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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
 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.

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© Oxford University Press 2023

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address above.

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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
4 The Principle of Political Hope

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
6 The Principle of Political Hope

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
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child: A farce, in two acts, as performed at the
Theatre Royal, Drury Lane
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Title: The spoil'd child: A farce, in two acts, as performed at the

Theatre Royal, Drury Lane

Author: Isaac Bickerstaff

Sir Richard Ford
Prince Hoare
Dorothy Jordan

Release date: July 30, 2022 [eBook #68649]

Language: English

Original publication: United Kingdom: Barker and Son, 1805

Credits: Charlene Taylor and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file
was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SPOIL'D

CHILD: A FARCE, IN TWO ACTS, AS PERFORMED AT THE
THEATRE ROYAL, DRURY LANE ***
 THE

SPOIL’D CHILD,
A FARCE,
IN TWO ACTS,
As performed at the
Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.
THIS AUTHENTIC EDITION, NOW FIRST PUBLISHED, IS
STRICTLY CONFORMABLE TO THE PROMPTER’s BOOK.
W. Powell, Prompter.
N. B. Whoever vends spurious Copies will be prosecuted.

LONDON:
PRINTED and PUBLISHED by BARKER and SON,
Dramatic Repository,
GREAT RUSSELL STREET, COVENT GARDEN.

1805.
[Price 1s. 6d.
 PROLOGUE,
SPOKEN BY MRS. JORDAN.
Enters opening a Letter.

“Dear Madam—Disappointed by a friend—

“Promis’d a Prologue—at my poor wit’s end—
“Ruin’d—unless so good—your laughing way—
“T’ insinuate something for my luckless Play.”
Poor Devil! what a fright he’s in—but why—
Am I to help him—What can I supply?
I’m doom’d to speak but just what Authors say:
Dull, when they’re dull—and sportive when they’re gay;
Mere puppets here, obedient to their will,
We love or hate—are blest or wretched—kill’d or kill—
Mirth we put on, just as we put on graces—
And wit—that’s sent home ready with our dresses.
What, tho’ at night so very smart and charming—
The dullest mortals breathing, in the morning—
Hence the nice sop, ’ere he our merit stamps.
Of rouge all doubtful—and these treach’rous lamps,
Midst the loud praise, still asks with cautious leer
How is she off the stage—what is she near——

But to my talk—to own it tho’ you’re loath

You’re all spoilt children of a larger growth,
Longing for each poor tinsel’d toy you see,
And only constant to variety——
Whilst each, the censor of his own defects,
The darling fault with gentlest hand corrects;
E’en from his very failings draws a merit,
And dooms each error but a proof of spirit.
 Look round the world——
When we say world—we mean not now-a days
A huge globe, form’d of mountains—rivers—seas—
The polish’d mind sinks from a scene so wide,
We mean from Hyde Park Corner to Cheapside——
Look thro’ the world—you’ll find my moral true
In all the varied shapes that rise to view.

But from spoilt children of six feet in height,

To the spoilt child our stage presents to-night,
Brimful of mirth he comes—Miss Tomboy’s brother,
We hope you’ll think they’re something like each other.
To plead his cause she’ll try a sister’s skill,
I’d fain prevent her—but, “ecod you will.”——
Perhaps she may shock you, of precise prim air,
But Lord! what then, she never minds that there.
The Country Girl a kindred tie may claim,
She too is anxious for his future fame;
And if you’ll spare him, swears whene’er she’s able
She’ll tread on all your toes—under the table.
Oft’ have you deign’d their artless toils to cheer,
And crown’d with flutt’ring smiles their labours, here
View then here the brother’s faults, with judgment mild,
And spare the rod—altho’ you Spoil the Child.

BARKER and SON

Respectfully inform the Public, they have a Collection of Plays on
Sale, which, considered either as to its Extent or Rarity, has scarcely
been equalled, having been upwards of Thirty Years in forming,
principally from the Libraries of

—— SHELDON, ESQ. MR. HENDERSON

MAJOR PEARSON DUKE OF BRIDGEWATER
DR. WRIGHT DR. FARMER
 MR. DODD G. STEVENS, ESQ.
MR. MACKLIN &c. &c. &c.

In this Assemblage will be found the original Editions of our most

valuable Writers; as,

SHAKESPEARE MIDDLETON SHIRLEY

JONSON WEBSTER DAVENANT
CHAPMAN BEAUM. & GLAPTHORNE
FLETCHER
HEYWOOD KILLIGREW, &c.
MASSINGER &c.

Subjoined to these, are the more modern Authors, to which every

Article is added as soon as published.
 DRAMATIS PERSONÆ.
1790. 1804.
Little Pickle, Mrs. Jordan. Miss De Camp.
Old Pickle, Mr. Suett. Mr. Suett.
Tagg, Mr. R. Palmer. Mr. Palmer.
John, Mr. Burton. Mr. Purser.
Thomas, Mr. Lyons. Mr. Evans.
Miss Pickle, Mrs. Hopkins. Mrs. Sparks.
Maria, Miss Heard. Mrs. Sharp.
Margery, Mrs. Booth. Mrs. Maddocks.
Susan, Mrs. Edwards. Miss Tidswell.

SCENE—Old Pickle’s Country House.

TIME—That of Representation.
THE SPOIL’D CHILD.
 ACT I.

SCENE I.—A Dining Parlour.—Pickle and his sister sitting by a

table, on which plates are set for dinner—the sister working.

Pickle.
Well, well, sister, a little patience and these holidays will soon be
over, the boy then goes back to school, and all will be quiet.
Miss P. Aye, till the next breaking up—no—no, brother, unless he
is severely punished for what he has already done, depend upon it
this vicious humour will be confirmed into habit, and his follies
increase in proportion with his years.
Pick. Now would not any one think, to hear you talk, that my son
had actually some vice in him, for my part, I own there is something
so whimsical in all his tricks, that I cannot in my heart but forgive
him, aye, and for aught I know, love him better into the bargain.
Miss P. Yes, truly, because you have never been a sufferer by
them, had you been rendered as ridiculous as I have been by his
tricks, as you call them, you would have been the first to complain,
and to punish.
Pick. Nay, as to that, he has not spared even his father—is there a
day passes that I don’t break my shins over some stumbling block he
lays in my way—Why there is not a door but is armed with a bason
of water on the top, and just left a-jar, so that egad, I can’t walk over
my own house without running the risk of being wet through.
Miss P. No wonder the child’s spoilt, since you will superintend his
education yourself—you! indeed!
Pick. Sister, sister, do not provoke me—at any rate I have wit
enough to conceal my ignorance, I don’t pretend to write verses and
nonsense as some folks do.
Miss P. Now would you rail at me for the disposition I was born
with—can I help it, if the gods have made me poetical, as the divine
bard says.
Pick. Made you poetical, indeed!—s’blood if you had been born in
a street near a college, aye, or even the next door to a day-school, I
might not have been so surprised—but d——n it, madam, in the
middle of the Minories, what had you to do with poetry and stuff?
Miss P. Provoking ignorance.
Pick. Have you not rendered yourself the sneer of all your
acquaintance, by your refined poetical intercourse with Mr. Tagg, the
author, a fellow that stroles about the country, spouting and acting in
every barn he comes to—was he not once found concealed in your
closet, to the utter scandal of my house, and the ruin of your
reputation!
Miss P. If you had the smallest spark of taste, you would admire
the effusions of Mr. Tagg’s pen, and be enchanted at his admirable
acting as much as I am.
Pick. Do you tell me I can’t educate my own child, and make a lord
chancellor, or an archbishop of Canterbury of him, which ever I like—
just as I please.
[Young Pickle by a string draws the chair, Old Pickle falls.
Miss P. How’s this—I’ll lay my life that is another trick of this little
mischievous wretch.
Pick. (getting up.) An ungrateful little rascal, to serve me such a
trick, just as I had made an archbishop of him—but he can’t be far off
—I’ll immediately correct him; here, Thomas. (going, meets Thomas
and servants bringing in covers for dinner.) But odso, here’s dinner—
well, I’ll defer my severity till that’s over—but if I don’t make him
remember this trick one while, say my name is not Pickle. (sits down
to table, Pickle cutting up a pheasant.) Sister, this is the first
pheasant we have had this season, it looks well—shall I help you—
they say anger makes a man dry, but mine has made me hungry—
come, here’s a wing for you, and some of the breast.
Enter Susan, (a Cook Maid) in haste.
Sus. Oh, dear sir—oh, dear madam—my young master—the
parrot, ma’am—oh dear!
Pick. Parrot, and your young master; what the deuce does the girl
mean?
Miss P. Mean! Why as sure as I live that vile boy has been hurting
my poor bird.
Sus. Hurting, ma’am—no indeed, ma’am; I’ll tell you the whole
truth—I was not to blame, indeed I wasn’t, ma’am, besides, I am
morally certain ’twas the strange cat that kill’d it this morning.
Miss P. How! kill’d it say you;—but go on, let us hear the whole.
Sus. Why ma’am, the truth is, I did but step out of the kitchin for a
moment, when in comes my young master, whips the pheasant that
was roasting for dinner, from the spit, and claps down your ladyship’s
parrot, picked and trussed in its place.
Pick. The parrot!—the devil.
Sus. I kept basting and basting on, and never thought I was
basting the parrot.
Miss P. Oh, my sweet, my beautiful young bird, I had just taught it
to talk, too.
Pick. You taught it to talk—it taught you to talk, you mean, I am
sure it was old enough, ’twas hatched in the hard frost!
Miss P. Well, brother, what excuse now?—but run, Susan, and do
you hear, take John, and——
Enter John, slowly and lame, his face bound up.
Oh John, here’s a piece of business.
John. Ay, ma’am sure enow—what you have heard, I see—
business indeed—the poor thing will never recover.
 Miss P. (joyfully) What, John, is it a mistake of Susan’s—is it still
alive?—but—where—where is it, John?
John. Safe in stables, and it were as sound—a’ made her a hot
mash, woud’nt touch it—so crippled will never have leg to put to
ground again.
Pick. No, I’ll swear to that—for here’s one of them. (holding up a
leg on a fork)
Miss P. What does the fool mean? what—what, what is in the
stable—what are you talking of?
John. Master’s favourite mare, Daisy, madam—poor thing——
Pick. (alarmed) What—how—any thing the matter with Daisy? I
would not part with her for——
John. Aye, sir quite done up—won’t fetch five pounds at the next
fair.
Miss P. This dunce’s ignorance distracts me—come along, Susan.
[Exeunt Miss Pickle and Susan.
Pick. Why, what can it be what the devil ails her?
John. Why, sir, the long and the short of the whole affair, is as how
—he’s cut me too all across the face—mercy I did not lose my eyes.
Pick. This cursed fellow will drive me mad—the mare, you
scoundrel, the mare.
John. Yes, sir, the mare—then too, my shins—master Salve, the
surgeon, says I must ’noint ’em wi’——
Pick. Plague on your shins—you dog—what is the matter with the
mare?
John. Why, sir, as I was coming home this morning over Black
Down, what does I see but young master tearing over the turf upon
Daisy, thof your honour had forbid him to ride her—so I calls to him
to stop—but what does he do, but smacks his whip in my face, and
dash over the gate into Stoney Lane; but what’s worse, when I rated
him about it, he snatches up Tom Carter’s long whip, and lays me so
over the legs, and before I could catch hold of him, he slips out of the
stable, and was off like a shot.
Pick. Well, if I forgive him this—no—I’ll send him this moment back
to school.—School! zounds, I’ll send him to sea.
Enter Miss Pickle.
Miss P. Well, brother, yonder comes your precious child—he’s
muttering all the way up stairs to himself, some fresh mischief, I
suppose.
Pick. Aye, here he comes—stand back—let us watch him, though I
can never contain my passion long.
[they withdraw to the back of the stage.
Enter Little Pickle.
Little P. Well, so far all goes on rarely, dinner must be nearly ready;
old Poll will taste well, I dare say—parrot and bread sauce—ha! ha!
ha!—they suppose they are going to have a nice young pheasant, an
old parrot is a greater rarity, I’m sure—I can’t help thinking how
devilish tough the drumsticks will be—a fine piece of work, aunt will
make when it’s found out—ecod, for aught I know, that may be better
fun than the other: no doubt Sukey will tell, and John too, about the
horse—a parcel of sneaking fellows, always tell, tell, tell.—I only
wish I could catch them a school, once—that is all—I’d pay them well
for it I’d be bound.—Oh! oh! here they are, and as I live, my father
and aunt—it’s all out I see—to be sure I’m not got into a fine scrape
now, I almost wish I was safe at school again. (they come forward)
Oh, sir, how do you do, sir, I was just coming to——
Pick. Come, come, no fooling now—how dare you look me in the
face after the mischief you have done?
Little P. What—what have I done?
Pick. You know the value I set upon that mare, you have spoilt for
ever.
Little P. But, sir, hear me—indeed I was not so much to blame, sir,
not so very much.
 Miss P. Do not aggravate your faults by pretending to excuse them
—your father is too kind to you.
Little P. Dear, sir, I own I was unfortunate——I had heard you often
complain, how wild and vicious little Daisy was, and indeed, sir, I
never saw you ride her, but I trembled least some sad accident might
befall you.
Pick. Well, and what is all this to the purpose?
Little P. And so, sir, I resolved, sooner than you should suffer, to
venture my own neck, and so try to tame her for you; that was all—
and so I was no sooner mounted than off she set—I could not help
that you know, sir, and so this misfortune happened, and so, sir—but
indeed, sir——
Pick. Could I be sure this was your motive——and ’tis purely love
and regard for your old father makes you thus teaze and torment him
—perhaps I might be inclined to——
John. Yes, sir, but ’tis no love and regard to me made him beat me
so——
Little P. John, you know you were to blame.—Sir, indeed the truth
is, John was scolding me for it, and when I told him as I have told
you, why I did it, and that it was to hinder you from being hurt, he
said that it was no business of mine, and that if your neck was broke
it was no such great matter.
Pick. What—no great matter to have my neck broke——
Little P. No, sir; so he said, and I was vex’d to hear him speak so
of you, and I believe I might take up the whip, and give him a cut or
two on the legs—it could not hurt him much.
Pick. Well, child, I believe I must forgive you, and so shall John
too; aye, aye.——But I had forgot poor Poll—what did you roast the
parrot for, you young dog?
Little P. Why, sir, I knew you and my aunt were both so fond of it, I
thought you would like to see it well dress’d.
Pick. Ha!—ha!—ha!——
 Little P. But dear aunt, I know you must be angry with me, and you
think with reason.
Miss P. Don’t speak to me, I am not so weak as your father,
whatever you may fancy.
Little P. But indeed, aunt, you must hear me, had I not loved you
as I do, I should not have thus offended you, but it was merely my
regard for your character.
John. Character!—
[Exit, Pickle kicks him off.
Little P. My dear aunt, I always heard that no lady’s keep parrots or
lap-dogs, ’till they can no longer keep lovers—and when at school, I
told ’em you had a parrot, the boys all said, then you must be a
foolish old maid.
Miss P. Indeed!—impudent young wretches.
Little P. Yes, aunt, and so I resolved you should no longer be
thought so—for I think you are a great deal too young, and too
handsome for an old maid. (taking her hand)
Pick. Come, sister, i’faith you must forgive him, no female heart
can withstand that.
Miss P. Brother, you know I can forgive where I see occasion; but
though these faults are thus excused, how will you answer to a
charge of scandal and ill-nature.
Little P. Ill-nature, madam—I’m sure nobody can accuse me of
that.
Miss P. How will you justify the report you spread, of my being
locked up in my closet with Mr. Tagg, the author—can you defend so
vile an attempt to injure my reputation?
Pick. What, that too, I suppose, was from your care of her
character—and so to hinder your aunt from being an old maid, you
locked her up in her closet with this author, as he is called.
 Little P. Nay, indeed, dear madam, I beseech you—’twas no such
thing, all I said was, you were amusing yourself in your closet with a
favourite author.
Miss P. I amuse myself in my closet with a favourite author! worse
and worse.
Pick. Sister have patience—hear——
Miss P. I am ashamed to see you support your boy in such
insolence—I, indeed! who am scrupulous to a fault; but no longer will
I remain subject to such impertinence, I quit your house, sir, and you
shall quit all claim to my fortune—this moment will I alter my will, and
leave my money to a stranger, sooner than to your family.
[Exit.
Pick. Her money to a stranger, leave her money to a stranger! Oh!
the three per-cent. consols—oh, the India stock—go, child—fly,
throw yourself at your aunt’s feet—say any thing to please her—I
shall run distracted.—Oh! those consols——
Little P. I am gone, sir—shall I say she may die as soon as she
pleases, but she must not give her money to a stranger.
Pick. Aye, aye, there’s a good boy, say any thing to please her,
that will do very well—say she may die as soon as she pleases, but
she must not leave her money to a stranger. (Exit Little P.) Sure
never man was so tormented—well, I thought when my poor dear
wife, Mrs. Pickle died, and left me a disconsolate widower, I stood
some chance of being a happy man, but I know not how it is, I could
bear the vexation of my wife’s bad temper better than this woman’s.
All my married friends were as miserable as myself—but now—faith
here she comes, and in a fine humour, no doubt.
Enter Miss Pickle.
Miss P. Brother, I have given directions for my immediate
departure, and am now come to tell you, I will persist in my design,
unless you this moment adopt the scheme I yesterday proposed for
my nephew’s amendment.
 Pick. Why, my dear sister you know there is nothing I would not
readily do to satisfy and appease you, but to abandon my only child,
to pretend that he is not mine—to receive a beggar brat into my arms
—impossible——
Miss P. (going) Very well, sir, then I am gone.
Pick. But sister, stop—was ever man so used—how long is this
scheme of yours to last? how long am I to be deprived of him?
Miss P. How long! why until he is brought duly to reflect upon his
bad behaviour, which nothing will induce him to do, so soon as
thinking himself no longer your son, but the child of poor parents—I
yesterday spoke to Margaret, his old nurse, and she fully
comprehends the whole affair.
Pick. But why, in addition to the quitting my own child, am I to have
the torment of receiving hers? won’t the sending him away be
sufficient?
Miss P. Unless the plot is managed my way, I will have nothing to
do with it, but begone—can’t you perceive that his distress at losing
his situation, will be augmented by seeing it possessed by another—
come, come, brother, a week’s purgatory will reform him, depend
upon it.
Pick. Why, to be sure, as you say—’twill reform him, and as we
shall have our eyes upon him all the while, and Margaret his own
nurse—
Miss P. You may be sure she will take care of him—well, since this
is settled, the sooner ’tis done the better—Thomas!
Enter Thomas.
Send your young master.
Pick. I see you are finally resolved, and no other way will content
you.—Well, heaven protect my poor child.
Miss P. Brother, you are so blinded by your foolish fondness, that
you cease to perceive what is for his benefit—’tis happy for you,
there is a person to direct you, of my superior discernment.
 Enter Little Pickle.
Little P. Did you send for me, aunt?
Pick. Child, come hither, I have a great secret to disclose to you, at
which you will be much surprised.
Little P. A secret, sir!
Miss P. Yes, and one that requires your utmost courage to hear—
you are no longer to consider that person as your father, he is not so
—Margaret, who nursed you, has confessed, and the thing is
sufficiently proved, that you are not his son, but hers—she
exchanged you when an infant for my real nephew, and her
conscience has at last compelled her to make the discovery.
Little P. I another person’s child!—impossible!—ah! you are only
joking with me now, to see whether I love you or not, but indeed (to
Pickle) I am yours—my heart tells me I am only only yours.
Pick. I am afraid you deceive yourself—there can be no doubt of
the truth of Margaret’s account; but still assure yourself of our
protection—but no longer can you remain in this house, I must not
do an injury to my own child—you belong to others—to them you
must now go.
Little P. Yet, sir, for an instant hear me—pity me—ah too sure I
know (to Old Pickle) I am not your child—or would that distress
which now draws tears of pity from a stranger, fail to move nature in
you.
Miss P. Comfort yourself, we must ever consider you with
compassion and regard—but now you must begone—Margaret is
waiting without to receive you.

SONG—Little Pickle.
Tune—Je suis Linder.

Since then I’m doom’d, this sad reverse to prove,

To quit each object of my infant care;
Torn from an honour’d parent’s tender love,