Political Hope and Cooperative Community

This chapter pursues three aims: First, I propose three different roles that hope can play in political philosophy - one instrumental, one constitutive, and the other justificatory. I then examine three major approaches to political hope, exemplified by Bloch, Rorty, and contemporary liberal authors in order to distinguish three approaches to the justificatory question. I argue that they make opposite mistakes with regard to the importance of hope. Whereas Bloch solves the problem of justification by introducing a metaphysics to support hope, thereby adopting an overambitious concept of hope, Rorty and contemporary liberals assign it too small a role. Based on this discussion, I then argue for my own proposal; the view that, while ethical pluralism rules out any expectation that we can achieve more ambitious forms of community than political liberalism seems to allow, the requirements of justice may still require us to hope for the emergence of such forms of community.