Hope and critical theory

Critical Horizons

Volumn 6, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 45-61

  Smith, Nicholas H ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

Frankfurt School; Humanism; Postmodernism; Rorty; Social Criticism; Social Hope

Indexed keywords

EID: 33748932710     PISSN: 14409917     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1163/156851605775009528     Document Type: Review

References (48)

1. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp-Smith, London, Macmillan, 1933, A805/B833.
2. See Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice & Paul Knight, Oxford, Blackwell, 1986.
3. See Eric Fromm, The Revolution of Hope: Towards a Humanized Technology, New York, Harper & Row, 1968.
4. See Ronald Aronson, Dialectics of Disaster: A Preface to Hope, London, Verso, 1983
5. and by the same author "Hope after Hope," Social Research, vol. 66, no. 2, Summer, 1999, pp. 471-94;
6. John Patrick Day, Hope, A Philosophical Inquiry, Acta Philosophica Fennica, vol. 51, Helsinki, 1991;
7. Joseph J. Godfrey, A Philosophy of Human Hope, Dordrecht, Martinus Nijhof, 1987.
8. The situation may be changing. Ghassan Hage has outlined a sketch for a critique of the present organised around the idea of hope that is powerful and provocative in the current Australian context. See Ghassan Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism. Searching for Hope in a Shrinking Society, Annandale, Pluto (London, Merlin Press), 2003. There also seems to be a renewed interest amongst sociologists and political theorists in the utopian dimension of critical theory, as the articles by Craig Browne and Pauline Johnson in this volume reflect.
9. The association of hope with women, weakness and an anodyne finds its archetype in the Pandora tale. For discussion see Godfrey, A Philosophy of Human Hope,
10. and Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. 1.
11. "Hope is the worst of all evils, for it protracts the torment of man," Friedrich Nietzsche, Human all too Human, vol. 1, trans. R.J. Holland, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986 (1878), p. 45.
12. For further discussion (drawing on Bloch's influential views on this matter) see Ruth Levitas, "Educated Hope: Ernst Bloch on Abstract and Concrete Utopia" in Not Yet. Reconsidering Ernst Bloch, eds. Jamie Owen Daniel & Tom Moylan, London, Verso, 1997, pp. 65-79.
13. See Day, Hope, p. 36.
14. See e.g. Joseph Pieper, Hope and History, trans. Richard and Lara Winston, London, Herder & Herder, 1969;
15. Gabriel Marcel, Homo Viator. Introduction to a Metaphysic of Hope, trans. Emma Crawford, London, Victor Gollancz, 1951.
16. See Manfred Buhr, "A Critique of Ernst Bloch's Philosophy of Hope," Philosophy Today, vol. 14, Winter, 1970, pp. 259-71
17. (a translation of 'Der religiose Ursprung Charackter der Hoffnungsphilosophie Ernst Bloch," Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, 4, 1958, pp. 576-98. In a concluding endnote, Buhr writes: "What remains to be done in reference to Bloch is to prove that the philosophy of hope is a manifestation of religious thought forms ... and to point out the affinities and common points between philosophy of hope and similar currents in contemporary late bourgeois philosophy," n. 49, p. 271.
18. See Rolf Wiggerhaus, The Frankfurt School, trans. Michael Robertson, Cambridge, Polity, pp. 65, 69.
19. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1999, p. xii.
20. See, for example, Jürgen Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, 2 Vols, trans. Thomas McCarthy, Cambridge, Polity, 1984,1987;
21. Kenneth. Baynes, The Normative Basis of Social Criticism: Kant, Rawls, Habermas, Albany, SUNY Press, 1991;
22. Maeve Cooke, Language and Reason: A Study of Habermas's Pragmatics, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1994;
23. William Rehg, Insight and Solidarity: The Discourse Ethics of Jürgen Habermas, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1994;
24. Shane O'Neill, Impartiality in Context, Albany, SUNY Press, 1997.
25. Alasdair MacIntyre, Marxism and Christianity, second edition, London, Duckworth, 1995, p. 89.
26. Alasdair MacIntyre, Marxism and Christianity, second edition, Ibid., p. 92.
27. See Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, trans. Geoff Bennington, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1984.
28. See Jonathan Rée, "Marxism and Hope," in Post-Marxism and the Middle East, ed. Faleh A. Jabar, London, Saqi Books,1997, pp. 203-11.
29. Jonathan Rée, in Post-Marxism and the Middle East, Ibid., p. 211.
30. See, for example, Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence, Cambridge, Polity, 1987.
31. See, for example, Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope.
32. R. Rorty, Against Bosses, Against Oligarchies, Chicago, Prickly Paradigm Press, 1998, p. 58.
33. R. Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1982, p. 208.
34. See Rorty, "Pragmatism as Romantic Polytheism," in The Revival of Pragmatism, ed. M. Dickstein, Durham, Duke University Press, 1998, pp. 21-36.
35. For further analysis of Rorty's 'romantic utilitarianism' and its approach to social hope see Nicholas H. Smith, "Rorty on Religion and Hope," Inquiry, vol. 48, no. 1, February 2005, pp. 76-98.
36. See John D. Caputo, "The Experience of God and the Axiology of the Impossible," in Religion after Metaphysics, ed. M. Wrathall, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 123-45, 134.
37. John D. Caputo, Religion after Metaphysics, Ibid., p. 134.
38. See e.g. John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, Bloomington & Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1997.
39. "If we follow probability there is no hope," Isabelle Strengers, interview with Mary Zournazi, in Hope - New Philosophies for Social Change, ed. M. Zournazi, Annandale, Pluto Press, 2002, p. 245, cited by Craig Browne in his contribution to this volume.
40. I have examined the sense Rorty gives to the idea of unjustifiable hope in "Rorty on Religion and Hope."
41. See Marcel, Homo Viator, p. 32f.
42. Marcel, Homo Viator, Ibid., p. 46.
43. J. Pieper, Hope and History, p. 25.
44. J. Pieper, Hope and History, Ibid., p. 91.
45. See Godfrey, A Philosophy of Human Hope, esp. pp. 133-154.
46. For example, by Hinrich Fink-Eitel in "Das rote Fenster. Fragen nach dem Prinzip der Philosophe von Ernst Bloch," Philosophisches Jahrbuch, vol. 95, no. 2, 1988. I thank Axel Honneth for alerting me to this piece.
47. As Rorty himself has remarked, "philosophy is responsive to changes in amount of political hope," and the preoccupation, amongst contemporary political philosophers with notions of "the impossible" reflects a lack of social hope, and "an inability to construct a plausible narrative of progress." Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, pp. 229, 232.
48. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 2004 Philosophy and Human Sciences Colloquium in Prague and the 2004 Annual Conference of the Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy at Macquarie University. I thank everyone who discussed the paper with me on these occasions for their helpful comments.