as if it is for the sake of moral experience. The same goes for teleological
progress in history, albeit, as we shall see, in a typically idiosyncratic manner.
Bloch, Peirce, James, and Dewey follow Kant in presenting hope not as ra-
tionally justifiable on the merits of its content as such, but as an indispensable
condition for sustained practical moral and political commitment. The title
of Bloch’s magnum opus is, after all, The Principle of Hope.
For these thinkers, moreover, hope does not presume an escape from the
conditions of human finitude, a point often obscured by its close associa-
tion with religion. Bloch speaks of “transcending without any heavenly tran-
scendence,”66 of stepping beyond the bounds of what is now understood to
be possible in the world. This aspiration reflects not a pernicious utopianism
but a simple observation about historical change: things once considered im-
possible do in fact become possible. In politics or any other enterprise that
relies on human action and coordination, the adage that “that’s just the way
things are” is invariably false. Put otherwise, although political hope does
not deny human finitude, it nonetheless maintains faith in the possibility of
miracles in Arendt’s idiosyncratic sense of events that “burst into the context
of predictable processes as something unexpected, unpredictable, and ulti-
mately causally inexplicable.”67 For Arendt, human beings are the “miracle
worker[s]‌” of history, for “whether or not they know it, as long as they can
act, [they] are capable of achieving, and constantly do achieve, the improb-
able and unpredictable.”68
In this regard, it is important to acknowledge the prophetic voice heard
in this study’s subjects, for its peculiarly Kantian cast anticipates Arendt’s
remarks on the miraculous quality of human action in concert. That Bloch
and the pragmatists engage in prophecy is perhaps to be expected; Bloch’s
Introduction 13
initial renown came from his messianic The Spirit of Utopia (1918), and a
number of scholars have documented the powerful and enduring resonance
of prophetic rhetoric in American thought.69 For reasons that will become
clear in exposition, I hear in these thinkers not an appeal to divine errand
but an echo of Kant’s discussion of a prophetic (wahrsagende) history of the
future. In The Conflict of the Faculties (1798), he writes that such a mode of
inquiry is plausible “if [and only if] the prophet himself brings about and
prepares the events that he announces in advance.”70 It is permissible to
prophesy, that is, if one also plays a role in the prophecy’s realization. As a
call to one’s self and others to act toward an animating ideal, prophecy is inti-
mately bound up with performance. Such a pragmatic, prophetic sensibility
is present in all of the authors in this study, manifesting itself in both form
and content. James’s renowned essays on moral life, for example, were orig-
inally public addresses, and their striking mix of first-person memoir and
second-person exhortation unmistakably enacts his substantive theme of the
vitality of philosophical reflection; similarly, I argue that Kant’s celebrated
essay on perpetual peace—written in the form of a treaty between nations—
is itself meant prophetically as an exemplary contribution to the legal foun-
dation of a future pacifist world order.
Perspective and Scholarly Aims
This book’s main purpose is to sketch an account of hope that is rooted in

political action and democratic experimentation, one that stands independ-
ently of the thinkers that guide this study. The question naturally arises why
I cast Kant, Bloch, Peirce, James, and Dewey rather than anyone else whose
thought speaks to hope—Augustine, Aquinas, Marcel, Adorno, Arendt,
James Baldwin, or Richard Rorty, for example—as my dramatis personae.
For one, I cannot escape the fact that due to the contingent circumstances
of life, temperament, and academic training, my professional gaze tends to
focus on American pragmatists and other inheritors of German idealism.71
Furthermore, excellent recent studies of other significant thinkers of hope
already exist that are more sensible and insightful than anything I could con-
tribute.72 That said, Kant is hardly an arbitrary choice: he exerted (and con-
tinues to exert) an outsized influence on subsequent philosophy, and “What
may I hope?” is one of the three questions that explicitly guide his work.
Kant’s reflections set the stage for the compelling efforts of Bloch, Peirce,
James, and Dewey, who take Kant’s sketch of hope as a working principle to
heart but reject his metaphysical dualism, the hard line he draws between
subject and object. Each post-Kantian thinker accordingly articulates a dis-
tinctive dynamic one-world metaphysics for an ontology of the not-yet, and
which gives criteria for distinguishing false hopes from those with traction.
To spell out two further, related convictions shared by Bloch and the
pragmatists, the first is that the world can change; as Brecht wrote, “the
contemporary world is describable to contemporary humans only if it is
described as a transformable world.”73 This transformation of the world goes
not simply for the possibility that new possibilities arise in reality, as it were,
but also conceptually, that we may offer new descriptions and vocabularies
by which we render our world intelligible, a possibility of special concern
to Bloch and Dewey. A second shared conviction, hinted at earlier, is that
reality is in process rather than static. With process metaphysics comes the
assumption of ontological continuity between subject and object as well
as between agency and structure: neither human nature nor the nature of
the world is fixed and final. Human action—or better yet, following Dewey,
“trans-action” with and within an environment74—may bring novel possi-
bilities and hence new realities into being. This point deserves emphasis. As
James writes, certain practical beliefs can “create [their] own verification.”
This is particularly the case for social and political action: “Wherever a
desired result is achieved by the co-operation of many independent persons,
its existence as a fact is a pure consequence of the pre-cursive faith.”75 A train
robbery will be foiled only if individuals are willing to believe that others
will join them in overpowering the villains; to invoke Arendt again, miracles
born of human cooperation—like political and social democracy—become
possible only because of the willingness to entertain their possibility and ac-
cordingly enact them.
Reading these thinkers in the light of anticipation, I defend them all from
accusations of optimism and challenge a number of conventional inter-
pretations of each in the process. The contours of the critical system allow
us to see that Kant is not a simple Enlightenment optimist, but a philoso-
pher of action well aware of the tensions between theoretical and practical
reason, not to mention the contingency of history. Bloch is not an abstract
utopian aesthete, but a philosophical polyglot who predicates concrete hope
on an idiosyncratic vital materialism that grounds his ontology of the not-
yet. The case is the same with each of the pragmatists in this study: against
recent appropriators of Peirce for democratic theory, I show that his
Introduction 15
community of inquiry stands against the background of a strongly meta-

physical providentialism, not to mention that he explicitly denied the appli-
cability of scientific epistemology to political matters; James I read as a more
slippery and ambiguous political thinker than recent enthusiasts find him,
largely on account of his psychological and methodological individualism;
and Dewey is not the mild pluralist of many recent readers’ imaginations,
but a radical internal critic of both liberal democracy and market capitalism.
Furthermore, the divergent approaches of Peirce, James, and Dewey put paid
to monolithic understandings of pragmatism, just as drawing together this
particular cast of characters highlights the legacy of German idealism for
both Marxism and pragmatism, the latter of which is too often portrayed as a
uniquely American invention.
Kant and pragmatism are by now more or less known quantities in po-
litical theory. Bloch, by contrast, remains largely neglected, overlooked in
the shadows of more luminous Frankfurt School affiliates like Adorno and
Benjamin. A further aim is therefore to give Bloch his proper due by bringing
his fecund work into view for scholars of political thought.76 Insofar as my
interpretation of Bloch leans heavily on his (mostly untranslated) writings
on the concept of matter, however, it presents a more complete picture of his
“open system” than one often finds in readings that approach him mainly as
an aesthetic philosopher of utopia.77 To recover Bloch is to recover utopia;
thus a final aim of this study is to insist that the hope to make the impossible
possible is a vital force in political life and political theory.78 Emphasizing
the anticipatory aspect of political thought allows us to make sense of polit-
ical acts as prefigurative instead of merely expressive; participation in voting,
electoral politics, protest, aesthetic happenings, and even everyday minor
acts of illegality like jaywalking (“anarchist calisthenics,” in James C. Scott’s
delightful phrase79), are not merely activities serving instrumental ends-
in-view but fleeting enactments of and preparation for a brighter future.80
Rather than stressing the past and present tenses of the history of political
thought, I stress the present progressive and the future.
Plan of the Work
The motion of this study is propelled by the tension between what might be
called “psychological” and “metaphysical” approaches to hope. The psycho-
logical approach, on the one hand, locates the basis for hope in the cognitive
and practical needs of an individual subject. The metaphysical approach, on

the other hand, vests hope in the dynamic processes of the material world,
supernatural providence, or some other teleological explanation. This dis-
tinction effectively amounts to the question of whether hope is a subjective
or objective matter. Psychological hope is immune to empirical disappoint-
ment, whereas individual psychology is irrelevant to a metaphysically vested
hope. In practice, both may be indistinguishable from idiocy or fanaticism.
Each of my thinkers, with varying success, negotiates between these heuristic
poles and gestures in his own fashion, I argue, toward a pragmatic under-
standing of hope, in which action translates subjective aspiration into objec-
tive possibility. Furthermore, I argue that despite the extraordinary richness
and surprises contained in the work of these thinkers, each save for Dewey
ultimately tacks toward one or the other ideal type. To preview, Kant and
James lean psychological, while Peirce and Bloch lean metaphysical; I argue
that Dewey’s understanding of democratic hope as intelligent public practice
manages, by contrast, to effectively attend to both poles without falling into
the potentially solipsistic rhapsodies of the former or the potentially deter-
ministic apathies of the latter.
The first chapter describes Kant’s approach to political hope through a
wide-ranging engagement with his work, including his writings on moral
theory, anthropology, religion, history, and politics, as well as his three foun-
dational Critiques. I first explain how Kant turns the lens of philosophy in-
ward, toward human cognition and away from the objective world; rather
than asking about the nature of reality, that is, he asks what must be necessary
for reality to take the form it does in our experience, as finite rational beings
located in space and time, with moral commitments and practical interests.
I then explicate Kant’s notion of “practical belief,” a belief indispensable for
normative agency, as the key to grasping his understanding of hope. Kant
argues that we cannot know there is progress in history, that is, and its many
catastrophes speak against this claim, but we may nonetheless hope for prog-
ress insofar as denying its possibility robs humans of the motivation to strive
for a better future. I then discuss in detail Kant’s various briefs in favor of
the “regulative” idea of progress, including his famous essays on perpetual
peace and the idea of universal history as well as lesser-read works like The
Conflict of the Faculties, in which Kant rejects Moses Mendelssohn’s view that
history neither progresses nor declines—a perspective he calls “abderitism”
for rare comic reasons—his writings on religion and anthropology, and
his comments of historical teleology in Critique of the Power of Judgment.
Introduction 17
Crucial to Kant’s view, I show, is that hope is predicated on action toward

one’s end, just as historical prophecy is only permissible if one has a hand in
its realization. A final section is dedicated to some shortcomings of Kant’s
account, chief among which is the ontological dualism the other thinkers in
this study reject.
The second chapter concerns Bloch, the philosopher of utopia. Bloch is
often thought of as an aesthete, mystic, or even messianic figure; I stress,
however, that his social, religious, and cultural writings operate against an id-
iosyncratic ontology of matter resting on the generative fecundity of nature.
Where Kant ultimately separates hope from empirical events, Bloch puts the
world front and center, attuning hope to the utopian possibilities gestating
within it. For the sake of clarity in explicating this very challenging thinker,
my exposition proceeds in stages through the distinct strands of Kant, Hegel,
and Karl Marx that he weaves together, along with his self-described neo-
Aristotelian or Avicennan vital ontology of matter. I argue that this ontology
is a linchpin of Bloch’s entire project, for it provides the material basis for the
necessary assumption that novel possibilities can arise in reality: even if some
utopias are impossible according to what is today taken to be possible, that is,
Bloch’s Avicennan understanding of matter lays stress what may become pos-
sible. Utopian anticipation relies on the latter “layer of possibility.” I defend
Bloch against the common charge that he hereby reintroduces “Nature” as a
metaphysical subject, for Bloch is clear that such new possibilities arise out
of human action, out of experimentation with the institutions and categories
of social life. At the same time, I argue that Bloch’s account does not escape
several other problems concerning the relationship of this performative ex-
perimentalism to his inevitabilist rhetorical inclinations.
The second part of the book turn to American pragmatism. Chapter 3
takes up Peirce and James, who lean toward metaphysical and psycholog-
ical accounts of hope, respectively. Peirce is a key thinker for understanding
James and Dewey, both of whom were deeply influenced by his work: the
insistence on the primacy of practice, the idiosyncratic terminology of habit
and inquiry, the definition of belief as a habituation to act, the assumption
of the ontological continuity of mind and matter, and even the name “prag-
matism,” all rooted in his writings. His influence in the epistemological de-
fense of democracy is furthermore significant, for Peirce’s model of truth
as the result of the agreement of a scientific community was appropriated
by James and Dewey, not to mention numerous other more recent polit-
ical theorists, as a model for the intersubjective and democratic creation of
truth, however much Peirce himself gave reasons not to. Indeed, I show that
Peirce envisioned this convergence temporally rather than spatially—truth
will eventually arise because from probabilistic perspective it logically has
to over the course of millennia of scientific experiments ever refining our
knowledge; this is a far cry from the deliberative conceit of a group of non-
expert citizens discussing political matters. I show, furthermore, that Peirce
later complemented this early idea of a community of inquiry with meta-
physical tales meant to spiritually underwrite the probabilistic hope he vests
in scientific inquiry, the most extravagant of which is an anti-Darwinian
evolutionary philosophy of history in which love increasingly suffuses the
universe. James’s pragmatism could not be more different. Constitutionally
allergic to anything like cosmic mind, James exhorts individuals to lead and
indeed make significant lives. I focus on James’s thoughts on novelty, drawing
from his writings on psychology, history, and ethics, especially essays like
“The Will to Believe” and “Is Life Worth Living?” For James, hope for the
future rests on the human capacity to create new realities through action, in
the psychological satisfaction and moral value of strenuous effort as well as
in the concrete practical effects of collective agency. As we shall see, James
underwrites the emergence of novel realities with a radically anti-monist on-
tology that posits a teeming “pluriverse” of abundant possibilities. Pluralism
notwithstanding, James’s thought is also radically individualist, a convic-
tion that I argue often blinds him to understanding structural accounts of
social power that impact an individual’s ability to lead the sort of strenuous
life he declares worthwhile. While James thus makes the most compelling
statements of our capacity to effectuate historical change by bringing new
realities into being, his experiments are too often expressive shots in the dark
fired for the individual’s sake, even if they do briefly illuminate the world in
the process.
Chapter 4 turns to Dewey as an exemplary thinker of democratic hope.
Dewey’s writings on politics and society are widely known, but they lose
much of their power when separated from the philosophical anthropology,
social psychology, and process metaphysics that inform them. The chapter
accordingly treats Dewey as the systematic philosopher he is, and explicates
his democratic hope against the background offered in works like Human
Nature and Conduct and the magnificent but rarely read Experience and
Nature, the closest he comes to a comprehensive statement of his views.
Chief in this regard is Dewey’s nonsovereign notion of the self: in all activity,
humans are not merely agents but “agent-patients,” acting and acted upon
Introduction 19
at the same time.81 Furthermore, for Dewey, the fact that habits of conduct
are socially constructed means that they are able to be re-constructed; his
emphasis on education and schooling derives from a concern to equip new
generations with the tools to navigate a world both increasingly intercon-
nected and increasingly in flux. As an ideal, democracy offers the promise
of a common recognition of the struggles facing contemporary publics,
and thereby of instantiating habits and reconstructing institutions so as to
adequately address them. Hope resides in laying the groundwork of dem-
ocratic agency, in equipping citizens with the tools to rise to the demands
of public participation; for Dewey, establishing hope’s traditional justifica-
tory ground is less important than seeding the soil in which an intelligent
public grows. An added benefit of taking a broader view of Dewey’s work
is that it explodes the common myth of Dewey as a mere reformist liberal.
The idea of democracy requires much more than even radical experiments
in public policy, but also seismic social transformations, from public ar-
chitecture and education (rather than mere schooling) to material redis-
tribution: he names capitalist private property, for example, as the single
most fundamental aspect of social power in need of reconstruction for a
genuinely democratic world. The chapter closes by detailing Dewey’s own
democratic activism as a reflection of what it means to live in the light of
democratic hope.
The conclusion draws together strands of thought in the preceding
chapters and asks what constitutes hopeful democratic experimentation.
I present three different metaphors of experiment in the history of Western
thought: a laboratory model drawn by analogy with controlled scien-
tific experimentation; an individualist- cum-social performative model
of “experiments in living” drawn from Mill and underlined by James and
Dewey; and a dramaturgical-cum-demiurgical model drawn from analogy
to theater, one highlighted by Bloch and Brecht. I argue that political theory
privileges the first, scientific model over the other two to its detriment, for
concrete utopian aspiration requires a willingness to embrace the perfor-
mative and dramaturgical/demiurgical. In light of this capacious notion of
experimentation, encompassing reconstruction in the institutions, forms
of life, and categories we use to render our world meaningful, I end by
discussing actual methods of democratic hope today. Pragmatism-inspired
institutional reform, political protest, and art simultaneously envision and
call a better world into being—anticipating, demanding, and drawing closer
to utopia in the process.
1
Kant, Practical Belief, and the Regulative
Idea of Progress
Creation itself, that is, that such a brood of corrupt beings ever
should have appeared on the face of the earth, seems impossible to
justify if we assume that the human race never can or will be any
better off.
—Kant, “Toward Perpetual Peace”1
Toward the end of his epoch-making Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel

Kant explains that three questions motivate his work: “What can I know?,”
“What should I do?,” and “What may I hope?”2 Each question refers to a dif-
ferent domain of philosophy. What I can know concerns epistemology, and is
answered mainly in the Critique of Pure Reason, or First Critique, where Kant
delimits scientifically valid cognition to the world of sensible phenomena.
What I should do concerns morality, and is answered in Kant’s practical phi-
losophy, mainly in the Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals, the Critique
of Practical Reason, or Second Critique, and the Metaphysics of Morals.
Finally, what I may hope concerns religion, and is taken up in Religion within
the Boundaries of Mere Reason and several shorter essays, as well as in parts
of the Critique of the Power of Judgment, or Third Critique. Kant’s answers to
these questions can be summarized pithily: I can know nature, I should do
my duty, and I may hope for the realization of the highest good. The apparent
simplicity of these responses is deceptive, however, for their precise meaning
resides in the intricate structure of his critical system. Moreover, the question
of hope is at once the most elusive and least satisfying of the three.
While hope only receives Kant’s full attention in later writings, two aspects
of his discussion in the First Critique already suggest this elusiveness. First,
the respective verbs employed by Kant in each question indicate a different
modal status for each answer. Knowledge is a function of cognitive makeup,
The Principle of Political Hope. Loren Goldman, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197675823.003.0002
Kant, Practical Belief 21
and the first question’s “can” (können: “to be able to”) negatively describes
the limits of finite human rationality. Morality’s “should” (sollen: “to ought
to”), by contrast, positively prescribes the laws according to which the good
will operates.3 The question of hope assumes a less determinate scope than
either knowledge or morality insofar as Kant makes its answer a matter of
permissibility (dürfen: “to be legally permitted to, to allow to”), and reflec-
tion on hope concerns objects beyond the ken of experience. Though I can
speculatively hope for a vast array of states of affairs, Kant holds that I may
only reasonably hope for those necessarily bound up with my moral expe-
rience. Second, these grammatical differences are justified by Kant’s further
elucidation of hope’s elusiveness vis-à-vis knowledge and morality. While the
question of knowledge is driven by reason’s theoretical interest of what it can
know and the question of morality is driven by its practical interest in what it
should do, the question of hope is “simultaneously practical and theoretical,
so that the practical only leads like a clue to answering the theoretical, and, in
its highest form, speculative question.”4 Not only does hope therefore occupy
an uncertain terrain between the limits of human rationality and the needs
of moral psychology; the negotiation of these poles places the philosopher
on the primrose path of transcendental illusion, Kant’s term for the misuse
of reason’s principles “entirely beyond the empirical use of the categories” of
the possibility of sense experience.5 The explanation of how to avoid hope
leading us astray is consequently one of Kant’s primary aims in his practical
philosophy.
This chapter works through the difficulties of Kant’s answer to his third
question and explicates the regulative logic of hope. My analysis makes
three broad steps. I first offer an overview of Kant’s critical system, an under-
standing of which is essential for grasping his claims concerning hope. I then
situate hope in Kant’s conception of practical belief (praktische Glaube), a
propositional attitude with an evidentiary basis in the moral needs of hu-
manity rather than in scientific falsifiability; its justification, that is, is prac-
tical rather than theoretical. Finally, I examine the sources and grounds of
political hope in Kant’s work, showing how his moral justification for prac-
tical belief in God translates into a providential history of humanity. This last
step draws extensively from the historical and political writings to show the
variety of institutional means available for creating a world in which hope
for progress has concrete warrant. I demonstrate that despite numerous is-
sues with Kant’s explication of hope as a practical belief, the upshot of his
arguments is that for us to be permitted to hope, we must first act morally.
While cursory readings can leave the sense that Kant uncritically assumes
the reality of historical progress, I show that the moral vocation of humanity
for which we accept regulative hope is not automatically given, but must be
earned through action.
The Critical System
In the words of Henry Allison, Kant’s philosophy is “critical” insofar as “it

is grounded in a reflection on the conditions and limits of human knowl
edge, not on the content of consciousness of the nature of an sich reality.”6
The genitive in the German title of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der
reinen Vernunft) works in both directions: it is simultaneously a critique of
pure reason and pure reason’s critique of itself. This self-reflective methodo-
logical innovation means nothing less than a wholesale reconceptualization
of philosophy, and the KrV is meant to offer a transformation in thinking
Kant saw as a sea-change in cognition no less significant than Copernicus’s
“revolution in thinking” about celestial physics.7 Kant accomplishes this
transformation by attending to the structure of human cognition rather
than the structure of the world as it appears to us in perception. In doing so,
Kant seeks the conditions for the possibility of subjectivity: any state of af-
fairs that sober humans experience must be represented in accordance with
certain a priori categories of the understanding. The answer to what I may
hope lies in grasping how Kant’s critical approach permits the entertaining of
some metaphysical beliefs in conjunction with scientific knowledge. Key to
Kant’s claims is his central distinction between phenomena and noumena.8
Phenomena are things as they appear in experience: everything that comes
to us through intuition and understanding, and thus everything that we can
potentially know with demonstrable certainty. Noumena are things as they
may be thought, albeit without possible representation in experience.9 This
distinction is of the utmost importance for the plausibility of Kant’s turn
from the world itself to the conditions of its representation in subjective ex-
perience as well as for his reflections on metaphysics.
For Kant, the cognitive faculty structures empirical representations
both passively and actively. Passively, the mind (as “sensibility”) is a re-
ceptor of sense-impressions, all of which are necessarily given in space
and time, the basic conditions of sensible intuition. Actively, the mind
(as “understanding”) synthesizes the manifold of spatio-temporal data
according to other pure concepts Kant called categories, comprising the

rules for representing and relating phenomena.10 A third element in the
process of representing sense-experience is judgment, the cognitive faculty
that enables the mind to subsume intuitions under appropriate concepts,
through a schematism effected by the imagination.11 The categories are the
forms through which experience is constituted: they allow sense-data to
be conceptually differentiated and systematically classified, without which
appearances would very much be the “great blooming, buzzing confusion”
of William James’s characterization of an infant’s consciousness.12 As in
James, the conceptual ordering Kant ascribes to the understanding vis-à-vis
the brute intuition of sensibility is not voluntary, but a preconscious syn-
thesis necessary for coherent experience.
Reason is the cognitive faculty’s final component for Kant. While the un-
derstanding provides rules for the synthesis of the manifold of sense percep-
tion, reason gives order and unity to the understanding’s otherwise arbitrarily
assembled concepts. To use Kant’s by now familiar terminology, the catego-
ries of our understanding are constitutive, decreeing the form experience
must take, while the principles of reason are regulative, guiding cognition’s
practical use toward a particular end.13 Sensibility, understanding, and
judgment are the essential elements for the representation of phenomena,
but they do not on their own make up the entirety of our cognitive faculty,
which can evidently step beyond the confines of empiricism into meta-
physical inferences. Kant calls these inferences “pure concepts of reason” or
(more frequently) “transcendental ideas,” for they refer to “cognition[s]‌of
which the empirical is only a part . . . to which no actual experience ever fully
suffices, yet which nonetheless belong to every experience.”14
Given that the First Critique’s first half is directed at demarcating the
boundaries of philosophy to include only what is properly available to phe-
nomenal experience, it may be surprising to find that Kant endorses some
use of transcendental ideas, and we shall presently encounter a number of
difficulties his doctrine raises. What is clear is that we cannot simply dis-
miss these ideas: they are “not arbitrarily invented [erdichtet], but given as
problems by the nature of reason itself.”15 The key distinction is between an
idea’s dogmatic and critical employment. If we take the ideas of reason to be
constitutive of the world, we end up in a skeptical predicament, and the cen-
tral question of philosophy remains the correspondence of our impressions
to the objects they ostensibly represent. Yet though the ideas mustn’t be used
dogmatically, they may nonetheless
have an excellent and indispensably necessary regulative use, namely that of

directing the understanding to a certain goal respecting which the lines of
direction of all its rules converge at one point, which, although it is only an
idea (focus imaginarius)—i.e., a point from which the concepts of the un-
derstanding do not really proceed, since it lies entirely outside the bounds
of possible experience—nonetheless still serves to obtain for these concepts
the greatest unity alongside the greatest extension.16
As regulative, immanent guides to reason’s use, the ideas are, as Lewis White
Beck puts it, “maxims necessary for the conduct of thought.”17 In the pre-
ceding passage, this necessity has two components: unity and extension.
On the one hand, the presumption of the idea of systematicity of natural
laws—Kant’s particular focus in the text just cited—unites the otherwise
empirically contingent manifold of appearances in a coherent, necessary
framework. On the other hand, the same idea extends our experience in-
sofar as it posits that any appearance we encounter will also accord with nat-
ural laws, enabling investigation and discovery of further, as of yet unknown
scientific knowledge.
From an architectonic perspective, this aspect of transcendental ideas
reflects reason’s conative and teleological nature. In Kant’s words,
reason really only has the understanding and its purposive [zweckmäßige]
application as its object, and just as the latter unifies the manifold [of sen-
sible intuition] into an object through concepts, the former unifies on its
side the manifold of concepts through ideas, in which it posits a certain col-
lective unity as the goal [Ziele] of the understanding’s actions.18
Ideas are the principles through which the categories of the understanding
are united. Though Kant calls a number of things “ideas of reason,” including
the immortality of the soul, the cosmopolitan society, the social contract, a
self-rewarding morality, the concept of race, happiness, and the concept of
a final end, most often transcendental ideas “consider all experiential cog-
nition as determined through an absolute totality of conditions.”19 Such an
absolute totality of conditions carries the full weight of this idea of an un-
conditioned totality that defies empirical demonstration, for phenomena are
always conditioned: sense experience could never yield more than elephants
all the way down.20 The very act of thinking beyond experience is therefore
thinking the unconditioned.
Although ideas of reason may appear to be flights of fancy given Kant’s

strict injunction against transgressing the boundaries of sense,21 he none-
theless holds them to be necessary, especially the ideas of God, freedom, and
immortality.22 This necessity stems from what Kant calls the “need of reason”
to anchor itself in an unconditioned. Human reason, he writes,
inexorably pushes [beyond experience], driven by its own need to such

questions that cannot be answered by any experiential use of reason and of
principles borrowed from such a use; and thus a certain sort of metaphysics
has actually been present in all human beings as soon as reason has ex-
tended itself to speculation in them, and it will also always remain there.23
In “What is Orientation in Thinking?,” Kant further elaborates that this need

concerns the explanation of appearances themselves; it demands a provi-
sional answer to the empirically unanswerable question of the unity and pur-
pose of experience.24 Limited as we are to representations, when confronted
with the conceptualization of inscrutable noumena, it is the “right of the
need of reason” to “assume something understandable [verständlich]” where
nothing understandable sensu stricto can be given.25 Kant thus argues that
just as we need a map to orient ourselves spatially, we need ideas to facilitate
our conceptual orientation.26 Taking care to avoid any conflation with con-
stitutive principles, Kant notes that these ideas do not posit the actuality of
their objects, but “merely find room” for them as possible.27
The way in which this need is satisfied differs depending on whether we
view reason in terms of its theoretical or practical interest.28 In the First
Critique, Kant explains that theoretical cognition concerns what exists, while
practical cognition concerns what ought to exist.29 An interest is the satis-
faction we obtain from the representation of the existence of an object, be it
of theoretical or practical cognition.30 In the Second Critique, Kant further
specifies that
the interest of [reason’s] speculative use consists in the cognition of the ob-
ject up to the highest a priori principles; that of its practical use consists in
the determination of the will with respect to the final and complete end.31
Both interests thus reflect reason’s need for an unconditioned. The theo-
retical or speculative interest of reason drives toward such an object for the
comprehension of phenomena, and reason’s practical interest consists in
the representation of an absolute end (Zweck) underlying all other rational

ends, namely the highest good. Since both interests find expression in Kant’s
considerations of teleological history as a foundation for hope, I take each
in turn.
Satisfying Reason’s Theoretical Interest Through Hypotheses
Reason’s theoretical interest demands orientation toward an uncondi-

tioned object for the sake of empirical inquiry. In “What is Orientation in
Thinking?,” Kant explains that “we must assume the existence of God if we
want to judge about the first causes of everything contingent, primarily
in the order of ends which actually exists in the world.”32 For this reason,
Kant calls the idea of God a “hypothesis” for understanding any chain of
conditions apparent in nature with reference to an unconditioned final
cause.33 Used as a regulative hypothesis, God is not dogmatic, but rather
a “heuristic fiction” harnessed by reason in its theoretical interest.34 And
while the teleological language of final causes in “What is Orientation in
Thinking?” is echoed several years later in the Third Critique’s doctrine
of reflective judgment,35 Kant ascribes a similar heuristic role in the First
Critique to idea of the systematicity of natural laws under the complete
“purposive unity of things” designed by a highest intelligence.36 Whatever
differences exist between these expositions,37 the theoretical use of the ideas
function the same in all three, grounding both the natural laws binding to-
gether our contingent empirical observations and our capacity to investi-
gate the world scientifically.
That said, the Third Critique stands out for its emphasis on teleology.38
Here, teleological principles concretize the “research program” aspect of
regulative ideas in the investigation of biological organisms.39 Since Kant
takes it as self-evident that the human cognitive apparatus “is incapable of
providing an explanatory ground for the generation of organized beings”
according to mechanical natural laws alone,40 he allows us to employ teleo-
logical principles for explaining these phenomena according to the assump-
tion of ends, or, as he puts it, “based in an entirely different kind of original
causality,” that of final causes.41 Teleology is not meant to supplant mechan-
ical explanations, but to supplement them as “a critical principle of reason
for the reflecting power of judgment” or “guideline[s]‌for considering things
in nature.”42 Kant offers an example to illustrate his point: in saying that the
eye’s lens has the purpose (Zweck) of focusing light on the retina one is not
making a factual claim about its intelligent design, but “one says only that
the representation of an end in the causality of nature is conceived in the
production of the eye because such an idea serves as a principle for guiding
[its] investigation.”43 Furthermore, this teleological principle enables the
identification of ways to correct defective vision, “with regard to the means
that one can think up to promote that effect.”44 Stressing the regulative, sub-
jective nature of the ideas of reason, Kant makes a small move from the local
application of teleological principles in investigating organisms to practical
belief in God as the underlying ground for nature as a whole. Though we
are, to be sure, critically restricted from making any positive claims about
things beyond the scope of natural laws, and hence barred from the dog-
matic claim “there is a God,” the assumption of teleology operates according
to the admission that we can only cognize the possibility of many things in
nature “by representing them and the world in general as a product of an
intelligent cause (a God).”45 Robert Butts’s suggestion that the concept of
God in Kant’s theoretical reason is “replaceable by the regulative idea of an
ordered universe in principle always accessible to human comprehension” is
therefore eminently reasonable:46 one heuristically assumes the hypothesis
of God as an intelligent designer for the sake of reason’s theoretical interest,
lest nature appear hopelessly inscrutable.
Kant does not restrict the ambit of teleological assumptions to the study
of natural organisms, however, for the need to satisfy reason’s theoretical
interest also underlies his turn to teleology in history. As he explains in his
“Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Perspective,” whose title
itself (“Idea”) is significant in light of this discussion, the assumption of nat-
ural purposiveness in the unfolding of human affairs enables us to fruit-
fully investigate systematic patterns of activity that might otherwise appear
random. In language almost identical to his discussions of natural teleology
in the First and Third Critiques, Kant writes that “although we are too short-
sighted to understand the secret mechanism of nature’s organization, this
idea may nonetheless serve as a guiding thread with which to describe an
otherwise planless aggregate of human activities, at least in the large, as a
system.”47 Like the teleological research program for investigating the eye’s
purposive construction, Kant believes that the regulative assumption of
teleology in history can aid us in promoting its own “natural” ends. Since
these ends are ultimately moral, however, it can be difficult to disaggre-
gate reason’s theoretical and practical interests in teleological history,48 and
indeed practical reasons for assuming a progressive historical narrative take

precedence over theoretical ones. I will treat the regulative concept of his-
tory in more detail when I come to the postulate of progress from a practical
and moral perspective.
Satisfying Reason’s Practical Interest Through Postulates
A similar chain of arguments underlies the practical interest of reason, albeit

with the difference that whereas the theoretical interest concerns what exists,
reason’s practical interest lies in what ought to be, in the determination of the
will according to the object of a final end. Kant grants primacy to the prac-
tical interest over the speculative or theoretical interest of reason, calling the
former “far more important” than the latter.49 The reason for this primacy
is that while the theoretical use of the idea of God as a purposive designer
is conditional upon the desire to investigate contingent appearances, Kant
considers the practical employment of the idea of God as a beneficent and
just ruler to be a precondition for human aspiration to fulfill the moral law.
Since striving to fulfill the moral law, unlike further knowledge of nature, is
not optional, the practical use of ideas of reason is unconditional and indis-
pensable: whether or not we want to act morally, Kant thinks we know we
should act morally.
Kant calls these practically necessary ideas of reason not “hypotheses” but
“postulates,” where a postulate is “a theoretical proposition, though one not
demonstrable as such, insofar as it is attached inseparably to an a priori un-
conditionally valid practical law.”50 In most writings, Kant claims there are
only three ideas that strictly speaking fit this definition: freedom, the immor-
tality of the soul, and God,51 yet since many of the ideas of reason Kant relies
on in his practical and political philosophy (such as progress, Providence and
a natural moral teleology) are correlates of the idea of God, the term may be
extended beyond this triad.52
Kant puts so much emphasis on the postulates because of his stance that
moral volition has its ultimate object in the idea of the highest good, which
represents the unconditional totality satisfying the need of reason in its prac-
tical aspect.53 Though Kant insists on morality’s formal structure and argues
that moral maxims must contain no material determining ground, he also
claims that the finite nature of human cognition requires an object as a voli-
tional lodestar.54 “Without this end,” he writes,
a power of choice which does not add to a contemplated action the thought
of either an objectively or subjectively determined object (which it has
or should have), instructed indeed as to how to operate but not as to the
whither, can itself obtain no satisfaction.55
In morality, this need for an end is met by the concept of the highest good,
which is both the object of moral volition and the necessary object of pure
practical reason. As such, the highest good lends concrete significance to
moral obligation.56 Since Kant holds that “reason cannot command some-
thing the pursuit of an end which is known to be nothing but a phantom of
the mind,” the moral subject has to assume the highest good to be possible.57
Were it not, Kant states in the Critique of Practical Reason, “then the moral
law, which commands us to promote it, must be fantastic and directed to
empty imaginary ends and must therefore in itself be false.”58 Given that we
cannot deny the moral law, the consciousness of which is a “fact of reason,”59
we must be able to achieve the highest good. The postulates are the necessary
background conditions that make this realization possible.
Hope and the Highest Good
The idea of the highest good is one of the central concepts of Kant’s practical
philosophy,60 and hope functions as the psychological stance appropriate to
its promotion. At a general level, the highest good is described by Kant as a
“moral world” or “the existence of rational beings under moral laws.”61 Thus
the highest good is, at least for human cognition, an ideal universe of moral
subjects acting in perfect conformity with duty and thus in collective har-
mony. That is not all, however, for although the objectively highest good may
be a moral world, the subjective condition under which humans can con-
ceive of the highest good must involve happiness, which Kant conceives to be
a subjective condition for the acceptance of something as a final end. Finite
rational beings can recognize that virtue is the supreme, unconditioned
good, but can only make this end an object of desire through the interpola-
tion of happiness, “the highest physical good that is possible in the world.”62
Only the two together are the “complete” highest good for humans.
Explicating the link between happiness and virtue brings complications.
Kant generally holds that the highest human conception of the good involves
the proportionality of one’s happiness to one’s virtue, one’s worthiness to be
happy. In the Second Critique, an individualist version of this conception

takes on a special prominence as the convergence of happiness and desert in
an individual moral subject’s future life,63 but elsewhere (and predominantly
in the later writings) Kant talks of the highest good in social terms, as “the
combination of universal happiness with the most lawful morality.”64 Perhaps
because the individualist version has the potential to occlude the duty to pro-
mote the highest good’s realization as a moral world,65 the social formulation
is more frequently employed.
A further complication comes in terms of the prospects of approaching
this highest good. As an ideal of reason, the highest good can never admit of
actual realization, but some of Kant’s formulations express the possibility of
progress toward its approximation. One may distinguish in this regard be-
tween “transcendent” and “immanent” senses of the highest good in Kant’s
work.66 In the Second Critique, the completion of the highest good is be-
yond our abilities altogether, only admitting a transcendent realization in
the “beyond” at the hands of supernatural powers.67 Moreover, the question
of how one strives for the ideal on this account is only answered individu-
alistically: one acts morally, and one hopes for happiness in proportion to
one’s personal virtue. Not only does this last claim place a great burden on
the postulate of personal immortality, it also means that the cash-value of
one’s moral striving is entirely speculative, as even the approximation of the
highest good stands outside the possibility of human experience.
Yet Kant also talks of the highest good as something to be approximated
(if not realized) in experience. This immanent conception, which finds em-
phasis in his writings on religion, politics, and history, describes the highest
good as “a mere, yet practical, idea, which really can and should have its in-
fluence on the sensible world, in order to make it agree as far as possible with
this idea.”68 This conception of the highest good as something to work to-
ward often finds voice in conjunction with the social construction of an ideal
moral world. In the Religion, for instance, Kant writes of it as “a common
good to all” that “will not be brought about solely through the striving of one
individual person for his own moral perfection but requires rather a union
of such persons.”69 Similarly, “On the Common Saying: This May Be True in
Theory, but It Does Not Hold in Practice” describes the final end of all things
(Ende aller Dinge) as “a highest good in the world possible through our par-
ticipation [Mitwirkung],” a common qualifier in Kant’s later formulations.70
The object of moral action in this conception of the highest good is not the
confluence of virtue and happiness in an individual, but “a universal republic
based on the laws of virtue” in which happiness is globally enjoyed, akin to

a kingdom of God on earth.71 The kingdom of God in heaven is simply too
abstract, Kant thinks:
For what does it help to praise the magnificence and wisdom of creation
in the nonrational realm of nature and to recommend its contemplation,
if there shall remain the constant objection, against that part of the great
scene of the most supreme wisdom which contains the purpose of all of
this—the history of the human species—the sight of which compels us to
reluctantly turn our eyes from it and, as we despair at ever finding it in a
completed rational aim, leads us to hope to find it only in another world?72
If we can only aspire to the highest good in the beyond, disaffection in the
here and now is likely.
Both visions of the morally highest good have a place in Kant’s philos-
ophy, but his political hope is oriented toward the social-immanent ac-
count. Indeed, whenever Kant explicitly links politics and moral teleology,
he invokes the social ideal of the highest good as a guide for human effort.73
Moreover, though Kant mentions the three cardinal postulates of freedom,
immortality and God in all three critiques, his later writings downplay the
second in favor of freedom and (especially) God. For example, the Religion,
where one might expect a thorough treatment of immortality, only glances at
the topic. Kant still maintains that progress toward moral perfection requires
endless duration, yet his new focus on radical evil—the universal human
propensity to choose maxims contrary to morality—reflects the centrality
of God all the more: since the evil in our hearts precludes our achievement
of holiness, even over an endless duration, we must postulate divine grace if
righteousness is to be thought possible.74 In addition, Kant’s Lectures on the
Philosophical Doctrine of Religion name the three articles of moral faith to
be “God, freedom of the human will, and a moral world,” leaving immortality
conspicuously absent.75 Finally, in a suggestive but undeveloped reflection
on religion, Kant writes that although belief in a future life is a “moral need,”
it “is only a belief of the second rank. For it is not necessary that we exist
or exist eternally, but rather that we comport ourselves worthy of life for as
long as we live.”76 The upshot of Kant’s shift in emphasis is a stress on the im-
manent possibilities of progress toward a morally better world rather than
the purely transcendent progress of the immortality postulate. Thus for the
purposes of understanding political hope, immortality is inconsequential,
though we shall see that Kant employs an analogous argument in terms of a

human lifetime being too short to fulfill humanity’s vocation, which can only
proceed through the future of the species.
In contrast to immortality, the postulate of God is of the utmost conse-
quence for political hope, yet it is important to recognize that for Kant be-
lief in God does not commit one (in principle) to any particular religious
doctrine. Justified solely by a practical belief in the possibility of the highest
good, the deity entailed by moral faith is neither confessional nor dogmatic.
Indeed, even the minimal determinate characteristics that Kant thinks
reason assigns God in practice (namely holiness, benevolence and justice)
derive from the moral need of an absolute end in conduct.77 Whether or not
one accepts Kant’s problematic assumption that morality only has value for
humans if the highest good is possible, what remains supreme in any case is
the moral law in the service of which we construct God’s image.78 The Third
Critique puts it so: “Faith [Glaube] (simply so called) is trust in the attain-
ment of an aim the promotion of which is a duty but the possibility of the
realization of which it is not possible for us to have insight into.”79 Hence,
parallel to the reduction of Kant’s God in theoretical reason, a deflation is
possible for the concept in Kant’s practical reason: the God of moral faith is
replaceable by the idea of a world in which good is not pursued in vain.
The loss of a transcendent conception of the highest good through this
interpretation of God should not blind us to the limitations Kant places on
human powers already implicit in the very idea of a critical philosophy. Even
on the immanent interpretation, the highest good exists as a regulative ideal
that we can only approach asymptotically.80 When one looks to the actual
role the figure of God plays in his practical philosophy, it is more often than
not a placeholder for the uncontrollable in moral life, and as such a constant
reminder of human finitude.81 Kant says as much in his Preisschrift, a com-
pendious essay composed in 1793 yet only published ten years later: “Since
[realizing] the final end is not fully in our control, we must therefore construct
ourselves a theoretical concept of the source from which it may arise.”82 As
a background condition for morality, God provides the bridge between the
empirical world of nature and the moral world of virtue, ensuring that one’s
well-being may conceivably accord with one’s well-doing.83 Experience
evidences no analytic relationship between happiness and the worthiness to
be happy, but the idea of God offers the possibility of an a priori synthetic
link. In the postulates argument of the Second Critique, for example, immor-
tality secures the temporal space for the possibility of the human realization
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vielä varjossa harjun kupeella. Kylältä ei vielä kuulunut minkäänlaisia
ääniä, mutta kosken pauhu kuului hauskana kohinana tyynen aamun
hiljaa heräävästä povesta.
Silloin uskalsivat he katsoa toisiaan silmiin. Lintujen laulu eneni,

nuoren lehden ja pihkaisen mahlan haju täytti ilman, ja taivaan sini
kirkastui. Koko muu maailma unohtui heidän ympärillään, he näkivät
ja tunsivat vain toisensa, ja kummankin sydän täyttyi suloisilla
tunteilla.
Martti kietoi kätensä Annan hennon varren ympäri ja kallisti

päänsä Annan puoleen. Anna tunsi voimiensa pettävän, ja hän sai
väräjävällä äänellä sanotuksi:
»Lähdemme kotia nyt!»
He laskeusivat alas kiveltä, katselivat vielä kiven kyljessä olevaa

ovenmuotoista, sammalpeittoista kuviota ja tulivat polulle, joka johti
pappilaan. Molemmin puolin polkua kasvaviin mäntyihin olivat
ohikulkijat piirtäneet nimikirjaimia. He katsoivat niitä, joita lapsena
olivat piirtäneet yhdessä.
»Nyt minä tiedän, mikä kesäyössä on selittämätöntä», virkkoi

Martti, ja hänen katseensa kiiti pitkin aamuauringon valaisemia
vaihtelevia maisemia.
»Joko tiedät… joko tunnet», haastoi Anna, innossaan tullen Martin

viereen. »Niin, se on kesäyön kirkkaus. Se ei ole auringon valoa,
eikä kuun valoa, ei tähden valoa eikä hämärätä; se on yön omituinen
hiljainen, kirkastettu hohde, lempeä ja juhlallinen, niinkuin
iankaikkinen ilo keskellä maan katoavaa kevättä…»
Annan silmät säteilivät, ja Martti katsoi häneen kuin kirkastettuun
olentoon, joka oli taivaasta lähetetty hänen omia ajatuksiaan
sanoiksi ja teoiksi saattamaan.
»Anna, Anna… kuule…! Minulla on uusi ajatus, suuri ja ihana! Voi

jospa kerran voisin sen kankaalle kiinnittää!»
»Jumala antaa voimia… Jumalan kunniaksi on Hänen suuren

luontonsa jäljentäminen. Sinun 'Kesäyösi' kerran vielä tekee
kuuluisaksi köyhän perukkamme, sillä henkesi imee voimansa
kesäyön kirkkaudesta… Niin usko, ja sinä tulet onnelliseksi… ja
minä rukouksissani autan sinua… Se on korkein onneni…»
Polku, jota olivat tulleet, johti korkealle kummulle pappilan riihen

taakse. Siihen loppui metsä, ja siihen päättyi polkukin, sillä siitä
alkoivat pellot.
Pappilassa oltiin liikkeellä, ja suvannolta kuului lauttamiesten

lauluja.
»Minä olen nyt niin onnellinen, ja minun on nyt niin hyvä olla…
sillä minä tiedän, että nyt ymmärrät, miksi minä kesäöitä rakastan…
Voi, usein viime kesänä ajattelin: Jospa Martti kerran vielä Pohjolaan
palajaa… silloin hänelle sanon: Kesäyö on ihanin kaikista… Ja
kauas vieraalle maalle rukoilevan rukoukseni lähetin, sinun luoksesi,
että Pohjolaasi muistaisit…»
»Ja minä muistin… Minun tuli ääretön ikävä tänne… Kaikki

muistin: talviset revontuli-illat, varhaiset hankiaamut ja kesäiset yöt.
Siksi takaisin tulin enkä koskaan pois enää halua…»
»Mutta ystäväsi, joka sinua rakastaa…?»

»Ei hän koskaan ole minua rakastanut eikä minun maailmaani
ymmärtänyt…»
Silloin juuri he saapuivat pappilan kujalle. Kumpikaan ei tiennyt

minkä vuoksi, mutta molempiin tarttui Martin viime puheen jälkeen
semmoinen ilo, että tuntui kuin maasta molemmin irtautuisivat.
Pääskyset kiitivät nuolena poikki ja pitkin pihaa, vilahtivat
avonaisesta ovesta karjalatoon ja suhahtivat pienestä reiästä tallin
ullakolle, visertelivät ja lensivät ihan Annan ja Martin päiden
päällitse.
Ison kuistin ovet olivat auki. Rovasti oli piippuineen tullut kuistille
keinumaan, niinkuin hänen tapansa oli aina ollut. Nouseva
aamuaurinko sopi siihen paistamaan, ja siinä oli hauska keinua, kun
ilmassa oli alkavan kesän lemua, joka kuistinkin täytti, ja huvikseen
katsella pääskysten lentoa halki päiväpaisteisen pihamaan.
Hän näki nuorten kujalla tulevan ja hymähti. Molemmat olivat

hänelle yhtä rakkaat, sillä Anna oli rovastin mielestä kuin oma lapsi.
Hän arvasi, mitä tietä nuoret olivat kesäkartanolta palanneet, ja
hänellä oli aavistus siitä, että heidän suhteensa ei enää ollutkaan
veljen ja sisaren. Hän oli sen heti huomannut.
Loistavin silmin riensivät Martti ja Anna kertomaan. Molemmat

näyttivät olevan yhtä iloisia ja juttelivat yhtaikaa.
Ruustinna kuuli ruokasaliin heidän tulleen ja riensi hänkin kuistiin.

Häneenkin tarttui heidän ilonsa, ja hän istahti rovastin viereen.
Martti ei ollut vielä yhtään kertaa sittenkun kotia saapui ollut niin
pirteällä tuulella, eikä Annasta ollut semmoinen ilo koskaan loistanut
kuin nyt.
»Juuri tämä aika on kaikkein ihanin täällä Pohjolassa», sanoi
Martti. »Mikä ihmeellinen yö oli! Niitä värivivahduksia! Niitä taivaan
selittämättömiä valoja… Nyt minä ymmärrän, miksi isä ei koskaan
ole täältä etelään ikävöinyt… Tämmöisenä yönä ei saisi kukaan
nukkua… eikä yön ihanuutta näkemättä antaa sen livahtaa
menemään…»
Rovasti katseli ihastuneena poikaansa. Noin oli hänkin tuntenut

nuorena! Noin innostunut kaikesta siitä, mikä oli kaunista!
Ruustinna katsoi rovastiin, ja oli kuin hän olisi miehensä

hymyilevistä silmistä lukenut:
— Enkö sitä ole sanonut! Nuo kaksi kuuluvat toisilleen nyt, niinkuin
ennenkin.
Ja hänestäkin tuntui nyt, että niin pitikin olla, eikä toisin.
9.
Annan päiväkirjasta.
Valoisa kesäyö!
Parin viikon päästä on juhannus.
Ihmeaikaa on tämä, jota elän. On kuin unta ja todellisuutta.
Olen katsellut tästä päiväkirjastani niitä lehtiä, joita kuluneina

vuosina olen kirjoitellut — silloin tällöin — ja enimmäkseen silloin,
kun Marttia muistelin. On hauskaa katsella, mitä silloin tunsin ja
ajattelin, ja verrata siihen, mitä nyt tunnen ja ajattelen.
Olenko nyt onnellisempi kuin silloin, kun häntä palavissa

ajatuksissani muistelin ja rukoilin, että Jumala hänen taiteensa tien
tasoittaisi? Ehkä olen, ehkä en.
Ei, onnellisempi olen; olisin vielä onnellisempi, jos tietäisin, että

hän on onnellinen.
Mutta en voi sitä uskoa. Siitä asti olen sitä epäillyt, kun
kesäkartanolta palasimme. Mikä äärettömän ihana yö se olikaan!
Siitä kirjoitan vielä joskus eri luvun tähän päiväkirjaani. Kuinka
ihmeellistä se olikaan. Pelkäsin ja vapisin! Voi jos hän olisi
aavistanut, kuinka lähellä oli, etten tarttunut hänen kaulaansa…!
Mutta hän ei sitä tiennyt, ja niin onkin hyvä.
Kuulen hänen kävelevän edestakaisin tuolla huoneessaan

ullakolla, aivan pääni päällä. Hän avaa ikkunan ja katselee kai
pohjoisiin vaaroihin ja koskelle, jonka rantakoivut jo ovat täydessä
lehdessä. Tietääkö, että minäkin valvon ja häntä muistelen?
Aavistaako, että seuraan hänen työtään aivan kuin se olisi omani ja
koskisi omaa iloani ja onneani?
Ehkä ei muista minua. Sitä toista ikävöi — ja pian kai hän on

täällä, hänen ystävänsä, morsiamensa…
Mitä nyt oikeastaan ajattelen ja tunnen? Mitä mietin?
Istun tässä, avoimen ikkunan luona, joka antaa joelle ja

puutarhaan. Tuomi on täydessä kukassa, pian puhkeaa pihlajaankin.
Valoisa, lämmin kesäyö! Täällä pappilassa on hiljaista nyt, siellä
kaikki nukkuvat, paitsi Martti ja minä. Kylällä eivät nuku. Aina on
tiellä joku kulkija, ja korva ottaa ääniä etempää ja likempää. Ei tänä
aikana saakaan nukkua, — niin sanoi Marttikin. — Nyt täytyy imeä
kesäyön kirkkaudesta! Tämä on lyhyt, tämän valon ja riemun aika
poloisessa Pohjolassa! — Mutta minä olen viettänyt ihanan yön
Haltiain kivellä — Martin kanssa.
Jospa näkisin hänen sydämensä syvyyteen! Jospa tietäisin syyn,

jonka vuoksi hän usein on alakuloinen ja hajamielinen. Usein olen
hänet tavannut puutarhan penkillä istumasta. Hän tuijottaa joelle ja
lännen vaaroihin, harmaansinisissä silmissään ikäänkuin
pelonsekainen katse. Kaiketi hän miettii taideteostaan, joka syksyksi
joutuu valmiiksi…
»Ei hän koskaan ole minua rakastanut eikä minun maailmaani

ymmärtänyt.»
Niin hän sanoi, kun palasimme kesäkartanolta. Miksi hän niin

sanoi?
Mitä tarkoitti?
Usein olen toivonut, että hän ottaisi puheeksi Ellinsä tännetulon.

Mutta hän ei virka siitä mitään. Ehkä hän kuitenkin puhuu paljonkin
asiasta isälleen ja äidilleen. Mitäpä minulle puhuisikaan…
*****
Mutta… mutta! Jumala, anna minulle anteeksi, että ajattelen niin ja

tunnen näin! Olenko niin pohjalta paha ja itsekäs? Raukka, orpo,
köyhä tyttö olen, Jumala yksin turvanani. Onko väärin, että häntä
rakastan? Onko väärin, että rakastan häntä ja hänen taidettaan ja
tahtoisin hänen vierellään aina olla?
Miksi sydämeni ja sieluni toista kuiskaavat? Ja miksi olen nähnyt
hänen silmistään, että hänkin rakastaa minua! Olenko erehtynyt ja
pettynyt? En. Sillä hän ei voisi pettää, ei valheverholla peittää syvien
silmiensä ilmettä. Ei ole Martti luotu tänne pettämään eikä valheen
palvelijaksi. Suurta, valoisaa totuutta on hän tullut luomaan, ja
Jumala kyllä auttaa häntä.
Voi, voi, kun saattaisin häntä lohduttaa! Kun rohkenisin häneltä

kysyä. Mutta en voi. Nämä päivät ovat olleet ikäviä, vaikka on kesän
kaunein aika. Kuinka onnellinen olisin, kun olisin varma siitä, että
hän vartoo, odotettua morsiantansa, häntä ikävöi ja rakastaa. Mutta
sitäpä juuri epäilenkin. Minä uskon niin, että hänen Ellinsä on kova ja
keikaileva maailmannainen, joka kyllä voi Marttia rakastaa, mutta ei
niinkuin Martti tahtoisi. Miksi hän muutoin olisi alakuloinen nyt, kun
otaksuisin hänen elonsa aamun kirkkaimmillaan olevan! Edessään
on hänellä loistava taiteen tie ja vieressään morsian, ystävä ja
hoivaaja!
Mutta ehkä hän ei Elliään ajattelekaan, ei minua eikä ketään. Ehkä

hän vain miettii taideteostaan, keväthankien kuultava kirkkaus
mielessään…
Nyt kuulen hänen kävelevän edestakaisin, väliin yhteen kohti

seisahtuen. Ehkä katselee hän tauluaan, uudistaen, muovaellen…
Rakas, rakas Martti! Hyvä Jumala sinulle parastansa antakoon!
Nyt taukoavat askeleet, hän varmaan koettaa nyt nukkua. Nukkua

pitäisi minunkin. Huomenna on raskas työpäivä. Juhannussiistimiset
alkavat pihasalla ja huoneissa. Kaikki pitää olla puhtoisen puhdasta,
suuren valonjuhlan tullessa. Salin kamari laitetaan kuntoon Martin
morsianta varten…
Nythän on jo aamupuoli. Aurinko paistaa jo joelle, suvannon
luhtasaariin ja lännen vaaroihin. Kesäyö! Kesäyö!
Miksi minä maata pannessani aina muistan Ellin muotokuvaa?

Aina siihen katson, kun Martin huonetta siistiän. On kuin silmäni
siihen väkisin kiintyisivät. Mitä on niin kovalta näyttävää niissä
silmissä ja suupielissä, jotka ovat minusta niinkuin tahtoisivat purra!
Minä varmaan erehdyn. Mutta yksi asia vielä. Ruustinna ei puhu
paljon mitään Martin morsiamesta. Eilen hän kuitenkin sanoi:
»Nyt me, Anna, panemme parastamme, toivottua vierastamme

varten.»
Martti on varmaan nyt unessa, koska ullakolta ei kuulu mitään

liikettä.
Nuku, rakastettuni, unelmieni ja nuoruuteni sulho! Minä rakastan

sinua sittenkin, vaikka täältä siirtynet lämpöisempiin maihin. Lähetän
terveiseni ja palavat rukoukseni sinun luoksesi, — lähetän näin
valoisina kesäöinä ja revontulten hulmutessa talviöinä! Aina, aina.
Sillä sinun onnesi on minunkin onneni.
Isätön, äiditön, koditon ja turvaton! Uskallanko minä näin ajatella ja

näin kirjoittaa? Mutta ei minua tunto soimaa. Minusta tuntuu niinkuin
hyvä Jumala katsoisi olkani yli jokaista sanaa ja jokaista kirjainta
eikä käske panna pistettä. Miksen siis kirjoittaisi!
*****
Pari päivää on kulunut.
Työtä ja kiirettä on ollut aamusta iltaan. Ilma on edelleen kirkas ja

kuulakka, yö ja päivä ovat yhtä valoisat. Valoisat yöt, joita rakastan!
Ihmeyöt, joina lintujen laulu ei koko yönä lakkaa! Minä olen nuori ja
nautin, enkä tunne väsymystä. Koko viime yönkin olin valveilla. Koko
kirkonkylä valvoi. Kuka tämmöisinä öinä hennoisikaan nukkua!
Iloinnevatko muut nuoret tytöt näin tästä valon ajasta kuin minä! On
niin kummaa olla. On ihanaa ja surullista samalla. Laulaa tekisi
mieleni. Minulla onkin laulu kesäyöstä, jonka jo kansanopistossa
tein. Mutta minulla on nyt siihen paljon lisäämistä, paljon… paljon.
Siitä tulee kaunis laulu — kauniimpi kuin nuoren Sallan ja uljaan
Juho metsästäjän…
Minulla olisi niin kovin paljon kirjoittamista, menisi päiviä, viikkoja,

enkä sittenkään ehtisi sanoa puoltakaan kaikesta siitä, mitä tänä
kesänä olen tuntenut. Säilytät ne vastaisen varalta ja ilokseni niistä
lauluja laadin. Sillä sydämeni on täysi, täysi.
Tänään on Martti siirtynyt pois ullakolla ja jättänyt kevättaulunsa

kesken. Hän on maalausvehkeineen siirtynyt Haltiain kivelle ja
aloittanut suurta tauluaan »Kesäyötä». Kuinka siitä iloitsen! Siitä
taulusta tulee se taikakalu, joka Pohjolan loiston näyttää etelän
ihmisille. Nyt minä ymmärrän, miksi Martti on niin miettiväinen ollut.
»Kesäyötään» on miettinyt. Kesäyön ihmevaloja.
Hänen katseensa oli kirkas, kun hän aamulla minulle virkkoi:
»Nyt minä siirryn Haltiain kivelle… Luuletko, että hyvät haltiat

minua työssäni auttavat?»
»Auttavat ne… Ne rakastavat sinua, joka olet erämaan ystävä ja

kiveliön veli, metsän poika, jonka hyväksi kaikkensa antavat…»
Niin hänelle vastasin, ja hänen katseensa oli niin kovin lämmin ja

koko hänen olentonsa kuin kirkastettu.
Minä seurasin mukana, ja me kävimme torpassakin, — niinkuin
ennenkin. Martti ja äijävaari ovat hyvät ystävät, vaikkei äijävaari
jaksa ymmärtää Martin yrityksiä. Mutta hauskaa oli.
Nyt on hän varmaan kivellä ja on aloittanut työtänsä, sillä öisin

aikoi hän työskennellä. Rakastettuni, unimaailmani sulho! Onnessa
työskentele, ja antakoon valkeuden Herra siveltimellesi voimaa ja
vauhtia!
Yksi asia on varma. Hän ei näytä isosti huolehtivan morsiamensa

tulosta. Lipposet jalassa hän kulkee paitahihasillaan niinkuin ennen
poikasenakin. Siten onkin hän kaikkein kaunein. Ei minkäänlaisia
herrasvehkeitä. En ole yhtään kertaa nähnyt hänellä tuota kankeaa,
korkeaa kaulusta, joka tekee hänet niin kovin juhlallisen näköiseksi.
Ruustinna on hänelle monta kertaa puvusta muistuttanut, mutta ei

hän näy siitä välittävän. Nauraa vain ja sanoo, että hän tahtoo kaikin
puolin nauttia vapaudestaan.
Tänä aamuna oli viimeksi puhe.
»Sinun pitää ruveta hiukan siistimään itseäsi sekä pukusi että

muunkin puolesta», sanoi hänelle ruustinna aamiaista syödessä.
»Ethän ole ajanut partaasikaan pitkään aikaan… Morsiamesi on pian
täällä…»
Minä toin juuri ruokaa pöytään ja kuulin Martin naurusuin

vastaavan:
»Morsiamelleni kelpaan kyllä näin kuin olen.»
Rovasti hymähti, ja minä näin, että hän hyväksyi Martin

mielipiteen.
»Ole sinä vain niinkuin itse somimmaksi tunnet», sanoi hän.
Mutta ruustinna arveli:
»Kummallisia ihmisiä ovat taiteilijat, sen sanon vieläkin. Olisinpa

minä morsiamesi ja sinä tuolla lailla tulisit eteeni, niin paikalla
käskisin mennä…»
Mutta Martti hymyili vain. Jospa hän olisi aavistanut, kuinka hänen
puoltaan pidin! Noin hän oli, valkoisine paidanhihoineen, ihmeen
kodikas ja mieluinen.
Olen kuitenkin utelias näkemään, eikö hän muuta pukuaan nyt

pian, sillä juhannus on aivan ovella ja morsian saattaa tulla millä
hetkellä hyvänsä.
Hänen huoneensa on nyt kunnossa, saapi tulla milloin hyvänsä.

Hän on laulajatar, joka on ollut oppimassa ulkomailla. Tavattoman
hieno ja sivistynyt nainen, kertoi ruustinna. Mutta sittenkin näyttää,
ettei hän oikein sydämestään iloitse morsiamen tulosta. Niin minusta
näyttää. Ja muutenkin on kuin olisi painajainen koko talossa.
Hajamielinen ja kärtyinen on ruustinna, rovasti on kadottanut
herttaista iloisuuttaan, ja kaikki tuntuu niin jännitetyltä ja pingoitetulta.
Ja Martti itse?
Minä en tiedä, mitä ajatella, enkä uskalla kaikkia ajatuksiani

kirjoittaa, mutta minulla on kummallinen aavistus siitä, ettei hän ole
iloinen morsiamensa tulosta. Eikö hän sitten rakasta? Martti-parka!
Ehkä hän kärsii hirveästi!
Jospa nyt juhannus tulisi ja morsian, että tämä pingoitettu elämä

pääsisi entiseen luontevuuteensa! Olen varma, että Marttikin tulisi
iloisemmaksi. Ehkä hänen Ellinsä on hyvinkin rakastettava, vaikka
minäkin toisin luulen. Mutta varmaa kuitenkin on, että joku syy on
olemassa juuri hänessä, sillä Martti ei olisi minulle niin sanonut, kun
kesäkartanolta palasimme.
Minun tekisi mieleni juuri nyt, kun muut pappilassa nukkuvat,

lähteä Haltiain kivelle. Martti maalaa paraikaa. Nyt on sydänyön
hetki, juhlallinen ja loistava! Sydämeni kuiskaa: mene Martin luo
Haltiain kivelle, hän muistaa sinua… odottaa sinua! Tyynny,
sydänraukkani! Ei Martti minua kaipaa. Minä näen hänet kivellä
seisomassa telineen vieressä… ja hän katselee ikävöiden pitkin
pappilasta tulevaa polkua…
Ei. Ei. Minä hourin ja haaveksin. Sydämeni on sairas, sairas,

mutta rakkauttani en voi kuolettaa. Yhden ihanan yön jo olen
viettänyt — siinä onkin kylliksi, ja siinä on minulle muistoja elämäni
ajaksi.
Kuinka hirveän paha on ihmissydän! Nyt juuri ajattelen: Jospa

hänen Ellinsä sairastuisi tai joku muu este sattuisi, ettei hän tänne
asti tulisikaan.
Mikä hirveä, syntinen ajatus! Jumala, anna minulle anteeksi

pahuuteni ja anna minulle voimia Martin onnen ja menestyksen
hyväksi toimia.
Lintujen laulaessa käyn nukkumaan. Kesäyö, kesäyö!
*****
Martti ei ole käynyt kotona laisinkaan.

Hän on nukkunut torpassa, äijävaarin pienessä, pimeässä
porstuan kamarissa, ja öisin on hän maalannut. Tänään olen käynyt
siellä ja Haltiain kivellä hänen »Kesäyötään» katsomassa. Kävin
viemässä ruokaa hänelle.
Vasta juuri olen palannut.
Martti on nyt iloisempi, ja hauskaa oli kuulla, mitä hän siellä

kahden vanhan kanssa hommaa. Hän näyttää unohtaneen koko
morsiamensa. Hän juttuilee ja tarinoipi äijävaarin kanssa, joka on
pian sadan vuoden vanha. Ukko alkaa vähitellen uskoa, että
maalaustaide sittenkin on jotakin erinomaisempaa. Ei syntiä eikä
vastoin Jumalan sanaa. Nyt käydessäni täytyi minun nauraa. Martti
on hämmästyttänyt molempia vanhoja erinomaisen hauskalla
taululla, johon hänellä jo ennen oli aihe ullakkokamarin seinällä:
Vanha Erkki poroineen.
Mutta nyt on taulussa pirtti, lampaita pirtin edessä jyrsimässä

männyn mäihää; Erkki metsästä palaamassa poroineen ja
honkakelkkoineen. Siitä on ukko mielistynyt ja nyt on niin hyvillään,
että häntä on ilo katsella.
Nyt ei hän enää epäile Martin kykyä, eikä pidä hänen tointansa
joutavana.
Martti on syönyt heidän kanssaan piimää ja leipää ja pitänyt ukon

sikaareissa.
»Minulla ei ole koskaan ulkomaanmatkallani ollut niin hauskaa

kuin täällä Jäkälärovassa näinä päivinä. Tämä on ihan kuin satua,
kun lisäksi on näin äärettömän kirkkaat ilmat», sanoi hän minulle.
Minä toin hänelle terveiset pappilasta, mutta hän sanoi, ettei hän
vielä malttanut tulla.
»Kesäyöt ovat lyhyet kuin ihanat unet. Niitä ei saa nukkumalla

kuluttaa, sillä ihmiselämä on lyhyt», sanoi hän.
Sitten kävimme Haltiain kivellä. Mikä ihana taulu siitä tuleekaan,

suuresta kesäisestä luonnosta suoraan jäljennetty!
Hän puhui koko ajan »Kesäyöstään», ja minä näin hänestä, ettei

hän muuta muistanut eikä muuta ajatellut. Ei sanaakaan
morsiamesta. Ei edes kysynyt, joko olimme huoneen kuntoon
laittaneet.
*****
Toin hänen terveisensä, ettei hän vielä malttanut tulla, hän tahtoi
nauttia ja imeä kaikki, mitä kesäyö tarjosi.
»Hän ei enää liene oikeillaan koko poika», pahoitteli ruustinna.

»Onko nyt enää suunnillakaan, että puuhaa siellä nälinkuoliaana
eikä välitä mistään!»
Mutta rovasti myhäili herttaista hymyään.
»Niin tuleekin! Ei hän muutoin tosi taiteilija olisikaan, ellei kaikesta

sielustaan antautuisi taiteellensa. Niin unohtaa taiteilija muun
maailman, sillä taide tahtoo miehensä kokonaan.»
»Olkoon sitten», virkkoi ruustinna, mutta kun hän näki, että rovasti
hyväksyi Martin hommat, tuli hänkin paremmalle tuulelle ja sanoi:
»Minkävuoksi hänestä nyt on tullut semmoinen kummallinen,
härkäpäinen olento… ja lapsena oli niin herttainen ja kuuliainen…»
Rovasti sanoi:
»Se johtuu siitä, että hän nyt vasta on selvillä tehtävästään.»
Nyt vasta alan minäkin Marttia oikein ymmärtää, hänen taidettaan.

Kuinka suuri onkaan hänen rakkautensa tähän luontoon! Kuinka
syvät ja voimakkaat hänen tunteensa. Minä voin vain aavistaa…
Kuinka onnellinen hän nyt olisikaan, jos hänen morsiamensa nyt

pian tulisi ja innostaisi häntä hänen työssään.
Osanneeko Elli ymmärtää hänen taideteostaan?
En tiedä. Minusta on kuitenkin kovin hauskaa, että Martti noin

tekee.
Tuntuu hyvältä minusta. Minkävuoksi? En tiedä sitäkään.
Kahden päivän perästä jo on juhannus-aatto.
Taas sama ikävä Haltiain kivelle. Olenko lumottu?
Voi että näkisin eteenpäin! Ei. Parempi on, etten mitään tiedä.
10.
Ellin kirje Martille.

Istun täällä ullakolla huoneessasi, jossa suurta tauluasi
valmistelet.
Minä näet olen tullut. En kuitenkaan kovin suurin toivein, samoin

kuin en erikoisen pettyneenä lähde takaisin. Kyllä tiesin, ettei
suhteemme eivätkä tunteemmekaan totta olleet.
Sinä olit kuitenkin aika veitikka! Jätät kirjeen, kuvani ja

sormukseni
tänne pöydällesi ja itse pakenit — niin, ties mihin erämaahan. Ehdit
ennen minua! Hyvä niinkin.
Haluan kuitenkin nämä rivit luettaviksesi jättää ennenkun lähden

takaisin, vaikka vasta tänä aamuna tänne tulin. Matka on pitkä,
mutta minä kyllä jaksan.
En ole sinulle suutuksissa, sillä minä ymmärrän tekosi vallan

hyvin. Olen sen nähnyt kirjeistäsi, ja samaa kai olet sinäkin
huomannut minun kirjeistäni, jos olet niitä joutanut lukea.
Avioliittoon tietysti ei olisi puhetta ollutkaan, mutta olisin minä
mielelläni tahtonut täällä viikon pari viipyä, viettääkseni kanssasi
Pohjolan kirkkaan kesän idyllin. Minä näet tunnustan, että tämä
kaukainen seutu miellyttää minua kirkkaine öineen ja alastomine
tuntureineen.
Pian olin selvillä, miten asiat ovat.
Ei ollut enää varhainen aamu, kun ajoin tänne pappilan kuistin

eteen. Luulin, että oltaisiin jo valveilla, mutta niin ei ollutkaan.
(Täällä näkyykin olevan tapana valvoa öisin ja vasta auringon
noustessa korkeammalle käydä nukkumaan.) Mutta juuri kun olin
noussut kärryistä, tuli nuori tyttö, — Anna kuuluu hänen nimensä
olevan — kuistille. Hän oli hirveän pelästyksissään ja kertoi, että
rovasti ja ruustinna vielä olivat yösijalla. Kertoi, että minua oli
varrottu, odotettu kuin kuuta nousevaa…
Hän selkisi pian aamu-unestaan, ja nyt minä vasta tulin häntä

tarkemmin katsoneeksi. Hän on todella ihana kaunotar. Mutta
samalla kun sen havainnon tein, ymmärsin minä heti, että olin tullut
liian myöhään. Tunsin raatelevaa tuskaa ja pettymyksen kipuja,
mutta nielaisin kaikki menemään.
Mutta hetken perästä jo uskoin, että olinkin erehtynyt. Annan

käytös ja koko olemus oli niin vilpittömän ystävällistä ja suoraa, että
jo uskoin erehtyneeni. En ole kenenkään ihmisen katseessa nähnyt
niin lempeää, niin suoraa ja sydämeen asti avonaista katsetta.
Minä en vielä kysynyt sinusta mitään. Hän vei minut minua

varten kuntoon laitettuun huoneeseen, ja minä aloin jo tulla
iloiseksi. Kaikki näytti niin somalta. Hän pyyteli anteeksi ja vakuutti,
että kaikki tulee hyväksi, jahka ehditään.
Silloin aloitin keskustelun Annan kanssa ja sain tietää, kuka hän

oli. Ensin uskoin, että hän oli joku sukulaisesi; en ymmärtänyt, oliko
palvelija vai eikö. Hänen käytöksensä oli teeskentelemätöntä ja
suoraa. Mutta lopuksi käsitin, että Anna kuitenkin, kasvattina, oli
enemmän kuin tavallinen palvelija.
Kysyin sitten sinua.
Anna selitti, missä olet, että maalaat jotakin uutta taulua lähellä
olevassa torpassa. Katoamisestasi erämaahan ei täällä silloin
kukaan tiennyt — ei Annakaan.
-Missä hän täällä kotona maalaa? Hän on kertonut suuresta
taulusta, jonka aihe on keväisestä kiveliöstä?»
Annan kasvot ihastuivat.
»Täällä ullakkokerroksessa. Pohjoispäässä. Hän rakastaa olla

pohjoispäässä sen vuoksi, että näköala on kauniimpi sieltä.»
Hän läksi minua opastamaan, ja me nousimme ullakolle.
»Se on ihana taulu, mutta se ei ole vielä valmis», kuulin Annan

sanovan, kun nousimme rappusia ylös.
Sitä sanoessaan soi hänen äänensä niin pehmeällä ja hellältä,

että äskeinen epäilykseni taas heräsi. Kun katsoin Annaan,
näyttivät hänen kasvonsa vaaleammalta.
Hän avasi oven, ja me astuimme tähän huoneeseen, jossa nyt

tätä kirjettä kirjoitan.
»Neiti on hyvä ja tulee alas sitten… Minä laitan siellä kuntoon

kaikki… uni, väsymys ja nälkä tulee taipaleella», kuulin Annan
sanovan, ja samalla hän poistui alas.
Hyvä olikin, että meni. Nyt sain rauhassa katsella tauluasi… Ilo ja
riemu ja ylpeys täytti sydämeni, sillä minä näen nyt vasta, että olet
todellinen taiteilija. Pitkään aikaan en voinut irroittaa katsettani siitä,
niin huikaisevan kaunis se oli suurine valkopäisine kukkuloineen,
jotka kuvastuivat tummansinervää taivasta vastaan…
Huoneessa oli siistiä, ja selvään näkyi, ettei siinä ollut moneen

päivään asuttu. Mutta minä havaitsin myöskin muuta, josta
epäluuloni taas virkistyi ja muuttui vihdoin varmuudeksi. Kukkia,
aivan vereksiä, oli maljakoissa sekä pöydällä että lipastolla. Kuka
niitä muu laittoi kuin Anna?
Katselin ulos ja avasin ikkunan.
Todellakin suurenmoinen on näköala.
Silloin huomasin kirjeen, jossa oli osoitteeni.
Ennenkuin sen avasinkaan ymmärsin kaikki.
Jos sinä hetkenä olisin voinut kostaa, olisi kostoni ollut

kamalaakin kamalampi.
Mutta minä olen näyttelijä pohjaltani, ja pusersin tuskani syvälle.

Mutta ajatuksissani riehui koston kuuma poltto — en omaani enkä
sinun onneasi ajatellut — kostoa, veristä ja julmaa…
En ole kuitenkaan niin huono kuin ehkä luulet. Ajattelin

menettelyäsi ja koetin sinua ja tekoasi ymmärtää. Ja uskon
löytäneeni syyt. Senvuoksi lauhtui vihani, ja koston henki laimeni.
Sillä minä uskon sallimukseen. Ajattelin omaa elämääni, joka on
takanani, ja tunsin, ettei se ollut semmoista elämää kuin sinun
Annasi elämä. Minun on helppo ymmärtää, että olet meitä
molempia toisiimme verrannut, ja että voitto kallistui Annan
puoleen, on selvä — siksi hyvin sinut tunnen. Minä tunnen, että et
rakasta aistillisuutta, joka on minun elämäni. Siksi kadotin arvoni
silmissäsi Annan rinnalla — ja olenhan jo Annaa vanhempikin.
Niinikään ymmärrän syyn, jonka vuoksi olet piiloutunut. Sinun

olisi ollut vaikeaa sanoa minulle suora totuus, etkä tietystikään
halunnut Annan läheisyydessä ruveta minua »rakastelemaan», jota
kuitenkin olisin tahtonut. Tekosi on haaveksijan, uneksijan teko, ja
minä käsitän sen ihmeen hyvin. Se on samalla alkuperäisen
romantillinen, vaikka se osoittaakin heikkoutta ja arkuutta.
Isäsi on herttainen vanha rovasti ja luulen, että olet isäsi

luontoinen. Äitisi on viisas, elämää kokenut nainen. Huomasin ensi
silmäyksestä, jonka hän minuun iski, että hän tahtoi katsoa pohjaan
asti. Minä luulen, että semmoisia vanhoja ruustinnoja on mahdoton
pettää — niin tutkiva on heidän katseensa. Riippuuko se siitä, että
heidän sielunelämänsä on niin kovin puhdasta, vai ainoastaan
toisen, tutkittavan, paha omatuntoko säpsähtelee tutkijan kirkkaan
silmän edessä?
En sitä tiedä. Mutta minä näin heti, että olin vastenmielinen

hänelle, vaikka hän koettikin, raukka, teeskennellä ystävällisyyttä.
Uskon, ettei ainakaan hän sure poislähtöäni.
Isäsi on toista maata, lämmin ukko, jonka nainen voisi taluttaa

minne hyvänsä. Me puhuimme paljon taiteesta ja taiteilijoista. Hän
on vanhaksi mieheksi seurannut merkillisen tarkkaan kaikkia
taideharrastuksia maassamme.
*****
Niin. Sinua on etsitty koko päivä. Ei jälkeäkään ole näkynyt.

Huomaan ruustinnan pelkäävän pahinta. Ja äsken, kun nousin
tänne ullakolle kirjoittamaan, näin ukko rovastinkin kävelevän
levottomana edestakaisin huoneessaan. He eivät tiedä kirjeestäsi
mitään, enkä siitä aio heille mitään mainitakaan. Annaa en ole
nähnyt sitten aamun, ja koko talo näyttää olevan levoton
katoamisesi vuoksi.

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The Principle of Political Hope Loren

The Principle of Moments Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson

Not Quite Hope and Other Political Emotions in the

Goldman-Cecil Medicine 26th Edition Lee Goldman

Goldman-Cecil Medicine 26th Edition M.D. Goldman

The One for You Roni Loren

The One for You Roni Loren

Goldman-Cecil Tratado de Medicina Interna 26a Edición

Principle of Macroeconomics: A Streamlined Approach 4th

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

© Oxford University Press 2023

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

You must not circulate this work in any other form

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

I subsequently spent three years as a visiting professor, I thank Sami

the University of Warsaw. The interlocutors I encountered strengthened this

In 1916, the American philosopher John Dewey confessed to having held a

confused rapidity of change with advance, and we took certain gains in

Reflecting on the political upheavals of Progressive era America and the

heralded the “end of history,” a culmination marked by the universal ac-

presumption, triumphant developmentalism, and paternalistic domination.7

utopias inevitably looks back.”33 Emancipatory aspirations are replaced by

done invaluable work explicating the cold limits of politics as a response to

The Varieties of Hopeful Experience

The historical specificity of contemporary critics of the idea of progress not-

in favor of a linear one looking toward the coming moment of messianic

In analytic philosophy, hope has conventionally been defined in terms

insofar as their political agency revolves around extrapolating an unfulfilled

provides a place where people come together, embodied and passionate, to

makes involvement in direct forms of political activism enjoyable; the sense

Perspective and Scholarly Aims

This book’s main purpose is to sketch an account of hope that is rooted in

community of inquiry stands against the background of a strongly meta-

Plan of the Work

and practical needs of an individual subject. The metaphysical approach, on

Crucial to Kant’s view, I show, is that hope is predicated on action toward

Toward the end of his epoch-​making Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel

The Critical System

In the words of Henry Allison, Kant’s philosophy is “critical” insofar as “it

according to other pure concepts Kant called categories, comprising the

have an excellent and indispensably necessary regulative use, namely that of

Although ideas of reason may appear to be flights of fancy given Kant’s

inexorably pushes [beyond experience], driven by its own need to such

In “What is Orientation in Thinking?,” Kant further elaborates that this need

the representation of an absolute end (Zweck) underlying all other rational

Satisfying Reason’s Theoretical Interest Through Hypotheses

Reason’s theoretical interest demands orientation toward an uncondi-

indeed practical reasons for assuming a progressive historical narrative take

Satisfying Reason’s Practical Interest Through Postulates

A similar chain of arguments underlies the practical interest of reason, albeit

Hope and the Highest Good

happy. In the Second Critique, an individualist version of this conception

based on the laws of virtue” in which happiness is globally enjoyed, akin to

though we shall see that Kant employs an analogous argument in terms of a

Silloin uskalsivat he katsoa toisiaan silmiin. Lintujen laulu eneni,

Martti kietoi kätensä Annan hennon varren ympäri ja kallisti

»Lähdemme kotia nyt!»

He laskeusivat alas kiveltä, katselivat vielä kiven kyljessä olevaa

»Nyt minä tiedän, mikä kesäyössä on selittämätöntä», virkkoi

Toward the end of his epoch-making Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel