The Principle of Political Hope: Progress, Action, and Democracy in Modern Thought 0197675824, 9780197675823

Citation preview

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. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2023 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. 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 involvement 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 present, 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 climate 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 contributed 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, responsibility 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  Works Cited  Index 

159 205 227

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 further 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 scholarly 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 amanuensis and Rosie DuBrin compiled the index; both are formidable minds and regular interlocutors. Thank you also to my other colleagues in political 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 fellowship 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 conferences 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 permission to reprint parts of those essays. Finally, my deepest gratitude goes to Susanna Loewy, who read manuscript draft upon draft, suffered through endless queries about phrasing, always 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 inevitably 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 pessimism easier . . . There is indeed every cause for discouragement.”2 This belated realization of inhabiting a fool’s paradise of automatic and uninterrupted 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 maintain 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 equitable, 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 account of hope as a principle of political action distinct from the facile expectation 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 acceptance 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 remain 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, equitable, and pluralistic societies; at the same time, the continued consolidation of oligarchic and plutocratic rule threatens to turn incomplete democracies into complete Potemkin republics. The failure of nation-​states to adequately 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 objective 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 exuberant critical theorist whose work revolves around hope, centers his sights on the world’s latent utopian tendencies; Peirce historicizes and (metaphorically) democratizes the creation of knowledge, tethering inquiry to hope; James exhorts the creation of new realities through hopeful action; Dewey, finally, 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 recast 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 current 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 therefore the product of a cultural field seeded with Christianity’s eschatological time, primed for a messianic rupture with the past, and confronted with unprecedented 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 hierarchical 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 process that transpires from East to West, reaching its culmination in modern, Christian Europe, “the absolute end of Universal History”; Africa, indigenous 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 official 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 cosmopolitan perspective enabled by Europe’s global political domination all conspired 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 pessimistic 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 linearity of time, but the presumption of an upward trajectory: “Change occurs, human nature and society may be profoundly altered over time, just not permanently 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 melioration 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 control.”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, judgment, 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 complicities, 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 passion . . . 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 concluding 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 radicalism “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 temptation 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 scholarly 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 realities.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 infinitum, 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 pessimism 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 experimentation are nonetheless indispensable. The hope entertained in this study is thus not optimism, the standard antonym 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 distinction between a “cold stream” and “warm stream” of Marxism, the first soberly 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 forward.35 With much the same intent, James distinguishes “tender-​minded” from “tough-​minded” thinkers, the former rationalistic, idealistic, optimistic, 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 complement (and complicate) their narratives with a warm account of political hope as an active principle that disentangles it from metaphysical historical progress and psychological optimism alike, one that reckons with human fragility and finitude while nonetheless looking toward a better future, taking the horizon as a threshold rather than a limit. Montesquieu defines a principle as an animating passion that makes one act; following him, Arendt notes its etymological 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 notwithstanding, 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 between 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 numerous 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

8  The Principle of Political Hope 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 participation in a divine Christian plan. Enlightenment ideologists of progress secularized 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 actuality 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 progressive 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 intellectual landscape. Hope has been addressed from an array of perspectives, including 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, despite 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 outcome 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 impossibility; 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 understood 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,

10  The Principle of Political Hope hope’s affective and phenomenological textures fall by the wayside. For the Christian existentialist Gabriel Marcel, if we approach hope only from an analytical 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 creation 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 indispensable 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 collaboration, 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 individual 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 present” 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 ancestral 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, however, 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 performance, 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 performance [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 insurmountable 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 similarly, 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 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 . . . 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, politically, to make it our future.65

12  The Principle of Political Hope 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 performative qualities leading toward moral personality, concrete utopia, or a genuinely 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 rationally 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 association with religion. Bloch speaks of “transcending without any heavenly transcendence,”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 impossible 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 ultimately 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 improbable 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 intimately 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 originally 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 foundation 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 independently 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 contribute.72 That said, Kant is hardly an arbitrary choice: he exerted (and continues 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,

14  The Principle of Political Hope 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 distinctive 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 possibilities 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 accordingly enact them. Reading these thinkers in the light of anticipation, I defend them all from accusations of optimism and challenge a number of conventional interpretations 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 philosopher 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 metaphysical providentialism, not to mention that he explicitly denied the applicability 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 political 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 political 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 psychological approach, on the one hand, locates the basis for hope in the cognitive

16  The Principle of Political Hope 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 distinction effectively amounts to the question of whether hope is a subjective or objective matter. Psychological hope is immune to empirical disappointment, 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 understanding of hope, in which action translates subjective aspiration into objective 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 deterministic 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 foundational Critiques. I first explain how Kant turns the lens of philosophy inward, 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 progress 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 idiosyncratic 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 possible. 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 experimentalism 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 psychological 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 “pragmatism,” all rooted in his writings. His influence in the epistemological defense 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 political theorists, as a model for the intersubjective and democratic creation of

18  The Principle of Political Hope 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 nonexpert citizens discussing political matters. I show, furthermore, that Peirce later complemented this early idea of a community of inquiry with metaphysical 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 ontology that posits a teeming “pluriverse” of abundant possibilities. Pluralism notwithstanding, James’s thought is also radically individualist, a conviction 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 interconnected 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 democratic agency, in equipping citizens with the tools to rise to the demands of public participation; for Dewey, establishing hope’s traditional justificatory 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 architecture and education (rather than mere schooling) to material redistribution: 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 scientific 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 performative 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 different 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 philosophy, 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 reflection 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 experience. 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 understanding 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 humanity rather than in scientific falsifiability; its justification, that is, is practical rather than theoretical. Finally, I examine the sources and grounds of political hope in Kant’s work, showing how his moral justification for practical 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 issues 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.

22  The Principle of Political Hope 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 methodological 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 affairs 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 experience 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 receptor 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

Kant, Practical Belief  23 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 synthesis necessary for coherent experience. Reason is the cognitive faculty’s final component for Kant. While the understanding provides rules for the synthesis of the manifold of sense perception, reason gives order and unity to the understanding’s otherwise arbitrarily assembled concepts. To use Kant’s by now familiar terminology, the categories 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 metaphysical 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 phenomenal 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 dismiss 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 central 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

24  The Principle of Political Hope 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 understanding 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 preceding 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 insofar as it posits that any appearance we encounter will also accord with natural 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 sensible intuition] into an object through concepts, the former unifies on its side the manifold of concepts through ideas, in which it posits a certain collective 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 cognition as determined through an absolute totality of conditions.”19 Such an absolute totality of conditions carries the full weight of this idea of an unconditioned 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.

Kant, Practical Belief  25 Although ideas of reason may appear to be flights of fancy given Kant’s strict injunction against transgressing the boundaries of sense,21 he nonetheless 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 extended 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 provisional answer to the empirically unanswerable question of the unity and purpose 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 constitutive 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 satisfaction 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 object 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 theoretical or speculative interest of reason drives toward such an object for the comprehension of phenomena, and reason’s practical interest consists in

26  The Principle of Political Hope 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 unconditioned 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 together our contingent empirical observations and our capacity to investigate 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 teleological principles for explaining these phenomena according to the assumption 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 mechanical 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

Kant, Practical Belief  27 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, subjective 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 dogmatic 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 natural purposiveness in the unfolding of human affairs enables us to fruitfully 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 shortsighted 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 disaggregate reason’s theoretical and practical interests in teleological history,48 and

28  The Principle of Political Hope indeed practical reasons for assuming a progressive historical narrative take precedence over theoretical ones. I will treat the regulative concept of history 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 practical 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 indispensable: 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 unconditionally valid practical law.”50 In most writings, Kant claims there are only three ideas that strictly speaking fit this definition: freedom, the immortality 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 practical 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 volitional lodestar.54 “Without this end,” he writes,

Kant, Practical Belief  29 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 something 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 harmony. That is not all, however, for although the objectively highest good may be a moral world, the subjective condition under which humans can conceive 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 interpolation 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

30  The Principle of Political Hope 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 promote 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 between “transcendent” and “immanent” senses of the highest good in Kant’s work.66 In the Second Critique, the completion of the highest good is beyond 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 individualistically: 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 emphasis 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 influence 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 toward 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 participation [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

Kant, Practical Belief  31 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 philosophy, but his political hope is oriented toward the social-​immanent account. 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 immanent 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,

32  The Principle of Political Hope 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 consequence for political hope, yet it is important to recognize that for Kant belief 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 attainment 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 compendious 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, immortality secures the temporal space for the possibility of the human realization

Kant, Practical Belief  33 of virtue, while the postulate of God secures the eventual confluence of virtue and happiness. So seen, the idea of God satisfies our empirical need for happiness by projecting it as a necessary characteristic of a moral world, but also reminds us of our ultimate incapacity to transcend the human condition of moral struggle. The idea of God in Kant therefore has both inspiring and humbling effects: on the one hand, it allows a subject to think that the ostensibly chaotic universe follows an intelligent order amenable to and even rewarding of moral endeavor; on the other, it stresses that the full realization of the highest good is beyond the capacities of finite rational beings. The teleological principles of the Third Critique are accordingly not just methodological corollaries of theoretical reason’s need for unity, but also of practical belief in God. By ascribing purposiveness to the world as if it were designed intelligently, Kant brings together his hitherto merely parallel arguments concerning the anchoring role of the unconditioned for the theoretical reason’s systematicity of natural laws on the one hand and its orienting function for practical reason’s moral laws on the other.84 He does this by transforming the teleological principles of scientific investigation into the grand moral teleology of his philosophy of history. In short outline, Kant argues that once we assume an intelligently acting cause can coexist with mechanical causality, we cannot remain satisfied without questioning further into “the objective ground that could have determined this productive understanding to an effect of this sort, which is then the final end for which such things exist.”85 In other words, reason’s need for the unconditioned will not be satisfied without an explanation of the teleological whole existing as it does. The answer to the question of existence’s total purpose is the “final end” (Endzweck) of nature, that which “in the order of ends . . . is dependent on no further condition other than the mere idea of it.”86 Kant continues that the only being in the world who exhibits both teleological causality, that is, orientation toward ends, and yet at the same time is “so constituted that the law in accordance with which they have to determine ends is represented by themselves as unconditioned and independent of natural conditions but yet as necessary in itself ” is the human being considered in its noumenal character.87 In being able to set the highest good as the unconditional object of their wills, humans are the purpose of creation, for they are the only beings who can both posit their aims by pure reason and work to bring the latter to fruition. This is not equivalent to saying that nature determines humanity’s actions, but rather that natural events can be interpreted as leading humans to

34  The Principle of Political Hope develop their rational capacities, thereby giving them the tools to actualize their natural moral dispositions in the empirical world. Teleology does not relieve humans of their moral duty to promote this end; this is the point of Kant’s often overlooked statement that “it is [mankind’s] vocation to be the ultimate end of nature; but always only conditionally, that is, subject to the condition that he has the understanding and the will to give to nature and to himself a relation to an end that can be sufficient for itself independently of nature.”88 Though teleological history is in the service of effectuating humanity’s duty to seek justice and peace, the presumption of this historical schema is contingent upon the willingness of humans to strive for these ends. We may entertain hope, that is, if and only if we act in a manner that can conceivably realize this progress. Thus while “teleology cannot find a complete answer [Vollendung] for its inquiries except in a theology,” Kant rejects chiliasm if it is taken dogmatically since it could then offer only ungrounded “sanguine hopes” rather than real possibilities.89 The historical chiliasm Kant proposes, in which the regulative ideas of nature and providence supplant the God of the epistemological and moral works, is therefore only tenable on the assumption that humans take it upon themselves to realize this progress. Kant’s chiliasm differs from such doctrinal wishes because it makes human agency a precondition for the realization of this historical vocation: “This is a chiliasm the idea of which, although only from very far away, can itself promote its realization, and which is, for that reason, anything but fanciful.”90 If practical belief is a matter of cognition necessary for action, teleological history offers a framework within which our ideal future appears actionable, a heuristic whose existence prods us toward its realization.

Hope as a Working Principle of Morality and Politics For Kant, then, hope is not a passive affair in which we idly await salvation, but an active engagement in which our conduct permits us to anticipate the world toward which we strive, a fact reflected in his reformulation of the question “What may I hope?” as “If I do what I should, what may I then hope?”91 If I do my duty, then I may hope for the eventual realization of the highest possible good. Although the complete realization of the highest good remains beyond our control, we nonetheless have a duty to promote it. Humans are not automatically nature’s final end: they must strive to occupy

Kant, Practical Belief  35 this seat. Human action in service of this end is accordingly a primary condition of permissible hope. The logic of political hope mirrors the logic of moral hope.92 In Kant’s writings, morality and politics are intertwined: symbolically, in the use of legal and political metaphors (e.g., the moral law, a universal republic of virtue, kingdom of ends), and practically, in the great sway the political realm holds over humankind’s progress toward its ultimate moral destiny. The two differ in an important regard, however: politics is the domain of right, “which deals with duties that can be given by external laws,” while morality is the domain of virtue, whose duties can be given alone by an internal legislator.93 Unlike the laws of justice, therefore, moral laws are not coercively enforceable, and so their incentive is duty itself.94 The objectives and means of moral and political hope therefore come in different forms. Taken stringently, moral hope aims at the realization of the morally highest good, a universe of morally perfect agents enjoying happiness in proportion to their virtue, while political hope aims at the politically highest good, or perpetual peace;95 the social-​immanent interpretation of the highest good allows us to say more modestly that both hopes are equivalent to the belief in the possibility of progress toward these respective ends. Although the ultimate realization of hope for progress is beyond our control, Kant suggests specific, humanly effected means through which our moral vocation may be promoted. In doing so, we fulfill the first condition of hope and make ourselves worthy of what Kant believes to be a reasonable anticipation of progress even from the perspective of human finitude. As he puts it in the emphatic last paragraph of one of his series of lectures on anthropology, “If the human race is to approach its vocation, this involves a perfect [vollkomme] civil constitution, good education, and the best concepts in religion.”96 This translates into republicanism, moral education, and natural (i.e., nondogmatic) religion, respectively, all of which may be variously institutionalized to serve ethico-​political ends. Since Kant’s reconceptualization of God as a regulative foundation for the moral and natural unity of experience has already been treated in some detail and I later engage the question of practical moral-​religious belief, I will focus here on politics and education. Before moving on to these topics, however, it should be noted that Kant highlights the importance of religion for hope in the context of the individual-​ transcendent rather than the social-​immanent version of the highest good. To recall, corresponding to this distinction, Kant presents two objectives of moral hope. The first is personal beatitude, the confluence of virtue and

36  The Principle of Political Hope happiness in an individual, while the second is a moral world in which this condition is universally enjoyed. As we have seen, Kant thinks personal beatitude can only be reasonably hoped for on the assumption of the postulates of immortality and the existence of God. Immortality is necessary, he says, because the temporal span of an individual’s life is too short for the long road to virtue. God alone can ensure the synthetic relationship of happiness and the worthiness to be happy. Since the realization of this conception of hope occurs in a transcendent realm, there is no historical aspect to speak of. God plays the active role of a literal deus ex machina providing for the individual’s transfiguration into a state of holiness and beatitude. Moreover, despite the significant differences to be shown between Kant’s individual-​transcendent account of hope in the Second Critique and the social-​immanent version found in the Religion, the moral psychology he presents in the latter raises more difficulties along these lines. Even though Kant reminds us that God will fulfill one’s moral effort only if one follows the duty to promote the highest good, by ascribing humans an inextirpable propensity toward radical evil, he leaves God’s grace as the only means of overcoming one’s naturally corrupt character,97 thereby further hampering the idea of human-​propelled progress toward moral perfection.98 Yet Kant’s Religion also anchors the possibility of individual progress toward the highest good in a social context oriented toward the second objective of moral hope, a realm of ends on earth.99 This state of affairs cannot come about through the striving of any one individual for their own moral perfection, “but requires rather a union of such persons into a whole toward that very end.”100 Kant calls this union an “ethical community,” “an association of human beings merely under [public] laws of virtue, ruled by this idea.”101 As far as humans can themselves forward the highest good, it can only be through the setting up and the diffusion of such a community, which Kant imagines realized in the state but in the form of a church, conceived as the idea of a people under God understood as the moral ruler of the world.102

Providential History and the Political Conditions of Hope Although the constitution of an ethical community “has nothing in its principles that resembles a political constitution,”103 Kant also claims that “without the foundation of a political community, [the ethical community] could never be brought into existence by human beings.”104 As he explains,

Kant, Practical Belief  37 the formal condition under which nature alone can reach this, its final end [Endabsicht], is the very constitution in the relation of humans to one another where the destruction [Abbruche, lit. “breaking off ”] of mutually conflicting [individual] freedom is countered by lawful power [Gewalt] within a whole called civil society; for only in civil society can the greatest development of natural dispositions occur. And yet this constitution requires something further, even if humans were clever [klug]105 enough to discover it and wise enough to put themselves under its constraint: still necessary is a cosmopolitan whole, i.e. a system of all states that are in danger of affecting each other detrimentally. In the absence of such a whole . . . war is unavoidable.106

Kant presents two reasons for the necessity of politics to moral progress, corresponding to domestic and international affairs.107 Within a state, political institutions ensure mutual external freedom among citizens; beyond its borders, a cosmopolitan organization of states can further the realization of perpetual peace. Both are indispensable for moral progress because they lessen the obstacles standing in its way. The state “provides . . . for the development of the moral predisposition to immediate respect for right by erecting a barrier to outbreaks of inclination that go against the law,” and perpetual peace marks the end of war, “the source of all affliction and destruction of morals.”108 The demands for a civil condition and a cosmopolitan state of peoples are parallel, for individuals and states alike must relinquish their “wild (lawless) freedom” for “public binding laws,”109 and Kant believes republics alone can achieve these aims. Concerning mutual guarantees of external freedom, a republican constitution approximates the very ideal of public right insofar as it is “the sole constitution that issues from the idea of the original contract, on which all rightful legislation of a people must be based.”110 With the original contract symbolizing a Rousseauian transformation from a “coalition of every particular and private will within a people into a common and public will,”111 Kant specifies the three principles of republicanism derived from this ideal as “the freedom of the members of society (as individuals),” “the dependence of all upon a single common legislation (as subjects),” and “the law of their equality (as citizens of the state),” where citizens are “the members of such a society who are united for giving law.”112 Thus in a republic, individuals are to have the freedom to pursue their own ends, have no special privileges differentiating them legally from other members of

38  The Principle of Political Hope the citizenry, and have the right to participate equally in selecting their representatives.113 While these principles may appear applicable to what today is called representative government, Kant explicitly rejects democracy. Admitting in “Toward Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch” that republican and democratic regimes are commonly confused, Kant suggests this conflation stems from a category mistake. The forms of a state may be classified, he writes, “either according to the persons who hold the position of highest authority in the state or according to the manner in which the head of state governs the people (whoever the head of state may be).”114 In the first category, the “form of sovereignty,” three types are possible: autocracy, aristocracy, and democracy, corresponding respectively to political authority being vested in a single person, a group of people and everyone in civil society. By contrast, the second category, “the form of government,” exhibits only two variations: republican and despotic. As a manner of governance, Kant continues, republicanism “is the principle by which the executive power (the government) of a state is separated from the legislative power,” while despotism “is the principle by which the state executes, on its own authority, laws that it has itself made.”115 Since “according to the proper sense of the term,” democracy is the direct determination and execution of the law by the citizenry,116 Kant holds that it is “necessarily a form of despotism” in which “everyone wishes to be the ruler.”117 Although what is now called representative government, defined essentially by its exclusion of an institutional role for the assembled people,118 arguably reflects Kant’s conception of the republican form of government,119 we should also not lose sight of the drastically limited citizenship in Kant’s ideal polity. Most significantly, Kant distinguishes “passive” from “active” citizens based on a person’s economic self-​sufficiency, with only the latter bearing the right to vote. As he puts it in the Metaphysics of Morals, “all women and, in general, anyone whose preservation in existence (his being fed and protected) depends not on his management of his own business but on arrangements made by another (except the state) . . . lack civic personality.”120 While this exclusion from citizenship does not mean exclusion from the respect due any person as a human being, Kant’s imagined republicanism is not, even charitably read, the inclusive state some have found it to be.121 Though Kant’s republic is neither a democracy in the classical sense nor a mass parliamentary democracy, he is nonetheless committed to a participatory public sphere as an indirect means of promoting progress.122 This freedom of opinion is not, however, bound to any particular regime type, and

Kant, Practical Belief  39 the essay “What is Enlightenment?” explicitly endorses a public sphere under the auspices of the absolute (albeit “enlightened”) monarch Friedrich II without mention of representation. That said, Kant does think that publicity will eventually tend toward republicanism, and indeed the respect for individual autonomy shown in permitting freedom of opinion parallels Kant’s principles of republican government anchored in the freedom and equality of citizens.123 Once individuals begin exercising freedom of thought, enlightenment, defined by Kant in a well-​known formulation as “the human being’s exit from his self-​incurred immaturity” is “nearly unavoidable.”124 Free-​thinking will “gradually extend its effects to the disposition [Sinnesart] of the people (through which the people gradually becomes more capable of freedom of action) and finally even to the principles of government which find it to be beneficial to itself to treat the human being . . . in accordance with his dignity.”125 Insofar as publicity therefore promotes the moral disposition of the people, it is an important counterpart of moral education, and insofar as it promotes a just civil society (which for Kant can only mean a republican constitution), it is an essential aspect of political and moral progress.

Realizing Perpetual Peace: The Highest Political Good The seventh proposition of Kant’s “Idea for a Universal History” states that “the problem of establishing a perfect civil constitution is dependent upon the problem of a law-​governed external relation between states and cannot be solved without having first solved the latter.”126 Since the situation between nation-​states is akin to a state of nature without any overarching authority, there always remains the danger of hostilities between them that would jeopardize the moral and physical well-​being of their citizens, not to mention the states themselves. To seek perpetual peace, the highest political good, is therefore just as incumbent upon political actors as the injunction to promote a civil constitution. Kant believes that republican representative accountability is the surest mechanism of this development.127 In “Toward Perpetual Peace,” he argues that “if (as must be the case in such a [republican] constitution) the agreement of the citizens is required to decide whether or not one ought to wage war, then nothing is more natural than that they would consider very carefully whether to enter into such a terrible game, since they would have to resolve to bring the hardships of war upon themselves.”128 These hardships

40  The Principle of Political Hope include, but are not limited to, military service, taxation, the destruction of one’s land and possessions, and the poisoning of future interstate relations. Kant’s argument is not that republics do not fight, or do not fight each other,129 but rather that those who would bear the brunt of war’s burdens are likely to be more cautious about choosing to engage in armed conflict. Since republics give political voice to their citizens, Kant reasonably argues that these states will have less martially aggressive foreign policies than states in which the decision to fight rests in the hands of a despot. Instead, Kant holds that republics—​and eventually all states—​will gravitate toward a cosmopolitan system of international law dedicated to the aim of ending war forever.130

Education as an Indirect Means of Promoting Progress Institutional politics provides the mutual guarantee of legal security and stability without which morality is impossible. Since moral character cannot be coerced into existence, Kant concentrates on outlining the structural conditions amenable to its promotion.131 An educator himself, Kant places particular emphasis on pedagogy as a means of developing moral character.132 In his Lectures on Pedagogy, he writes that “behind education lies in the great secret of the perfection of human nature” since through it the human species may “bring out, little by little, humanity’s entire natural [moral] predisposition by means of its own effort.”133 Notwithstanding the possibly corrupt nature of this text,134 the various reflections on pedagogy throughout Kant’s work together present a consistent vision of humanity leading itself toward its moral vocation by dint of education. For one, we have already seen that Kant holds the ultimate purpose of nature for humans to be culture, defined as “man’s aptitude in general for setting ends for himself,”135 and that he divides the latter into a culture of training (Zucht; “breeding”) or discipline (Disciplin), and a culture of skill (Geschicklichkeit). Discipline is self-​control, the ability to both contain one’s natural urges as well as the extravagant speculative use of one’s reason. The former aspect is highlighted in the Third Critique, where Kant describes discipline as “the liberation of the will from the despotism of the desires [Begierde], by which we, bound to particular natural objects, become incapable of choosing ourselves,” while the First Critique draws out the latter in Kant’s equation of discipline with “the compulsion through which the constant propensity to deviate from certain rules is limited.”136 As such, discipline forms the “negative” dimension of

Kant, Practical Belief  41 education. Its “positive” dimension is cultivation, understood broadly as the constructive development of natural aptitudes and moral character. In the language of the Third Critique, this aspect of education falls under the auspices of the culture of skill, broadly understood as the development of one’s aptitudes for any purposes, inner and outer.137 If discipline keeps humans focused on the proper ends of mankind, skill enables them to effectuate their aims. The Lectures on Pedagogy are more detailed, dividing education in four stages: discipline, cultivation, civilization and moralization,138 with the last three denoting difference aspects of its positive dimension. In principle, each term also refers to the development of the different natural human predispositions Kant describes in the Anthropology. Cultivation (Cultivirung) concerns skill and aims at the development of the “technical” predisposition for manipulating the world.139 Civilization (Civilizirung) concerns “worldly prudence” (Weltklugheit), and consists in “the art of applying our skillfulness to man, that is, of how to use human beings for one’s purposes.”140 Despite his wording, Kant is not contravening his categorical injunction against treating others as a means, but instead characterizing prudence as the particular type of skill involved in realizing our (natural or moral) ends in a social context, in a world populated by others. Civilization corresponds to what Kant calls humanity’s “pragmatic” predisposition for social qualities.141 As Kant explains in the Lectures on Pedagogy, prudence is the last thing to be achieved by humanity, although it is second in importance to the final element of education, moralization.142 Moralization (Moralisirung) is the development of moral character proper: the promotion of “the disposition [Gesinnung] to choose nothing but good ends,” and is therefore linked to developing the moral predisposition in mankind.143 Without education, these natural predispositions remain dormant, and humanity can expect no real progress toward its moral vocation. History’s Contribution to Hope Though Kant holds that natural religion, education, and republican government can all contribute to progress toward the highest good, he has no illusions about the challenges facing humanity. Indeed, he singles out proper moral education and a perfect political constitution as the two most difficult tasks for humankind, as well as the last to be realized.144 Not only are humans deeply resistant to moral reform, but the woof and warp of history offers little evidence of sustainable improvement in morality or politics. For these

42  The Principle of Political Hope reasons, Kant postulates historical progress in both domains as the practically objective ground for hope in achieving of our aims. The difficulty of effectuating humanity’s moral and political improvement is reflected in Kant’s celebrated claim that “nothing entirely straight can be fashioned from the crooked timber of humankind.”145 Because critical philosophy sweeps away appeals to transcendent guidance, humans are responsible for their own bootstrapping. In politics and education, Kant sees this implication yielding Rousseauian paradoxes of autonomy: politically, human beings must somehow find a supreme authority that is “just in itself and yet also a human being,” while educators always have to contend with the fact that while humans are taught “only by human beings who have likewise been educated.”146 Finding the best methods (if any) of political and educational progress accordingly takes time, and can only be achieved “after many futile attempts” and “over many generations.”147 The difficulty is that although Kant claims that we can render history as progressing over the long run, he denies that history can be shown to progress at all. As the narrative account of past human actions, history is the interpretation of finite beings who cannot transcend the limits of their senses. To be sure, Kant occasionally offers evidence for political and/​or moral progress, his best-​known example being the “universal and yet unselfish sympathy” that he sees greeting the French Revolution and which revealed at the very least “a moral capacity in the human race.”148 Yet even this exceptional passage does not claim to offer evidence of progress, but for hope in the possibility of progress given the glimmer of moral capacity this sympathy could be taken to suggest. In a similar vein, Kant writes in “What is Enlightenment?” that though the people are not in the main enlightened, the age of enlightenment is upon the world,149 and while this is no guarantee of progress, it offers a ground for hope in progress. Since this possibility cannot be read off of empirical history, however, hope for progress is no less a matter of practical belief than the stronger claim that history does progress. Not all of Kant’s claims can be so easily worked away, however, and some passages appear to contravene Kant’s critical strictures on the use of dogmatic teleology. A particularly problematic example can be found in “Toward Perpetual Peace”: When I say that nature wills that this or that ought to happen, I do not mean that she imposes a duty upon us to act thus (for this can only be done by practical reason acting free of compulsion), but rather that she does it herself, regardless of whether we will it so or not.150

Kant, Practical Belief  43 Though this type of passage is rare in his work, it undoubtedly appears to upset the critical interpretation of the idea of progress. It is possible that Kant simply slipped up and violated the critical system’s ground rules. Rather than taking the easy way out, however, this passage can be instead read in light of both the intellectual context of his historical writings, and against the background of the first-​person/​third-​person divide introduced by practical belief. As for the literary context, we must recognize that Kant wrote in different registers for different audiences. Anyone who has opened the Critique of Pure Reason knows it was not intended for the philosophically uninitiated. By contrast, the essays in which Kant’s historical teleology mainly appears were geared for popular consumption—​an enlightened reading public, yes, but a public nonetheless.151 Insofar as they were intended for contemporary political debates, these essays are themselves acts of describing the “anything but fanciful” chiliasm Kant holds necessary to the realization of humanity’s moral vocation. Directed at the very people whose actions (he thought) could effectuate the highest good in history, these occasional pieces serve hortatory aims not keenly felt in his more philosophically rigorous and self-​ consciously wissenschaftlich critiques. In addition to their substantive content, the essays are performances of a sort, contributions to the emergence of the novel public sphere in which Kant vests his hope of the cultivation of our common humanity. While Kant may slip occasionally from regulative to constitutive language, such slips reflect the difficulty of grasping this concept apart from the phenomenological perspective of action. We have seen that Kant holds practical belief to resist the sort of logical consistency philosophers looking at politics tend to seek. From a third-​person, observing perspective, such passages can look determinist indeed. From the first-​person perspective of political agent who finds herself in situ, however, detachment is a luxury. Shortly before the previously cited passage, Kant flags his sensitivity to his point. A moral end, he writes, is an idea that is transcendent from a theoretical perspective. From a practical perspective, however (for example, in view of the concept of perpetual peace and the duty to work toward it by using that mechanism of nature), this idea is dogmatic and its reality is well established.152

Kant employs both perspectives in his historical and political writings. As a philosopher, he can see in the idea of a wise creator a cipher for the world’s

44  The Principle of Political Hope compatibility with moral aspiration. As a reformer addressing other prospective agents of reform, he acts with an operative orientation toward an absolute underwriter of moral and political progress. From the first-​person perspective, in the act, there is little such critical purchase, and part of the reason that practical belief involves a reductio ad absurdum practicum is that action by its nature transcends discursivity. Kant’s historical and political essays are not mere exercises in speculation; they are acts of prophetic history in which the prophecy makes its realization possible. The occasional deterministic phrase in Kant’s invocations of progress may not therefore reflect a problem in regulative principles themselves so much as the constitutive impossibility of grasping practical belief without placing oneself in the position of an active subject. Another way of making this point is to say that practical belief is a presupposition of what we are already committed to as moral beings. On this interpretation, Kant’s moral and political philosophy is better seen as a species of philosophical anthropology than an attempted rational justification of faith. In this regard, Kant’s arguments for the a priori assumption of progress may be seen as “regressive,” starting from the observation that moral consciousness is an evidently real aspect of human experience and then ascertaining the necessary historical condition for its efficacy according to Kant’s understanding of human psychology.153 As such, Kant’s elucidation of hope as a practical belief, though it could be seen as ironically undercutting the very point he wants to emphasize, is actually better seen as a critical attempt to combat self-​opacity and thus further enable autonomy. If we thus keep in mind the hypothetical and postulatory role of the transcendental idea of progress, and remember that practical belief is the first-​person stance of holding fictions to be true for the sake of action, we will be unlikely to mistake even Kant’s most prima facie determinist historical claims for dogmatism. Such dogmatically flavored passages are rare, in any event, and are countered by a preponderant historical skepticism in line with the epistemological strictures Kant puts on empirical knowledge.154 Elsewhere, indeed, Kant suggests that experience disconfirms the assumption of progress; in the Religion, he writes that “the history of all times speaks far too powerfully against” it.155 A backward glance reveals “bustling foolishness” to be characteristic of our species, and “despite the occasional semblance of wisdom to be seen in individual actions, [human activity appears] all to be made up, by and large, of foolishness, childish vanity, and, often enough, even of childish wickedness and destructiveness.”156 The partisans of progress, decline, or

Kant, Practical Belief  45 any other temporal orientation are bound to be disappointed, however, for Kant ultimately holds that the constitutive reality of any perceived systematic historical tendency cannot be gleaned from empirical history, for the permanence of any perceived directionality can never be ascertained. As he writes in a section of The Conflict of the Faculties titled “The Task [Aufgabe] of Progress is Not to be Directly Solved Through Experience,” “if the human race, considered as a whole, were found to be moving forward and in the process of progressing even for a great length of time, one could still not be certain that the epoch of regression is not setting in precisely at this point in time.”157 The obverse is also the case. Like the empirical world, history offers no definitive order we can extrapolate, and the systematicity we find in it is a product of our own critical consciousness. Answering the question of history accordingly comes down to perspective, and Kant argues throughout his historical writings that this perspective must, for practical purposes, be teleological. This is partly to satisfy reason’s theoretical need for grounding the systematic unity of appearances: as we have seen earlier, if one seeks to investigate history, it is acceptable to presume it unfolds for the development of humanity’s moral predisposition. More importantly, this teleological narrative meets reason’s practical interest by undergirding the value of moral and political striving. Since Kant’s historical essays differ in the emphasis given to the respective aspects of the regulative assumption of teleology, he offers multiple arguments for progress in history, but the moral justification is in every case ultimately supreme. This moral priority is especially evident in works like “Theory and Practice” and The Conflict of the Faculties, whose central aims are hortatory, yet it is no less evident in Kant’s more ostensibly theoretically oriented historical works like the later sections of the Third Critique and the “Idea for a Universal History.” In the latter, Kant lauds the “consoling outlook on the future” where humans fully develop their moral predispositions, which he adds is “something that one cannot reasonably hope for without presupposing a plan of nature” in history.158 Faced with the choice of viewing history as moving regressively, recurrently, or progressively, Kant thus argues that the last option alone is tenable. He dismisses the regressive conception out of hand, calling it “moral terrorism” because of its adherents’ unseemly yearning not for the world’s amelioration but for “the re-​creation of all things and a newly born world after this one has gone down in flames.”159 The recurrent conception—​ Kant calls it “abderitism,” after the legendarily dense inhabitants of ancient

46  The Principle of Political Hope Abdera, as dramatized by Christoph Martin Wieland in his wildly popular 1774 novel The Story of the Abderites—​holds human history to be nothing more than an incessant, directionless hither and thither, an “empty bustling, letting good and evil alternate by moving forward and backward.”160 Kant offers several different arguments against this view, all of which have the rational need of humanity at their heart. In The Conflict of the Faculties, he claims that abderitism demeans human dignity, since it “would require regarding the entire play of interaction of our species with itself on this planet as a mere prank, which can lend it no greater worth in the eyes of reason than that of other animal species that engage in this game with far lesser costs and without the use of intellect.”161 Kant deploys a fuller arsenal of claims in “Theory and Practice,” where he seeks to establish that the human race is “as a whole to be loved.”162 Presented as a rebuttal of Moses Mendelssohn’s stance that “the human race as a whole makes small oscillations; and it has never made steps forward without soon thereafter slipping back in to its previous states with twice the speed,”163 this claim in context is identical to the assumption that humanity is progressing toward a morally better future. First, as in The Conflict of the Faculties, Kant offers that abderitism offends human dignity, for “it is a sight not only unworthy of a deity, but also highly unworthy of the more common but well-​ thinking person to see the human race make steps upward toward virtue from time to time, only to fall back just as far down into vice and misery soon thereafter.”164 Second, on the plane of moral psychology, Kant argues in parallel fashion to the Second Critique’s postulates that our practical certainty about the moral law precludes abderitism. Just as the latter two postulates provide for the conceivable possibility of approaching the highest good given mankind’s finitude, the regulative assumption of historical progress offers the possibility of approaching the highest good in the world despite the evidently innumerable obstacles in the way. Here our duty to promote the moral end of existence trumps theoretical skepticism about its real possibility in history, for “however [theoretically] uncertain I am and may remain about whether improvement is to be hoped for in the human race, this uncertainty cannot detract from my maxim and thus from the necessary supposition for practical purposes that it is feasible [thunlich].”165 Historical progress may be occasionally interrupted, but it can never be broken off. If progress can be broken off, Kant believes this means our ultimate moral ends are incapable of actualization, and “the dismal reign of chance thus replaces the guiding principle of reason.”166 The regulative assumption of historical progress therefore

Kant, Practical Belief  47 safeguards the value of our rational moral vocation and grounds our confidence in the possibility of approaching our ends; without it, as without the postulates of pure practical reason, Kant thinks humans cannot even anticipate the efficacy of their agency. Looking to historical progress as a regulative fiction, as if history were providentially ordered, must be done “in part so that one can still take heart in the face of such labors” required by the moral law.167 Third, after making these moral claims for the presumption of progress, Kant turns the tables on Mendelssohn with the ad hominem charge that the latter is himself guilty of holding a progressivist hope in humanity’s future relying similarly on the species’ endeavors over time, for Mendelssohn “could not reasonably have hoped to bring [enlightenment] about himself, if others did not continue on this same path after him.”168 With this argument, Kant transforms his earlier moral claims into a critical assessment of the presuppositions of Mendelssohn’s work, and indeed the work of all reform-​minded writers, suggesting that their commitment to reform is incoherent without the assumption that it may have lasting effects. Mendelssohn’s denial of the possibility of progress is belied by the fact that “this hope for better times, without which a serious desire to do something that promotes the gen­eral good would never have warmed the human heart, has always had an influence on the work of the well-​thinking.”169 Finally, Kant turns to the empirical record itself, claiming “there is ample evidence” that the current generation of humanity has morally progressed more than previous ones, and that much of the hullabaloo over the supposed impossibility of progress is the upshot of being able to see our moral ends more clearly in the present than was possible in earlier times.170 While this last claim apparently stands in tension with the insolubility of the problem of history from empirical evidence, Kant’s important qualification that progress cannot be determined directly from evidence means that only the inappropriate use of phenomenal observation is problematic, not the use of observation full stop. Principles, not the world, are still the source of our hope; with them in hand, we can ascertain their fruitfulness in application.171 Kant’s view of history is thus a regulative chiliasm for the sake of action, different from the simple faith in the inevitability of human harmony he associated with doctrinal religion. Prophecy accordingly takes on a different cast. Kant explains in The Conflict of the Faculties that a “prophetic” (wahrsagende) history of the future is possible a priori “if the prophet himself brings about and prepares the events that he announces in advance.”172 The

48  The Principle of Political Hope action-​demanding historical chiliasm Kant proposes is therefore only tenable on the assumption that humans take it upon themselves to realize this progress. Thus again we see that the regulativity of Kant’s political hope does not let us off the hook, as it were, but makes it incumbent upon humanity to act in service of our hopes. With his guiding thread the idea that nature evidences its purpose in the development of mankind’s natural predisposition for reason, Kant’s historical narrative simultaneously serves reason’s theoretical and practical interests. The theoretical interest of reason permits a teleological conception of history for the sake of ascribing systematic order to the contingent manifold of empirical events, while the practical interest of reason encourages a providential view of history that shows the world in harmony with our moral duties. Pauline Kleingeld has helpfully shown how Kant uses a different metaphor for each aspect of his teleological narrative.173 On the one hand, when he is speaking of the regulative projection of teleological order onto the empirical world without transcendent reference, Kant writes of a personified “nature” that provides a guarantee for or “wills” historical progress. “Nature” in this sense represents the teleology evident in mechanical causality, “a purposive plan to create harmony through discord among people, even against their own will.”174 Insofar as reason’s theoretical need pushes us to make sense of the world of appearances, the idea of nature supplies the systematic ground for comprehending the events of human history. Just like the lens of the eye, comprehension of history also entails knowledge of how to better the progress of humanity, for once a mechanism of development is determined we can promote the latter by using it.175 On the other hand, when his focus is the transcendent cause of this order, Kant talks of “providence,” to which I shall turn shortly. Kant’s hopeful narrative of political development in history rests on his famous doctrine of “unsocial sociability,” humankind’s propensity to antagonism in society.176 Building on Bernard Mandeville, Kant argues that history reflects human inclinations of both sociability and selfishness. Though the latter quality draws individuals into conflict, it also encourages them to develop their capacities for the sake of survival in a hostile world. One hears an echo of Rousseau and an anticipation of Hegel in Kant’s argument: Without those characteristics of unsociability, which are indeed quite unattractive in themselves, and which give rise to the resistance that each person necessarily encounters in his selfish presumptuousness, human beings

Kant, Practical Belief  49 would live the Arcadian life of shepherds, in full harmony, contentment and mutual love. But all human talents would thus lie eternally dormant, and human beings, as good-​natured as the sheep they put out to pasture, would thus give their own lives hardly more worth than that of their domesticated animals. They would fail to fill the void with regard to the purpose for which they, as rational nature, were created. For this reason one should thank nature for their quarrelsomeness, for their jealously competitive vanity, and for their insatiable appetite for property and even power! Without these al of the excellent natural human predispositions would lie in eternal slumber, undeveloped. Humans desire harmony, but nature knows better what is good for their species: it wills discord. Humans wish to live leisurely and enjoy themselves, but nature wills that human beings abandon their sloth and passive contentment and thrust themselves into work and hardship, only to find means, in turn, to cleverly escape the latter.177

The struggle between sociability and selfishness may never end, although its negative effects can be mitigated in a rightfully constituted civil society, “one in which its members continually struggle with each other and yet in which the limits of this freedom are specified and secured in the most exact manner, so that such freedom of each is consistent with that of others.”178 The last three propositions of “Idea for a Universal History” as well as “Toward Perpetual Peace” extend this logic to external relations between states and hence to the highest political good. Nature, Kant writes, “guarantees” peace by virtue of the visibly purposive mechanical course history takes “to create harmony through discord among people.”179 Though war is the ultimate political evil, its horrors can prompt humanity to develop stable institutional structures for peace.180 The practical interest of reason is satisfied by the ascription of moral purposiveness to historical mechanisms of progress. Just as with the observation of organisms, Kant believes that such mechanisms of progress only make sense to humans if the teleological course of history in nature is thought by attribution to “an author who determined it in advance.”181 “Providence” is Kant’s term to capture this sense of moral predeterminism, that events in the world are ultimately spurred by a purposive power for the sake of the moral perfection of humanity.182 In contrast to nature, which expresses progress as the result of causal mechanisms among phenomena, providence expresses the latter as part of a greater framework of moral ends for which we ultimately have no demonstrable evidence. While not identical, the two terms

50  The Principle of Political Hope overlap significantly, and Kant uses both to illuminate human history. At the end of an “Idea for a Universal History,” for example, Kant writes, “a justification of nature, or rather of providence, is no insignificant motivation for choosing a particular point of view when regarding the world.”183 Yet Kant also restricts each term’s appropriate domain: since nature can reveal historical progress’s efficient causes, while providence answers questions of final causes, the critical standpoint requires circumspection in the assumption of the latter. Kant makes this clear in “Toward Perpetual Peace,” a text oriented toward natural, not providential, explanations of political progress, when he writes that the use of the word nature is . . . when speaking here merely of theory (not religion), more appropriate for denoting the limits of human reason (as reason, regarding the relation of effects to their causes, must confine itself within the limits of possible experience) and more modest than the expression of a providence that is knowable to us. With an expression such as providence one presumptuously fits oneself with the wings of Icarus, in order to approach the secret of inscrutable intention.184

As moral actors, it is incumbent upon us to maintain a providential view of history lest we lose heart about the point of our own actions,185 but as observers of human affairs as events in the world we can only properly speak of natural mechanisms.

Dogmatism and the Difficulties of Practical Belief This reconstruction of Kant’s philosophy of history in the context of his critical system enables us to see that accusations of dogmatism made against him are untenable.186 At first glance, a teleological orientation may appear to be at odds with Kant’s insistence on human freedom, since a foreordained historical telos would seem to rob our agency of any consequence. As Elisabeth Ellis puts it in her excellent Kant’s Politics, “teleological accounts of human history preclude meaningful voluntary action.”187 Since Kant’s practical philosophy rests on the possibility of human freedom, this reasoning holds, we have to reject the teleological elements of his political writings. Thus Ellis argues that Kant’s political philosophy can only be of service to us if it “can be freed of its teleological blinders.”188

Kant, Practical Belief  51 At this point the distinction between what can be shown in experience and what can only be thought is of the utmost importance, for the constitutive inexorable progress Ellis sees in Kant’s historical works is less problematic when viewed as a regulative assumption for practical belief. In “Toward Perpetual Peace,” for example, when Kant states that a cosmopolitan order is “guaranteed by no less an authority than the great artist nature herself ” and that a peaceful order will arise “whether we will it or not,” he qualifies these apparently strong claims with the acknowledgment that we cannot actually observe such an agency [of teleological design] in the artifices of nature, nor can we even infer its existence from them. But as with all relations between the form of things and their ultimate purposes, we can and must supply it mentally in order to conceive of its possibility by analogy with human artifices.189

History is teleological because we do read and must read teleology into it; the idea of progress is but another “heuristic fiction” serving reason’s practical interest. Indeed, Kant often takes pains to stress the regulative nature of teleological history, noting that his conjecture “is mere opinion and hypothesis” and inviting other “philosophical minds” to try their own hands at an idea for a universal history should they find Kant’s version wanting.190 This is not to say, however, that misgivings about Kant’s regulative history are entirely misplaced. Kant speaks too strongly at times about the subjective necessity of a guarantee of progress when all that he needs to argue is that it is possible for progress to occur. A weaker version of the assumption of progress which only relies on the latter’s possibility is present in Kant’s historical writings, running parallel to the stronger claims about progress’s inevitability, but can get drowned out by the more striking language of guarantees. Part of the reason for the dual perspective on history has to do with the agent’s standpoint in theoretical and practical reason, respectively. While the third-​person standpoint of the philosopher allows critical reflection on the ostensible demands of human cognition vis-​à-​vis the world, the moral agent has no such luxury, finding himself in situ and forced to act. From the latter’s first-​person, subjective perspective, the reality of historical teleology is dogmatic, since Kant’s moral psychology rests on the contention that the idea of the highest good is empty for humans unless it can be completely achieved.191 Human finitude means that in history as in morality, though humans are intended to themselves actualize their vocation as the final end

52  The Principle of Political Hope of nature, the complete realization of these ends remains beyond human control, and thus can only to be expected from nature and providence.192 While the philosopher can see the idea of a wise creator as a cipher for the world’s compatibility with moral aspiration, the historical agent is already acting prereflectively with some operative orientation toward an absolute underwriter of moral and political progress. Even if one mitigates the apparent dogmatism of Kant’s moral subjects with the awareness that it is practically assumed for the sake of action, a greater problem awaits in the very idea of a practical belief that one’s theoretical reason denies, which Kant acknowledges to be “so unusual a concept” that it will likely meet with misunderstandings.193 In translation this confusion can be even greater, for Kant’s term Glaube covers both the English terms “faith” and “belief,” and there is no exclusive German word for either concept.194 Accordingly, Glaube as a catch-​all category can obscure the various shades of meaning between a number of propositional attitudes like belief such as hoping that p, presuming that p, and accepting that p.195 The curiosity of Kant’s conception of practical Glaube is that he insists that it is a rational choice which, although attendant to moral and not epistemic evidence, is subjectively no less certain than the material facts of science. Kant explains in the First Critique that belief lies in between having an opinion (Meinen) and knowledge (Wissen).196 Calling subjective sufficiency for truth “conviction (for myself)” and objective sufficiency “certainty (for everyone),” he describes opinion as assent to something in consciousness of both its subjective and objective insufficiency and knowledge as assent to something for which the grounds are both subjectively and objectively sufficient. In other words, with opinion, the grounds for assent are neither sufficient for personal conviction nor for general certainty, while knowledge provides for both. Whatever domains admit of opinion or knowledge, neither is appropriate to the transcendental use of reason. Rather, the transcendental may only be considered in terms of belief, as something for which one has subjective conviction but not objective certainty.197 Since our unconditional duty to act morally has primacy over our conditional, speculative interest in explaining phenomena, Kant writes that “in regard to its practical use reason has the right to assume something which it would in no way be warranted in presupposing in the field of mere speculation without sufficient grounds of proof.”198 Practical belief involves those subjectively necessary but objectively indemonstrable assumptions in the service of our practical interest: it rests thus on the subjective grounds of the will and not on objective certainty.199

Kant, Practical Belief  53 At the same time, however, since it is an absolute duty to promote the highest good, and Kant believes that the subjective grounds of the latter’s realization lie in postulates of practical reason, then the merely subjective conviction of these assumptions nonetheless suffices for their practical presumption. In his lectures on logic, Kant goes so far as to say that practical belief “is decisive and completely certain, such that its taking to be true is complete in sensu practico and itself can receive nothing additional even from the greatest grounds of speculation.”200 Our certainty about moral duty translates into a practical certainty in the achievability of moral ends. Since transcendental ideas are beyond the boundaries of the categories, denying practical belief in them is not illogical: it is immoral.201 A major problem is that it is difficult to see how someone who is not already committed to Kant’s account of moral certainty could obtain the subjective conviction Kant identifies as practical belief ’s basis. For the most part, Kant speaks of practical belief as if it can be rationally justified to a moral skeptic, but such an approach would appear to steer us directly into what contemporary philosophers have called the problem of deciding to believe.202 In this English-​language discourse, believing that p commits me to the veracity of p, and yet insofar as Kant’s practical belief is instrumental for the achievement of what is only subjectively certain and self-​consciously not objectively true, it cannot rationally be maintained in good faith. On the other hand, if we try to make practical belief equivalent to faith, it would seem that it automatically is put beyond rationality altogether, and this is clearly not what Kant intends. A way out of this mess might be to read Kant as offering practical belief as the necessary presupposition of what we are already committed to as moral beings, thereby suggesting, as I have hinted, a philosophical anthropology of belief rather than an attempt at the rational justification of faith, full stop.203

A Kantian Philosophical Anthropology Despite Kant’s language of “holding” beliefs, which implies that humans will their practical orientations, he also suggestively terms practical belief a “habitus” in the Third Critique: Belief (as habitus, not as actus) is reason’s moral way of thinking in the affirmation of that which is inaccessible for theoretical cognition. It is thus the constant fundamental principle of the mind to assume as true that

54  The Principle of Political Hope which it is necessary to presuppose as a condition for the possibility of the highest moral final end, on account of the obligation to that, although we can have no insight into its possibility or into its impossibility.204

Habit, however, is not exactly prereflective for Kant, and it does not seem that interpreting belief in this manner gets around the problem. Further on in this passage, for example, he declares habitual belief “a free affirmation,” and he explains in the Anthropology that because habit (Gewohnheit) is a matter of self-​discipline, it “so designates a certain degree of will [Wille], acquired through the frequently repeated use of one’s faculty: ‘I choose this, because duty commands it.’ ”205 Indeed, without the quality of free affirmation, habit remains beneath the dignity of humanity insofar as it “destroys the freedom of the mind and moreover leads to thoughtless repetitions of the same acts (monotony) and thus becomes laughable.” Such habits are accordingly “as a rule reprehensible” from a moral point of view; from a practical point of view, the reduction of belief to habit mires us in a relativism at odds with Kant’s universalism.206 These complications notwithstanding, practical belief undeniably does exhibit qualities of something that is always already with us, and thus an investigation of the possibilities of an anthropological interpretation is warranted. While philosophers including Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer have offered different views of how exactly Kant’s work can be read or at least reconstructed as a philosophical anthropology,207 for present purposes Hans Vaihinger’s and Paul Ricoeur’s work clearly highlight the prospects and problems of such a reading. The founding editor of the journal Kant-​Studien and a towering figure in early twentieth-​century Kant scholarship, Vaihinger’s 1911 The Philosophy of As-​If offers a fictionalist account of cognition indebted to Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and especially Kant.208 Vaihinger views thought functionally, as the means by which organic beings adapt themselves to the material circumstances of their lives. Following Schopenhauer and echoing Kant, he argues that “we must hold the entire world of representation . . . to be a mere instrument that serves to better orient us in the world of reality,” the objective nature of which remains impenetrable to human cognition.209 The symbolic anchors of this world of representation he calls “fictions,” a term Vaihinger takes from the First Critique and equates with postulates: they are “psychical structures” that cognition relies upon practically when its empirical limits are reached.210 While their value is purely heuristic, fictions do not, like hypotheses, aim at verification of determinate states of affairs in the empirical world;

Kant, Practical Belief  55 unlike myths, which are maintained without critical reflection, fictions are held in full awareness of their “falsity,”211 that is, their heuristic function. Since Vaihinger holds that fictions are indispensable for cognition, the problem of deciding to believe doesn’t stalk his philosophy—​believing isn’t really an option at all; it is merely something that we as thinking beings just do insofar as we are thinking. Two points can be advanced on this reading. First, Vaihinger’s model of cognition appeals more convincingly to Kant’s theoretical use of transcendental ideas as tools for furthering scientific inquiry than to the practical use of ideas for moral ends: although he names an impressive array of fictions, among which he classes the ideals of the highest good and historical providence,212 the bulk of Vaihinger’s examples stem from science. While there is some plausibility to the idea of holding the model of an atom, for example, to be a heuristic device while recognizing the impossibility of its actual existence as constructed in cognition, it seems far more difficult to make the case for a similar function of fictions in ethical matters. Problematically, Vaihinger does not distinguish between the theoretical and practical value of fictions in Kant’s narrower understanding of those terms: the role of practical fictions like the highest good or Providence are, like scientific fictions of causality or the atom, given strictly in terms of their necessity for orientation, without the added—​and as we have seen, crucial for Kant—​aspect of their “subjectively objective” reality for moral agents as engendering belief in the practical possibility of approaching these ends. In other words, this reduction is in the interest of a coherent orientating narrative function of cognition rather than the moral imperative of maintaining one’s duty in a world of contingent moral appearances.213 For my purposes, a second issue is more important. Vaihinger avoids the problem of deciding to believe only to raise the criterial question of why one should assume one particular belief rather than any other particular belief. From Vaihinger’s functionalist perspective, fictions appear acceptable insofar as they facilitate the vital interaction of individuals with their world. What results is a purely negative and wholly unhelpful criterion for rejecting fictions, for on such an account it is difficult indeed to see any reason to reject a fiction short of a tendency toward the destruction of human life. By making all thought fictional, Vaihinger is able to sidestep the problem of deciding to believe because we never actually decide to believe: we believe insofar as we are human, yet because human cognition is vitally linked to the function of adapting us to the world as organic beings, it seems that no fictions short of those leading to death are beyond countenancing. Not only is it then difficult

56  The Principle of Political Hope to understand how one could entertain practical ideals in Vaihinger’s sense without also sacrificing the conviction necessary for pursuing them; even if one grants this possibility, Vaihinger offers no positive ground for adjudicating between competing fictions, not least because he defines the latter as constitutively contradictory. Where Kant’s endorsement of publicity as a vehicle for enlightenment at least offers an intimation of the appropriate space for such adjudication, Vaihinger offers nothing even comparable for his own conception of fictions. Similar issues are present in Paul Ricoeur’s appropriation of Kant for narrative theory. I will focus here only on Ricoeur’s reconceptualization of Kant’s threefold synthesis of First Critique’s “A-​edition,” from which the contours of his larger project can be easily discerned. The “three-​fold synthesis” is Kant’s phrase for the congeries of cognitive mechanisms ostensibly demonstrating the “inner sense” a priori conditions of the possibility of human experience.214 Though the argument is far from clear—​Kant was so unsatisfied that he replaced it entirely in the First Critique’s “B-​edition”—​a sense of its structure can at least be given. In his first step, Kant claims that for any experience to be possible, representations have to be apprehended by the subject as belonging to a unitary sequence over time; this is the “synthesis of apprehension.” The second step introduces a concomitant “synthesis of reproduction,” in which representations are maintained and reproduced by the imagination in the course of apprehension. The third and concluding step of Kant’s argument concerns the “synthesis of recognition in the concept,” in which the apprehended representation is linked to a general concept.215 This latter synthesis entails nothing less than the fundamental synthesis of the “transcendental unity of apperception,” or the subjective awareness of oneself as an individual consciousness.216 Ricoeur transforms Kant’s synthesis into a “threefold mimesis” that encompasses the central argument of Time and Narrative, namely “that time becomes human to the extent that it is articulated through a narrative mode.”217 Though “imitation,” mimesis’s standard translation, connotes passivity, Ricoeur states that on the contrary, “imitating is elaborating an articulated significance of some action.”218 He proceeds with this transcendental hermeneutics by articulating three distinct forms of mimesis as cognitive mechanisms of narrative structure, Ricoeur’s own condition for the possibility of meaningful temporal experience. The first mimesis, unfortunately named “mimesis1,” refers to “a pre-​understanding of the world of action, its meaningful structures, its symbolic resources, and its temporal character,”

Kant, Practical Belief  57 in which any human experience occurs.219 A subject cannot have meaningful experiences without a symbolic constellation as a stable frame of reference. Mimesis2 is a second mode of enacting meaning, called by Ricoeur “the mimesis of creation” that “opens the kingdom of the as if.”220 Like Kant’s synthesis of reproduction, this step of Ricoeur’s argument invokes the imagination, here by equating mimesis2 with the activity of “narrative configuration” or “emplotment.”221 Finally, mimesis3 is characterized by the meaningful interpretation of others, which, though Ricoeur couches it in the language of literary hermeneutics (“a spectator or reader”222) can be seen from the perspective of philosophical anthropology as positing meaning as necessarily intersubjective and publicly revisable. The literary analogy is helpful for seeing the larger picture, albeit slightly misleading. First, the helpful part. Asking the meaning of a play commits one to exploring three related sets of circumstances: the author’s world and symbolic context, the author’s configuration of that world in narrative plot, and the reader’s engagement with and response to the finished product. Similarly, for an individual to have meaningful experience requires she exist in a given symbolic world and context, operate with a temporal, narrative configuration of those symbols, and be able to communicate her meanings with others. The last clause is where the literary analogy misleads: Ricoeur thinks that unlike a finished novel, mimesis remains an unceasingly dynamic phenomenon, with mimesis2 driving from mimesis1 to mimesis3 and the dissonances of meaning caused by the latter reflecting back on the status of mimesis1.223 In human experience, we constantly reassess meaning on an intersubjective basis and subsequently reconfigure our conceptual and symbolic schemes. The upshot of Ricoeur’s discussion is that to talk of meaningful experience—​which for him is to talk of any human experience at all—​ involves talking of temporal narrative as a condition for the very possibility of meaning. In this regard, Ricoeur’s considerations of hope as a cardinal element in the structure of philosophical systems can be illuminated by reference to narrative’s constitutive role in meaning and thus human experience in general.224 On Ricoeur’s reading of Kant, that is, hope may be understood phenomenologically as a constitutive element of any human experience insofar as it is interpreted according to narrative, which is to say of any human experience at all. The suggestion that humans simply not be hopeful is then on the same level of appropriateness as the suggestion they not be bipedal. Hope is something humans do, rational or not, for it is a crucial element in the narrative configuration we all enact.225

58  The Principle of Political Hope While Ricoeur avoids the problem of deciding to believe by making meaning reliant on a coherent narrative in which hope plays a central role,226 like Vaihinger, he does not suggest criteria for the acceptance of any particular practical belief over any others. Thus despite the significant differences in their respective appropriations of Kant, neither Vaihinger nor Ricoeur offers a foundation for critical, normative assessment of practical beliefs: in Vaihinger’s hands, fictions are justified by their external expediency in our interaction with the world; in Ricoeur’s, symbols are appropriate so long as they do not disrupt the tale’s internal semiotic coherence. Reading Kant as a philosophical anthropologist of practical belief enables us to sidestep the issue of deciding to believe, albeit at the price of a relativism about the content of belief against which Kant’s rigorism militates. Indeed, Kant’s own conception of anthropology as a pragmatic endeavor is explicitly in the service of achieving final ends already laid out by pure reason. At the same time, however, it is difficult to see a way around the problem of deciding to believe without some such naturalization of practical belief as an already existing congeries of conceptions we entertain by dint of being human, be the crucial element of the latter’s definition the functional-​organicist instinct of adaptation to one’s environment, as in Vaihinger, or the fact that human experience is always constituted within a rich semiotic field, as in Ricoeur. However antithetical the relativism of philosophical anthropology might be to Kant’s intention, this discussion allows us to see Kant’s rigorism in sharp relief. Whereas Vaihinger and Ricoeur alike suggest the mutual constitution of ideals and actions, Kant indicates only the mutual implication of ideals and actions (insofar as history can be prophetic or our perspective on it “authentically” theodical), with the ideal itself never changing. Even if one anthropologizes away the formal problem of deciding to believe in Kant, the latter’s insistence on the highest good as the ultimate focus of morality and politics presumes agreement on the content of hope that agents are expected to endorse upon sufficient reflection.

Conclusion The aim of this chapter has been to lay out Kant’s conception of progress as a postulate of pure practical reason undergirding hope. Hope is a leading-​ string of practical reason, the necessary anticipation of the highest good’s possibility in the world. In morality and in politics, we act “as if ” progress

Kant, Practical Belief  59 is real, though the “objective” validity of this assumption, as with all transcendental ideas, is only “internal,” or objective for the practical purposes of an acting subject. The rub is that the avoidance of despair seems to require a belief in progress, yet it appears impossible to simply decide to believe something the truth of which is impossible to ascertain. The fact that an agent’s hope is merely “subjectively objective” leaves no way of obtaining any critical standpoint on that hope, and the line between mystification and reasonable possibility subsequently disappears. As a consequence, Kant’s account of hope has a Munchhausenian air: an agent may apparently wish an objective of hope into possibility by sheer tenacity in the face of disconfirming evidence of its potential realization. While hope is essentially uncertain, the resistance of hope in Kant to empirical assessment raises questions about the possibility of hopes being anything more than personal convictions untranslatable into collective action. The upshot is that despite Kant’s pains to the contrary, the line between willing, hoping, and wishing in his work is indeterminate, and we have to look beyond pure postulation if we are to avoid the unworkable despair of chronic hopers.227 Though Kant attempts to explore ways of engendering an institutional and even intersubjective framework for hopefulness in his work on politics, education, and religion, his practical philosophy on this score becomes mired in an inescapable subjectivism insofar as the will ultimately drives anticipation of progress. Thus despite what he writes about prophetically effectuating hope’s realization, Kant never deviates far from the necessary and self-​aware assumption of the postulates of reason. An objective of hope cannot, by definition, be something foreordained, but it also is irresponsible to hope for something without a reasonable possibility of its realization. Although Kant occasionally speaks giddily about glimmers of hope in the world, he admits more frequently that no real knowledge of the world as such is possible. In other words, hope is a condition of practical reason, but Kant does not adequately show hope itself to be practical. If we interpret practical belief as an elucidation of that what one is already committed to, seeing Kant as writing a regressive argument, some of this rationalist problem subsides, albeit only to mire us in the further problem of obtaining a critical purchase on our ethico-​political orientation. Whereas an anthropological reading might tell us that we hope because humans simply hope, Kant’s perspective is that we hope because without hope our necessary moral duties will appear worthless to us. By making hope a problem in the nature of practical reason itself, one that forms a necessary condition for moral and political action yet which

60  The Principle of Political Hope stubbornly resists traction in the world, Kant throws down the gauntlet for subsequent approaches to the topic. The intimations of later solutions to the problem are present in his work, namely in his elucidation of the institutional practices without which even practical belief in progress is unwarranted. Indeed, Kant’s recommendations for progress grounded in a transformation of education, politics and religion are taken up and radicalized without the (admittedly critical) “metaphysical” baggage that undercuts Kant’s considerations. In the end, the radical break between freedom and nature, part of which hope is meant to overcome, makes it impossible for Kant to overcome the tensions implicit in his work. For subsequent thinkers, denial of this dualism is the first step toward a workable theory of moral and especially political hope. The regulativity of Kant’s conception of progress does not let us off the hook, but makes it incumbent upon humans to act toward the realization of our hope’s objectives. Hope is therefore not a passive affair in which we wait for salvation, but an active engagement in which our conduct alone permits the anticipation of a better world. My account of Kant’s teleological history as a regulative basis for political action shows that he is neither inattentive to the limitations of human rationality nor a dogmatist who just assumes progress is a constitutive fact about the world. Both complaints ignore the central place accorded in his work to practical belief, a concept that prioritizes the subject’s first-​person perspective over the detached, third-​person stance usual in philosophy and political theory alike. In making the now unusual case for progress and in defending Kant against accusations of dogmatism, I have undoubtedly read with charity, albeit hopefully not to an egregious extent. Kant’s limitations in the content of his highest good should not obscure the phenomenological power of his analysis of teleological hope as a regulative principle underwriting political action. Superimposing teleology on human history is Kant’s way of reinforcing human autonomy as an ideal to be achieved; with this orientation gleaned from the regulative use of the idea of progress, humans are permitted to hope for ideal ends. Political hope is therefore a species of practical belief, a necessary condition of social action without which politics itself cannot exist. The lesson for scholars of Kant’s politics is that they should neither avoid his writings on history nor interpret them dogmatically. A strong, constitutive account of teleological progress like Condorcet or Hegel may indeed rob human agents of any consequence, anchoring melioration in the starry heavens above. The weaker, regulative account we find in Kant, by contrast,

Kant, Practical Belief  61 is projected and effected by human agents, anchoring melioration in the capacity for freedom within. Rather than making a mockery of human agency, by focusing us on ultimate ends, Kant’s “teleological blinders” create and magnify attention to structures of possibility for change we might otherwise miss. To be sure, the line between conviction in utopian fantasy and a genuinely possible better world can be fine, but the formal proximity of the two should not lead us to deny aspiration. Politics inhabits the intersection of action and theory, and engaged theory can show us what to make of action, just as action can sometimes show us what we make of theory. Only with a sense of the horizon can we construct a path toward and beyond it. For political theorists more generally, Kant’s regulative assumption of historical progress and its attendant stance of hope challenge the dichotomy between realism and utopian or ideal politics. Indeed, Kant’s concept of practical belief reveals cracks in the façade of any such division. Not only does it show his own work to be attentive to the nebulous and partly arational nature of human agency, a position usually seen as distant from his ostensibly formalist concerns, it also offers an alternative model of “realistic” human agency, in which ideal constructions operate as part of the ambient framework underlying action. To paraphrase Kant, realism without idealism is blind, and idealism without realism is empty. The question of what I may hope if I do what I should do cannot be dispatched by an appeal to the supposedly hard facts of reality. Whatever interesting discussions may be had concerning the content of the question’s “may” and “should,” Kant’s hope for politics remains constant, for that is where the action is.

2 Bloch and Latent Utopia Introduction Ernst Bloch is that rare philosopher who puts hope at the center of his oeuvre. At once one of the most important Marxist theorists of the twentieth-​ century and (now) one of its least read, Bloch’s direct impact on his younger contemporaries was profound. His early work, most notably 1918’s The Spirit of Utopia, inspired Theodor W. Adorno and the intellectual circle that went on to comprise the Frankfurt School,1 and his short-​lived but intense friendship with Georg Lukács formed the background of the latter’s 1923’s History and Class Consciousness.2 Bloch’s indirect influence has arguably been even greater: The Principle of Hope is a central philosophical foundation for Jürgen Moltmann’s Theology of Hope, the major Protestant contribution to liberation theology, the radical ecclesiastical movement whose profusion in 1980s Latin America threatened the political and ideological status quo enough to earn condemnation from Pope John Paul II and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI.3 Bloch’s own work in political philosophy remains largely unknown, however, especially in English; less than a third of his writings exists in translation, and most of the secondary literature on his work focuses on his contributions to aesthetics or religious philosophy. Reasons for this neglect are not hard to find: Bloch’s corpus is voluminous,4 his scope is astonishing, and his prose is remarkably dense, at times practically inscrutable. The Principle of Hope is a case in point: this 1,600-​page encyclopedia of utopian phenomena pirouettes dizzyingly through the global history of philosophy, literature, and music, in an often convoluted literary style regularly exacerbated in translation. Bloch was, moreover, a grammatical virtuoso: Adorno, of all people, once described his writing as “great Bloch music” rather than prose, a pun on Blechmusik (“brass band music,” but it can also colloquially mean “drivel-​music”), and wrote that the Spirit of Utopia felt at times composed “by Nostradamus himself.”5

The Principle of Political Hope. Loren Goldman, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197675823.003.0003

Bloch and Latent Utopia  63 These issues notwithstanding, engaging Bloch as a political theorist is rewarding. In the context of my story, his contributions are considerable. Most significant is his insistence on hope’s practical character as something to be realized in this world. Like Kant, Bloch takes hope to be an ineliminable aspect of human consciousness, but unlike Kant, for whom hope is ultimately justified by an appeal to the subjective needs of moral agents, Bloch anchors hope to extrasubjective reality; to use his terms, our hope must be “concrete,” not “abstract.” Another important contribution is his stress on the utopian function of art. As Jose Muñoz writes in Cruising Utopia, a work that stages Blochian conversations within queer theory, Bloch takes aesthetic production to “articulate a forward-​dawning futurity.”6 While Bloch’s aesthetics are relatively well-​known, and Muñoz’s performance-​oriented interpretation is a testament to his continuing actuality, his third contribution is more obscure: a naturalist ontology rooted in a “neo-​Aristotelian” or “dialectical” understanding of matter. Bloch considered this difficult aspect of his philosophy crucial for the utopian distinction between abstract and concrete, a distinction that often gets overlooked in treatments like Cruising Utopia that mainly stress aesthetics. From Bloch’s perspective, the relationship between dialectical matter and poesis is the deepest issue for a philosophy of hope. After a brief section introducing his central operator of the “not-​yet,” this chapter presents Bloch through his engagement with the three thinkers to whom he is most indebted: Kant, Hegel, and Marx. As we shall see, Bloch’s reading of Kant as unable to break out of a subjective circle is close to the interpretation I offered in the previous chapter. To remedy the subject-​object dualism hamstringing Kant’s approach, Bloch puts the two in a reciprocal relationship, albeit with an insistence on the real possibilities offered for the future by the material conditions of society. Bloch accordingly turns to Hegel, from whom he derives his critical conceptual opposition of abstract and concrete utopia, and yet whose work ultimately fails for Bloch because of Geist’s fixed and foreordained telos. In Marx, Bloch finds his prophet of utopia via human agency, yet as we shall see, he has tremendous difficulty fleshing out the details of his account.

Not-​Yet, Not-​Yet-​Conscious, and Not-​Yet-​Existent For Bloch, human experience is primarily constituted by expectation of the future, a quality he invokes with the term “not-​yet” (Noch-​Nicht), that state

64  The Principle of Political Hope of affairs inchoate in reality which may eventually be realized. Drawing on Hegel, Bloch considers all human striving to stem from our radical limitations, by the sense of what we lack and wish to gain.7 This is physically evident in animal drives like hunger, but the same logic of a subject engaging a world to overcome its incompleteness resounds throughout Bloch’s writings, such that he discerns a tacit utopian aspiration for the unity of the subject with the world as the highest good toward which all human endeavor strives. Like Kant, Bloch holds that hope “implies the highest good,”8 but this state is filtered through Marx as the universal overcoming of alienation rather than the realization of a determinate moral vocation. Bloch’s not-​yet is meant to emphasize the anticipatory nature of the “not” that characterizes the human condition and to trace the revolutionary implications of this basic orientation. This not-​yet reflects an element of utopia equally present in mundane and sacred things, and therefore human activity can be characterized as fundamentally hopeful, oriented toward an imagined utopian future objective, be it a bouquet of posies or a proletarian dictatorship of justice. Against those Marxists and others who would collapse utopianism to idealism, Bloch insisted on the necessary place of hope in realism or materialism. In The Principle of Hope, Bloch writes, so far does utopia extend, so vigorously does this raw material spread to all human activities, so essentially must every anthropology and science of the world contain it. There is no realism worthy of the name if it abstracts from this strongest element in reality, as an unfinished reality.9

Bloch’s plea for us to “learn to hope” is an injunction for us to become aware of this utopian anticipation as “essentially as a directing act of cognitive orientation” toward the future in the present.10 The not-​yet has two aspects, however, one oriented toward the subject, and one oriented toward the world’s objective possibilities. From the subject’s first-​person perspective, the not-​yet is a “not-​yet-​ conscious.” Bloch holds that human consciousness is intimately bound up with temporality. Consciousness’s “edges” are the outermost limits of our temporal vision, and in Bloch’s linear conception can be defined as either “receding” into the past or “dawning” from the future.11 Here a contrast with Freud is helpful: while Freud’s influence secured the general acceptance of the unconscious as a factor in human experience, Bloch writes, his conception of the unconscious looks backward toward the receding edge of our

Bloch and Latent Utopia  65 temporal scope. Freud’s unconscious is then really a “no-​longer-​conscious,” described by Bloch as “an old one with old content.”12 By contrast, Bloch’s not-​yet-​conscious looks forward to the future’s dawning. So described, it is the unconscious as “preconscious,” and the second section of his Principle of Hope is dedicated to the elucidation of the not-​yet-​conscious as “a content of consciousness which has not yet become wholly manifest, and it is still dawning from the future.”13 Whence this future dawns is the “front,” Bloch’s dynamic spatial and military metaphor for the “foremost segment of history,” at any given time only vaguely descried, where the world’s inchoate tendencies surface and toward which humans act as hopeful subjects.14 The not-​ yet’s objective aspect is the “not-​ yet-​ existent” (Noch-​Nicht-​ Seiendes). If hope is not mere fantasy, if the not-​yet-​conscious is to have traction in reality, it must align somehow with reality itself. Many futures lay dormant in the present, but not just any future may ultimately come to pass. To schematize the relationship of aspiration to realization, Bloch distinguishes four “layers” of practical possibility.15 First is the “formally possible,” or that which can be thought, regardless of theoretical or practical coherence. Second is the “factually-​objectively possible,” which refers to that which is considered possible given our contemporary state of knowledge. Third is “the fact-​based object-​suited possible,” a mouthful meaning that which is possible in relation to “objects themselves and in their factual relations.”16 This third layer of possibility concerns the world without the contribution of creative human agency; in J. J. Godfrey’s words, “in relation to which persons—​insofar as they are contrasted with objects—​stand only as spectators.”17 Finally, and most importantly for the purposes of hope, is the “objectively-​real possible” or the “real possible,” which Bloch means to refer to that which is possible given the interaction of human agents and material objects, of self and world, such that genuinely new possibilities emerge. Insofar as the real action of hope lies in linking the not-​yet-​conscious and the not-​ yet-​ existent, subjective aspiration should be oriented toward objectively-​real possibility. If this disjunction is not bridged, we are left with Kant’s subject-​object dualism, and no closer to a workable theory of hope.

Bloch and the Kantian Problematic Kant wrote that he “had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith [Glaube],”18 a position that spelled the primacy of practical reason in matters

66  The Principle of Political Hope of vital moral importance. Bloch proceeds similarly, albeit with a shift in the senses of both knowledge and faith. Though he was certainly aware of Kant’s epistemological concerns, Bloch’s orientation was sociological. The knowl­ edge he wanted to limit in order to make room for faith was not natural science but the ostensibly fixed social dynamics of political analysis. Once Bloch fully embraced Marxism after penning The Spirit of Utopia, the determinism of orthodox historical materialism became his primary target. Against those who suspected ideals as ideological dross, Bloch fought to maintain a place for utopianism within Marxism as an indispensable cooperator in the genesis of a nonalienating and nonalienated world. In other words, he denied the absolutism of social analysis to make room for hope, a stance that led him to seek out superstructural manifestations of the anticipatory desire he perceived at the core of human consciousness. Just as Kant sought to uncover the rational moral logic of Christianity in his Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, moreover, Bloch tried to reveal utopia as the common emancipatory kernel of art and religion alike. As Bloch explains, by destroying the perceptual bases for knowledge, Kant left us without any objective philosophical legs to stand on, alighting on the subject as “our only salvation and declaration of color, now that nothing else can still provide color or substance.”19 Influenced by process philosophy, Bloch takes issue with Kant’s insistence on the a priori categories of experience, writing that “neither the particulars nor the whole of this most esteemed part of Kant’s investigations, insofar as it relates to the coherence of the natural world, is [sic] tenable.”20 Yet Bloch does not think this admittedly major problem is the final lesson to be drawn from the sage of Königsberg. Instead, “there is another Kant, and this one is inexhaustible,” the Kant of the postulates.21 “The real issue in Kant” is not the coherence of the external world, “but rather that unconditional totality of determinations, those basic limit concepts that can only be willed or thought, but not recognized, insofar as they can perhaps be ‘experienced’ in an immediately practical way, but cannot be ‘intuited,’ insofar as their object is no empirical reality.”22 Kant’s lasting insight is his explication of the transcendental ideas, those enabling lodestars of practical reason. Bloch interprets the ideas of reason as utopian objects of hope, setting the course for human striving. In Kant’s practical reason, we first, finally become free, and the outer encirclement breaks; the genuine self steps forward. No matter how the things that still exist respond: hope

Bloch and Latent Utopia  67 makes one partial to precisely the invented [erdichten] but otherwise unverifiable idea . . . Here the world’s labyrinth and the heart’s paradise become visible discretely; the world in the focus imaginarius, in the more hidden, intelligible part of our subjectivity, begins to appear as hope for the future.23

The position that Kant leaves us in vis-​à-​vis this hope is particularly uncomfortable, however, since he explicitly denies the possibility of ever achieving these ideals. On Bloch’s reading, Kant’s conclusion makes us “lonesome” as we “stand in the dark of an infinite, merely asymptotic convergence toward the goal.”24 While Kant thus may have rightly discovered the driving impetus of human action in our utopian imagination, Bloch sees the doctrine of the postulates as profoundly disempowering. Since, as Bloch reads Kant, we can have no hope of contributing to the realization of our ideal ends, we are relegated to waiting for grace, and human action is ironically reduced to precisely the sort of practical “mere tapping around” that Kant decried:25 “the constant problem of the real determinant of even the most unhypothetical imperative has not gone away.”26 Translating Kant’s concepts into his own philosophical language, Bloch writes that “the moral as-​if really appears here essentially as a theological not-​yet,” one that can only come to fruition through divine intervention.

Hegel, the Idealist Prophet Kant cannot be completed if Hegel is left out. Kant remains inward and infinite; his demand just fades away in eternity, contentually weak. . . one can see further in Hegel than in Kant. . . because Hegel has built well and thus can stand on the battlements; because he understands intensification, and above all, instead of unarticulated, unmediated feeling, understands the mediates thought that secures against every kind of avoidance or Don Quixote, against a false, disengaged unreal radicalism. —​Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia27

The problem Bloch identifies in Kant’s account of hope is that postulation does not entail real possibility, however morally indispensable it may be, and consequently must rely on a deus ex machina for its realization. For a Marxist oriented toward praxis, this result will not do: Bloch invokes Quixote because

68  The Principle of Political Hope tilting at windmills is poor political strategy. By contrast, he seeks a real radicalism that doesn’t suffer illusions gladly, one that affords a reasonable chance of success in the world, and in which human action supplies the causal spark. Since Kant’s dualism leaves obscure the bridge from subjective aspiration to objective possibility, Bloch turns to Hegel for his methodological and categorial blueprint to transcend the Kantian problematic. Bloch’s engagement with Hegel accordingly affords the best entry into his own positive considerations on political hope. Methodologically, Hegel’s dialectics offers Bloch a reciprocal, processual interpretation of the relation between the self and nature, or will and world, that at least holds the promise of overcoming Kant’s dead end; categorially, Bloch’s major conceptual distinctions derive mainly from Hegel, in whose phenomenology Bloch finds support for his own not-​ yet. Moreover, Bloch’s appropriation of Marx makes little sense unless placed against the background of his (and Marx’s) critique of Hegel. Indeed, so many of Bloch’s philosophical idiosyncrasies are indebted to Hegel that it is difficult to know where to start. For architectonic ease, I begin with Bloch’s most fundamental borrowing, the dialectical method, which he integrates into his own process conception of philosophy. Afterward, I examine Bloch’s objections to Hegel’s understanding of novelty and then explicate Bloch’s idiosyncratic appropriation of Hegel’s categories of concrete and abstract. Lastly, I show how Bloch’s dissatisfaction with Hegel’s conception of Geist’s unfolding tendency led him to Marx as the prophet of praxis as the motor of history.

Dialectics If we are to bridge the gap between subjective aspiration and objective possibility, we require a model for thinking that accurately reflects the nature of the world, and this is the role of dialectics in Bloch’s (and Hegel’s) work. Dialectics has a long history in philosophy, dating back to its dialogic origins in Socratic maieusis, but Hegel’s insight was to broaden its idea beyond merely a method to a vision of the structure of reality in toto. As Allen Wood writes, in the Hegelian sense, “dialectic is best viewed as a general conception of the sort of intelligible structure the world has to offer, and consequently a program for the sort of theoretical structure which would best capture it.”28 Bloch’s characterization of dialectics reflects his own philosophical preoccupations: it is “the relationship of subject and object, nothing else; it is subjectivity working

Bloch and Latent Utopia  69 its way forward, again and again overtaking the objectivation and objectivity it has attained and seeking to explode them.”29 For Bloch as for Hegel, this structure of the world that thought is meant to mirror is processual, and thus while Bloch identifies dialectics in Leibniz, Kant, and Fichte,30 he privileges Hegel for the “fluidity of concepts” in his work: “It is this thoroughly historical and becoming in which Hegel’s dialectic has its life and so expresses as well as makes up the content of life.”31 Everything has at least two sides—​only the stupid don’t recognize this fact, he writes32—​and on Bloch’s account everything has three sides, for “actual thought does not proceed linearly like fixed thought, in which nothing extends and nothing changes, and in which therefore no transformation truly occurs; rather, it develops triangles.”33 Bloch characterizes these triangles in several ways, all of which coalesce around the shorthand canard of thesis-​antithesis-​synthesis,34 but his intention is clear: our conceptual apparatus, like the world, is not static but develops and changes over time; similarly, any mode of thought that does not incorporate the dynamic nature of existence is inadequate for representing the world.

Das Neue versus Das Novum The fluidity of concepts is not the only thing that attracts Bloch to Hegel; in addition, Hegel’s dialectics offers Bloch a way of conceiving novelty as part and parcel of the world. Like Kant, Bloch envisions hope as an orientation toward the realization of the highest good, albeit the highest good interpreted not as the confluence of virtue and happiness but as the transcendence of human self-​alienation, resulting in “bliss such as has never been before.”35 Bloch is critical of Kant not only because he cannot bridge the gap between aspiration and realization, but also because Kant’s highest good can only be approached asymptotically over an infinite duration. Truer to Kant’s postulative moral psychology than Kant himself, Bloch insists on the realizability of this nonalienated world, a world of absolute plenty in which there would be complete satisfaction of all desires. Bloch’s end has been criticized as fantastic,36 but the possibility of its realization is not the concern here; instead, my interest lies in the logic of Bloch’s position. At issue is what Kierkegaard called hope’s “absurd logic,”37 namely the demand in Christian hope for transfiguration upon its realization, such that the anticipated end marks a qualitative break with all that had come before. While Bloch’s hope does not reside in Christ, he describes the ideal world as the kingdom of

70  The Principle of Political Hope heaven on earth—​hence his appeal to liberation theology.38 Christian eschatology and Bloch’s eschatology coincide insofar as both foresee the realization of hope as a qualitative break with the present and the old, the ushering in of a new era of human spiritual and material flourishing. To make this vision compelling, Bloch needs to show that novelty is not foreign to this world, and here is the second moment that Hegel’s dialectic plays in Bloch’s own philosophy. Crucial in this regard is the triangle’s third side, so to speak, the growth of the new out of the old, for Bloch reads Hegel’s Aufhebung as a gesture in the direction of novelty. What the third side hebt auf is all that has come before it, such that Bloch can describe Hegel’s dialectic as “an uninterrupted process of breaking through” the given.39 Hegel, however, breaks through the given in only a half-​true way; that is, the movement of Hegel’s dialectic rightly points toward the development of newness out of the old, albeit only as a philosophical half measure, for Bloch sees the ostensibly novel capstone of every dialectical concept’s triadic structure as already foreordained by Hegel, thereby undermining the Aufhebung’s novelty from the start. Bloch’s critique of Hegel as only a half-​hearted philosopher of the new is central to both his reading of the history of philosophy as well as understanding his appropriation of Marx as the true thinker of novel transcendence. The central term for Bloch’s critique is anamnesis, or knowledge as recollection, which he believes dominates the history of philosophy. Anamnesis is best seen in Plato’s Meno, where Socrates brings an enslaved servant boy to recognize the truth residing within him,40 and on Bloch’s account, this model of knowledge subsequently became the philosophical standard, involving our grasp of ahistorical verities reached by peeling back the layers of phenomenological ignorance. Hegel’s attempt at breaking through falls into the same trap insofar as Geist already has the future of its self-​manifestation of freedom completely determined within its dialectical unfolding. As we have already seen, the Freudian unconscious similarly participates in anamnesis, and finds in human consciousness only history that has come to shape the present. For Bloch, then, whatever the differences between, say, Plato, Descartes, Kant, and Hegel, all share a refusal to countenance anything genuinely novel in the world, finding knowledge as recovery instead of creation.41 What Bloch seeks instead is to explicate a form of knowledge concentrated on the genuinely new, the unexpected and unpredicted future. Bloch calls this transfigured conception of novelty the Novum. The idea of the new

Bloch and Latent Utopia  71 is of course hardly new, but Bloch believes that philosophy has not gone to the root of the “truly” new even among those thinkers who privilege temporality and futurity. While Henri Bergson, for example, appears to talk about newness, Bloch accuses him of explicating it as “meaningless changing modes” and “abstract opposition to repetition,” or any unexpected difference from the present.42 Bergson’s new lacks any real novelty, and is instead assimilated to the unpredictable but qualitatively similar. Bloch’s Novum, on the other hand, represents the genuine future in which humans create their own world anew, not merely as an update of the old, but as a transfiguration of the world as we know it, to create unanticipated possibilities and open unanticipated paths into the future. In Wayne Hudson’s words, the Novum is “the radical new which has never yet been.”43 Drawing a contrast to Bergson, Bloch writes that “appropriate to the Novum . . . is not only abstract opposition to mechanical repetition, but actually also a kind of specific repetition: namely of the still unrealized total goal-​content itself, which is suggested and tended, tested and processed out in the progressive newnesses of history.” In the last analysis, Novum becomes Ultimum, the highest end of history, the ideal of human self-​realization—​it is “a total leap out of everything that previously existed, but it is a leap towards the newness that is ending or identity,” and thus already encoded with hope’s absurd logic.44 Try as Hegel might with his dialectical Aufhebung, Bloch explains, he nonetheless cannot free himself from the “spell of anamnesis” insofar as the moments of Geist’s unfurling are set in advance.45 Bloch’s other main criticism of Hegel concerns the nonmaterial nature of the metaphysical substrate underlying the world process.46 Hegel thought he had overcome Kant’s dualism by making the subject substance, such that the beyond (Jenseits), by which Hegel means the object of Kant’s noumenal perspective, falls away in favor of the here-​and-​now (Diesseits) in which all reality is encoded, if only latently. For Hegel, the rejection of the noumenal perspective accordingly spells the reconciliation of these two “worlds” such that “present and reality are united,” and in the Phenomenology Hegel describes this reconciliation as amounting to “heaven being planted down on earth.”47 On this matter, at least, Hegel and Bloch are close, for just as Bloch seeks a praxis-​mediated conception of experience, Hegel seems to offer a vision of a world in which reality itself is a function of human action. Readers of Hegel know, however, that the instantiation of ideals by real subjects occurs only insofar as the latter are seen as manifestations of Geist, as particular moments of “the universal spirit, the spirit of the world, [that] produces itself in its freedom from all limits” over the course of history.48 Though Hegel may

72  The Principle of Political Hope then appear to credit humanity with producing reality, human action only does so indirectly, in the service of Geist, and then too even at times inadvertently, reflecting the “cunning of reason” working as it were behind our backs.49 For Bloch, this insistence on the primacy of spirit in Hegel amounts to a denial of the primacy of practice, a displacement and denigration of the fundamentally human impetus in the (literally) social construction of reality. Hence Bloch writes that “the genuine objection to the Hegelian type of dialectic is not that it anthropomorphizes, but that it makes it all conceptual.”50 To return to Bloch’s comment cited at the opening of this section that Hegel “built well,” we can see that the value of Hegel’s construction is its unity, not its foundation; Hegel designs a grand system that overcomes the Kantian gap between real and ideal, but his construction nonetheless lacks a ground, a material foundation on which to stand. Geist may be a mighty fortress, but it is still a castle in the air. Hegel is thus also susceptible to accusations of Quixotism and only takes us so far toward the real radicalism Bloch seeks, for though he has reconciled potentiality and actuality, he, like Kant, still gives us no material handle with which to grasp the world.

Concrete and Abstract The third aspect of Bloch’s Hegel interpretation worth highlighting is his distinction between abstract and concrete, categories Bloch takes directly from Hegel. For Bloch, abstract utopia is a bad utopia; that is, an ideal vision “not mediated with the existing social tendency and possibility,” and into this category fall most of history’s utopian projects as well as the utopian socialisms attacked by Marx and Engels.51 The “unreal radicalism” Bloch decries in the quotation opening this section is unreal precisely because it is abstract. “Concrete” utopias, by contrast, reflect objectively-​real possibility, “the future-​laden definiteness in the real itself,” those forms of reality that are “latent in its womb and are delivered of it through process.”52 The process by which Bloch’s concrete utopia is delivered differs significantly from Hegel’s, but their terminology is identical. To wit, Bloch explains that for Hegel, the abstract is partly the [concept’s] empty general representation, [and] partly the formula of the concept, its mere “undeveloped content.” The concrete, by contrast, is the concept developed [das Entfaltete] to particular and individual determinations, the universal mediated through the particular.

Bloch and Latent Utopia  73 The abstract is thus the undetermined or the mere in itself maintaining in-​ itself [das bloß ansich haltende Ansich] . . . The concrete is indeed not the mere arbitrary sensual, conceptless individual, but instead the rationally suffused [individual], that bound up in its dialectical richness. The abstract only relates to the concrete like the shadow to the living body or like the silhouette to the colored painting.53

Bloch shares Hegel’s preference for the concrete over the abstract, but does not share Hegel’s idealism, in which the movement of Geist ensures that the abstract can become concrete, that every concept has its universal and particular manifestations. Instead, Bloch appropriates Hegel’s language for his own purposes, and the concrete becomes a modal category indicating a concept’s potential for realization in the world rather than a description of a particular phase of a concept’s manifestation. In this way it is possible for Bloch to speak of utopia as concrete, despite the locution’s oxymoronic sound. In Bloch’s work, abstract hopes are not actionable, concrete hopes are, and the central question is how to differentiate the two in practice. Hegel distinguishes the potentially real from that which is not in terms of the concept’s place in Geist’s historical unfolding, thereby identifying the world’s latent tendency with spirit’s self-​realization as freedom. Bloch’s insistence on a praxis-​based solution to the bridge between the will and the world clearly makes this approach to tendency unacceptable, though he does find overlooked avenues for such an account in Hegel whereby labor could be a mediating factor between ideals and reality.54 In Bloch’s estimation, however, only Marx succeeds in forging a proper materialist vision of the relationship between will and world according to which the tendency of history is a product of hopeful human action.

Bloch’s Left-​Hegelian Marxism The rational can become actual, the actual can become rational; it depends on the phenomenology . . . of true action. This is the action of the true or the end of its continuing pre-​history, it is the changing of the world according to its comprehended dialectical-​material tendency, it is the correspondence of human theory-​praxis with an in-​ itself corresponding reality. —​Bloch, Subjekt-​Objekt55

74  The Principle of Political Hope Hegel fails for Bloch because his transcendent metaphysics closes off the world from significant human malleability, leading to a closed system hostile to novelty and hence real emancipation. Bloch’s “open system” is meant to secure the place of agency and utopian possibility on the basis of a mundane metaphysics while maintaining a realism about the world’s latent potential.56 Hence Marx’s importance, for not only does the latter insist on a praxis-​ based materialism diametrically opposed to Hegel’s story of Geist as history’s motor,57 but Bloch finds in dialectical materialism a logic of historical change he believed to be a compelling step beyond Hegel’s. Against the anamnetic, contemplative philosophical tradition, Bloch embraces Marx’s insight into concrete practice’s role in shaping the world. Knowledge is a function of our engagement, something “which goes with process, which is actively and partisanly in league with the good which is working its way through, that is, what is humanly worthy in process . . . this mode of knowledge is also the only objective one, the only one which reflects the real in history.”58 Kant and Hegel do not explain how we are meant to bring about our ideals; for both, means and ends remained eternally separate, and no real radical politics could accordingly arise: in the end, Bloch believes that Kant and Hegel condemn us to quietism. With his insight that “social life is essentially practical,”59 Marx identifies the basic truth of knowledge’s social construction and, by extension, humanity’s power to change the world. At the same time, however, Marx does not, like Fichte and Moses Hess, fall to the temptation of a radical subjectivity that describes no limits on human capacities.60 Not any and every change is possible—​I cannot grow fins, let alone will myself to have been in Duluth last Tuesday—​and it is paramount for Bloch’s understanding of concrete hope that subjective desire attends to the boundaries of reality. Without such a connection, action lacks traction, and rather than a mediated, later explosive breakthrough [to the Novum], there is merely a putsch as a short, futile blaze. The force [Drängen] of change may appear subjectively in the putsch, but it has nothing to do with objective tendency, which only becomes capable of actions insofar as it has an objective path for itself.61

As Bloch puts it several pages later, “without precise consideration of conditions, the future’s expectable new [Neue] cannot arise.”62 It is this combination of the primacy of practice and an attention to possibilities borne of social conditions that makes Marx Bloch’s philosophical hero.

Bloch and Latent Utopia  75 For all of his stated concern for objective conditions, however, Bloch demonstrates little interest in the details of Marx’s economic analysis, relying more often than not on platitudes about class struggle and the coming proletarian revolution than on any rigorous engagement with reality. This disinterest leaves it unclear what social conditions mean for Bloch: for most of The Principle of Hope, his talk of objectively-​real possibility revolves around the question of whether adequate groundwork for a revolutionary transfiguration yet exists, suggesting something like a Gramscian historical bloc, in which the social forces necessary for toppling capitalism are propitiously aligned.63 In the work’s closing section, however—​significantly titled “Karl Marx and Humanity: Raw Material [Stoff] of Hope”—​as well as in Das Materialismusproblem, Marx’s importance lies in the processual, entelechtic conception of matter he makes possible, and thus the idea of objective conditions appears here to concern the ontological constitution of reality itself. For the purposes of addressing the problem of political hope, I believe the second interpretation must take precedence, for the bridge between the not-​yet-​conscious and the not-​yet-​existent requires that the world be amenable in the first place to the sort of utopian transformation Bloch anticipates. In this light, is it helpful to see the self-​described Marxist Bloch’s appeal to materialism in the context of the Left Hegelian concerns animating the early Marx rather than in historical materialism.64 Indeed, although Bloch takes his Marxist bearings primarily from the prophet of self-​conscious praxis he reads in the “Theses on Feuerbach,” the problem of humanistic naturalism is one that Marx, too, sees penetrating to the philosophy of matter. Nominally at least, this concern drives Marx’s 1841 dissertation, The Difference between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature, in which he sketches the debate between these two schools as one between necessity and accident or spontaneity.65 Both Democritus and Epicurus, Marx explains, are materialists in the sense of holding that matter alone comprised the universe. Citing Seneca and Diogenes Laertius, Marx writes that while both philosophers claimed that all matter was falling in a void, Democritus’s worldview is determinist while Epicurus allows for unexpected developments. To use the language of the Epicurean Lucretius, an atom falling in the void can experience a spontaneous “swerve” that changes its trajectory.66 In Marx’s words, the atom frees itself from its relative existence, the straight line, by abstracting from it, by swerving away from it; so the entire Epicurean philosophy swerves away from the restrictive mode of being wherever the

76  The Principle of Political Hope concept of abstract individuality, self-​sufficiency, and negation of all relation to other things must be represented in its existence.67

While this apparently simple difference between explaining the movement of individual phenomena might seem to be of little consequence, Marx holds that it entails an enormous difference in the possibility of freedom, and consequently the possibility of bringing new things into being. Marx signals this grander interpretation in the preceding passage when he describes the physical, spontaneous swerve metaphorically as an “abstraction” away from the straight path, paralleling Ludwig Feuerbach’s language of the human species essence as the capacity to reflect and abstract from the givenness of a particular situation: humans, unlike other animals, can separate themselves from the present and imagine a different world. In this light, Seneca finds an ethical lesson in Epicurus, whom he cites as saying, “it is wrong to live under constraint, but no man is constrained to live under constraint.”68 For Marx, the swerve of atoms, this abstraction from their straight path, is—​remarkably—​ “the first form of self-​consciousness.”69 Furthermore, Marx makes the ostensible (although by no means willed) freedom of the swerve an index for the human capacity to build autonomous social relations, for its ultimate consequences are the ability to make friendships and covenants.70 For Marx, then, Epicurus reflects the first glimmers of absolute self-​consciousness,71 the first hint, that is, of the eventual realization of Geist as the idea of freedom. Marx’s foray into the philosophy of matter in his dissertation highlights two points that will occupy Bloch, both related to alternatives to determinism that nonetheless remain within a materialist framework. The first is how new things can come into being; how, that is, can genuine novelty—​ Novum—​exist in a world that is solely comprised of matter, considered to work according to mechanistic causality and never to intersect with the possibility of things being otherwise. To put this point in terms of a distinction employed by Kant, how can we retain the spontaneous causality of freedom if we reject the idea that there is a different domain or perspective that operates according to a different logic than the mechanicism of nature? Second, and relatedly, how can chance itself exist in a world of matter? Marx believes that the swerving atoms of Epicurus make sense of both possibilities. It is worth noting that here Marx is focused here on (notional) physical aberrations in atomic trajectories, and that the accumulation of tiny swerves ultimately leads to freedom as an emergent property. Taken together, this possibility of aleatory activity within matter (between atoms) and the emergent possibility

Bloch and Latent Utopia  77 of freedom secure the material bases for believing that the higher-​level social activity can be directed after a fashion. In any event, just as Kant regarded regulative principles as the assurance of nature’s legibility and the world’s friendliness to moral endeavor, Bloch’s revised conception of matter acts as the guarantee that subjective potency can accord with objective potentiality.72 With a better sense of Bloch’s speculative materialism we will finally be in a position to assess his success in bridging this divide.

Dialectical Matter Hudson has written that “Bloch’s conception of matter is one of the most difficult features” of his system,73 and, indeed, the very name Bloch gives his ontology, “speculative materialism,” smacks of contradiction. When the Hegelian background of Bloch’s understanding of “speculation” is clear, this impression subsides, but the actual explication of Bloch’s materialism remains challenging.74 For Hegel, Bloch writes, “speculative method [is] cognition precisely through concrete concepts in opposition to mere abstract concepts of reflection.”75 By describing his own approach as speculative, then, Bloch intends to raise “a certain barrier against limiting materialism to the realm of mechanical necessity,” thereby leaving “an unfinished opening of the content of materialism to the realm of freedom.”76 What we see here is a curious transformation of Kant, for whom the Reich der Freiheit stands as the domain of practical reason over against the Reich der Natur as the domain of theoretical reason. While Kant wants to secure a place for freedom outside the chain of nature’s mechanical causality, Bloch, rejecting dualism, wants to say that matter itself can generate freedom.77 Bloch’s criticism of Fichte’s prometheanism means that he cannot be suggesting we can mold matter however we like, an interpretation that would also undermine the very point of the distinction between abstract and concrete. With an eye to praxis, always important in Bloch insofar as he is constantly positioning his own humanist approach to historical materialism vis-​à-​vis the determinism of some of his contemporaries, we could more sympathetically understand Bloch to be simply reminding us that matter is shaped by human activity, and thus that ideals can have a certain force in history, even if history does have a structural logic. In its favor, this interpretation accords with much of what Bloch writes about the fluidity of the philosophical category of matter in Das Materialismusproblem and Experimentum

78  The Principle of Political Hope Mundi. Moreover, from this perspective, speculative materialism is a profoundly political doctrine, for a processual conception of matter can support a call for revolutionary proletarian class consciousness:78 a worker’s realization that material is malleable according to ideals is a necessary step toward his being able to direct their productive activity toward emancipation. Nonetheless, Bloch’s emphasis is on neither the subject’s freedom nor the dynamic between producer and object, but on matter itself, and in particular on its entelechtic properties he expresses by the term “tendency” (Tendenz). Tendency is the energy of matter in action, driving forward in all its already reached forms through excerpt forms79 towards what the tendency implies in the intended entelechtic goal, as it has not yet become, yet is nonetheless latent in a utopian manner.80

Like Aristotle, Bloch holds that matter has motive force, that the “nature” of phenomena unfolds and develops according to its inner essence in the course of its existence. The difference between Bloch and Aristotle here parallels Bloch’s critique of the anamnetic tradition in philosophy, as Aristotle’s matter realizes the essence already posited within it, and thus the phenomenological genesis of nature is something already given. For Bloch, by contrast, objective tendency pushes toward the realization of the not-​yet-​existent, toward the Novum of the genuine future. Since the content of its potentiality is not already determined—​otherwise it could not represent the Novum—​Bloch calls his conception of matter “unfinished entelechy,”81 where the finish is provided by human freedom. While Bloch’s talk of matter having latent energy could suggest hylozoism, or the idea that all matter is alive, full stop, he is adamant that tendencies are only educed through human action.82 Thus while a teleological principle drives the material world, it is a complicated one, latently conditioned according to the nature of the object in question yet predicated on human striving. Bloch believed he was drawing in his conception of matter on Marx, who in his First Thesis on Feuerbach had called for a materialism that recognized reality not merely as an object of contemplation but as “sensuous human activity, practice.”83 This Marx serves as an inspiration for Bloch in his own investigations, as he seeks to make sense of Marx’s description of a society free from alienation as “the essential unity of man and nature . . . the genuine resurrection of nature, the accomplished naturalism of man and the

Bloch and Latent Utopia  79 accomplished humanism of nature.”84 This glimpse of utopia suggests a world in which human activity is, as Bloch later described it, “co-​productive” with nature.85 Such a state of affairs would signal the end of humanity’s exploitative relationship to nature, a relationship Bloch associated with capitalism, and mark the beginning a collaborative relationship between humans and nature that would entail, again following the early Marx, the end of the alienation of humanity from nature and, by extension, of humanity from itself.86 Such an emancipated world would indeed be genuinely unprecedented—​ Novum, not Neue. Our account of matter must permit this novel possibility. Bloch therefore rejects what he considers to be the “narrow, ossified” view of matter in modern science, for it simply cannot accommodate the genuinely new: “Mechanical materialism can have no utopia. Everything is present in it, mechanically present.”87 In failing to acknowledge reality as unfinished, moreover, the mechanistic view threatens utopia altogether. If matter is fixed, change becomes unthinkable, and hope pointless—​put in Bloch’s terms, mechanistic matter makes utopia abstract. Bloch thus worries that “confronted with the future-​state which stands like an agreed consequence in the so-​called iron logic of history, the subject can just as easily lay his hands in his lap as he once folded them when confronted with God’s will.”88 Instead, we need to think the world as becoming, for only when possibilities remain latent is it possible to imagine the realization of concrete utopia. A world of becoming requires a dynamic conception of matter, however, which allows “new shoots and new spaces for development” against the completed world of inert matter.89 To invoke Bloch’s layers of possibility, mechanicism reflects the fact-​based object-​suited possible, while dialectical matter alone is able to convey the real possibility of concrete utopia in process. Bloch calls his conception of matter “neo-​Aristotelian,” and Aristotle’s discussion in the Metaphysics provides the key terms for Bloch’s own analysis: matter, form, potentiality, and actuality. For Aristotle, all things are compounds of matter and form, the former providing the material (say, wood), and the latter providing the essential substance (say, chairness or a bedness);90 Aristotle privileges form because it lends the thing its essence—​a bed is a bed whether made out of wood or metal. A closely linked distinction in Aristotle is between potentiality or power (δύναμις, dynamis) and actuality (ενέργεια, energeia or ἐντελέχεια, entelechia).91 Matter exists in a state of potentiality—​it has the capacity to become many things—​which attains actuality when combined with form. The relationship between matter, form, potentiality, and actuality remains a source of considerable debate among

80  The Principle of Political Hope Aristotle scholars, from his earliest commentators in the ancient world to the philosophers of the present day. In Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left, Bloch mobilizes the ambiguity of matter’s potentiality against the primacy of form suggested by Aristotle. Bloch finds in Aristotle’s dynamis both structured and unstructured types of potentiality, differentiated by their capacity to receive form. The first, structured type of potentiality, kata to dynaton, Bloch renders as “Nach-​ Möglichkeit-​Sein”; the second, unstructured type, dynamei-​on, Bloch renders as “In-​Möglichkeit-​Sein.” Literally translated, these terms become “being-​ according-​to-​possibility” and “being-​in-​possibility”; Peter Thompson and I opted for the more helpful (if arguably editorial) translations “what-​is-​ considered-​possible” and “what-​may-​become-​possible.” The latter phrases more clearly convey Bloch’s meaning, which can be gleaned by reference to the aforementioned layers of possibility. “What-​is-​considered-​possible,” the kata to dynaton, denotes that which is possible given what we know now, while “what-​may-​become-​possible,” the dynamei-​on, is that which may become possible whether or not it accords with the currently accepted notion of possibility. For Bloch, this ever-​fruitful material basis of form approximates the objectivity whereby reality is inscribed in the process of becoming. To put this explanation in more concrete terms: in ancient times, a world without slavery would have been considered impossible by most, for the institution and the assumption of natural inferiority that underlay it were widespread: to argue for its end would have seemed foolishly utopian, for in a refrain one still hears constantly, “that’s just the way things are.” And yet the abolition of slavery was possible had there been the will to abolish it, and remains so today; it is not a natural fact that humans must be enslaved to other humans, even if is an undeniable and morally abhorrent reality that human beings have been so enslaved since time immemorial. To look to what-​may-​ become-​possible rather than what-​is-​considered-​possible is to appreciate the possible that transcends the bounds of accepted possibility, to the possibility that there are possibilities we have not yet actualized; this is why Bloch prefers the more “open” possibility of the Aristotelian dynamei-​on. This openness is crucial for Bloch’s concept of matter, and for his thought as a whole; as noted earlier, he called his philosophical project an “open system.” It is reflected, furthermore, not only to his preferred understanding of potentiality in the dynamei-​on but also in his preferred understanding of actuality, the energia or entelechy. In Aristotle, entelechy is the principle that propels something’s development from potential to actuality. This is almost always

Bloch and Latent Utopia  81 toward a determinate end, a predisposed form, and thus an entelechy whose telos is defined and whose realization spells its final actualization. Bloch, however, draws on a different type of entelechy Aristotle mentions: “open” or “unfinished entelechy,” and occasionally uses this phrase to define his notion of matter.92 For Aristotle, unfinished entelechy describes progress in motion—​the entelechy of a driving car, for example. Bloch interprets unfinished entelechy as related not only to motion but also to ends themselves, for—​in his view, at least—​matter itself is in the process of development. He holds that what develops it, moreover, is human agency, itself rooted in openness by dint of the human capacity for freedom. How exactly human agency brings forth the latent objectively-​real possibilities of matter toward concrete utopia is a question Bloch has difficulty answering, however. As we have seen, the consideration of conditions he calls for does not lead him to social analysis, but to the history of philosophical naturalism, in service of the idea that the world can be otherwise. Although Bloch does not design utopias, he holds that art and aesthetic practice can offer “anticipations” (VorScheine: lit. “preappearances”) of a better world, thereby affording access to futurity. At the close of Avicenna, Bloch cites G. E. Lessing’s observation that artists paint their pictures “as Plastic Nature—​if there is such a thing—​imagined it.” The modern artist, then, Bloch writes, “steps into the scene as both the liberating and perfecting force, such that he clearly and distinctly brings out, exposes, the shape of matter predisposed in matter.”93 In Cruising Utopia, Muñoz draws Bloch onto the stage, reading a variety of queer aesthetic performances as future-​laden moments of rupture in the present, a utopian “insistence on something else, something better, something dawning”;94 flashes of artistic brilliance allow glimpses of the Novum. Muñoz’s use of Bloch is inspired and inspiring, yet also reveals the limits of thinking with him only in the aesthetic mode. Put simply, it leaves us no way to distinguish between concrete and abstract utopia, for any aesthetic performance may be read as an act of dawning futurity regardless of its relationship to real possibility. Instead, it threatens to fetishize artistic poeisis, full stop, without taking it as a metaphor for the creation of a new set of power relations, severing the suture between the imagined not-​yet and the material tendencies of concrete possibility. This happens to extreme effect, as in Muñoz’s discussion of the dancer Fred Herko, whose suicide (with a “perfect jeté”) from a fifth-​floor window while listening, nude, to Mozart’s Coronation Mass, becomes an exquisite example of utopian excess rather than a tragic suicide by a drug-​addled and mentally unstable genius.95 The point, however, of

82  The Principle of Political Hope turning to matter in the first place—​and Bloch, incidentally, wrote his work on materialism before and as a basis for The Principle of Hope96—​is to give criteria for distinguishing between layers of possibility, measures for separating abstract daydreams from the real stuff of hope. Bloch claims the possibility of an agent-​orchestrated utopia due to matter’s plasticity, yet he also maintains the necessity of orchestrating this future according to matter’s innate predispositions, and hence it becomes well-​nigh impossible to sort out how the “grasped tendency” of concrete hope is different from a surrender to the ostensible nature of the world itself.97 Despite his criticisms of Hegel, Bloch appears not to have broken out of determinist shackles: freedom is equated with the embrace of the latent material course of history rather than the embrace of one’s role in Geist’s unfolding. If matter has determinate tendencies, even if those are tendencies brought out by human activity, then we are debarred from the significance of human creative capacity to reconstruct the world. This is not in itself problematic—​it may very well be true—​and if he denied it Bloch would be no closer to a practical theory of hope than the fantasists he criticizes insofar as he would be pretending that any hope could be realized. At the same time, however, linking an understanding of possibility to tendencies inherent in matter itself seems either to constrain possibility too deterministically and doctrinally, thereby undercutting the Novum, or, if we insist on the human component, to empty the concept of tendency of its force. There is an irony in a philosophy of praxis that denies the effectiveness of any practice save for that which accords with the particular end its author foresees, and The Principle of Hope reflects this tension throughout. In sections explicitly focused on the nature of Marx’s praxis-​theoretic contribution to thought, Bloch is clear about the subject’s power to change the world according to its imagined projections.98 These sections are contradicted, however, by numerous statements later in the work—​when Bloch addresses Marxist political action proper—​that describe the “objectively inevitable aspect of socialism”99 as history’s unavoidable conclusion. Bloch wants to secure his hope by vesting it in the latent tendencies of the world, and I have offered an interpretation of possibility as doctrinally prescribed to accord with his ethical Cockaigne. Yet it also appears that Bloch’s speculative materialism, if made thoroughgoing, undercuts the very notion of objective tendency he claims to find in matter. This is because humans are matter, too: “Working man, this subject object relation living in all ‘circumstances,’ belongs in Marx decisively with the material base [i.e., the

Bloch and Latent Utopia  83 mode of production]; the subject in the world is also world.”100 If the subject is world, the subject is matter, and the latent tendencies present in the world are manifest in humans as agents of concrete hope. As such, the tendency in matter is itself directed by (or susceptible to direction by) self-​conscious historical actors, in which case talk of inevitability or even perhaps (the) matter itself becomes unnecessary, if not entirely nonsensical.

Conclusion In sum, Bloch appears to sacrifice the ostensibly agentive aspects of human praxis to an undefined objectively-​real tendency, over which humans are either sovereign (in which case there is little need to talk of tendency) or to which they are subjected (in which case there is little need to talk of praxis). Given that Bloch rejects the second option, the first would seem better, and yet if he goes down this path, he finds himself back in the Kantian quandary of a gap between subjective aspiration and objective possibility. Bloch’s contemporaries mocked his messianism: Max Scheler quipped that his philosophy amounted to “running amok with God,” Siegfried Kracauer complained that he was “fornicating with God,” and Max Weber is reported to have said that Bloch while “is possessed with his God, I am a scientist.”101 In my account, vital matter takes the deity’s role in Bloch’s project: like Hegel, Bloch brings God down on earth, but in an even more literally profound manner, locating the possibility of transfiguration in his conception of matter. As a way of thinking a deus absconditus this move leaves us in the curious position of puzzling about the power of the material tendency over which we supposedly hold sway. One possible disastrous consequence of Bloch’s work, ironically enough, is that we could lose the idea of our own contribution to progress save but as players in the grand intending of nature itself. Such concerns were not foreign to Bloch, moreover, as they form the core of his exchange with radical student leader Rudi Dutschke,102 and the questionable consequences of Bloch’s Marxist doctrinal certainty can be seen in his decisions to unapologetically defend the Moscow Show Trials and (initially, at least) toe the Party line long after most of his colleagues had abandoned it.103 At the same time, regardless of his ultimate success, Bloch’s insights into the utopian element of hope as well as the distinction between grounded and ungrounded hopes are both helpful in considering the concept’s political

84  The Principle of Political Hope articulation. Briefly, Bloch’s first major contribution is to specify future-​ orientedness as a condition for the possibility of agency itself. Hope and agency are then mutually constitutive. Here Bloch can be seen as crystallizing one of Kant’s explanations for regulative teleological ideals not normally discussed in the political literature: the need for meaning, which the future gives to the past and present alike. This element of Bloch’s thought accordingly reiterates and deepens an issue Kant raises and which is later developed by Ricoeur into a general theory of the indispensable relationship between narrative, hope, and agency.104 Furthermore, this also explains why Bloch describes hope as a principle, a rule for action, rather than as merely a concept to explore: as I mentioned in passing in my introduction, his magnum opus is Das Prinzip Hoffnung and not, as one might expect from a Hegelian, Der Begriff Hoffnung. Second, Bloch’s introduction of utopian language adds a special twist to the idea of hope as a regulative principle. While it is at times evident that Kant, too, sees hope as a utopian affair insofar as we are moving toward a projected ideal future, describing hope as fundamentally utopian opens the door to a creativity in practical reasoning about final ends that is absent in Kant’s account. Finally, Bloch’s distinction between abstract and concrete offers a crucial axis along which to assess practical hopes, and one needn’t accept historical materialism as an accurate theory of social development to profit from Bloch’s analysis. Given that hope is a motivating factor in its objective’s realization, the line between sound and unsound hopes is subtle and dynamic. Bloch’s insistence on the distinction between concrete and abstract utopias should ideally force theorists to consider their own criteria for accepting or rejecting particular hopes. Thus while dialectical materialism accounts for the practical soundness of Bloch’s political hope, a regulative rationalist natural teleology ultimately undergirds Kant’s hope for interminable progress toward the realization of humanity in a kingdom of ends on earth. In the contemporary environment hostile to social explanation by philosophy of history, any compelling political hope will have to be agent-​orchestrated. Ultimately, Bloch’s adherence to an objective framework for seeing hope through arguably undercuts the uncertainty that defines the phenomenon. If Kant makes it difficult to overcome the subjectivism of regulative ideas in practical reason, Bloch makes it very difficult to overcome the objective unfolding of history. Bloch’s insistence on calling only historically materialist hopes “concrete” amounts in practice to a limitation on the possibilities for myriad types of political action, including the democracy he invokes

Bloch and Latent Utopia  85 in The Principle of Hope’s closing pages. 105 Indeed, Bloch appears to deny that hopes not in line with dialectical materialism can even be hopes: from his standpoint, they remain outside the realm of objectively-​real possibility. And however much the final push toward utopia might come from political (or economic) actors, his rigid emphasis on this particular historical teleology comes within a hair’s breadth of collapsing anticipatory consciousness to a simple expectation of the inevitable, the stirring rhetoric of the Novum notwithstanding.

3 The Logic and Vitality of Ends in Peirce and James Introduction This and the next chapter shift focus from Germany to America, from Kant’s transcendental idealism and Bloch’s speculative materialism to the pragmatism of Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. Pragmatism has enjoyed a resurgence of interest in recent decades, and yet its German intellectual roots remain generally obscured in the literature; even among some of its best commentators there persists the myth that it is, as Joseph Margolis has written, “a uniquely American phenomenon.”1 This myth overlooks both the deep impression made on pragmatism by German thought as well as its fruitful early cross-​pollination with a number of European intellectual traditions.2 For present purposes, understanding these German roots also makes it easier to understand what the classical pragmatists thought they were doing. Pragmatism is more than an American phenomenon; it is also remarkably diverse. While its early progenitors agreed on turning philosophy toward practice, they disagreed in gross and in fine on the meaning and implications of this general reorientation.3 This chapter deals with the work of Peirce and James, while Dewey is treated in its sequel. Separating Peirce and James from Dewey reflects an important distinction between the relatively apolitical—​ or at least not as directly political—​pragmatism of its Harvard originators and the socially oriented experimentalist or “instrumentalist” incarnation at the University of Chicago.4 As James wrote in a letter to Dewey, he and Peirce came to pragmatism via scientific empiricism while Dewey and his colleagues came to it via Hegel.5 At the same time, this distinction should not be overstated, for it can mask significant differences between Peirce and James as well as lines of continuity between these authors and Dewey. My interest in these chapters lies in the manner that each thinker understands the relationship between hope and its political instantiation.

The Principle of Political Hope. Loren Goldman, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197675823.003.0004

Peirce and James  87 Like Kant and Bloch, Peirce, James, and Dewey predicate hope in some sense on action. All three pragmatists treated here hold that hope becomes concrete through the development of habits of conduct enabling social melioration, but they differ on both the type of conduct necessary and the means of achieving the transformation of habit. Briefly put, Peirce vests hope in habits of logical self-​control, James in a habitual openness to pluralism, and Dewey in habits of intelligence. Yet while Dewey suggests a number of domains for the concrete reconstruction of habit, neither Peirce nor James extends their reflections bearing on hope to a positive political program. This lack of political orientation reflects in part Peirce’s and James’s different intellectual backgrounds. Peirce’s training in mathematics and logic led him to hold the pursuit of truth as the saving grace of humanity, where hope resides in laying bare and trusting in the world’s inherent rationality. By contrast, James’s intellectual roots in psychology made his major concern the justification of hope for individual moral striving rather than its translation into collaborative public action. Peirce’s response to the problem of political hope is nearer to Bloch’s orientation toward utopian seeds germinating in the world, while James’s response is nearer to Kant’s emphasis on hope’s meaningful and motivating subjective aspects. In this chapter, I first deal with three general themes that form the background of my understanding of pragmatism and play into my readings of Peirce, James, and Dewey: its Kantian inheritance, its action-​theoretic account of belief, and its evolutionary impetus. After these preliminaries, I turn to the nature of hope in Peirce’s philosophy. While Kant views hope as a necessary condition for moral motivation, Peirce predicates his entire epistemology and ontology on it; since truth and reality are defined by the convergence of a community of inquirers in the last instance, hope is “rigidly demanded by logic.”6 To explicate this claim, I draw on Peirce’s architectonic writings to show the cosmological grounds underlying his hope in this convergence, as well as to explore Peirce’s insistence on severing philosophy from practical affairs. The second part of this chapter takes up the nature of James’s “will to believe.” James’s argument for moral faith parallels Kant’s, but his commitment to value pluralism makes him wary of providing a comprehensive view of how this hope should translate into concerted public action. Despite their profoundly different approaches, both Peirce and James ultimately rely on the promise of evolution to do the heavy lifting of politics.

88  The Principle of Political Hope

Pragmatist Preliminaries: Kant, Bain, and Evolution Three characteristics of early pragmatism help situate Peirce, James, and Dewey in my narrative. The first is pragmatism’s Kantian roots, most evident in Peirce but palpable in each of these thinkers.7 In the 1898 lecture in which he first publicly introduced the name “pragmatism,” James claims that Peirce had originated the term in a talk given to Harvard’s Metaphysical Club in the early 1870s.8 When James later again invokes Peirce as the source for this “new name for some old ways of thinking,” he gives it no deeper intellectual provenance, stating merely that it derived from the Greek πραγμα, “from which our words ‘practice’ and ‘practical’ come.”9 Peirce was clear about his debt to Kant, however: he described himself a “passionate devotee” from an early age, saying “when I was a babe in philosophy my bottle was filled from the udders of Kant,”10 and claiming to have almost memorized the Critique of Pure Reason in his teens.11 Later in life, Peirce called an early essay of his that revises Kant’s categories his “one contribution to philosophy,”12 and he referred to his own work as “the Kantian philosophy, so far as it is correctly developed.”13 The Kantian background is explained most fully by Peirce in a 1905 essay titled “What Pragmatism Is.” He writes that his work as an experimental scientist led him to the maxim that the meaning of any expression “lies exclusively in its conceivable bearing upon the conduct of life,” and he was encouraged by his peers to call his new theory “practicism or practicalism (perhaps on the ground that πρακτικός is better Greek than πραγματικός).”14 Yet for one who had learned philosophy out of Kant, as the writer [i.e., Peirce], along with nineteen out of every twenty experimentalists who have turned to philosophy, had done, and who still thought in Kantian terms most readily, praktisch and pragmatisch were as far apart as the two poles, the former belonging in a region of thought where no mind of the experimentalist type can ever make sure of solid ground under his feet, the latter expressing relation to some definite human purpose. Now quite the most striking feature of the new theory was its recognition of an inseparable connection between rational cognition and rational purpose; and that consideration it was which determined the preference for the name pragmatism.15

Recall that for Kant, practical is differentiated from theoretical as the normative from the descriptive, and hence practical reason refers to cognition

Peirce and James  89 about what one should do, not how things are. Shoulds are not empirically verifiable, however, and hence in limiting the ambit of theoretical reason, Kant creates space for the possibility of commitment to ideals that do not meet the same evidentiary demands as natural science. Practical belief (praktische Glaube) concerns the objects of thought necessary for the possibility of human normative striving. Pragmatic belief (pragmatische Glaube), by contrast, is used by Kant to describe belief that is contingent, “but which underlies the actual use of means for certain actions.”16 Given certain ends or purposes, pragmatic belief is the mode of thought that enables us to pursue those ends. Hence the use of the term in the title to Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View: having argued for the moral vocation of humanity in his practical philosophy, in the Anthropology Kant describes the psychological and social structures that inform an agent’s capacity for consistent moral action.17 Since pragmatists reject Kant’s thing-​in-​itself, they seek the meaning of concepts in terms of their practical consequences—​a paraphrase of Peirce’s “pragmatic maxim,” to be discussed in the next section. Two further considerations underlying the early pragmatists relate to the devotion Peirce, James, and Dewey have to scientific method, albeit one that should not be confused with reductive positivism.18 I shall have more to say about the particular meaning of “science” in this regard in the next chapter; here I want to note the more specific implications of the scientific study of mind as well as the theory of evolution for the early pragmatists.19 The first involves a conception of belief drawn from Alexander Bain, a pioneer of scientific psychology. Peirce explains that during the meetings of the Metaphysical Club, the discussion group in which the kernel of pragmatism was developed, the lawyer Nicholas St. John Green “often urged the importance of applying Bain’s definition of belief, as ‘that upon which a man is prepared to act.’ From this definition, pragmatism is scarce more than a corollary.”20 Bain’s 1859 The Emotions and the Will describes belief as “essentially related to Action, that is, volition,” such that “preparedness to act upon what we affirm is admitted on all hands to be the sole, the genuine, the unmistakable criterion of belief.”21 Part of this is no doubt a result of a tough-​minded empiricism, for one can only ascertain the actual presence of belief with acts carried out in its name. Thus Bain can write that “readiness to act is . . . what makes belief something more than fancy.”22 Belief is accordingly a choice, but it is not an idle one; it involves, as James might say, an assumption of liveness,

90  The Principle of Political Hope a willingness to act in its favor: indeed, this willingness is the belief.23 Peirce wholeheartedly takes on this conception; for him, “belief is the willingness to risk a great deal upon a proposition,” beliefs “guide our conduct and shape our actions,” and to have a belief means “we shall behave in a certain way, when the occasion arises.”24 Several consequences of Bain’s conception of belief suggest its usefulness for the early pragmatists. First, belief for Bain is future-​oriented, for “only when performing acts that do not afford immediate gratification, but are reckoned on as bringing gratification in the future, are we properly said to be manifesting our belief.”25 This means that hope, “belief in some contingent future bringing good,” is of special importance, as it too is only explicable in terms of actions to be taken by the subject. As Bain explains, “when an event happens to place this [desired future] object within reach, so that we have only to put forth some effort of our own to attain it, or to wait a certain time, at the lapse of which we shall possess it, the state of belief is generated.”26 Hope is then not apart from the world; it is predicated on events and (at least sometimes) involves active engagement for conviction in its possibility. A second corollary follows from what Bain says about hope, namely that belief involves a web of other beliefs, commitments, and habits that must hold if one’s belief as willingness to act is to hold. Writ large, this means that the validity of belief is linked to a conception of the nature of things, of the order of the universe; more modestly, it means that the possibility of belief is linked to the possibility of action having traction in the world, on the amenability of reality to human endeavor.27 Finally, Bain writes that the real opposite of belief “is not disbelief, but doubt, uncertainty.”28 To clarify this claim, Bain asks his readers to imagine coming to a fork in the road without knowing which way proceeds toward an intended destination. In hesitating, I do not deny that one path leads to Ishkabibble; instead, I am in a state of uncertainty about which path to take. The implication for pragmatism is that global, Cartesian skepticism is based on a false model of human cognition; in the words of intellectual historian Murray Murphey, “Bain holds that men are naturally believers and that doubt is produced only by events which disrupt our beliefs—​not by pretense.”29 Inquiry’s aim is not to accumulate abstract knowledge but to settle the doubts that arise in the course of experience. The second major scientific influence on early pragmatism was evolutionary theory. Two implications of evolution are of special importance, one that concerns the pragmatist rejection of Cartesian skepticism and one

Peirce and James  91 that concerns the status of post-​Kantian epistemology. The first implication, emphasized by Peirce, dovetails with the idea of belief as a guide to conduct. Evolution teaches, he writes, that our instincts as animals are “chiefly, if not altogether, directed to the preservation of the stock.”30 The continued existence of the human species indicates that the beliefs governing its members’ conduct are adapted at least to some extent to the exigencies of life, for otherwise the species would have died out long ago. “Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts” is not then simply a philosophical principle, but also a reflection that what is in our hearts is at least a minimal reflection of some practical truths tested by evolution: natural selection shows, as Peirce writes, that “we do generally reason correctly by nature.”31 Moreover, evolution ostensibly gives empirical legs to the Kantian suggestion to take the human species over the course of its long history, not individuals at a particular snapshot at any point in that history, as the unit of practical analysis, an insight that Peirce put to use in his conception of the community of scientific inquiry. Another implication of evolution runs even deeper, upsetting the traditional philosophical appeal to ahistorical truth. As Dewey puts it, In laying hands upon the sacred ark of absolute permanency, in treating the forms that had been regarded as types of fixity and perfection as originating and passing away, the Origin of Species introduced a mode of thinking that in the end was bound to transform the logic of knowledge, and hence the treatment of morals, politics and religion.32

With its emphasis on change and transition, Darwinism forces a turn away from the quest for “absolute origins and absolute finalities in order to explore specific values and the specific conditions that generate them.”33 It is not that evolution solves these traditional philosophical problems, but “we get over them.”34 The relationship between knowing and concrete purposes accordingly comes to the fore, which in politics and morality spelled a shift “from an ultimate goal of good to the direct increments of justice and happiness that intelligent administration of existent conditions may beget and that present carelessness or stupidity will destroy or forego.”35 In the next chapter, this new perspective will play out particularly clearly in Dewey’s work, but both consequences of evolution underlie all of the pragmatists considered here.

92  The Principle of Political Hope

Peirce and Logical Hope We are in the condition of a man in a life and death struggle; if he have not sufficient strength, it is wholly indifferent to him how he acts, so that the only assumption upon which he can act rationally is the hope of success. So this sentiment is rigidly demanded by logic. —​Peirce, “Grounds of Validity of the Laws of Logic”36

Though Peirce is not known as a philosopher of hope, the subject is the linchpin of his philosophy, a fact that can be easily missed if one looks only to his justly celebrated essays “The Fixation of Belief ” and “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” often considered pragmatism’s founding documents. His other writings have been generally neglected by political philosophers for understandable reasons. Not only is much of Peirce’s work extremely technical, but he wrote little on what he calls “vital matters” distinct from the scientific and philosophical pursuit of truth, and indeed he denies that philosophy has anything to offer practical affairs. Furthermore, the political and moral opinions expressed in his work are extremely unpalatable: he embraced race science, mocked democracy, and pined for an elite “Pythagorean brotherhood” of gifted minds to rule over the intellectually inept masses. At the same time, Peirce gave initial impetus to one of pragmatism’s fundamental ideas: that truth is a function of the agreement of a community of scientific inquirers, a claim Dewey democratized with his concept of the public, Habermas employed in developing his discourse ethics, and which informs the prominent pragmatist models of deliberative democracy espoused by Cheryl Misak, Robert Talisse, and Hilary Putnam, among others.37 While I shall have more to say shortly about Peirce’s rejection of vital matters as topics for philosophical inquiry, my purpose here is to explicate the metaphysical underpinnings of Peirce’s thought in order to highlight the role of hope as a regulative principle in his account of inquiry and as a necessary presupposition for the idea of intersubjective convergence upon which his doctrine of the community of inquirers rests. This task involves supplementing Peirce’s cardinal statements of the community of inquiry in his early essays with his later writings, for the comprehensive metaphysical picture he presents only becomes clear in his work after its “architectonic turn” of the 1890s, a period in which, not coincidentally, James’s first popular pragmatic writings appeared and during which Peirce sought to distinguish his own rechristened brand of “pragmaticism” (a name “ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers”38) from the “pragmatism” of his contemporaries.

Peirce and James  93 Peirce approaches philosophy from the side of logic, which he envisions not merely as the abstract analysis of argumentation but “the analysis of the conditions of attainment of something of which purpose is an essential ingredient.”39 Being a “normative science,” logic tells us the rules proper thinking ought to achieve certain ends.40 In Peirce’s case, the end of thought is to produce belief—​this is its “sole motive, idea and function.”41 Since “the essence of belief is the establishment of habit,” “the final upshot of thinking is the exercise of volition,”42 and the “self-​control” over reasoning we learn in logic translates into conduct attuned to the exigencies of reality.43 Peirce’s takes logic as the first step toward a less alienated and more rationally determined life; the behavior resulting from good reasoning is less likely to leave us dissatisfied than behavior resulting from poor reasoning insofar as it enables us to develop plans in response to the actual course of the world. Self-​control in reasoning grants an individual the capacity to “exert a measure of self-​control over his future actions.”44 It is in this way that Peirce’s “pragmatic maxim” comes into play, for it defines the meaning of any concept employed in logic by its concrete practical effects. In its initial formulation, it runs as follows: Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.45

Peirce elsewhere translated the maxim as simply “dismiss make-​believes”;46 that is, if the creation of a separate concept makes no practical difference to our engagement with the world, to our potential self-​control in mind and conduct, it is unnecessary and should be dropped. How can we achieve this rational self-​control? In “The Fixation of Belief,” Peirce delineates four possible methods of inquiry. The first is “tenacity,” in which one holds belief regardless of evidence to the contrary, and it is not up to the job of overcoming doubt because it “will be unable to hold its ground in practice.” More specifically, “the social impulse is against it”: “The man who adopts it will find that other men think differently from him, and it will be apt to occur to him, in some saner moment, that their opinions are quite as good as his own, and this will shake his confidence in his belief.”47 Try as we might, we cannot reason in a vacuum, and sooner or later the contrary beliefs of others will catch up with us, for “unless we make ourselves hermits, we shall necessarily influence each other’s opinions; so that the problem

94  The Principle of Political Hope becomes how to fix belief, not in the individual merely, but in the community.”48 The second method is that of “authority,” in which we simply follow the dictates of an epistemic superior. Authority has been the method of fixing belief wherever there is “organized faith” or “a priesthood,” and Peirce thinks its practical benefits are evident in world history: “it has over and over again worked the most majestic results,” he writes, citing the “mere structures of stone which it has caused to be put together—​in Siam, for example, in Egypt, and in Europe.” Hinting at his elitism, Peirce claims that “for the mass of mankind, then, there is perhaps no better method than this. If it is their highest impulse to be intellectual slaves, then slaves they ought to remain.” For those whose highest impulse transcends slavery, however, the method of authority fails because the awareness that “men in other countries and in other ages have held to very different doctrines” will lead to the realization that their own beliefs are “determined by the caprice either of themselves or of those who originated the popular opinions,”49 thus raising doubt. In short, the social impulse also upsets the method of authority, though here the relevant society is transhistorical. Peirce’s third unsatisfactory mode of fixing belief is the “a priori method,” according to which belief should be “agreeable to reason.”50 While this approach is “far more intellectual and respectable” than tenacity or authority, “its failure has been the most manifest” since “it makes of inquiry something similar to the development of [arbitrary] taste.” As such, the a priori method “does not differ in an essential way from that of authority,”51 and it stumbles on the same obstacle of difference. The final method of fixing belief, and “the only one . . . which presents any distinction of a right and a wrong way” is science, in which “our beliefs may be caused by nothing human, but by some external permanency—​by something upon which our thinking has no effect.”52 The fundamental hypothesis of science is that there are real things, whose characters are entirely independent of our opinions of them; those realities affect our senses according to regular laws, and, though our sensations are as different as our relations to the objects . . . we can ascertain by reasoning how things really are, and any man, if he have sufficient experience and reason enough about it, will be led to the one true conclusion.53

Because it is oriented toward the independent external world, the method of science ensures that “the ultimate conclusion of every man shall be the

Peirce and James  95 same.”54 Science, in other words, satisfies the social impulse. Its path may be arduous, and it may beyond the reach of most, since “in the matter of ideas the public prefer the cheap and nasty,”55 but it alone yields incontrovertible results. Though it is absent from “The Fixation of Belief,” other essays from Peirce’s early work employ the concept of a community of inquiry to explain how the method of science approaches the nature of reality. Individual investigation is not sufficient for truth since the observations of a single inquirer cannot alone establish generality in the laws of nature: “We individually cannot reasonably hope to attain the ultimate philosophy which we pursue; we can only seek it, therefore, for the community of philosophers.”56 Moreover, truth cannot be incontrovertibly gained from the scientific investigations of any one period in history. Instead, what anything really is, is what it may finally come to be known to be in the ideal state of complete information, so that reality depends on the ultimate decision of the community; so thought is what it is, only by virtue of addressing a future thought which is in its value as thought identical with it, though more developed.57

In science, a theory “is considered to be on probation until this agreement is reached. After it is reached, the question of certainty becomes an idle one, because there is no one left who doubts it.”58 For this reason, Peirce writes that “the opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real.”59 A question immediately arises about Peirce’s claim that reality is defined by intersubjective agreement. This should not be taken to mean that the decisions of the community are arbitrary, and indeed this is why Peirce uses inevitabilist language in his descriptions of this ultimate agreement. Science relies on perceptual evidence, and reality is a “force outside” us we cannot deny, such that this method carries us “to a foreordained goal . . . like the operation of destiny.”60 Even if the human species disappeared, were another species to arise with similar faculties of inquiry, “that true opinion must be the one which they [too] would ultimately come to.”61 Reality exists independently of what we think about it, but without a priori insight into its nature we can only come to comprehend it by dint of a long chain of experimentation. Truth is then the end of inquiry in a double sense, as its purpose and its upshot.

96  The Principle of Political Hope Why, however, is Peirce so certain of this eventual convergence? In the background of his thought stands the transcendental Kantian claim about the regulative necessity of assuming at least the possibility of truth to get the scientific enterprise off the ground.62 Yet Peirce also wants to say something more, to anchor the possibility of convergence in reality itself. In this regard, statistical probability gives him his assurance. Over an infinitely long time, that is, a community of inquirers will necessarily alight on a determinate conclusion to a concrete research question, just as a roomful of typing monkeys will eventually produce Borges’s Total Library of everything ever written.63 Unlike monkeys, human inquirers may rationally direct their analyses, and thus the required infinity is considerably smaller than that needed for the probability of great literature emerging from random keystrokes. In any event, it is important to appreciate how Peirce conceives of the community of scientific inquiry in temporal and not spatial terms. When one pursues scientific inquiry, there must be “a conceived identification of one’s interests with those of an unlimited community” that “may last beyond any assignable date.”64 As long as science concerns “real questions” to which definite and true answers may be given,65 Peirce claims that “the rule of induction will hold good in the long run” and thus “belief gradually tends to fix itself under the influence of inquiry.”66 In induction, we see the “marvelous self-​ correcting property of Reason.”67 But even Peirce’s probabilistic argument is itself predicated on a conception of reality that ensures mental products can accurately match up with material circumstances. Here we get to the metaphysical underpinnings Peirce believed to be the center of his philosophy, and one that political appropriations of his work generally overlook: synechism, the doctrine of universal metaphysical continuity, that “all phenomena are of one character, though some are mental and spontaneous, others more material and regular.”68 For Peirce, as for Bloch, existence is a matter of degree. Unlike Bloch, however, Peirce takes ideas as more primordial than matter, for Peirce explains that “the one intelligible theory of the universe is that of objective idealism, that matter is effete mind.”69 (It is thus with good reason that Peirce was later to write, “it appears to me that Hegel is so nearly right that my own doctrine might very well be taken for a variety of Hegelianism.”70) As Peirce sees it, everything—​mind and matter, ideas and empirical facts—​ can be classed according to three categories, Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness.71 Firsts are the immediate qualia of experience, the sense of brownness and oblongness (or, perhaps more accurately, brown oblongness)

Peirce and James  97 one gets from seeing an American football, for example.72 Seconds, by contrast, are a subject’s unique reactions to Firsts, what results from occurrence, “something whose existence consists in our knocking up against it”—​into this category fall the immediate, nongeneralized hard facts of experience: a football (albeit not as “football”) recognized as an object independent of me.73 Finally, Thirds are representations as elements of phenomena, the universal categories that mediate between Firsts and Seconds: the concept “football.”74 All three categories cooperate in experience, but insofar as it aims at universal truth, science concerns the specification of Thirdness, the category under which all generals are classed, including laws of nature, habits of conduct, ethical ideals, and language. Language as Thirdness is why a community is indispensable for the determination of truth, for the meaning of a term is a general rule for its use in practice, and the specification of generality is something that only happens in its discursive articulation. Anticipating Ludwig Wittgenstein, Peirce denies that there can be such a thing as private language, so the interpretation of generals rests on an intersubjective agreement about the appropriateness of terms.75 The oblong brown object is only a football because speakers of American English agree that it is; at the same time, however, there can be no real practical doubt that this object is a football. Synechism allows Peirce to claim that there can be convergence on the truth of real questions because it denies the modern separation between mind and matter, hearkening back to a Scholastic realism according to which “general principles are really operative in nature.”76 The world itself has a logic expressed in even the most insignificant perceptual judgment, and the part of science, as with the Scholastics, is the determination of the general principles underlying the ostensibly discrete and unrelated moments of experience. As Peirce puts it succinctly, “there is a Thirdness in experience, an element of Reasonableness to which we can train our own reason to conform more and more.”77 When we inquire, we abnegate ourselves in favor of this Noûs, and Peirce even holds that the “selfhood you like to attribute to yourself is, for the most part, the vulgarest delusion of vanity.”78 In this light, Murray Murphey notes that while the community of inquiry “appears to assume the reality of other minds . . . it would be more accurate to say that Peirce assumes the existence of mind.”79 The insight into reality afforded by synechism ensures both that perception encodes universality within it and that even our wickedest flights of fancy may be real, just not currently actualized in experience.80

98  The Principle of Political Hope We can now see that Peirce’s hope for the convergence of a community of inquirers on determinate truth is multilayered. It is, first, a regulative principle without which scientific inquiry would be pointless and fruitless. Second, probability theory suggests that over the long run, that is, from the final perspective of the entire accumulation of scientific knowledge throughout human history, inductive guesses will eventually hit upon the truth. Third, the continuity of mind and matter in his scholastic realism indicates that we have in some sense direct insight into the nature of reality, even if it is only faintly glimpsed.

Peirce’s Vital Matters and Evolutionary Hope I have noted several times in passing Peirce’s exclusion of practical affairs from the sort of reasoning involved in philosophy and science. In 1898, Peirce delivered a fascinating lecture titled “Philosophy and the Conduct of Life,” the thrust of which is that the two titular domains should not intersect. Taking his lead from Book X of the Nicomachean Ethics, where Aristotle praises the contemplative life as superior to all other modes of being, Peirce declares himself “an Aristotelian and a scientific man, condemning with the whole strength of conviction the Hellenic tendency to mingle Philosophy and Practice.”81 While it is undeniable that “the man whose brain is occupied with utilities . . . may do a great deal for human life,” the philosopher who pursues the same “will endanger his own moral integrity and that of his readers.” Inquiry must “animated by the true scientific Eros” that aims at truth and truth alone, lest truth be corrupted by regard for expediency. In practical affairs, “it is very easy to exaggerate the importance of ratiocination,”82 and Peirce recommends leaving vital matters “to sentiment, that is, to instinct,” for even if “a great many people think they shape their lives according to reason . . . it is really just the other way”: sentiment drives the conduct of life.83 As if the futility of applying rationality to what is instinctual weren’t enough, Peirce repeats his claim that philosophy is “a search for real truth,” a search for irrefutable and determinate answers of the sort that, Peirce implies, cannot be won in the arational social domain.84 Peirce’s strongest scientific argument for convergence, that of statistical probability, is inapplicable in the realm of vital matters. Concomitant with this exclusion of practical conduct from the affairs of philosophy is a moral devalorization of anything but the life of the mind.85 As

Peirce and James  99 a normative science, logic teaches the rules of proper reasoning, but it is not the only normative science; it is, in fact, subservient to ethics and aesthetics. Peirce argues that logic approves of certain voluntary acts of mind, and that “the approval of a voluntary act is a moral approval.” Put otherwise, a logical thinker “is a reasoner who exercises great self-​control in his intellectual operations; and therefore the logically good is simply a particular species of the morally good.”86 Because morality concerns “what ends of action we are deliberately prepared to adopt,” it requires an account of what ideal is admirable in itself, “having the only kind of goodness that such an ideal can have, namely, esthetic goodness.” As such, “the morally good appears as a particular species of the esthetically good.”87 What, then, is this admirable ideal that aesthetics reveals? Peirce explains that it must have two characteristics; “it should accord with a free development of the agent’s own esthetic quality” and “it should not ultimately tend to be disturbed by the reactions upon the agent of that outward world.”88 The only possible absolute aim meeting this criteria is “that process of evolution whereby the existent comes more and more to embody those generals which were . . . said to be destined, which is what we strive to express in calling them reasonable.”89 More frequently, Peirce refers to this end as “the development of concrete reasonableness” in the universe.90 Since “Reason” is the same as Thirdness or generality, vital matters are morally deficient because they exhibit little space for the rational control of conduct. Science, “which consists in actually drawing the bow upon truth,”91 is therefore the only end of a life worth living. This devaluation of the world of practice is evident in Peirce’s disdain for the masses as intellectual inferiors as well as in his regular complaints about the tyranny of utility under the modern world’s “Gradgrind banner . . . long flaunting in the face of heaven,” a tendency reflected in the common presumption that “greed is the great agent in the elevation of the human race and in the evolution of the universe.”92 One cannot serve both God and Mammon and be left with “any great intellectual motive.”93 It is not then surprising to find a deeply conservative strand running through Peirce’s few writings on politics, a sphere dominated by instinct and sentiment; after all, “sentimentalism,” he writes, “implies conservatism.”94 Peirce’s politics do not end with the standard conservative denial of rationalism’s value in social affairs, however. His moral devalorization of practice leads him to remarkably cruel opinions about the need for a ruling intellectual elite. In his early essay “The Fixation of Belief,”95 Peirce offers that “the method of authority will always govern the mass of mankind,” a

100  The Principle of Political Hope prospect he found salutary. Later reflections show the continued strength of his convictions. In a letter to the philosopher Victoria, Lady Welby, he states that naturally and necessarily nothing can appear to me sillier than rationalism; and folly in politics cannot go further than English liberalism. The people ought to be enslaved; only the slaveholders ought to practice the virtues that alone maintain their rule.

The passage goes on to decry the rise of universal suffrage and labor organizations, who clamor for the right to “persecute and kill people as they please” and aim to enslave the effeminate upper class.96 Peirce’s only published work on politics is a curious three page fantasy titled “Pythagorics,” in which he writes wistfully of a modern Pythagorean brotherhood comprising “the wisest of all the race of men” to whose governance the rest of mankind should be subjected.97 Such sentiments pervaded Peirce’s life, and as the son of a noted anti-​abolitionist, Peirce sympathized with his father’s pro-​slavery views.98 Although it would be foolish to suggest that authors’ personal opinions should automatically disqualify their thought from consideration in contemporary political theory, I do think the ensemble of Peirce’s views on the relationship between truth and governance should give us pause. Even if one dismisses his haughty disdain for the unwashed as irrelevant, Peirce’s insistence on the unequivocality of real truth is difficult to square with a recognition of value pluralism and hard choices that characterize the social world. Even if one does want to appropriate Peirce’s conception of the community of inquiry for politics, it is not clear that his arguments for intersubjective convergence in science can be translated into claims for the sort of practical democratic deliberation others have found in his work. I have noted that Peirce’s community has a temporal and not spatial unity, with each inquirer building on the wealth of knowledge inherited from other seekers of truth since the dawn of science, and indeed it must be so if his statistical argument for our gradual progress toward knowledge of the Real is to work. This model of scientific inquiry would translate practically into a reliance on the wisdom of tradition far more readily than the contemporary ideal of intersubjective democratic negotiation. One can bite the bullet and deny Peirce’s distinction between determinate scientific truth and the messiness of the practical sphere, as Cheryl Misak does in her Peircean account of epistemic

Peirce and James  101 democracy.99 Just as Peirce saw the end of scientific truth as the end of inquiry, Misak claims that when we deliberate about morality and politics, we also participate in inquiry that aims at truth. Misak reconstructs Peirce’s account of truth to avoid traditional concerns about how we would know what would be agreed upon by the community in the last instance, that is at the end of time, so that the upshot of inquiry is what could not be improved upon in experiment, but it is hard to see what difference this change of view makes in practice; in both cases, inquiry still aims at attaining irrefragable belief. Here I think we should take seriously Peirce’s injunction against finding truth in politics, for a great deal of literature has been dedicated to distinguishing precisely the essentially contested nature of the political from other domains of knowledge, such that the sort of running together of truth and justification Misak draws from Peirce is precisely what needs to be disentangled in political theory.100 Indeed, it would seem that many of the important political issues that remain the subject of contestation in contemporary America, for example, do not admit of truth claims in the manner that Peirce sees a scientific community of inquiry doing so: What is the “true” and ultimately nonpolitical answer to questions of abortion policy, corporate personhood, or democratic inclusion? This possibility would appear all the more important on pragmatic foundations in which practice is primary, for insofar as the meaning of a proposition is its consequence for human conduct, the sheer variety of modes of life indicates that the general meanings of “democracy” of “freedom” are not of the same type as the meaning of chromium’s atomic weight, for instance. Participants involved political deliberation who believe themselves to be seeking irrefragability, even as a regulative ideal, are thus bound to be disappointed. As Habermas notes in one of the first serious takes on Peirce by a social theorist, any politics that comes out of Peirce must be supplemented with a hermeneutics of public life not available in his work.101 Ornery though he was, Peirce did not let his injunction against applying the method of logic to practical affairs leave him to despair at the possibility of human progress toward a better future. Though the mass may act primarily on instinct, Peirce laid his trust in evolution to overcome humanity’s rational defects in the long run. At a time when social Darwinism was a dominant public ideology,102 however, Peirce’s distaste for utility led him to reject any of evolution’s supposedly egoistic ethical implications. As he saw it, the self-​interest exhibited by Darwinian tychastic, or chance-​based, evolution must be rejected as contrary to the ethical ideal of concrete reasonableness, which as Thirdness is necessarily universal and unbounded by the “barbaric

102  The Principle of Political Hope conception of personal identity” assumed by his contemporaries.103 Because “the Origin of Species of Darwin merely extends political-​economical views of progress to the entire realm of animal and vegetable life,” it implicitly endorses a “Gospel of Greed” deleterious to the ideal community of mankind. Hence Peirce’s own doctrine of evolution, agapism or “evolutionary love,” is predicated instead on the “gospel of Christ,” which “says that progress comes from every individual merging his individuality in sympathy with his neighbors.”104 Agapistic evolution occurs through “the adoption of certain mental tendencies . . . by an immediate attraction for the idea itself, whose nature is divined before the mind possess it, by the power of sympathy, that is, by virtue of the continuity of mind.”105 Since Peirce rejects evolution according to chance, agapism is according to necessity, which in Peirce’s scholastic realism amounts to the gradual diffusion of mind throughout the universe, the leveling up of matter toward the rational organization of general rules operative in nature. Peirce’s idea seems to be that the recognition of synechism, of the continuity of universal mind as well as the continuity of mind and matter, entails an ethical imperative to further realize Reason in history. How this reflectively harnessed List der Vernunft comes about reveals, unsurprisingly, that Peirce provides little room for democratic agency in its realization: First, it may affect a whole people or community in its collective personality, and be thence communicated to such individuals as are in powerfully sympathetic connection with the collective people, although they may be intellectually incapable of attaining the idea by their private understandings or even perhaps of consciously apprehending it. Second, it may affect a private person directly, yet so that he is only enabled to apprehend the idea, or to appreciate its attractiveness, by virtue of his sympathy with his neighbors, under the influence of a striking experience or development of thought. The conversion of St. Paul may be taken as an example of what is meant. Third, it may effect an individual, independently of his human affections, by virtue of an attraction it exercises upon his mind, even before he has comprehended it. This is the phenomenon which has been well called the divination of genius; for it is due to the continuity between the man’s mind and the Most High.106

Even in evolution, Peirce rests his hope for social progress not on the intersubjective negotiation of a demos but on the insight of those who have

Peirce and James  103 the capacity to see the truth for what it is. The impetus for evolutionary love comes from the leadership of an epistemic elite, the miracle of conversion, or the solitary flash of genius. Peirce’s invocation of Christian love reveals how ethically infused his conception of logic is in the end: just as in the Gospel of John the truth alone will make one free, the truth in Peirce plays a salvific role in guaranteeing our eventual remove from the sins of practical life.

James and the Will to Hope Philosophy is more a matter of passionate vision than of logic. —​James, A Pluralistic Universe107

Although they traditionally share the mantle of pragmatism’s co-​originators, Peirce and James are philosophers who at first glance could not be further apart; on almost all counts they are diametrically opposed. Peirce is a grand metaphysical unifier, James a vehement opponent of monism; Peirce abhors chaos, James revels in it; Peirce denies the applicability of philosophy to life, James is nothing if not fixated on vital matters; Peirce approaches knowledge objectively, from the top down, James starts and ends with subjective experience, from the bottom up; and while neither wrote sustained political philosophy, Peirce is conservative and authoritarian, James liberal and anarchistic.108 Even as personalities, the two were night and day: Peirce was famously prickly, whereas James was famously charming. And indeed, though Peirce was extremely grateful for James’s championing of his work (adding the name “Santiago”—​“St. James”—​to his own in 1909, such that for the last five years of his life, Peirce was “Charles Santiago Sanders Peirce”109), his dissatisfaction with James’s appropriation of his philosophy lay behind his decision to rename pragmatism “pragmaticism,” explaining that “-​icism might mark a more strictly defined acception of that doctrine.”110 Peirce’s central complaint was that James and his ilk had elevated the pragmatic maxim, which Peirce meant as a tool for logical clarity, to “a sublime principle of speculative philosophy”111 and so made pragmatism “imply ‘the will to believe,’ the mutability of truth, the soundness of Zeno’s refutation of motion, and pluralism generally.”112 While the merits of Peirce’s criticism of James are not my concern,113 Peirce was right to see that James was involved in a very different enterprise from his own, for though they shared a common orientation toward the primacy of practice in knowledge, James’s foundation in

104  The Principle of Political Hope psychology led him to a justification of hope predicated, like Kant’s, on the acting subject’s moral interest rather than on logical necessity. At the same time, despite this different point of departure, James also looked to evolutionary theory to ground his hope while similarly underspecifying the practical means of effectuating social progress. The introspective method of studying the mind that James employed in his first book, The Principles of Psychology, is an abiding characteristic of his subsequent reflections on philosophy, morality, and religion. Against a psychology that reads mental phenomena discretely categorized from a third-​person perspective into the subject of experience, James proposes to understand consciousness as the processual mess it is from the first-​person perspective. From “our natal day,” he writes, consciousness “is of a teeming multiplicity of objects and relations”; in a celebrated image noted earlier, James asserts that a newborn experiences nothing but “one great blooming, buzzing confusion.”114 The primordial experience of thinking is of an undifferentiated stream rather than discrete successive moments, and like a bird’s life, it is “made of an alternation of flights and perchings,” or “transitive” and “substantive” parts, respectively.115 Out of the maelstrom of information bombarding us, we acquire habits that select out certain perchings as substantively significant, and the “bundles of habits” so developed constitute each individual’s idiosyncratic character.116 One’s habits determine one’s “attention,” which simply amounts to perching on a particular idea to the exclusion of others for a duration of time. This attention James equates with the will, which, following Bain, is the same psychological phenomenon as belief.117 You (or Peirce) may claim to believe in Christian morality, but unless you act in such a way that accords with the latter, there is no reason to accept your declaration of creed. The upshot of this methodological holism, James believes, is a rejection of a Cartesian subject in favor of reading psychological phenomena as relations within a world. Consciousness is not an entity; it is a functional process.118 In the Principles of Psychology, this is shown in James’s enumeration of four senses of self simultaneously at play in experience. We are each comprised of overlapping selves:119 a somatic or “material” self, a “social” self derived from recognition, a “spiritual” self of our felt “inner or subjective being,” and a “pure Ego” of Kant’s transcendental apperception. Each self is present at any given moment in consciousness, and none is reducible to any of the others. For present purposes, the social self is most significant insofar as it reflects James’s conviction in the irreducible pluralism of human judgment

Peirce and James  105 in practice. Since we are each privy to numerous spheres of recognition—​our vision of ourselves in regard to our partner(s) differs from our vision of ourselves in regard to our business associates or our news vendor—​James writes that “a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind,” which in practice amounts to the claim that an individual “has as many different social selves as there are distinct groups of persons about whose opinion he cares.”120 As the habits of the self determine which substantive moments of the stream of thought warrant attention, different subjects’ beliefs, and indeed the possibilities of practical valuation, differ markedly. This does not mean that there can be no agreement on common values, but that there is no perspective-​independent datum of experience against which we can achieve an objective Truth such as we find Peirce seeking. The panoply of subjective realities taken in the aggregate are the closest we can get to such an independent view, though it is folly to assume that these realities will or even can fit together seamlessly in a single objective narrative of the whole. In later work, James translated his psychological investigations into a “mosaic philosophy” of radical empiricism and ontological pluralism.121 James is an empiricist insofar as he begins from concrete experience, but his empiricism is radical insofar as it does not confine itself to atomic percepts like billiard balls. Though he seconds the traditional empiricist denial of any element of knowledge that is not directly experienced, James adds to this datum the felt relations between experiences his psychological work showed him to be just as present to human consciousness as the discrete objects of the external world. To be radical, empiricism must not exclude anything that is directly experienced, and thus “for such a philosophy, the relations that connect experiences must themselves be experienced relations, and any kind of relation experienced must be accounted as ‘real’ as anything else in the system.”122 This radical turn obviates the need for a distinct subject of experience separate from the world of experienced objects: there is no more mystery of a ghost in the machine. Instead, we start from the supposition that “there is only one primal stuff or material in the world,” namely “pure experience,” and “knowing can easily be explained as a particular sort of relation toward one another into which portions of pure experience may enter.”123 On this basis, James claims that subjectivity and objectivity are affairs not of what an experience is aboriginally made of, but of its classification. Classifications depend on our

106  The Principle of Political Hope temporary purposes. For certain purposes it is convenient to take things in one set of relations, for other purposes in another set. In the two cases their contexts are apt to be different.124

Because radical empiricism introduces a variability and plasticity to knowl­ edge that “leans on nothing” save for human purposes, James calls it a “humanism” and lauds it ethically as “essentially a social philosophy, a philosophy of ‘co,’ in which conjunctions do the work.”125 Humanism is one with pragmatism in the shared conception of truth as that which enables one to get into a “satisfactory” relationship with life, and this conception leads James to pluralism insofar as the sheer variety of contexts in experience means that satisfactoriness “has to be measured by a multitude of standards.”126 This pluralism plays out differently in science and morals, and James makes a crucial distinction between the permissible measures of truth in each domain. James is concerned not so much with the abstract truth as with how statements come to be regarded as true.127 From James’s perspective, true thoughts are “invaluable instruments of action,” such that “ideas . . . become true just in so far as they help us to get into satisfactory relation with other parts of our experience.”128 If an idea or belief plays a concrete function in making our lives richer, then it is true for us. For the Jamesian pragmatist, then, the truth or falsity of a proposition consists in how it leads us successfully or unsuccessfully back into sensible experience, but the predictive nature of science is such that its verification is of a different sort than verification in morality or metaphysics. Science concerns the physical matrix of experience and “can only admit facts that are actually tangible.”129 Though each individual’s beliefs derive from the particularities of their context, some facts are empirically undeniable—​I cannot fly by flapping my arms. In such matters, belief must accord with reality, for practice denies dissent.130 If we keep in mind the equation of belief with willingness to act, this practical orientation is all James means when he writes that truth is “the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons.”131 The definite, assignable reasons James posits here are “vital benefits” that enable a subject to live a satisfactory life. For obvious reasons, believing in the impossibility of unaided human flight is of great vital benefit when considering how to safely descend from one’s roof, and in the empirical domain James offers a rather Peircean account of scientific truth as determined by an ultimate consensus of inquiry.132 The theory of evolution having shown that even scientific truth is not absolute, however, James maintained a

Peirce and James  107 looseness about the sorts of facts that can be permitted in science, as demonstrated by his interest in paranormal research.133 Since “what really exists is not things made but things in the making,”134 any scientific hypothesis is subject to revision and may happen to become true in the future—​our categories are revisable. Nevertheless, science is confined to the study of the “objective reality” of “a world of objects which [our minds] share in common,”135 and its truths are confined to what can be experienced in this physical space. When it comes to morality and metaphysics, “where our ideas cannot copy definitely their object,”136 James is more catholic in the way of permissible belief. Here the significance of truth lies not in its predictive capacity but in its effectuation of what James calls a “strenuous mood” of moral endeavor, a mood that enables us to act morally in the face of present ill, “if only the greater ideal be attained.”137 Faith—​and particularly religious faith—​may engender a sense of intimacy and relationship to what would otherwise be the universe’s cold indifference; it can yield a sense of “one harmonious spiritual intent” without which the physical order of nature “is mere weather . . . doing and undoing without end.”138 Postulation of metaphysical truths is not merely for our own assurance, but also instrumental for the realization of life’s ideals: “We need only in cold blood ACT as if the thing in question were real, and it will infallibly end by growing into such a connection with our life that it will become real.”139 More specifically, James explains that there are cases “where a fact cannot come at all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming.”140 A mundane example James offers involves a train robbery in which “each passenger fears that if he makes a movement of resistance, he will be shot before anyone else backs him up.” If, James suggests, “we believed that the whole car-​full would rise at once with us, we should each severally rise, and train-​robbing would never even be attempted.”141 The logic of faith is the same for metaphysical questions, as on behalf of the “interests of our own ideal of systematically unified moral truth,” we have the right to “postulate a divine thinker, and pray for the victory of the religious cause,”142 lest we lose trust in the possibility of moral agency. “In truths dependent on our personal action, then, faith based on desire is certainly lawful and possibly an indispensable thing.”143 Moral matters are the purest example of such truths, for the highest good “can be achieved only by getting our proper life; and that can come about only by help of a moral energy born of the faith that in some way or other we shall succeed in getting it if we try pertinaciously enough.”144 The world has shown itself to exhibit considerable plasticity, but we will never know what possibilities reside in it unless we actually act toward our

108  The Principle of Political Hope ends,145 and this experimentation often requires belief that transcends the bounds of sense. The strictures on active faith are laid out most clearly in James’s celebrated essay “The Will to Believe,” a work he dedicated to Peirce. This perennially controversial piece is an “essay in justification of faith, a defense of our right to adopt a believing attitude in religious matters, in spite of the fact that our merely logical intellect may not have been coerced,” intended to provide parameters for employing these regulative concepts.146As James explains, for us to be in a place to will to believe something, to act as if it were true in the hope of promoting its reality, a candidate for belief must be a genuine option, meaning that it is live, forced, and momentous. A live option “appeals as a real possibility to him to whom it is proposed.” The reasons an option may appeal to any one as opposed to another person are experiential and are as varied as there are individuals. James offers the example of somebody posing the choice to either “be a theosophist or be a mohamedan,”147 a decision perhaps more live now than 1897 (thus nicely illustrating the historicity of guiding norms), but one that, however times have changed, was in any event deader to his Harvard audience than the alternative choice between being agnostic or Protestant. Moving onto the second condition, a forced option or choice is one that “is unavoidable,” and James’s immediate example is of somebody saying, “Either love me or hate me.”148 Finally, a momentous option is “a unique opportunity” that will most likely not present itself again;149 James’s example is an invitation to join a polar exhibition. If all of these criteria are met, one is permitted to will to believe something, by which James means one is entitled to act as if the belief were true. The criterion of forcedness is the most apropos for present purposes, since it is along this axis that James draws his distinction between justification in science and morality. In most cases, the propositions of science are not forced—​we can approach chromium’s atomic weight with an equanimity of mind and vital disinterestedness that morality rarely affords. Moral questions, by contrast, “immediately present themselves as questions whose solutions cannot wait for sensible proof.”150 If life is to be worth living, we must have ideals toward which we strive and against the background of which our experience has significance. In James’s universe, the question of God is the primary determinant of this moral either/​or: either God does not exist, in which case the sublimity of moral ideals disappears and we are left bereft of hope, or God does exist, in which case we have reason to maintain our strenuous mood. Like Kant, James posits the necessity of practical belief

Peirce and James  109 in matters about which theoretical reason cannot have any purchase yet which are nonetheless essential to the moral life. Furthermore, James explicitly names hope as the indispensable practical attitude we can and must will ourselves to believe, noting that when he talks of choice in our “willing nature,” “I do not mean only such deliberate volitions as may have set up habits of belief that we cannot now escape from,—​I mean all such factors of belief as fear and hope, prejudice and passion, imitation and partisanship, the circumstance of our caste and set.”151 Although the plasticity of James’s categories of experience have led several authors to claim that he is “more Kantian than Kant,”152 James’s denial of the a priori distinguishes his moral faith from the version found in the Second Critique. Unlike Kant’s understanding of the highest good as the coincidence of virtue and happiness, James’s moral ideal is instead a world in which the greatest number of personal ideals exist harmoniously. James defines this ideal negatively, stating that we should aim in moral life “for the best whole . . . by whose realization the least possible number of other ideals are destroyed.”153 In advance, however, we cannot know what actions will bring us closer to this ideal, and we can only assess the relevant fit of our actions after we have brought our personal ideals to bear on the world through moral experiment.154 Also unlike Kant, James does not expend much energy on the postulate of immortality. In Kant, immortality is the subjective analogue of God’s objective existence: if the highest good requires the absolute confluence of virtue and happiness, we need to be able to approach the former before we can even hope of achieving grace, a task that can only be envisioned over the course of many human lifetimes. Though later in life James personally found the promise of immortality reassuring,155 its possibility is inconsequential for his ideal of practical harmony between the variety of human ideals in social life. The idea of God, on the other hand, is central for James because it symbolizes our possible intimacy with and in the world, not the promise of an eventual reward for justice in the afterlife.

“Divinity Lies All About Us”: Great Men and Progress James’s concern in his ethical writings accordingly lies not in specifying the paths by which we may attain virtue, but in exhorting his readers to both overcome the “blindness” that leaves them insensitive to the myriad ways in which other individuals derive value in their lives and to embrace a

110  The Principle of Political Hope strenuous mood of moral action. In these writings, we see the full sweep of James’s pluralism as well as his individualist presumption that social progress occurs mysteriously thanks to the heroism of great men. James is agnostic when it comes to the content of one’s moral ideals so long as their pursuit does not infringe upon other individuals’ ability to do the same. What matters is that every individual discover their idiosyncratic moral vocation, for “wherever a process of life communicates an eagerness to him who lives it, there the life becomes genuinely significant.”156 I say “discover” because the process by which one comes to recognize what makes one’s life significant is obscure: James explains that the “higher vision of an inner significance” we each possess is a “vital secret” that occurs to individuals suddenly and without warning, often in the most banal situations.157 The idiosyncrasy of each individual’s moral ideal should caution us, then, against harshly judging others’ pursuits, and James condemns “the stupidity and injustice of our opinions, so far as they deal with significance of alien lives.”158 Such blindness was not foreign to James, as he tells of having to check himself after precipitously passing judgment on the inhabitants of some impoverished Appalachian hovels he had come across years before. “The forest had been destroyed,” he writes, “and what had ‘improved’ it out of existence was hideous, a sort of ulcer, without a single element of artificial grace to make up for the loss of Nature’s beauty.” Talk about going back to nature! I said to myself, oppressed by the dreariness, as I drove by. Talk of country life for one’s old age and for one’s children! Never thus, with nothing but the bare ground and one’s bare hands to fight the battle! Never, without the best spoils of culture woven in! The beauties and commodities gained by the centuries are sacred. They are our heritage and birthright. No modern person ought to be willing to live a day in such a state of rudimentariness and denudation.159

Stopping to converse with the mountain men, however, James learned that they took great pride in having cleared and cultivated the land themselves: I instantly felt that I had been losing the whole inward significance of the situation. Because to me the clearings spoke of naught but denudation, I thought that to those whose sturdy arms and obedient axes had made them they could tell no other story. But, when they looked on the hideous stumps, what they thought of was personal victory . . . In short, the clearing,

Peirce and James  111 which to me was a mere ugly picture on the retina, was to them a symbol redolent with moral memories and sang a very paean of duty, struggle, and success.160

The moral of James’s cautionary tale, of course, is to maintain an openness to the practically infinite paths to moral satisfaction. Yet while the content of another’s moral ideals is no ground for judgment, James valorizes the heroic form of active life these ideals foment, and this concern pulses through the essays published together with “The Will to Believe.” In “Is Life Worth Living?,” James answers the titular question in the affirmative with the proviso that it is so “no matter what it bring, if only such combats may be carried to successful terminations and one’s heel set on the tyrant’s throat.”161 Life is struggle, and moral convictions are nothing if they do not lead us to decisive action in the face of uncertainty. Belief being willingness to act, moral belief is the willingness to act for one’s ideals amid the flux and arduousness of existence: “It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all.” A strenuous mood in morality is what enables us to keep striving even when risk appears overwhelming, and the will to believe requires such determination, since, as James never tires of repeating, “often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true.”162 For James, the significance of the Appalachian farmers’ valuation of their land is not that they had moral vision, but that they achieved their ends through “struggle” and thus identified their actions as personal victories over nature’s adversity. Elsewhere James explains that without risk and struggle, moral ends have little appeal. What excites us “is the everlasting battle of the powers of light with those of darkness: with heroism, reduced to its bare chance, yet ever anon snatching victory from the jaws of death.”163 In and of itself, idealism does not suffice for the moral life; we also need a passionate willingness to act with joy in service of those ideals. For James, religious faith offers just the sort of cosmological narrative capable of satisfying the human need for struggle, as we can each cast ourselves as warriors in the battle of good with evil. Hence “even if there were no metaphysical or traditional grounds for believing in a God, men would postulate one simply as a pretext for living hard.”164 James does not, however, retreat from his pluralism in extolling the strenuous mood of morality. In line with his reflections on his Appalachian farmer, James admits that “wishing for heroism and the spectacle of human nature on the rack, I had never noticed the great fields of heroism lying round about me, I had

112  The Principle of Political Hope failed to see it present and alive,” and he urges his readers not to fall prey to traditional conceptions of virtue. Nowadays, he explains, while it may appear that “higher heroisms and the old rare flavors are passing out of life,” we can find contemporary analogues “in the daily lives of the laboring classes.”165 That said, James rues the “barrenness and ignobleness of the more usual laborer’s life” consisting “in the fact that it is moved by no such ideal inner springs.”166 Toiling as they do more for bread and tobacco than for ennobling ends, the laboring classes are in the thrall of an expediency contrary to the strenuous mood that makes life significant. One might expect James to provide a solution to the dearth of opportunity for ennobling struggle by offering a critique of the systemic social structures relegating men to moral cowardice by trapping them in a cycle of exploitation, but here we find the limits of James’s pluralism as a tool for political theory. The ground of James’s pluralism resides, as we have seen, in the “secret and mystery” of each individual’s discovery of their own moral vocation.167 As such, the spark of strenuous morality is particular to the person, which breeds in James an aversion to systematic social solutions to what is very much an individual problem of discovery. Despite recognizing the oppressive potential of economic structures that force one to ignore ideals for the sake of mere existence, for example, James maintains that one’s moral vocation is a personal, private matter entirely up to the individual. Action takes precedence in belief, but it is not action directed toward collective or structural transformation: “There is only one way to improve ourselves, and that is by some of us setting an example which others may pick up and imitate till the new fashion spreads from east to west.”168 For fear of paternalism, James refuses to posit any potential institutional or systematic levers for change in the world, and thus his pluralism leads him away from programmatic political plans and toward an anarchistic individualism in which heroism is the primary virtue of public life and the motor of progress. This individualism is evident in many of James’s occasional writings on politics. James was one of his era’s major public intellectuals and voiced opinions on many of the pressing issues of the day.169 In all of his pronouncements, James ignores the systemic reasons for social ills in favor of a psychological understanding of their causes. State action can be helpful, but it does not get to the roots of the problems, and is thus generally played down. Lynching, for example, must be combated with “heroic” means, including strong social legislation and the execution of mob inciters, though James attributes its appeal not to structural racism but to the fact that

Peirce and James  113 illiterate whites have no other outlet for their passions.170 Similarly, while James recognizes that war is a grave ill, he treats armed conflict as a result of the need for men to express their vital energies, not as a consequence of power politics in the international system. His solution to war is accordingly to find a different outlet for our “military feelings” in the creation of a national civil service into which would be conscripted all young men who would otherwise have sought to sow their martial oats in fighting.171 The same goes for James’s vehement opposition to imperialism and colonialism, brought into focus by the brutal American conquest of the Philippines and the support it garnered from his one-​time Harvard student Theodore Roosevelt. Rather than seeing imperialism à la his contemporaries J. A. Hobson and V. I. Lenin as a structural imperative of capitalism,172 James views it as a psychological problem of blindness toward the inner lives of others, in this case the Filipino population.173 Even when James does flirt with a structural solution, as in his discussion of the antagonism between labor and capital, he suggests that such social change is beyond the means of humanity and retreats to a psychological solution. As he puts it, “the distribution of wealth has doubtlessly slowly got to change: such changes have always happened and will happen to the end of time.” This comment comes in passing, however, and is immediately followed by the claim that such change will not make “any genuine vital difference” for the parties involved insofar as social change cannot foment the spark of moral vocation.174 The real problem in the labor question, James writes, is that each side in the dispute “ignores the fact that happiness and unhappiness and significance are a vital mystery; each pins them absolutely on some ridiculous feature of the external situation; and everybody remains outside of everybody else’s sight.”175 When confronted with what are essentially social and structural problems, James’s solution is psychological exhortation to think about them differently. Space constrains further discussion of this point, but it should be noted that James’s neglect of the institutional context in which we come to our habits extends to his characterization of religion by its subjective experiential qualities alone,176 which Charles Taylor complains misses the central significance of ritual in Catholicism,177 a worry that can be voiced as well about its appropriateness for Judaism, Haitian vodun, or any other system of faith deeply linked to cultic practice. The problem for James and political philosophy is not that he is a relativist, but that his understanding of the construction of ideals and the structural circumstances that enable or impede their pursuit is sociologically mute.178

114  The Principle of Political Hope *** James’s laissez-​faire social heroism is even more explicit in his discussions of the grounds for political hope, in James’s case toward “the reign of peace and in the gradual advent of some sort of socialistic equilibrium.”179 As with Peirce, James takes his cue from contemporary theories of evolution, but unlike Peirce, he sets himself squarely against Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinism. His opposition to Spencer does not stem from the prioritization of struggle in social life, of course, which James fully endorsed, nor does it stem from Spencer’s amorality. Rather, James denies Spencer’s structural determinism, arguing that social change is and has always been the product of the inspiration of “great men.” Whereas Spencer would claim that social changes “are irrespective of persons, and independent of individual control,” “due to the environment, to the circumstances, the physical geography, the ancestral conditions, the increasing experience of outer relations; to everything, in fact, except the Grants and the Bismarks, the Joneses and the Smiths,” James offers that social change is “due to the accumulated influences of individuals, of their examples, their initiatives and their decisions.”180 As James sees it, the true moral of Darwin’s story is not that the environment is all-​powerful, but that evolutionary variation operates at a “molecular and invisible” level over which we have no control.181 These variations are compatible, moreover, “with any social, political, and physical conditions of environment.”182 Evolution proceeds along without any input from us, and particular adaptations take hold serendipitously according to the mutual interaction of the agents and the contexts in which they find themselves. Incorporating his individualism into evolution, James argues that environments “select” certain men for greatness, whose actions then directly or indirectly cause the “mutations of societies.”183 Since we can never know how or when such great men are produced, the social theorist “must simply accept geniuses as data, just as Darwin accepts his spontaneous variations.”184 The community, James writes, “may evolve in many ways,”185 but we have no control over its direction—​geniuses will crop up and steer us forward, whether we like it or not. Our hope lies in the possibility that some good men will arise and we may learn to imitate their examples. Thus evolutionary theory gives James what he calls “the lasting justification of hero-​worship.”186 Against this evolutionary background, James’s essay “The Social Value of the College Bred” brings the question of hope directly to bear on democracy. The value of a college education, he explains, resides in enabling us to “learn what types of activity have stood the test of time”187 such that we

Peirce and James  115 moderns can imitate history’s example and strike out into the world with boldness. This learning is essential for democracy, which must, more than any other regime, have its “sons and daughters skilful.”188 James’s worry is that the low intellectual level of the masses—​the personal significance of their lives notwithstanding—​jeopardizes the democratic future. Indeed, we cannot know if democracy will ever succeed, but insofar as it is like a religion, we must persevere on its path. The college bred accordingly play a role of particular importance in our democratic future insofar as this class (“les intellectuels!”) can help it “catch the higher, healthier tone” of ideal ends.189 In James’s words, “we alumni and alumnae of the colleges are the only permanent presence that corresponds to the aristocracy in older countries,” and our hope resides in maintaining the tried and true ideals of truth and justice. If we are to be “the yeast-​cake for democracy’s dough . . . we must see to it that culture spreads broad sails.” And why should we expect high culture to lead toward progress? Because it is the repository of permanently worthwhile ideals, the “ceaseless whisper” of which, “give them but time, must warp the world in their direction.”190 The hope for democracy then lies in the encouragement of an elite stratum of individuals, themselves following the noblest ideals in American history, who may act as moral beacons for those less fortunate. In this, the hope for democracy is identical to the hope for moral progress, to be predicated on the actions of those few individuals graced by circumstance who can lead us to the promised land. James explains this philosophy of history best in a passage from “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life” worth quoting in full: The course of history is nothing but the story of men’s struggles from generation to generation to find the more and more inclusive moral order. Invent some manner of realizing your own ideals which will also satisfy the alien demands—​that and that only is the path to peace! Following this path, society has shaken itself into one sort of relative equilibrium after another by a series of social discoveries quite analogous to those of science . . . The anarchists, nihilists, and free-​lovers; the free-​silverites, socialists, and single-​tax men; the free-​traders and civil-​service reformers; the prohibitionists and anti-​vivisectionists; the radical Darwinians with their idea of the suppression of the weak—​these and all the conservative sentiments of society arrayed against them, are simply deciding through actual experiment by what sort of conduct the maximum amount of good can be gained and kept in this world . . . The pure philosopher can only

116  The Principle of Political Hope follow the windings of the spectacle, confident that the line of least resistance will always be towards the richer and the more inclusive arrangement, and that by one tack after another some approach to the kingdom of heaven is incessantly made.191

In sum, though James is insistent about the indispensability of hope and believes progress only to arise from an active engagement with life, his psychological individualism and pluralism, not to mention his sheer delight in the kaleidoscope of human aims, leaves him disinterested in the institutional and structural means by which a democratic public can orient its collective self toward a more just and humane future.

Conclusion Though Peirce’s work reflects a logical severity of judgment borne of an assumed insight into the divine mind and James’s work reflects a pluralism derived from the humbler but no less intricate domain of the human mind, both thinkers ultimately conceive of the realization of social hope as beyond the powers of collective political agency. In the scope of this study, however, Peirce and James mark certain improvements on answering the question of hope posed by Kant while at the same time reflecting a retreat from an attempt to provide a concrete political perspective on how to bridge the gap between subjective aspiration and objective possibility at the core of hope’s problematic. On the one hand, their mutual acceptance of the action-​ theoretic foundation of belief, Bain’s idea that belief is best defined as a willingness to act, enables us to bypass concerns about rationally deciding to believe that murmurs beneath Kant’s account of praktische Glaube. Insofar as I act, I believe, and the question of what to believe comes to the fore rather than the question of why I should believe that Kant addresses to the skeptic. Moreover, insofar as belief is the end of inquiry, we can also see the glimmers of an intersubjective account of the content of social hope, even if Peirce does not think that his conception of community is appropriate for practical affairs. James and Peirce, furthermore, suggest that experimentation is the only sure method of knowing what sorts of actions can work for the concrete melioration of society, an orientation toward practical results which can sustain hope entirely absent in Kant’s a priori certainty and only accepted in Bloch if it accords with a material latency conceptually determined a priori. The view

Peirce and James  117 of experimentation in both authors treated in this chapter varies, with Peirce exhibiting little interest in the sorts of experiments in living James exhorts, but neither maintains a conception of what the results of our experimentation must be in advance of the experiment itself. On the other hand, neither Peirce nor James extends their thinking in any detail to the social foundations for the creation of habits of inquiry and openness on which progress relies, thereby undercutting the possibility of concretely instantiating hope for social melioration as a consequence of collective action. In Peirce’s case, the masses’ inability to exercise logical self-​control, together with the sway of passions in practical conduct, lead him to deny the possibility of agent-​orchestrated political hope, thereby yielding an evolutionary pastiche of Kant’s providential history without its public levers of potential change in state organization and pedagogy. As such, Peirce’s hope is predicated on an absolutist logic of necessity similar in form to what we have seen in Bloch. In James’s case, moral pluralism leads him to shy away from any positive political program involving the reconstruction of the social bases of subjectivity, leaving him in the end to similarly rely on a “scientific” philosophy of history in which hope resides in the serendipitous confluence of great leaders and propitious moments. James is like Kant in that he predicates hope on the needs of moral subjects, but he takes a step back from Kant insofar as he, like Peirce, refuses to specify the social spaces in which hopeful interventions into history can be directed. In their work, we find nothing like Kant’s practical recommendations for perpetual peace, education, and publicity, Bloch’s revolutionary praxis, or, as we shall soon see, Dewey’s democratic activism. Despite ostensibly rejecting evolutionary determinism, Peirce’s and James’s appeals to evolution both amount to a denial of the capacity of humans to contribute in any intelligent manner to their collective future as humanity; instead, we are to drift along until the unpredictable currents of history bring us ashore. Taken together, however, we can glean much from Peirce and James about how a different pragmatic account of political hope might look. Peirce’s refusal to apply his community of scientific inquiry to vital matters could gain a good deal from James’s pluralist openness to other forms of moral aspiration, as we can imagine communication between individuals as a process of overcoming the certain blindnesses they carry as a step toward a social hermeneutics of a public’s collective identity. Similarly, James’s steadfast insistence on the rationally incommensurable nature of our personal moral ideals

118  The Principle of Political Hope could gain from an intersubjective Peircean community as a basis for identifying common collective aspirations. Had Peirce and James attended more to the concrete instantiation of habits in social life, they might have revised their respective denials of the possibility of intelligent intervention in public affairs. This is the challenge taken up by Dewey.

4 Dewey and Democratic Experimentation An American philosophy of history must perforce be a philosophy for its future, a future in which freedom and fullness of human companionship is the aim, and intelligent cooperative experimentation the method. —​Dewey, German Philosophy and Politics1

Introduction The path of political hope I’ve traced, beginning with the Kantian subject and traversing the assorted cosmoses of Bloch, Peirce, and James, culminates in the work of John Dewey, the most politically oriented of pragmatism’s originators. I ended my discussion of Kant by arguing that dualism damns his theory in the end, leaving a gap between subjective aspiration and objective possibility that cannot be bridged on his system’s terms. The subsequent thinkers I have treated each contribute something to overcoming this gap: Bloch with his conception of concreteness as the measure of political hope, Peirce with his emphasis on reality’s intersubjective construction, and James with his insistence on action as the center of belief as well as his value pluralism. For two reasons, Dewey’s work marks a qualitative step beyond these thinkers. First, more than even James, Dewey undermines the dualism of radical and material hope by stressing the reciprocal construction of the two in practice. Second, as a result of this mutual implication of will and world, of psychology and metaphysics, Dewey locates the source of political hope in democracy, in contradistinction to James, who sees hope for democracy in the creation of a cultural elite. Since Dewey conceives of democracy as more than a system of government, however, its hope is predicated on reconstructing the habits and institutions of social life in service of purposive intelligence in human conduct, such that the democratic citizens may perform.

The Principle of Political Hope. Loren Goldman, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197675823.003.0005

120  The Principle of Political Hope Though the idea that there is a special relationship between democracy and hope is present even in Thucydides, the topic has not garnered extensive comment.2 At first glance, it could appear that democratic hope is simply a species of political hope with an institutional twist: if hope is an anticipatory stance toward a desired possible future state of affairs whose realization is uncertain, democratic hope is the belief that this objective can be achieved by democratic means.3 This means-​based view works logically, and many real people undoubtedly live in the light of monarchic, plutocratic, or authoritarian hope. To be sure, democratic hope involves democratic means to achieve political ends, but by leaving the nature of democracy itself unthematized, this view ignores aspects of democratic hope that distinguish it from its nondemocratic conceptual counterparts. On my reading, John Dewey corrects this transferable view of hope by emphasizing the unique complementarity of the regulative idea of democracy with intelligent habits of openness and experimentation. The idea that Dewey offers a novel, action-​theoretic account of hope may be surprising in light of the standard reading of Dewey as endorsing a quasi-​mystical leap into the unknown. Most notoriously, Richard Rorty reduces Dewey’s democratic hope to a simple faith in democracy, calling his metaphysical writings a “sidetrack” and endorsing what he calls Dewey’s “ungrounded hope” as a helpful mode of redescription that those of us morally committed to democracy should simply embrace.4 Likewise, Robert Westbrook describes Deweyan hope as a “deep-​seated trust” in democratic life while remaining silent on the grounds we have for maintaining this trust in the absence of metaphysical guarantees of progress, not least when the sort of community Dewey envisions does not yet exist.5 A more extreme view is found in the work of Patrick Deneen, for whom Dewey’s quotidian focus disqualifies his project tout court from the language of hope, since according to Deneen’s theological characterization hope only deals with the divinely transcendent; as such, Dewey is merely a Panglossian optimist.6 I aim to show that such interpretations of Deweyan hope as simple faith are one-​sided, and in doing so will defend Dewey against the common but undeserved charge that his thought is insensitive to the concrete difficulties of political power. Not all scholars emphasize Dewey’s lay theology.7 In the only monograph on Dewey’s theory of hope, Stephen Fishman parses a number of important characteristics of the concept and its role in Dewey’s work.8 For Fishman, Dewey’s theory of hope incorporates a number of understandings of the theme often kept distinct in the historical literature, reading it as an emotion,

Dewey and Democratic Experimentation  121 an estimate, an expectation, a habit, and a virtue alike, and thus deserves praise for its attention to hope’s variegated complexity in practical experience. Dewey’s unique contribution to the discourse on hope is his interpretation of it as a native impulse anchored in a biological picture of humankind. Fishman portrays two subsequent transformations of this native impulse as “disciplined hope,” or that which is constructed according to an intelligent plan, and “reasonable hope,” or that which incorporates critical moral reflection upon the appropriateness of the goals of one’s hope.9 This analysis is valuable, and Fishman buttresses his reconstruction of Dewey’s theory of hope with illuminating scholarship. My account differs in its emphasis on the holistic nature of democratic hope as a mutually constituted relationship between members of society and the socially constructed institutions of that society, rather than on the internal components of hope as a psychological stance. Fishman’s distillation of the keys to Dewey’s hope as “gratitude, intelligent wholeheartedness, and enriched present experience” is spot-​on,10 and yet his subjective characterization of these habits can be concretely situated within Dewey’s understanding of their social formation and public use. A second work of note is Patrick Shade’s exploration of hope in pragmatist thought as a set of habits to be cultivated in the formation of character.11 While Shade stresses the explicit personal cultivation of hope in individuals, I emphasize the soil in which this cultivation may take root, namely the reconstruction of society and hence hope’s political manifestation. Moreover, my account of habit has a different focus from Shade’s insofar as it emphasizes the primacy of environing conditions in the formation of habit. Though Shade situates his pragmatic theory of hope in a contextualist account of human experience, it often seems as if the contexts of human activity are populated by humans and humans alone, embodied in a world, but not a world to change. Since Shade does not incorporate the material reality of social life into his account, there is an air of unreality about his claims on habit. This comes out most clearly in his endorsement of James’s recommendations in the Principles of Psychology for changing habit, whereby sheer willpower is the driving force. On my account, Dewey could countenance this Jamesian way of attacking the problem. As Dewey writes in an attack on the Alexander technique, which may be read as a challenge to James’s willful transformation of habit, bad habits can no more dismissed by a direct effort of will than the conditions which create drought can be dispelled by whistling for wind. It is as reasonable to

122  The Principle of Political Hope expect a fire to go out when it is ordered to stop burning as to suppose that a man can stand straight in consequence of a direct action of thought and desire. The fire can be put out only by changing objective conditions; it is the same with the rectification of bad posture.12

Neglecting the role of environing conditions in Dewey’s philosophy of conduct is a common fault in works on Deweyan hope that this chapter seeks to remedy, for without an appreciation of how radically Dewey undermines the traditional distinction between subject and object, his account of democratic hope remains elusive, and the importance of his cardinal conception of social reconstruction can easily be overlooked. My criticism of the literature on Dewey can be summed up by Orwell’s complaint about Dickens: “He is always pointing to a change of spirit rather than a change of structure.”13 Dewey indeed holds that hope is vested in individuals, and that our faith in democracy ultimately depends on the ability of individuals to transform themselves, but it often escapes notice that the only way to transform individuals is to transform their environments, and thus that the establishment of democratic hope requires concrete action toward conditions amenable to its realization. Put simply, transforming individuals requires transforming the society in which those individuals find themselves. Those familiar with Dewey’s educational writings know that their key is a rethinking of not merely the curriculum challenging students, but the entire learning environment;14 just as one cannot (normally) expect a poorly trained student to smarten up by strong admonition, one cannot expect individuals to embrace a more democratic way of life—​however defined—​if they are given nothing more than a scolding and a pat on the back. And yet this is what much of the literature makes Dewey say. Thus we must first explore his idiosyncratic ontology to see why Dewey holds that democracy alone among political and social arrangements may engender hope. Dewey’s reconstruction of the subject–​object relationship as one of mutual constitution enables him to locate democratic hope in something more concrete than a subjective will to believe, but without making its objective ground more than an uncertain and at times fragile possibility disclosed through experimentation, which we must instantiate through the transformation of our habitual environment. Democracy engenders hope because it establishes conditions for intelligent action: the formation of democratic publics enables (1) the identification of social problems more readily than in

Dewey and Democratic Experimentation  123 any other social formation, and (2) the same inclusion of voices brings with it the prospect of widened methods of experimentation for the solution of identified problems. What separates Dewey from his contemporary Progressive era theorists like Herbert Croly, Walter Weyl, and Walter Lippmann is his dynamic, ecological vision of experience in which self and environment mutually (re)construct one another, such that democracy is not merely an instrumental good in the service of society but mirrors and transcends human experience.15 Understanding this systematic aspect of Dewey’s thought is key to understanding the radical nature of his aspirations as well as the clue to his continuous personal activist engagement in politics. For Dewey, hope in democracy is not passive; his insistence on the inseparability of theory and practice burdens political philosophers and political agents alike with the responsibility of remaking the world in order to liberate its (and our) democratic potential.

Experience and the Reciprocity of Will and World All conduct is interaction between elements of human nature and the environment, natural and social. —​ Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct16

In opening with the concept of experience, I take my cue from Dewey himself, who poses the question: Is democracy a comparatively superficial human experiment, a device of petty manipulation, or does nature itself, as that is uncovered and understood by our best contemporaneous knowledge, sustain and support our democratic hopes and aspirations?17

He answers squarely in favor of the second option. To illuminate how Dewey weaves together an anti-​dualist naturalism with a commitment to democracy as a way of life, I focus on three concepts in his philosophical anthropology: experience, habit, and intelligence. Taken together, these topics hold the key to understanding the particular manner in which Dewey sees democracy as both the ground on which modern political hope stands as well as the soil in which such hope takes root.

124  The Principle of Political Hope Dewey is not interested in abstractions or universal truths, and he indicts the history of Western philosophy for what he perceives to be an obsessive quest for certainty at the expense of real human problems. While allowing that the starting point of any philosophical analysis is in some sense arbitrary, he also offers that “the notion of experience implied in the [philosophical and practical] questions most actively discussed gives a natural point of departure.”18 Since Dewey’s pragmatism committed him to the primacy of practice in knowledge and life alike, he needed to offer an account of experience as the locus of human conduct. Moreover, experience was an ideal concept for Dewey’s vision of philosophy as an exercise in recovery: denigrated in antiquity by Platonism and Christianity, even in its rise to prominence with British empiricism, experience remained a denuded, atomistic form of itself which quickly raised unanswerable questions.19 In Dewey’s view, this type of empiricism had become the dominant strand of contemporary philosophical thought; given that Dewey believed the “constant task” of thought was “to establish working connections between old and new subject matters,”20 his choice of experience as his starting point is self-​evident. Dewey considers his own philosophy a species of empiricism, yet he broadens the term’s meaning beyond the realm of sense-​perception to include all traits of experience, natural and social.21 This redefinition provides the clue to Deweyan hope: against the early modern view of experience as a subjectively held sensory basis affording questionable access to a questionably external world, in Dewey’s philosophy it becomes an expression of the mutually constituting relationship between will and world, and thereby the locus of connection between subjective aspiration and objective possibility. Dewey’s empiricism thus extends, like James’s radical empiricism, to relations between objects as well as our relations to the world and to each other. And like James, Dewey’s empiricism is rooted in a biological perspective of humans as organisms functioning within and hence with their environment.22 Against the traditional view in Western philosophy that experience is primarily a “knowledge affair” in which sovereign subjects encounter a given world across an epistemological gap, Dewey writes wryly that “to eyes not looking through ancient spectacles, it assuredly appears as an affair of the intercourse of a living being with its physical and social environment.”23 The biological roots of this conception are evident in a supplementary definition Dewey offers when he describes experience as “the entire organic agent-​patient in all its interaction with the environment, natural and social . . . Experiencing is just certain modes of interaction, of correlation, of

Dewey and Democratic Experimentation  125 natural objects among which the organism happens, so to say, to be one.” Accordingly, experience “means primarily . . . ways of doing and suffering” and cannot be delineated apart from the world in which we act and react;24 indeed, all action is ultimately “re-​action” to an environment. What results is an experimental conception of action, for the precariousness of existence means that “our undergoings are experiments in varying the course of events; our active tryings are trials and tests of ourselves.”25 “Undergoings” is Dewey’s shorthand for the “simultaneous doings and sufferings” that characterize human action in experience. Dewey notes that despite its connotation of something that happens to an agent (as in “he underwent surgery”), undergoing “is never mere passivity,” for the most patient patient is more than a receptor. He is also an agent—​a reactor, one trying experiments, one concerned with undergoing in a way which may influence what is still to happen . . . . Even if we shut ourselves up in the most clam-​like fashion, we are doing something; our passivity is an active attitude, not an extinction of response.26

By rejecting the picture of a ready-​made world populated by sovereign individuals, Dewey highlights the essential flux of existence. In a chapter of Experience and Nature titled “Existence as Precarious and Stable,” he introduces the basic fact that experience is ultimately unpredictable: human acts “are trespasses upon the domain of the unknown,” leaving the present potentially ominous in the face of an uncertain future.27 From Dewey’s perspective, Western philosophy’s hypostatization of the absolute as eternal and unchanging is a doomed attempt to avoid this reality, to anchor thought by orientating it toward (an unattainable) constitutive certainty, and Dewey calls this conversion of the changing into the static “the philosophic fallacy.”28 In light of Dewey’s reconceptualization of experience, the aim of intelligent human effort should be not to determine absolute ends, but rather to strive “to make stability of meaning prevail over the instability of events.”29 One consequence of Dewey’s understanding of experience as an interaction between agent and environment is his transactionalist account of knowl­edge, or better yet, “knowing.” Against the picture of knowledge as eternal and ultimately rooted outside of experience, Dewey holds it to be a product of our engagement with our environment. Thought begins with “a felt difficulty,” a problematic situation in experience in which an organism’s functioning within the environment is obstructed. In light of a felt difficulty,

126  The Principle of Political Hope human reflection proceeds in steps toward the resolution of the problematic situation.30 The upshot of Dewey’s conception of knowledge is that belief or disbelief is a response to the assonance or dissonance of an idea, plan, or valuation with the environment into which it is projected. Such an instrumentalism “means that knowing is literally something which we do; that analysis is ultimately physical and active; that meanings in their logical quality are standpoints, attitudes, and methods of behaving towards facts.”31 To keep with Dewey’s metaphorization of action as experiment, knowledge and belief derive from the results of our experiments in the world. With such a view, Dewey stresses the fallibilistic and provisional nature of knowledge, and by the time he wrote his Logic at the age of seventy-​nine, he had dropped the language of “truth” altogether in favor of “warranted assertability” as the end of inquiry.32 What is important to take from this situational conception of knowledge is that what we take to be true—​what warrants assertability at any given time—​is determined by our interaction with the world, and that the context in which we feel a problem requiring attention is inseparable from the very idea of a problem. To put this in a way that will be illuminating for my subsequent discussion of democracy, one can say that a problem is constituted by the holistic situation in which it arises. Situating human experience also enables Dewey to develop a purposive conception of action and knowledge. Dewey is neither a teleologist like Hegel or Marx who presents a global narrative of reality’s tendency toward a fixed end in which we all make cameos in a world-​historical play, nor is he a proponent of an Aristotelian entelechy in which phenomena ultimately achieve their full and final actualization. For Dewey, these conceptions of teleology fail for the same reason: they both maintain telê of “fixed, eternal ends.”33 Given his transactional and fallibilist conception of knowledge, Dewey holds instead that means and ends stand in a far more dynamic relationship, and that the terms themselves are “two names for the same reality.”34 In Naoko Saito’s words, ends function “as a means by serving as the perspective from which we anticipate the next act,” and “a means is the name for the next immediate action to be taken as ‘a temporary end.’ ”35 Ends therefore become “ends-​in-​view,” provisional objectives rather than fixed essences or even limits toward which action aims: “An end is a device of intelligence in guiding action, instrumental to freeing troubled and divided tendencies.”36 As Saito points out, Dewey’s conception of ends is open-​ended, for the consummation of one action means the commencement of a new set of potentialities.37 Moreover, ends-​in-​view themselves become means in their own

Dewey and Democratic Experimentation  127 realization.38 The sense in which Dewey reorders these terms can be gleaned from another of his descriptions of experience in his essay “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy,” where he writes that experience is preoccupied “with things which are coming (are now coming, not just to come).”39 Ends are malleable, and change according to the means at our disposal as well as our changing valuations of our aims, both as ends-​in-​view and also according to a traditional conception of end as a final purpose, albeit not fixed. The dynamic conception of experience further allows Dewey to stress the importance of temporal consciousness in any account of human conduct, for “aims, ideals, do not exist simply in ‘mind’; they exist in character, in personality and action.”40 Insofar as knowledge is a transaction between the agent and its environment, temporality enters into the picture first in an unavoidable historicism, for our concepts must be understood as functions of the contingent moment the inquirer inhabits.41 Yet even without a genetic appreciation of knowledge, Dewey’s ontological picture entails temporal consciousness by the very fact that experience is uncertain. This second aspect of temporality comes to the fore in “The Need for a Recovery” when Dewey describes in detail how experience may be seen as “but a future implicated in the present.” He ventures that hope and anxiety (which are not self-​enclosed states of feeling, but active attitudes of welcome and wariness) are dominant qualities of experience. Imaginative forecast of the future is the forerunning quality of behavior rendered available for guidance in the present. Day-​dreaming and castle-​ building and esthetic realization of what is not practically achieved are offshoots of this practical trait, or else practical intelligence is a chastened fantasy.42

This passage brings together two important ideas. First, Dewey’s identification of hope and anxiety as dominant qualities of experience as well as his invocation of imagination suggest the underlying significance of narrative structure to agents in his world-​vision. Though in and of itself temporal consciousness does not necessarily become narrative (although it is hard to see how it couldn’t meaningfully become so), that Dewey held it so is clear from his claim that what is unique about any experience is the “property of awareness or perception” of its temporal situatedness. Like Ricoeur, for whom narrative is a condition of the possibility of meaning, Dewey describes the characteristic human need “for possession and appreciation

128  The Principle of Political Hope of the meaning of things,” which can only be satisfied by a forward-​looking mode of perception that orients action.43 When he explicates the temporal nature of experience in inquiry, the inherently narrative quality of consciousness is evident: “The initial stage [i.e., the experienced situation] is capable of being judged in light of its probable course and consequence. There is anticipation.”44 In other words, conscious human activity is predicated upon a narrative of possibility and actuality, without which action is meaningless because it is blind. As he writes in the Logic, “what is described [in judgment] exists within some temporal process to which ‘narration’ applies.”45 Second, the conceptualization of future in activity is the work of imaginative projection, a creative drawing out of a situation’s possibilities in which the dynamics of the present are seen in light of their diverse conceivable termini.46 It is important to see that the imagination Dewey taps is not detached reverie or unworldly fantasy: rather, Dewey envisions an imagination that reworks and transforms the world into which it is projected. As Thomas Alexander writes, imagination for pragmatists “is neither merely an extension of the passive capacity of sensation, subsumable under preestablished rational categorical structures, nor is it a purely intuitive source of novelty. It is a mode of action and as such seeks to organize experience so that it anticipates the world in a manner that is meaningful and satisfying.”47 We do not think ourselves into nebulous nothingness; imagination is a tool for the transformation of our world, and since the material to be transformed is already given to us in the form of our inherited institutions and habits of social interaction, Dewey calls its exercise “imaginative recovery”: Imaginative recovery of the bygone is indispensable to successful invasion of the future, but its status is that of an instrument. To ignore its import is the sign of an undisciplined agent; but to isolate the past, dwelling upon it for its own sake and giving it the eulogistic name of knowledge, is to substitute the reminiscence of old-​age for effective intelligence. The movement of the agent-​patient to meet the future is partial and passionate; yet detached and impartial study of the past is the only alternative to luck in assuring success to passion.48

Hope lies in the possibility of creatively transforming our concrete practices, or habits, in order to foment our ideals.

Dewey and Democratic Experimentation  129

Habit and the Shaping of Dewey’s Philosophical Anthropology To change the working character or will of another we have to alter objective conditions which enter into his habits . . . . No amount of preaching . . . will accomplish the results. There must be change in objective arrangements and institutions. We must work on the environment, not merely the heads of men. —​Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct49

Even if hope is a primary feature of existence by dint of our situated uncertainty, it remains to be seen how it translates into a political concern, let alone a democratic one. Why should democracy lend itself to hope? Dewey’s answer is that democracy provides an ideal model for the intelligent negotiation and reconstruction of competing habits. As a result, democracy is the best political hope for social reconstruction, a reconstruction that is ultimately self-​reconstruction. Before turning then to politics proper, we must first get clear on Dewey’s understanding of habit, his term of art for the socially acquired physical and mental practices that constitute our meaningful existence and thus provide stability amidst the flux of existence. Habit is never sui generis: Dewey believes that all organisms, including humans, are foundationally constituted by impulse or instinct.50 Impulse is a native element of any life, and yet only comes to have form through habit; impulses are habit’s pliable material, the putty molded by social experience into behavioral patterns. To paraphrase Kant, for Dewey, habit without impulse is moribund, and impulse without habitual form is meaningless.51 For this reason, although impulse is “primary” for life insofar as it is “native” or inborn, it is only profitable to discuss habit, for only through habit does impulse find expression. As Dewey explains, despite the fact that from a biological point of view habits “are secondary and acquired, not native and original,” they are nonetheless primary for human experience and human action: “In conduct the acquired is the primitive.”52 Human Nature and Conduct, Dewey’s major work on social and moral psychology, therefore begins with habit and addresses impulse afterward. “All habits,” writes Dewey, “are demands for certain kinds of activity; and they constitute the self. In any intelligible sense of the word will, they are will . . . . They form our effective desires and they furnish us with our working capacities.”53 Furthermore, “the essence of habit is an acquired

130  The Principle of Political Hope predisposition to ways or modes of response, not to particular acts except as, under special conditions, these express a way of behaving.”54 In any situation, we act through acquired habits particular to the context at hand, be it the mode of addressing one’s elders, crossing the street, or writing an essay. Habits are both a result of the objective material conditions of society—​as Dewey explains later in examining the effect of the machine age on habits of communication—​and a central element of objective conditions for action insofar as they regulate conduct toward particular ends. Indeed, the very selection of ends is a function of habit, insofar as the interpretation of which ends may be appropriate in any given situation is habitual. The modes of human interaction condition customs—​another word for habit—​which form “deeply grooved systems of interaction” already established at the time of any individual’s birth.55 Society is prior to the individual in the sense that “habits are formed for the most part under the influence of the customs of a group.”56 These “definite modes of interaction of persons with one another” create intersubjective self-​replicating norms that channel conduct toward particular responses to different situations.57 The monadic self of early modernity is consequently decentered into the collection of habits in our environing conditions. In Dewey’s well-​known phrase, “character is the interpenetration of habits.”58 Character is not stable, however, as the self “is in the process of making” at all times.59 As environing conditions change, the self responds and shifts to a new composition of habits. Human relations are especially efficacious in these shifts, since “the environing affairs directly important are those formed by the activities of other human beings.”60 The social conditions for conduct thus comprise all institutions of society, formal and informal, insofar as they effect and reproduce habits. To change habits, one needs to change these concrete conditions. The centrality of habit to Dewey’s social thought suggests that despite the emphasis in some recent studies on his philosophy’s biological foundations,61 we must not lose sight of its anthropological import. Though the impetus for Dewey’s situational understanding on experience may have been evolutionary functionalism, he writes that the word “experience” has its “nearest equivalents” in “such words as ‘life,’ ‘history,’ ‘culture,’ (in its anthropological use). It does not mean processes and modes of experiencing apart from what is experienced and lived.”62 In his unpublished draft introduction to the 25th anniversary reissue of Experience and Nature, Dewey goes so far as to declare that had he written the work in 1950, he would have titled it Culture and Nature on account of the first term’s capacity to capture the material and

Dewey and Democratic Experimentation  131 ideational complexes of meaning through which agents (or “agent-​patients”) encounter the world.63 Indeed, he had already oriented himself toward culture as the fundamental object of social inquiry in Freedom and Culture, the last major statement of his mature social philosophy, where he defines it as shorthand for the “complex of conditions which taxes the terms upon which human beings associate and live together.”64 Culture is thus a foundational catch-​all term, to which the institutions of society and politics are epiphenomenal: “If it is true that the political and legal react to shape [social relations], it is even more true that political institutions are an effect, not a cause.”65 As broad as Dewey’s use of the term may be, he specifies five “phases” or “factors” intrinsic to his understanding of culture: economics and politics (which Dewey views as inextricably linked), science and industrial technology, the arts, morality, and ideology, understood neutrally as “schools of social philosophy.”66 Anthropology has shown us, Dewey claims, that “whatever are the native constituents of human nature, the culture of a period and group is the determining influence in their arrangement; it is that which determines the patterns of behavior that mark out the activities of any group, family, clan, people, sect, faction, class.”67 Habit is a function of culture—​its grooved channels of interaction are the roadmaps of conduct—​and thus one cannot speak of the former, let alone talk of their change, without a comprehensive appreciation of the latter. Scholars have noted the similarities between Dewey’s conception of habit and Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus,68 but habit has a pedigree within anthropology dating back to Dewey’s contemporaries, and not only in the work of his Chicago colleague George Herbert Mead. Despite Dewey’s obvious appropriation of the term from James’s Principles of Psychology, his description of habit as a consequence of “social institutions and expectations” parallels its use in the then-​nascent field of academic anthropology more closely than James’s institutionally unmediated account,69 a difference also reflected in James’s literary rather than anthropological approach to culture. When Franz Boas, Dewey’s colleague at Columbia, writes in 1920 that “the activities of the individual are determined to a great extent by his social environment, but in turn his own activities influence the society in which he lives, and may bring about modifications in its form,”70 the words could be Dewey’s, not least because Boas then explains that “the social behavior of man depends to a great extent upon the earliest habits which are established before the time when connected memory begins . . . . Most of these habits do not rise into consciousness and are, therefore, broken with difficulty only.”71

132  The Principle of Political Hope For Dewey, the breaking of habits is precisely what reflects democracy’s promise as well as its peril. Dewey describes behavioral change in Human Nature and Conduct as a question of engineering,72 a metaphor that can suggest the reduction of behavior to a social physics and thus a crude determinism. It is important not to make this jump, which I will discuss in more detail later, but for the moment it should be kept in mind that in this instance Dewey qualifies his suggestion of engineering by applying it to “the arts of education and social guidance,” two broad domains of conditioning that form the bread and butter of political and ethical theorists; Dewey’s scientistic language, not his philosophy, is at fault here. Nonetheless, the question of determinism raises a perennially important issue for Dewey: How are humans supposed to work on the conditions of society if they are themselves a product of those conditions? Indeed, how could anyone obtain critical distance from habits enough to reflect upon them at all? Put in Hegel’s (and Bloch’s) terms, how might we envision a pragmatist dialectics? Since habits “canalize” our action and thought, we cannot simply step back and assess them independently of experience.73 Yet the loss of this transcendental moment is not as damaging as one might think: Dewey always speaks of habits in the plural, for there are practically infinite modes of human associations in any society. Dewey understands the social world pluralistically, and the profusion of habits means that they will often come into conflict. When they do conflict, the human organism may be shocked out of its nonreflective complacency in conduct and see its habits in relief against one another. The same logic applies in society; social engagement may foment a fruitful conflict of habits by drawing together different-​minded individuals onto a common plane, ideally oriented toward the solution of common problems facing the community at large. Just as Dewey believes the reconciliation of competing habits ideally spells individual “growth,” the closest thing to an ethical ideal for him, so the reconciliation of social habits in a way that leads to the greater fulfilment of all signals progress. However idealized this image may be, it can only be realized first through the transformation of social conditions such that new habits may be successfully instantiated. Dewey’s clearest exposition of this conception of progress can be found in his 1916 essay of the same name with which this book opens. To recall, he admits that the outbreak of the Great War had forced him and his contemporaries to rethink their earlier latent faith in progress, and he allows that he and others may have mistaken “the rapid change of conditions”

Dewey and Democratic Experimentation  133 evidenced in the scientific advances of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for progress itself.74 In light of this conflation, Dewey declares the need to rethink and make explicit the conditions for the possibility of progress in a more socially and actively mediated manner than that of James’s account discussed in the previous chapter. Blessed with the benefit of hindsight unavailable to James, deceased 1910, Dewey writes that two things are now apparent: First,—​progress depends not on the existence of social change but on the direction which human beings deliberately give that change. Secondly,—​ ease of social change is a condition of progress. Side by side with the fact that the mere substitution of a dynamic or readily changing social structure for a static society does not accomplish progress, stands the fact that this substitution furnishes the opportunity for progress.75

Hope for progress is thus rooted in the possibility of deliberate activity toward a projected future. Not just any deliberative activity will do: the sort of progressive activity Dewey envisions is a particular type of conduct he calls “intelligence,” to which I now turn.

Breaking and Making Habits: Intelligence and Reconstruction When environing conditions are no longer in equilibrium for the organism and habits thus conflict with goals at hand, the opportunity for reconstruction arises. The same goes for society. This reconstruction is effectuated by “intelligence,” a technical term in Dewey’s work meaning purposively oriented practical reason.76 Intelligence links directly to the temporal nature of experience: “The use of the given or finished to anticipate the consequences of processes going on is precisely what is meant by ‘ideas,’ by ‘intelligence.’ ”77 As we have seen, all action is for Dewey in some sense reaction to the environment, but not all reactions are equally appropriate to one’s ends. Intelligent action is a “reflective” response to a problematic situation, taking ends-​in-​ view into account and sorting through various means in order to effect a plan that will conduct one best toward one’s aim. Dewey’s belief that ideas are tools for action has often led to the accusation of an instrumental rationality of means that ignores critical moral judgments

134  The Principle of Political Hope about ends.78 Pragmatic intelligence has been seen as a technologism ignorant of its very irrationality in light of human emancipation; as Randolph Bourne puts it, the emphasis on intelligence could become “a mere surrender to the actual, an abdication of the ideal” in favor of “technique.”79 It is clear from Dewey’s writings, however, that he does not yield ideals to technology: if undesirable consequences would follow from the realization of a certain end, Dewey holds that that end must be revised, for “a pragmatic intelligence is a creative intelligence, not a routine mechanic.”80 Nevertheless, Dewey’s use of “intelligence” and “science” continues to provoke confusions and misreadings. Three criticisms resulting from misunderstanding are common. The first worries that Dewey is naïve, the second questions his faith in science, and the third is suspicious of the relationship between intelligence and mastery; all exist along the common axis of bridging the gap between subjective aspiration and objective possibility that I have been tracing through the problem of hope.

Intelligent Naïveté Bourne and Reinhold Niebuhr both worried that Dewey’s emphasis on intelligence was naïve, that to put so much to bear on reflective practical reason ignores the far more pressing problems of power and influence in the world.81 Writing in 1932, Niebuhr attacks from the left, arguing that the social problems Dewey means to address are rooted in the economic structure of society that his method of rational inquiry leaves untouched. Niebuhr makes two related points. The first is that Dewey’s emphasis on intelligence is mystifying because ideas and methods are epiphenomenal to a society’s mode of production.82 The second is that the “intelligence” Dewey prescribes for solving problems is already corrupted by society’s inequitable class structure. Against Dewey’s call for the use of scientific method in inquiry, Niebuhr claims that the social sciences themselves are “based upon the economic interest of the dominant social classes who are trying to maintain their special privileges in society” and thus cannot guide progressive politics.83 Dewey responds to Niebuhr in an essay titled “Intelligence and Power,” writing in regard to the first charge that only on a traditional conception of intelligence as distinct from and indeed preceding action can one hold that it is inadequate to human needs.84 With an action-​oriented, embodied conception of intelligence, the question of what method of thought-​action enables

Dewey and Democratic Experimentation  135 our ends-​in-​view is unavoidable, and “intelligence” fits the bill. In response to Niebuhr’s second point, Dewey is more forceful, writing that he does not claim that intelligence per se has power. With Niebuhr, he is willing to admit that “intelligence becomes a power only when it is brought into the operation of forces other than itself.”85 The question to be asked is not then how intelligence becomes power, but how power can be harnessed intelligently.

Wariness of Scientism A second criticism mixes Niebuhr’s skepticism toward intelligence with questions about using science as the model for intelligent action. Max Horkheimer’s 1947 Eclipse of Reason assails Dewey’s enthusiasm for intelligence with accusations of complicity in the positivist reduction of humans to data and an apparent lack of self-​critique.86 Like Bourne, Horkheimer argues that Dewey sacrifices values on the altar of method, and thus pragmatism’s “worship of natural sciences” makes it an unacceptable tool for emancipation.87 Moreover, with their obsessive practicality, pragmatists make no room for critical self-​reflection, thereby mimicking the worst in thoughtless self-​ duplication, to no end other than serving the needs of the “practical.” A more institutionally oriented version of this critique is lodged by Sheldon Wolin, who argues that Dewey’s picture of science is outdated, based on a conception of “small-​scale laboratories in universities” now hopelessly antiquated in the face of the reality of “ ‘big science’ housed within government departments and corporations, and organized accordingly.”88 For Wolin, Dewey’s misrecognition of contemporary scientific practice raises a second concern that the embrace of science as it is now leaves no room for democratic participation, participation that is unpredictable and hence resistant to the organization modern science aims to impose. Wolin is undoubtedly right about the problematically parasitical relationship between science and corporate control in the present age.89 Nonetheless, I don’t believe that this critique touches what’s going on in Dewey’s appropriation of scientific metaphors for his conception of intelligence, which amounts to something significantly less than the unqualified endorsement of the practices of scientists that Wolin reads in his work. For one, Dewey’s insistence on the reflective nature of ends in intelligence militates against the attribution of a value-​neutral scientific scheme to his philosophy, and indeed Dewey leaves the critical negotiation of values to democratic practice and deliberation. Furthermore, Wolin himself notes that

136  The Principle of Political Hope Dewey was hardly ignorant of the corrupting power of running together inquiry and capital.90 Horkheimer and Wolin err, however, in assuming Dewey’s talk of science refers to a set of existing practices rather than a general evidentiary method of inquiry. Here Dewey’s anthropological sense sheds light again. When he speaks of science as a model for social inquiry, he does not intend a reduction of social philosophy to social physics, but rather the more modest idea that only through attention to the results of our actions/​experiments can we gain insight into how to effectively direct subsequent activity. According to the conception Dewey offers in Freedom and Culture, a positivist approach to scientific method is precisely what intelligence means to preclude. Intelligent thinking is not reductive—​Dewey decries the “influence of belief in bald single forces”;91 instead, it engages with the total set of conditions in which a particular problem arises. Dewey describes himself as certain that solutions are idle until the problem has been placed in the context of elements that constitute culture as they interact with elements of native human nature. The fundamental postulate of the discussion is that isolation of any one factor, no matter how strong its working at a given time, is fatal to understanding and to intelligent action.92

The model for Dewey’s conception of intelligence is not science on the level of the industrial manipulation of nature, but science more broadly construed as a study of the modes of the practical consequences of human conduct. To be intelligent in a scientific mode is not to be subordinate to any particular institutional arrangement nor is it to hypostatize the instrumental logic of experiment. It involves instead an expansive attitude in inquiry (and hence life) of attention and openness in a Jamesian mood to evidentiary claims and the contexts in which they are made. To use a term from Dewey’s ethical thought, intelligence in inquiry is a function of “conscientiousness,” the ability to judge the significance of what we are doing and to use that judgment in directing what we do, not by means of direct cultivation of something called conscience, or reason, or a faculty of moral knowledge, but by fostering those impulses and habits which experience has shown to make us sensitive, generous, imaginative, impartial in perceiving the tendency of our inchoate dawning activities.93

Dewey and Democratic Experimentation  137 This anthropological orientation invites interpretive and hermeneutic methods, not positivistic fictions.

Intelligence as Mastery A last concern is that Dewey’s focus on intelligence is tantamount to the recommendation that we master the world, demanding an impossible sovereign control that ignores human finitude and the fragility of life. This critique is not commonly raised in works on Dewey, but his writings lend themselves to enough misinterpretation to warrant a regard to this criticism. What else can the desire for control be, even in the sense of Dewey’s intelligent “engineering,” save for the claim of human dominion over the world, a claim that is normatively suspect (e.g., in morally prioritizing humankind over nonhuman animals and the natural world), unrealistic (human power is, after all, limited), and politically dangerous (who chooses to control what and whom)? It should be clear by now, however, that mastery so understood cannot be Dewey’s aim by dint of the fact that he repeatedly stresses the precariousness and unpredictability of experience. No claim is made concerning the total control of an environment, let alone of the humans who inhabit that environment. When Dewey discusses forward-​looking intelligence and talks of “plans” to realize ends-​in-​view, he clearly denies sovereign mastery as a goal; throughout his work, the regulative, practically orienting function is intelligence’s overriding value. As he puts it in Human Nature and Conduct, rather than having its purpose being the “control of the future,” intelligence takes up the future as “only way to appraise [the present’s] significance,” for “study and planning are more important in the meaning, the enrichment of content, which they add to present activity than is the external control they effect.”94 While Lippmann saw in the same progressive moment a choice only between “drift” and “mastery,” the latter akin to a political technocracy, Dewey argued instead that “our choice is between the development of a technique by which intelligence will become an intervening partner and a continuation of a regime of accident, waste and distress.”95 The foregoing talk about intelligence and science may seem to crowd out hope’s affective, conative aspects, leaving us with a denuded probabilism rather than anything that can result in an imaginative, even spontaneous recovery for the future. It is important to note that Dewey does not see any great

138  The Principle of Political Hope divide between intelligence and affect. Emotions—​and Dewey regularly calls hope an emotion—​are powerful motive forces in humans, yet in themselves they are blind. If harnessed in the service of intelligent ends, however, their effects are salutary, and collusion between affect and intelligence is a prerequisite for progressive social reconstruction. As he writes in A Common Faith, intense emotion “may utter itself in action that destroys institutions. But the only assurance of birth of better ones is the marriage of emotion with intelligence.”96 Hope is already anchored by Dewey in our temporal consciousness by the precarious nature of existence, but we can only reasonably enact it through intelligence. At this point, it may help to rest for a moment and survey where we stand. Dewey’s interactionist ontology is the cornerstone of his bridge between subjective aspiration and objective possibility I’ve identified as the Kantian problematic of political hope. Like Kant, James cannot escape subjectivism because he is less concerned with the realizability of ideals than with their moral value for life; by contrast, Dewey’s naturalist experimentalism holds subjective will to concrete practice. On the other hand, where Bloch and Peirce both needed teleological metaphysics to inspire their worlds, Dewey retains a spark of radical voluntarism, for his definition of experience as the mutual constitution of subject and object through practice holds hope that we may with intelligent work shape the world according to our ideals. Both positive claims require we finally turn to democracy as the ground for Dewey’s intelligent hope.

Democracy and Progress Democracy is neither a form of government nor a social expediency, but a metaphysic of the relation of man and his experience to nature. —​Dewey, “Maeterlinck’s Philosophy of Life”97

I have argued that instead of being an inevitabilist,98 Dewey holds the view that if we are to have progress at all, it cannot be expected from the hand of nature or God, but only by the deliberate actions of humans through the application of intelligence to the transformation of social conditions. Because Dewey is a naturalist, he rejects the dualisms between subject and object as well as between will and world, instead implicating these binaries’ antipodes in the mutual construction of one another, and thus the transformation of

Dewey and Democratic Experimentation  139 the world effectively results in the transformation of ourselves as actors in that world. Democracy comes into the picture as the social formation ideally suited to effect an ongoing mutual reconstruction of agents and their world, and thus to vest one’s hope in democracy is to vest one’s hope in the capacity of humans to change their environment in a manner amenable to their continued flourishing or “growth,” Dewey’s metanormative end of human conduct. As Sidney Hook explains, growth “embraces all the positive intellectual, emotional, and moral ends which appear in everybody’s easy schedule of the good life and the good education—​growth in skills and powers, knowledge and appreciation, value and thought.”99 Growth’s precondition is a rupture in experience, requiring intelligence to reconcile the disharmonious strands of habit and give meaning to the new formation. Dewey thus remarks that “life grows when a temporary falling out is a transition to a more extensive balance of the energies of the organism with those of the conditions under which it lives.”100 A condition of growth is openness to the variegated dynamism of social life, and individual growth occurs when one changes one’s character in light of the changing environing conditions around oneself.101 The democratic ideal represents an imaginable world we desire to approach whose approximation is in large part up to human effort. Our hope toward its realization must be then a working hope that attempts to reconstruct our inherited world(s). In order to appreciate this active hope, we need to first “get rid of the ideas that lead us to believe that democratic conditions automatically maintain themselves, or that they can be identified with fulfillment of prescriptions laid down in a constitution.”102 Deweyan democracy is then much more than a system of political institutions. As he writes in The Public and Its Problems, “the idea of democracy is a wider and fuller idea than can be exemplified in the state even at its best. To be realized it must affect all modes of human association, the family, the school, industry, religion.”103 Moreover, Dewey acknowledges that as an idea democracy is truly an impossible ideal: it “is an ideal in the only intelligible sense of an ideal: namely, the tendency and movement of some thing which exists carried to its final limit, viewed as completed, perfected. Since things do not attain such fulfillment but are in actuality distracted and interfered with, democracy in this sense is not a fact and never will be.”104 Because it operates as a regulative ideal, the relationship between “democracy” and its political instantiation in Dewey is amorphous. Institutional democracy is a necessary but insufficient for its approximation realization: “Even as far as political arrangements are concerned, governmental

140  The Principle of Political Hope institutions are but a mechanism for securing to an idea channels of effective operation.”105 Government secures these channels “to an idea”—​it relies on a particular understanding of what those channels of effective operation are. Criticisms of effective government activity necessarily draw us back to the idea of democracy, for “they arouse him to bestir himself in order that the idea may find a more adequate machinery through which to work.”106 Therefore the old saying that the solution to the ills of democracy is more democracy “is not apt if it means that the evils may be remedied by introducing more machinery of the same kind as that which already exists, or by refining and perfecting that machinery.”107 That is, the expansion of current modes of democratic institutions will not contribute to the expansion of democracy as a social ideal until the institutions themselves are reconstructed in line with this ideal. To effectively reform democracy, Dewey writes that we need to return to the idea itself. The task before any theorist of democracy is therefore twofold: “[1]‌clarifying and deepening our apprehension of it, and of [2] employing our sense of its meaning to criticize and remake its political manifestations.”108 Since any political system is a product of its era, the current contours of political democracy, “general suffrage, elected representatives, majority rule, and so on,” are not sacred.109 Rather, they are “devices” developed in service of the historical movement away from feudalism: the doctrines behind them “served a particular local pragmatic need” in the transition from monarchy to democracy.110 In the present, these elements of government—​“not the whole of the democratic idea, but . . . its political phase”—​require reconstruction so that “the interest of the public [can become] a more supreme guide and criterion of governmental activity, and to enable the public to form and manifest its purposes still more authoritatively.”111 The description of political democracy as a “phase” is significant as an indication of how the democratic project is necessarily larger than its manifestation in representative government, and Dewey uses the term to express a limited temporal context of social habituation.112 The imaginative recovery of the ideal of democracy involves multiple sites of social reconstruction, not just the organs of the state. As Dewey explains in Democracy and Education, “[a]‌society which makes provision for participation in its good of all its members on equal terms and which secures flexible readjustment of its institution through interaction of different forms of associated life is in so far democratic.”113 The state is but one form of associated life, one that since early modernity has served as the idealized locus of common interest, but we should not focus on it obsessively lest

Dewey and Democratic Experimentation  141 we become blind to the multitude of other associations at hand. In a review of Lippmann’s The Phantom Public, Dewey endorses the former’s claim that there are “many publics” comprising democracy rather than a single superior site of social reconstruction,114 and in The Public and Its Problems Dewey tells us that “democracy must begin at home and its home is in the neighbourly community.”115 If the point of political institutions is to represent a common interest, we must first find “the means by which a scattered, mobile and manifold public may so recognize itself as to define and express its interest.”116 The term “public” is used here in an idiosyncratic way linking democratic participation with the possibility of intelligence. Dewey defines the public not in traditional spatial terms as the site of that which is not private, but rather in functional terms, where a public comprises “all those who are affected by the indirect consequences of transactions to such an extent that it is deemed necessary to have those consequences systematically cared for.”117 Defining the public in this way speaks to two aspects of Dewey’s transactional view of knowledge, both of which make their way into the epistemological justification of democracy Hilary Putnam and others have found in his work, the claim of which is that “democracy is not just one form of social life among other workable forms of social life; it is the precondition for the full application of intelligence to the solution of social problems.”118 On the one hand, since we only know the problems facing us in the context of inquiry, the imagined extension of a public to society as a whole—​or through the profusion of publics, for Dewey is a pluralist—​will more likely enable a broader and more comprehensive understanding of the problem(s) demanding solution. On the other hand, deliberation about solutions is also more likely to be reasonably attuned to the interests and goods of the greater society by dint of public participation. This epistemological justification has become de rigueur in recent interpretations of Dewey’s philosophy, not least because it makes him a precursor of deliberative democracy.119 Yet we should not let these affinities distract from the more radical thrust of Dewey’s work.120 Deliberation as a “dramatic rehearsal (in imagination) of various competing possible lines of action”121 is an important means of intelligently negotiating democratic conduct, but it is not the be-​all and end-​all of democratic theory. For with this concept of the public in hand, Dewey argues that the first problem of democracy is not the construction of proper political institutions of representation, but instead “the search for the conditions under which the Great Society may become

142  The Principle of Political Hope the Great Community. When these conditions are brought into being, they will make their own forms. Until they have come about, it is somewhat futile to consider what political machinery will suit them.”122 In contrast to the Great Society, the Great Community offers a social world in which activity is not severed from meaningful experience. Meaningful experience is a function of intelligently cognizing the present in terms of past activity and seeing potential trajectories—​be they radically different from the past or much the same as it—​of one’s life in the future. Each person writes their own narrative based on their environing conditions. Bereft of a nexus of social relations, the Great Society in Dewey’s eyes leaves individuals without the tools to intelligently organize their experience as personally meaningful; it affords few opportunities for growth. The Great Community, by contrast, saturated with meaning thanks to the plenitude of significant human interactions, offers all opportunities for directing oneself intelligently in search of experiences. This ideal of individual lives as endeavors growing intelligently is the fundamental meaning of democracy for Dewey, to which its political manifestations are epiphenomenal. Dewey never suggests that democracy can reconcile all modes of growth; indeed, it is precisely because different habits interact and conflict that growth occurs at all. Dewey’s point is instead that democracy in action ideally represents intelligence in action, linking autonomy with individuals’ capacities to understand the complex relationships between themselves and others in society. The orientation toward the common good is not an orientation toward a demanding sense of communal loyalty, nor of subjugating individually perceived interests to the interests of the whole. Rather, it is an orientation toward maintaining social relations that do not impede opportunities for the growth of any individuals in the ways that those individuals see fit. Since Dewey’s concern lies with what one might call democratic anthropology rather than political democracy, the maintenance of these social relations goes beyond liberal concerns for the equitability of political institutions. Here the maintenance of social relationships dedicated to openness is a matter of ensuring the social-​psychological character of citizens as commensatory experiencers in constant growth. The task of democracy can only be achieved democratically, however, through the citizen-​driven reconstruction of social institutions from the bottom-​up and not by the oppressive imposition of norms from the top down.123 Democracy and morality are problems of engineering conditions; they are not resolvable by command, yet since Dewey never notes that even

Dewey and Democratic Experimentation  143 engineers have to interpret plans, there is an imaginable added difficulty in effective intelligent practice. Nonetheless, the picture of social personality in Dewey is not bound up with the oppression of individual interests for the sake of the whole. Instead, the interests of the whole reside in the effective conditions for every individual to develop their own personality. This precludes power asymmetries that stymie individual autonomy, as well as any socially destructive behavior like murder, but it does not assume a harmonious whole. If anything, it welcomes conflict in the sense of pushing toward the development of personality, as the clash of habits alone encourages intelligence, providing the “inexhaustible and flowing fund of meanings upon which to draw” Dewey foresees in a truly democratic society.124 Dewey no doubt underestimates the difficulties of assuming this radical social-​psychological transformation: his own professed plasticity of habit is unusual and perhaps exaggerated.125 At the same time, his demand for openness is quite different from the appeal to a reinstitution of a “canonical form of social life”126 some read in his work. Matthew Festenstein, for example, worries that Dewey’s democratic community may be tantamount to a sly totalitarianism eventually poisonous to freedom,127 and feeling a very different valence, Michael Sandel praises Dewey for a communitarian orientation.128 If anything, Dewey’s vision of openness suffers from the opposite problem of having too few psychological moorings. The particular mode of growth Dewey takes as his highest ethical principle (all ethical principles being tools for conduct rather than imperatives) may nonetheless be divorced from the social conditions for the achievement of this aim. Dewey desires only that impediments to growth be removed, not that all individuals must grow in the same fashion. Dewey provides a new currency for a reconstructed world; the ends one seeks with that currency are not his concern, as long as they do not impede other individuals’ potentials.

Approaching Real Democracy: The Need for Reconstruction in Society Dewey wrote that the task of democracy “can be accomplished only by inventive effort and creative activity.”129 Our only way of approaching an ideal is the reconstruction of the objective conditions in society that enable growth. As Dewey explains, “the important thing is the fostering of those habits and impulses which lead to a broad, just, sympathetic survey of situations.”130

144  The Principle of Political Hope Since “social institutions, the trend of occupations, the pattern of social arrangements, are the finally controlling influences in shaping minds,”131 democracy requires the radical transformation of the social bases for individuality. Richard Bernstein puts it so: “If we are to make the ideal of critical intelligence a living reality, then radical steps must be taken. A thorough reconstruction of social institutions is required.”132 My criticism of much of the literature on Dewey and hope was crystallized by Orwell’s comment that Dickens sought a change in spirit, not in structure, and the same can be said for the attempt to construct a Deweyan political practice based entirely on reviving “communication” and hence community, as if the manifestation of publics were simply a matter of discourse. For Dewey, communication means more than mere discussion, although he certainly appreciates the importance of the latter. Toward the end of The Public and Its Problems, he formulates an answer to the ills of contemporary democracy as follows: The essential need . . . is the improvement of the methods and conditions of debate, discussion and persuasion. That is the problem of the public . . . this improvement depends essentially upon freeing and perfecting the processes of inquiry and of dissemination of their conclusions.133

This passage has been cited by Habermas as proof of Dewey’s affinity with deliberative democracy,134 but it reveals in fact that deliberation alone cannot suffice. As with changes in the physical and social conditions conducing to openness of character, Dewey’s statement here requires the amelioration of conditions of debate, the capacities of participants to engage productively in communication and the level at which participants in debates encounter each other. Part of this solution stands in the reconstructed and enlarged role of the social sciences in discovering the consequences of lines of conduct. But a fundamental precondition of communication is the “readjusting [of] social relationships,”135 for without a reorganization of the social bases of interaction, discussion will be fruitless. “Capacities are limited by the objects and tools at hand. They are still more dependent upon the prevailing habits of attention and interest which are set by tradition and institutional customs.”136 As such, the question of effective democracy is not simply one of talking about issues but of creating the social conditions within which free discussion can occur. The question of communication is then still “the question of practical re-​formation of social conditions.”137

Dewey and Democratic Experimentation  145 Transforming social conditions is arduous work. A sense of the extent of reconstruction Dewey envisions necessary for the realization of democracy as a social ideal can be gathered from his explanation for the persistence of dualism in philosophy from Human Nature and Conduct. Dewey offers that the foundation of traditional morality is “the existence of classes. Control has been vested in oligarchy.”138 The “rulers” of society have found it convenient to partition off intellectual from manual life, creating a false division of labor between thought and action and maintaining a position of ideological domination for themselves. While this class language immediately lends itself to a Marxist reading linking the bases for conduct to the economic structure of society, Dewey explicitly broadens the notion of oligarchy, thereby precluding such reductionism. The rulers who he claims have fostered the dualism antithetical to seeing activity as creative intelligence encompass dominant groups in myriad power asymmetries. Moving sequentially through forms of political organization growing in scope, Dewey offers that those in positions of power in the family, religion, tribe and the modern state each reproduce traditional modes of viewing the world. “Parents, priests, chiefs, social censors,” he writes, “have supplied aims, aims which were foreign to those upon whom they were imposed, to the young, laymen, ordinary folk.”139 These relations form the bases for conduct in society, and until they themselves are reconstructed along lines that allow for the growth of all, democracy will ever remain completely out of reach. At the same time, the parallel to Marx is nonetheless appropriate: Dewey is acutely aware of capitalism’s inhumane and alienating nature, and argued that private property was the key social institution to reconstruct for a more democratic world.140 That Dewey sees capitalism pervading social life at every level is evident in a passage that follows a discussion of the aesthetic emptiness of American cities. Modern architecture, he writes, is determined by an economic system in which land is used—​and kept out of use—​for the sake of gain, because of profit derived from rental and sale. Until land is freed from this economic burden, beautiful buildings may occasionally be erected, but there is little hope for the rise of general architectural construction worthy of a noble civilization. The restriction placed on building affects indirectly a large number of allied arts, while the social forces that affect the buildings in which we subsist and wherein we do our work operate upon all the arts.141

146  The Principle of Political Hope More than anything else, capitalism in its American incarnation hinders the development of the idea of democracy in the world. This is in part because Dewey holds economic polarization, like technocracy, to render individuals cognitively deficient by separating their experiences from those of their compatriots. More important is Dewey’s belief that wage labor condemns the mass of humanity to exploited lives of drudgery on an assembly line. Writing in a period of Taylorism (and in the preceding citation, during the Great Depression), Dewey’s condemnation of the aridity of life under conditions of alienation from one’s labor applies no less to the drudgery and disinterest experienced by any workers who find no fulfilment in their jobs. The solution to this problem is not easy, but Dewey thinks it cannot be “solved by mere changes in wage, hours of work and sanitary conditions.” Rather, “no permanent solution is possible save in a radical social alteration, which effects the degree and kind of participation the worker has in the production and social disposition of the wares he produces.”142 If the nature of the work itself cannot be changed, the way in which work is performed and the control one has over one’s contribution to work can be. From his earliest to his latest writings, Dewey viewed democratic workplaces as the linchpin of democratic societies.143 Though Dewey rejects the rhetoric of class war and stresses cooperation over conflict, he nonetheless characterizes democracy as a “fighting faith” on the path toward the realization of individual self-​direction.144 As a fighting faith, moreover, democracy makes radical demands, such as Dewey’s claim that “regimentation of material and mechanical forces is the only way by which the mass of individuals can be released from regimentation and consequent suppression of their cultural possibilities.”145 The idea of democracy is that of the growth of all members of the community, each developing their capacities by learning and interacting with others. The democratic moral psychology this presumes can only be achieved in a social world radically different from ours, and thus Dewey turns in the last instance to a reconstruction of economic relations in society as a prerequisite of real democracy in practice. Dewey’s recommendations for change go considerably further than gen­ eral reflections on the exploitation and alienation inherent in industrial capitalism. The state also has a role, although to what extent and in what way is open for debate: Dewey supplies little discussion of any positive political program for its reconstruction.146 Part of this may stem from the fact that Dewey

Dewey and Democratic Experimentation  147 feels any description of fitting democratic institutions before reconfiguring of social relations was impossible, for the type of institutions appropriate to social conditions can only be known once those conditions exist; hence the ineffectiveness of extending contemporary democratic institutions without returning to the idea of democracy itself.147 Here is a point at which we may better find the sense of democracy as working hope in Dewey’s own hopeful work in its service. Despite not laying out a systematic blueprint for the future, Dewey acknowledged that the institution of the state could foment change, and he contributed in various ways to bringing about its transformation. Dewey’s activism is famous and his activities legion;148 for present purposes his attempt to start a third political party to counter the dominance of Republicans and Democrats can serve as representative. Named chairman of the newly formed League for Independent Political Action in 1929, Dewey pushed, along with such luminaries as W. E. B. Du Bois and Lewis Mumford, for an alternative to the established political factions to benefit wage earner and farm laborers alike.149 Although a (Socialist) Norman Thomas voter himself, in 1930 Dewey was tasked with personally inviting Nebraska Senator George Norris to lead the new party’s ticket (he declined). The League subsequently endorsed Thomas for the 1932 election. In 1935, efforts were made in vain to enlist either Wisconsin Senator Robert LaFollette Jr. or Minnesota Governor Floyd Olson to head the ticket. While an inability to find a major-​name candidate brought the party nought after several years, and while Dewey was not the primary mover behind the League, it is significant that the enterprise was conceived of as more than a means to hold the reins of state power. Instead, it was an attempt to spawn a social movement that reflected the mode of intelligent activity Dewey perceived in the democratic ideal. While the League languished after 1935, its newspaper Common Sense became the primary organ of progressive thought for the rest of the decade, notably critical of the New Deal for not transitioning the economy forcefully enough toward cooperative management.150 This engagement in creating public associations for the expression of community was not confined to the League of Independent Political Action, as Dewey was a founding member of numerous civil society organizations, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the last of which is responsible for the institution of tenure.151

148  The Principle of Political Hope Dewey’s writings and activities on behalf of education can also be read through the lens of creating the conditions for democratic hope. Education for him means “something much more extensive than schooling”;152 it includes the complete environment contributing to the construction of how individuals see themselves as agents related to others. All social and political institutions are then potentially part of the educative process.153 In Dewey’s words, “every care would be taken to surround the young with physical and social conditions which best conduce, as far as freed knowledge extends, to release of personal potentialities.”154 Since school is where the bulk of formal education occurs and since children exhibit a plasticity of mind untainted by severely entrenched habits, Dewey concentrated his pedagogical writings on the classroom. Here too he was an activist, and a successful one to boot, establishing the renowned Laboratory School at the University of Chicago, intended to educate students to develop the conscientiousness demanded of democratic citizens.155 To close this short list of domains for social reconstruction and hence the siting of democratic hope, I draw the reader’s attention to an oft-​overlooked concern of Dewey’s for the physical architecture of experience. It should come as no surprise that a thinker who placed such weight on the potential for democracy to engender consummatory experiences maintained an interest in the environment’s aesthetic character. It is in art that humans achieve the full realization of their humanity, for art is the creation and reception of meaning par excellence.156 A civilization’s art—​where art means anything experienced aesthetically, not just museum art—​embodies the meanings it values and transmits; it underlies the commensatory experiences of individuals living within it. In the present, we do not need to found more museums, but to incorporate art into life, to make experience itself aesthetic in the sense that humans find satisfying meaning in their activities. With this knowledge, cities can be designed to effect meaningful experience, to foster imagination and foment growth. Though it comes in passing, Dewey asks with exasperation, Why is the architecture of our large cities so unworthy of a fine civilization? It is not from lack of materials nor from lack of technical capacity. And yet it is not merely slums but the apartments of the well-​to-​do that are esthetically repellent, because they are so destitute of imagination.157

One gathers that Dewey believes the reconstruction of social space would encourage democratic psychology in a variety of ways, from encouraging

Dewey and Democratic Experimentation  149 the intermingling of citizens, thereby provoking their moral imaginations through the confrontation of difference (and similarity) to offering an experiential respite from the quotidian humdrum by puncturing the routine of the workday. Public architecture, including sculpture, the design of parks, and urban planning, is an essential element of the reconstructed democratic society.158

Conclusion: Democratic Hope as a Working Hope Against those who read democratic hope as a species of religious hope as well as those who treat it apart from the environment in which it may be instantiated, I have argued that Dewey conceived of democratic hope first and foremost as an active orientation toward the reconstruction of the social conditions for intelligence. Democratic hope is neither idle nor impotent; it is a working hope in the service of an ideal of social life, the motivational and orienting importance of which is made no less real by its ideality. Since Dewey rejects the dualisms of subject/​object and self/​world more completely than his predecessors, the question of how to get there from here does not arise as viciously as it does in Kant and James, both of whom are tempted to retreat into subjectivism on matters of practical belief, or in Bloch and Peirce, both of whom are tempted to translate aspiration into a determinate historical teleology. By contrast, Dewey’s proof is in the democratic pudding, in the experiments of conjoint living intended to overcome the obstacles hindering growth. The future offers practically infinite imaginable possibilities from the state of the present and none is foreordained; once we alight on democracy as our ideal social formation for normative and instrumental reasons the question becomes how we are to go about reconstructing our society and hence ourselves to bring us closer to this aim. Since existence is precarious, we can never do anything with absolute certainty, but experimentation can at least give us the outline of what does and does not work in attempting to orchestrate the future. And while intelligent action is the ground upon which Dewey rests his hope, the creation of an environment worthy of democratic hope is the precondition for faith in intelligence in the first place. This does not mean that the democratic project is pie in the sky—​far from it—​only that the hope underlying it requires vastly greater social reconstruction than is currently appreciated by Dewey scholars and democratic theorists alike.

Conclusion: Hope and the Production of a Transformable World Inventions of the unknown demand new forms. —​Rimbaud, Letter to Paul Demeny, May 15, 18711

In these closing pages, I want to draw together some of the various strands of thought that have been presented and try to offer some practical upshots. Hope is often treated like optimism, the conviction that progress is actual, that the future will necessarily be better than the present, and that we live in the best of all possible worlds. This equation saddles hope with the burdens of Panglossian quietism and the heavy baggage of developmentalist accounts of history. As a result, it can call forth histrionic opposition, in which the wholesale denial of possible change threatens to yield the very quietism and resignation to oppression that the same critics assail in chronic hopers. The story of hope I tell complicates this bifurcated approach to thinking about utopian anticipation in political thought, and renders hope as a creative companion to sober, self-​reflective despair on pathways toward a better future. The thinkers I present follow Kant in taking hope as a practical orientation in thought necessary for concrete undertakings. Kant, Bloch, Peirce, James, and Dewey all accordingly wrestle with navigating between its affective, radical, subjective aspects and its rational, material, objective aspects. Each in their own way, moreover, articulates a transactional, performative, and processual method of hope. Kant tells us that we may hope if we do what we should, and lays out educational, social, and political reforms that could aid in this endeavor; Bloch educes novel, utopian political forms out of matter through our activation of its latent tendencies; James exhorts us to bring new facts into being through action; Peirce seeks the eventual realization of truth through scientific inquiry; Dewey grounds the possibility of progress in the expansion of our capacities and the conditions for democratic The Principle of Political Hope. Loren Goldman, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197675823.003.0006

Conclusion  151 experimentation. In addition to contributing to the scholarship on hope as well as the thinkers and traditions in the foregoing chapters, I have sought to add another chink in the armor of the common interpretation of Kant as Reason’s inhumane martinet, to highlight underappreciated links between American and German thinkers engaged in similar practical-​philosophical lines of inquiry, and to further recover the idea of the productive complementarity of warm and cold approaches in thought. I began with Kant because of his extraordinary influence; the subsequent thinkers all (largely self-​consciously) developed tendencies latent in his work. While Kant is the Archimedean point for a great deal of thought that continues to resonate today, he can also be put in the greater context of the major shift in European temporal consciousness that occurred in the eighteenth century. This era saw the rise of both the idea of universal history, of capital-​h History as a collective singular, as well as the idea of “a time determined solely by history”—​that is, without reference to the cyclicality of nature or the succession of political leaders, but to its own rationality.2 As the authority of “history” grew, so did that of its authors, both in the literary sense of historiography and the concrete sense of its agent(s)—​those who render and those who propel its events. The creation of history as a problem means that its future now “opens itself as the unknown,”3 thereby opening space for self-​consciously regulative narratives of progress, not to mention questions about the use and abuse of history for life. Indeed, like Nietzsche’s critical historian,4 Kant proposes his idea for a universal history as a fallible account that helps us make sense of our present and encourages us to forge forward with our practical commitments. Awareness of this ability to write and direct our own history may be the burden of the modern present, and barring divine, alien, or some other fantastic intervention, it will remain a burden for the conceivable future. This is the predicament captured by Walter Benjamin in his celebrated “On the Concept of History.” In the ninth thesis, Benjamin describes progress as a wind blowing from paradise that buffets the impotent angel of history backward, surveying the ruins of civilization. This renowned cameo portrait speaks to despair, yet Benjamin’s other theses suggest that the loss of dogmatic faith in progress open fresh opportunities for hope. The assumption of progress can, after all, induce complacency; it also deadens history to “a homogenous, empty time” in which all moments are ultimately equally significant (and hence equally insignificant) in relation to the inevitable progression.5 To this empty progression Benjamin contrasts the present

152  The Principle of Political Hope moment’s “time of the now” (Jetztzeit) that does not progress, yet remains as a repository of possible action, a promise of the possibility of “blast[ing] out of the continuum of history.”6 In this “Messianic time,”7 we are the (weak) agents of transfiguration, and the collapse of a monological homogenous historical progression offers the opportunity of actively redeeming the unfulfilled promise of futures past. In the introduction, I quote Brecht—​a friend of Bloch’s and Benjamin’s—​ as writing that the modern world is only representable if it is understood as a transformable world. All of the authors in this study have held to this vision of a transformable world, although they differ considerably in how the world can be transformed. Kant’s dualist worldview allows him to ultimately escape the bite of this question, since on his account practical reason simply demands (practical) belief in historical progress, the ultimate reality of which cannot be gleaned from empirical history. Whether or not the world is transformable, Kant tells us that we may believe it to be so. The subsequent thinkers seek, in one way or another, to put meat on these rationalist bones and bridge Kant’s separate domains of freedom and nature. The various foundational doctrines presented in the foregoing chapters—​synechism, radical empiricism, transactionalism, Avicennan materialism—​assert an ontological continuity between the self and the world that enables practical belief in the transformative possibilities of human agency. The ontological story of a world of becoming underlies the hope that we can create a world more becoming of us. The thread of hope predicated on active transformation can be taken up in myriad ways. Among the thinkers in this study, Dewey is an exemplary democratic agent(-​patient), but each in their own concrete way is true to the method of hope. In line with the substance of “What is Enlightenment?,” Kant intended his historical and political essays as contributions to a nascent public sphere in which, by his lights, lay the seeds of a utopian Enlightened Age. In one instance, moreover, Kant’s attention to style is significant: “Toward Perpetual Peace” is formatted as a treaty ready to be endorsed or amended, making the essay legible as a prefigurative performance of the juridical utopia it sketches.8 In practical politics, Bloch was loyal to state communism to a fault; in the life of the mind, his utopian hermeneutics serve the didactic aim of teaching humanity to hope. James’s activities as a public philosopher, political commentator, and strident anti-​imperialist are well-​known, as are his hortatory ethics enjoining boldness in the face of despair—​most of what we now consider his essays were in fact given as addresses—​and his sundry

Conclusion  153 personal experiments in making life worth living.9 At a stretch, even the retreat of Charles Sanders Santiago Peirce into personal seclusion and philosophical productivity at a large house in rural Milford, Pennsylvania from 1887 until his death in 1914 may be seen as a performance of a part in his imagined transhistorical epistemological comedy of an ever-​converging community of scientific inquiry. More generally, the thinkers in this study all insist (each in his own way) that the method of hope is one of experimentation. What, however, constitutes an experiment? The modern scientific model of experimentation, conducted under controlled conditions in laboratories, is ill-​suited to the uncertain and changing conditions of social life (and even arguably does not accurately reflect laboratory practice).10 From a pragmatic point of view, life is itself experimental in the broad sense of a purposive trial from which one gains knowledge of the unknown.11 In a transformable world, many courses of action conceivably contribute to the aspiration for more self-​ aware, equipped, and democratic publics. Dewey expended hopeful energies in educational reform, labor and civil rights activity, and public philosophy. He does not, however, think much about state institutions, and recent discussions of democratic experiment in political science—​often nodding to Dewey—​take up his slack in administrative reconstruction. The metaphor of democratic experimentation can be extended further, however, following Jose Muñoz, to “the socially symbolic performative dimensions of certain aesthetic processes that promote a modality of political idealism.”12 I discuss these performative models of experiment in terms of aesthetic production, exemplary living, and collective social action. In terms of institutional reconstruction, for example, Christopher Ansell, Michael Dorf, and Charles Sabel have developed approaches that encode the possibility for policy experimentalism within constitutional and administrative design.13 Dorf and Sabel devolve policy design to local units, emphasizing the generation of a multitude of solutions to problems by those tasked most directly with their management. Ansell supplements Dorf and Sabel’s top-​down constitutional framework with a bottom-​up emphasis on openness the assessment of an experiment’s success to a democratic community of inquiry. Ansell frames his model as “design experimentalism,” starting with the presumption that “the world is a messy place and that experiments will not be able to isolate the effect of single variables.”14 Design experiments are pursued well aware of the totality of the setting in which they are conducted; their focus is “not to definitively accept or reject a hypothesis, but rather to

154  The Principle of Political Hope iteratively refine the intervention (design-​ redesign cycles).”15 Crucially, design experiments do not sharply distinguish between researchers and subjects; “instead, the practitioners often become experimenters.”16 State agencies work in concert with citizens and civil society at various solutions, creating Deweyan publics “that have the capacity for joint learning.”17 The result is a pragmatic model of statist political experimentation as cooperative policy inquiry in which the democratic identification of social problems forges communities of concern. Insofar as this model assumes the existence of a citizenry with habits of intelligence, moreover, it points beyond concerns of state constitution to the constitution of the demos. Prefigurative performances provide another, complementary model of experimentation. First, take Mill’s notion of “experiments in living,” an idea close to James’s heart.18 Discussion individuality in On Liberty, Mill writes, as it is useful that while mankind are imperfect there should be different opinions, so is it that there should be different experiments of living; that free scope should be given to varieties of character, short of injury to others; and that the worth of different modes of life should be proved practically, when any one thinks fit to try them.19

These experiments in living are particularly important for breaking others out of the thrall of conformity, for since we live “under the eye of a hostile and dreaded censorship . . . it does not occur to [humans] to have any inclination, except for what is customary.”20 Mill’s hope for progress resides in the freedom individuals have for these experiments in living. On Elizabeth Anderson’s reading, Millian experiments are tests for the sake of their author to determine the ethical norms relevant for the practitioner’s own individuality.21 The proof of these experiments is in the pudding of the experimenter’s life, so to speak, for what works for developing one’s idiosyncratic character might not be the same for developing another’s. This is undoubtedly the case for Mill, and yet it is also the case that the very act of challenging custom, moreover, can be exemplary for others. By acting on norms contrary to established moral schedules, the experimenter may become, as Mill puts it, “a noble and beautiful object of contemplation” that spectators can then emulate.22 Crucial in this spectacular interpretation of Mill is that whether or not a particular experiment in living succeeds for the experimenter—​imagine, now, the anonymous Tank Man of Tiananmen Square—​the act itself may provide a model for subsequent political action. Even in the failure of an

Conclusion  155 experiment, there may be some success if the performance is compelling, and the very act of experimental performance may bring with it its own practical validation. This, I take it, is Muñoz’s attraction, noted earlier, to the dancer Fred Herko, whose last perfect jeté remains for him a legendary symbol of utopia well over fifty years after Herko died from the impact of his five-​story descent. Less morbidly and more directly minded with the public, consider the salutary hope that may be enlivened by participation in social movements.23 Take Occupy in its multiple manifestations, an amorphous movement that could easily be considered a failure: it neither changed the outsized role of money in American politics, nor did it end police brutality, nor did it ultimately stop tuition hikes at UC Berkeley, my perch when it erupted. But to assess the movement only on such utopian aspirations is to miss its point. What was genuinely transformative in the eyes of many students, at least, was participation in its general assemblies, for those interminable sessions on the campus plaza realized, for some at least, a form of democratic self-​ governance that made real the latent possibilities of power in concert.24 In other words, these utopian productions hashed out one possible prefiguration of an alternative model of power-​sharing. On a less dramatic and individual scale, everyday life offers copious opportunities for prefigurative experiments in living both for agents and spectators—​James Scott, I noted earlier, proposes the utopian training of “anarchist calisthenics,” breaking one little, silly law each day in order to keep limber for the moment when big, important ones need to be broken.25 Another model of performative experimentation can be found in aesthetics, the focus of a massive amount of Bloch’s work. Like his Frankfurt School colleagues, Bloch holds aesthetics to be a last redoubt of emancipatory thinking, that artistic products offer intimations, or preappearances of a better future. While scholarly attention has been given to Bloch’s thoughts on literature and music,26 performance arts and theater provide arguably provide richer opportunities to prefiguratively enact objective-​real fantasy. In the discussion of art as the midwife of nature that concludes his study of Avicenna, Bloch emphasizes the activity rather than the product of painting, and draws his reference to visual arts from a work of theater, Lessing’s Emilia Galotti.27 The title of Bloch’s last book, Experimentum Mundi, plays on the Baroque conceit of “Theatrum Mundi,” in which the world was God’s theater, with the corollary that the we are always acting, even feigning, in one way or another.28 Substituting “experiment” for “theater,” Bloch stresses the

156  The Principle of Political Hope world’s processual openness. In this light, Bloch’s theoretical lens is close to Brecht’s, for whom representing the modern world as transformable on stage means rendering it coherent as a place wherein human agency has traction. As Fredric Jameson glosses Brecht’s method, “instead of concealing the act of acting, the spectacle as a whole should try to demonstrate to the audience that we are all actors, and that acting is an inescapable dimension of social and everyday life.”29 Brecht’s experiments, in other words, serve to remind the audience that the world proceeds experimentally. Expressing this logic musically, the composer Giorgio Battistelli’s 1981 opera Experimentum Mundi is scored for an ensemble including blacksmiths, coopers, chefs, and masons, among other artisans, with text from Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopedia.30 Other writers, including Jose Muñoz, similarly highlight the utopian potential of performance. As noted in my introduction, Jill Dolan reads theater as a prefigurative, hopeful space insofar as live performance allows fleeting yet intense experiences of a different world, a point Emily Beausoleil makes with regard to the cultivation of democratic habits of receptivity through assuming the perspective of different characters in theater acting.31 Vaclav Havel offers yet another perspective on performative politics characterized by resistance to a dominant script. A playwright before he was a dissident and then a politician, Havel exploited the dramaturgical sensibility in his reflections on the everyday method of hope, an orientation he called “living in truth.”32 In his 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless,” the writing of which was, in context, already a risky act of working hope, Havel imagines a Czech greengrocer who, like practically all of his compatriots, hangs a “Workers of the World, Unite!” slogan in his shop window. He does so not out of conviction, but simply because it had been done that way for years, because everyone does it, and because that is the way it has to be. If he were to refuse, there could be trouble . . . It is one of the thousands of details that guarantee him a relatively tranquil life “in harmony with society,” as they say.33

The pragmatic meaning of the greengrocer’s action is a declaration of loyalty “in the only way the regime is capable of hearing; that is, by accepting the prescribed ritual, by accepting appearances as reality, by accepting the given rules of the game.”34 The greengrocer has now “become a player in the game, thus making it possible for the game to go on, for it to exist in the first

Conclusion  157 place.”35 Havel does not condemn the greengrocer—​there is no suggestion that alienated citizens run around playing at Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He notes, however, that given the transformability of the world and the unpredictability of life, a refusal to comply with certain ambient orders of the system, the refusal to follow the ritualistic social script “may grow into something more.”36 As Havel puts it in his stirring last lines, the real question is whether the “brighter future” is really always so distant. What if, on the contrary, it has been here for a long time already, and only our own blindness and weakness has prevented us from seeing it around us and within us, and kept us from developing it?37

Havel’s warm words are intended for citizens, not philosophers, for whom the cold stream may be more bracing. I will close closer to home, with a few lines on lessons scholars of political thought and related fields might draw from this study. If hope in democracy is predicated on the promise of public experimentation, then concerned thinkers would do well to attend to the conditions for an efficacious and intelligent demos. On the one hand, this means that theorists should ask themselves honestly what vestigial teleological or progressive assumptions about the course of history inform their work. If, as Bloch writes, to think means to go beyond, to overstep (Überschreiten),38 getting ahead of oneself is an occupational hazard for anyone pursuing the life of the mind. The charge of unreality with which hopeful thinkers are often attacked would be perhaps blunted if we all were more open about the hidden teleological or progressivist assumptions operating beneath the threshold of argument. On the other hand, it also means that rather than wring hands we might instead reach them out and inquire as to how institutions and practices might be organized to facilitate and empower working hope.39 We should be wary of obsessing over ends at the expense of efficacy, for real utopia is a hopeful process and an ongoing task, not a fixed target.40

Notes Introduction 1. John Dewey, “Progress,” MW 10:234–​235. Unless otherwise noted, Dewey references are to the Southern Illinois University edition of his collected works, given by period, volume, and page number: EW =​ The Early Works. 5 vols, ed. Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969–​1972; MW =​The Middle Works, 1899–​1924. 15 vols., ed. Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1976–​1983; LW =​ The Later Works, 1925–​1953. 17 vols., ed. Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981–​1992. 2. Dewey, MW 10:234. 3. Dewey, MW 10:238. 4. Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?,” The National Interest 16 (Summer 1989): 3–​ 18; see also Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: The Free Press, 1992). 5. The rhetoric of hope is closely associated with Barack Obama’s 2008 US presidential campaign, but its use has been widespread in recent American politics, including the spresidential campaigns of Bill Clinton (1992), John Kerry (2004), Bernie Sanders (2020), and Joe Biden (2020). Critics of hope in popular politics also abound, from US vice-​presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s mockery of “that hopey-​changey stuff ” at the 2008 Republican National Convention and Naomi Klein’s dismissal of Obama’s rhetoric as mere branding (Klein, NO LOGO: Tenth Anniversary Edition, xv–​xxxii [New York: Picador, 2009]) to Eddie Glaude Jr.’s likening of Obama’s hope rhetoric to “snake oil” (Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black [New York: Crown, 2016], 7); cf. Adolph Reed Jr.’s scathing essay “Nothing Left,” Harper’s Magazine, March 2014. See also David A. Graham, “The Wrong Side of ‘the Right Side of History,’” The Atlantic, December 21, 2015. 6. See, e.g., Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (New York: Viking, 2018) and The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Penguin, 2012), Hans Rösling, Factfulness (New York: Flatiron Books, 2018), and Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Penguin, 2005). 7. See Amy Allen, The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). 8. See, e.g., Condorcet, “Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind: Tenth Epoch,” tr. Keith Michael Baker, Daedalus 133, no. 3 (Summer 2004 [1795]): 65–​82; the anarchist William Godwin envisioned the coming perfection

160 Notes of humanity to include the overcoming of physical immortality (see An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, ed. Mark Philp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013 [1793]), 453. 9. The anarchist communist (and Marx’s son-​in-​law) Paul Lafargue saw in “the god Progress, the eldest son of Work,” a myth concocted by ruling classes to make laborers accept their political impotence; see The Right to be Lazy (Chicago: C. H. Kerr Publishing Company, 1975), 41. 10. See Anibal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” Nepantla: Views from the South 1, no. 3 (2000): 533–​580, “Coloniality and Modernity/​ Rationality,” Cultural Studies 21, nos. 2–​3 (March/​May 2007): 168–​178, and Enrique Dussel, “Eurocentrism and Modernity (Introduction to the Frankfurt Lectures),” boundary 2 20, no. 3 (Autumn 1993): 65–​76; cf. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), part 1. For a study that links postcolonial Iranian thought to ideals of the European Enlightenment, see Ali Mirsepassi, Political Islam, Iran, and the Enlightenment: Philosophies of Hope and Despair (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 11. See Alison Stine, “Hegel and Colonialism,” Hegel Bulletin 41, no. 2 (June 2017): 247–​ 270, Dussel, “Eurocentrism and Modernity,” and Teshale Tibebu, Hegel and the Third World: The Making of Eurocentrism in World History (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2011). 12. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989 [1859]), 14. 13. See, e.g., John Gray, “An Illusion with a Future,” Daedalus 133, no. 3 (Summer 2004): 10–​17, Roger Scruton, The Uses of Pessimism: And the Danger of False Hope (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), and Joe Bailey, Pessimism (London: Routledge, 1988). 14. Joshua Dienstag, Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 18. 15. Ibid.; see also Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974 [1961]). 16. Tracy Strong, Politics without Vision: Thinking without a Banister in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 17. Robyn Marasco, The Highway of Despair: Critical Theory after Hegel (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 1. 18. Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos (London: Zone Books, 2016), 221; cf. her Politics Out of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 5. 19. Brown, Undoing the Demos, 221–​222. 20. Ibid., 222. 21. “Where the Fires Are: Wendy Brown Talks to Jo Littler,” Soundings 68 (Spring 2018): 20. 22. Marasco, The Highway of Despair, 8; cf. 5. 23. Dienstag, Pessimism, 18. 24. Walter Benjamin, “Left-​Wing Melancholy (On Erich Kästners New Book of Poems),” Screen 15, no. 2 (Summer 1974): 30. Brown describes it as “Benjamin’s name for a

Notes  161 mournful, conservative, backward-​looking attachment to feelings, analyze, or relations that have become fetishized and frozen in the heart of the critic,” Politics Out of History, 170; cf. Enzo Traverso, Left-​Wing Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 45–​48. 25. Alan B. Spitzer, “The Historical Problem of Generations,” American Historical Review 78, no. 5 (December 1973): 1353. 26. Arthur Danto, Analytical Philosophy of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965). 27. See Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-​Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014 [1973]), which has deeply influenced my thinking about history and historiography. 28. See Sylvie Agacinski, Time Passing, tr. Jody Gladding (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). Werner Sollors, for example, documents how contemporary German accounts in the immediate post-​WWII period are suffused by despair; the wreckage of Hitler’s world-​historical project was everywhere palpable, and material devastation, deprivation, and reckoning with the terrors wrought in part by their own complicity could not be avoided. A generation later, this historical vignette of decline had been integrated into a rosier progressivist self-​understanding of the democratic, technochratic Wirtschaftswunder, a vision reinforced (initially) by reunification; see Sollors, The Temptation of Despair (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); cf. Harald Jähner, Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945–​ 1955, tr. Shaun Whiteside (New York: Knopf, 2022). See also Zeev W. Mankovitz, Life Between Memory and Hope: The Survivors of the Holocaust in Occupied Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 29. Ernst Bloch, “Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to Its Dialectics,” tr. Mark Ritter, New German Critique 11 (Spring 1977), 22–​38; I borrow language from Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 307. 30. François Cusset, How the World Swung to the Right: Fifty Years of Counterrevolutions, tr. Noura Wedell (South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2018), 63. 31. François Hartog, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time, tr. Saskia Brown (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 196–​199. 32. See Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: on the Semantics of Historical Time, tr. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004 [1979]), 95, and Traverso, Left-​ Wing Melancholia, 9. 33. Traverso, Left-​Wing Melancholia, xiv, 9. 34. William James, Pragmatism, ed. Fredson Bowers and Ignas K. Skrupskelis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975 [1907]), 41. In democracy, optimism is dangerous because it can absolve citizens of responsibility, that “sobering political literacy that only arises out of the political experience of becoming a participatory citizen” described by Antonio Vázquez-​Arroyo in Political Responsibility (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), xv–​xvi. 35. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, tr. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986 [1954]), 1:208.

162 Notes 36. James, Pragmatism, 13. 37. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, tr. and ed. Anne M. Cohler, Basia C. Miller, and Harold S. Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 21; cf. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1990), 212–​213. 38. See Glenn Most’s Translator’s Note to Hesiod, Works and Days (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 95n7. 39. Hesiod, Works and Days, l. 498–​502. 40. Pindar, Nemean Odes, tr. and ed. William H. Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), XI, l. 43–​48, 131; cf. Pindar, Olympian Odes, tr. and ed. William H. Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), XII, l. 5–​11, 187. 41. Fragment #18, cited in Dror Post, “Heraclitus’s Hope for the Unhoped,” Epoché 13, no. 2 (2009): 229. 42. See Babrius, Fables, tr. Ben Edwin Perry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press: 1965), #58, and pseudo-​Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, tr. James Scully and C. John Herington (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), l. 248–​250. For the ambiguities of elpis in this period, see Post, “Heraclitus’s Hope.” 43. As far apart as they are in political vision, for example, Plato and Aristotle both subscribe to the doctrine of anacyclosis, or the unending cycle of regime types; see Plato, Republic, Book VIII, and Aristotle, Politics, Book V, esp. 1304b19–​1316a1; see Polybius, The Histories, 6.4.7–​10, for the doctrine’s canonical formulation. 44. For the change in temporal consciousness from a cyclical to a linear view of history, see Karl Löwith, Meaning in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957 [1949]); Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, tr. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985 [1976]); Koselleck, Futures Past; and Dienstag, Pessimism, chap. 1. 45. I Corinthians 13:13 and Romans 8:24–​25. 46. See, e.g., I Thessalonians 4:15. 47. On the gradual displacement of “church time” by “merchant’s time” in the High Middle Ages, see Jacques Le Goff, Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages, tr. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980 [1977]), chaps. 1–​3, and Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), chap. 4. Two new literary genres in the period attest to the shift toward seeing progress as a worldly affair. First, early modern utopias like Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) and Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun (1602) were written not as practical plans but ideal constructs enabling critical purchase on the present; while of course speculative utopias never disappear, the nineteenth century sees the remarkable development of utopian tracts intended as blueprints for actual communities, however spacey, like Charles Fourier’s Theory of the Four Movements (1808) and Etienne Cabet’s Travels in Icaria (1840). Second, the eighteenth century sees the advent of a new genre of secular political tract, the sketch for perpetual peace, of which Kant’s is only the most famous, the utopian end of which would have earlier been unthinkable without divine intervention; for others, see Pauline Kleingeld, Kant and Cosmopolitanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

Notes  163 48. See Löwith, Meaning in History, “Conclusion.” 49. In addition to the works cited in this introduction, see Josef Pieper, Über die Hoffnung (München: Kösel, 1962 [1935]), Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope: On the Ground and the Implications of a Christian Eschatology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993 [1964]), Ronald Aronson, Dialectics of Disaster: A Preface to Hope (London: New Left Books, 1983), J. Joseph Godfrey, A Philosophy of Human Hope (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), Mary Zournazi, ed., Hope: New Philosophies for Change (London: Routledge, 2002), Studs Terkel, Hope Dies Last: Keeping the Faith in Difficult Times (New York: New Press, 2003), Martin Seligman, The Hope Circuit: A Psychologist’s Journey from Helplessness to Optimism (New York: Public Affairs, 2018), and Adam Potkay, Hope: A Literary History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022). 50. Adrienne Martin, How We Hope (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 11. 51. See J. M. O. Wheatley, “Wishing and Hoping,” Analysis 18, no. 6 (June 1958): 121–​131, and J. P. Day, “The Anatomy of Hope and Fear,” Mind 79, no. 315 (July 1970): 369–​384. 52. Jayne M. Waterworth, A Philosophical Analysis of Hope (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003), 4. 53. See Waterworth, A Philosophical Analysis of Hope, and Day, “The Anatomy of Hope and Fear.” 54. Martin, How We Hope, 17. 55. Gabriel Marcel, Homo Viator (Aubier: Editions Montaigne, 1944), 54. 56. Marcel, Homo Viator, 52. 57. Marcel, Homo Viator, 53, 52. See also Godfrey, A Philosophy of Human Hope, 9, and Waterworth, A Philosophical Analysis of Hope, 69. 58. Marcel, Homo Viator, 58. 59. Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 103; cf. Timo Jütten, “Adorno on Hope,” Philosophy & Social Criticism 45, no. 3 (March 2019): 284–​306. 60. Hirokazu Miyazaki, The Method of Hope (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 120, 139. 61. Miyazaki, The Method of Hope, 110. 62. Ibid. 63. Jill Dolan, Utopia in Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 1. 64. Ahmed’s note: Sasha Roseneil, Disarming Patriarchy: Feminism and Political Action at Greenham (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1995), 99. 65. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 184. 66. Bloch, The Principle of Hope, III:1288. 67. Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken, 2005), 111. 68. Arendt, The Promise of Politics, 114. 69. See Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012 [1978]), Cornel West, Prophesy Deliverance!: An Afro-​ American Revolutionary Christianity (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002 [1982]), Eddie Glaude Jr., Exodus!: Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth

164 Notes Century Black America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), George Shulman, American Prophecy: Race and Redemption in American Political Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), and Joseph R. Winters, Hope Draped in Black: Race, Melancholy, and the Agony of Progress (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). For histories of American thought in the shadows of progress and Protestantism, David W. Marcell, Progress and Pragmatism (New York: Praeger, 1974), Paul K. Conklin, Puritans and Pragmatists: Eight Eminent American Thinkers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), Bruce Kuklick, Churchmen and Philosophers: From Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), and Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989). 70. See Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, tr. Mary Gregor, in Religion and Rational Theology, edited by Allen W. Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 7:80. 71. For philosophical reflections on the contingency of intellectual formation, see G. A. Cohen, If You’re An Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), chap. 1. 72. Of particular note is Winters, Hope Draped in Black; see also Norman Geras, Solidarity in the Conversation of Humankind: The Ungroundable Liberalism of Richard Rorty (London: Verso, 1995); Shulman, American Prophecy; Judith Green, Pragmatism and Social Hope: Deepening Democracy in Global Contexts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); Alan Mittleman, Hope in a Democratic Age: Philosophy, Religion, and Political Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Jill Graper Hernandez, Gabriel Marcel’s Ethics of Hope: Evil, God, and Virtue (New York: Continuum, 2011); Michael Lamb, “Aquinas and the Virtues of Hope: Theological and Democratic,” Journal of Religious Ethics 44, no. 2 (June 2016): 300–​332, and “Between Presumption and Despair: Augustine’s Hope for the Commonwealth,” American Political Science Review 112, no. 4 (November 2018): 1036–​1049; Ronald Aronson, We: Reviving Social Hope (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017); and Jütten, “Adorno on Hope.” I treat Rorty elsewhere, arguing, among other things, that his denial of justificatory possibilities for social hope leaves him powerless to respond to those who do not already share his morally relevant vocabulary, and that his ironism does not reflect the vital investment individuals make in their narratives of political identity; see Loren Goldman, “Richard Rorty’s ‘Post-​Kantian’ Philosophy of History,” Journal of the Philosophy of History 9, no. 3 (November 2015): 410–​443, and “Richard Rorty: Homo Academicus Politicus,” Analyse und Kritik 41, no. 1 (May 2019): 31–​68. 73. Bertolt Brecht, Schriften zum Theater (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp: 2000 [1955]), 8. 74. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, LW 2:244. 75. William James, “The Will to Believe,” in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Practical Philosophy, ed. Frederick Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979 [1896]), 29. 76. There has been a blossoming of interest in Bloch’s work in recent years; see, e.g., Peter Thompson and Slavoj Zizek, eds., The Privatization of Hope: Ernst Bloch and the Future of Utopia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013); Ivan Boldyrev, Ernst

Notes  165 Bloch and His Contemporaries: Locating Utopian Messianism (London: Bloomsbury, 2015); Cat Moir, Ernst Bloch’s Speculative Materialism: Ontology, Epistemology, Politics (Leiden: Brill, 2019); Monika Woźniak, Karolina Jesień, Adam Klewenhagen, eds., Special Issue: “Dreams of a Better Life: Ernst Bloch,” Praktika Teoretyczna 35, no. 1 (2020); and Henk de Berg and Cat Moir, eds., Rethinking Bloch (Leiden: Brill, 2023). 77. See, e.g., the inspired use of Bloch by José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: NYU Press, 2009). 78. As well as in academic political theory: political theorists, Dienstag writes, “plot passively, as recorders of events; but they plot actively as well, with hidden or not-​so-​ hidden plans for tomorrow. They describe politics with a sense of time—​but also with the aim of altering the future. And these are not really two distinct projects but rather two ways of looking at one and the same activity. The political plots they write include, not just their sense of the course of past events, but also what they anticipate will come”; Joshua Dienstag, Dancing in Chains: Narrative and Memory in Political Theory (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 19; cf. Susan McManus, Fictive Theories (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005). For Bloch and the other thinkers in this study, the perennial debate between idealism and realism in political thought presents a false dichotomy; as Oscar Wilde writes, “[a]‌map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing”; Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism (Boston: J. W. Luce and Company, 1918), 33. 79. James C. Scott, Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 121. 80. See, e.g., Jeroen Gunning and Ilan Zvi Baron, Why Occupy a Square: People, Protests and Movements in the Egyptian Revolution (London: Hurst & Company, 2013), and Basil Rogger, “PROTEST. The Aesthetics of Resistance,” in PROTEST: The Aesthetics of Resistance, ed. Basil Rogger, Jonas Voegeli, and Ruedi Widmer (Zürich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2018). 81. MW 10:10. As Dewey writes in Human Nature and Conduct: “Breathing is an affair of the air as truly as of the lungs; digesting an affair of food as truly as of tissues of stom­ ach. Seeing involves light just as certainly as it does the eye and optic nerve. Walking implicates the ground as well as the legs; speech demands physical air and human companionship and audience as well as vocal organs. We may shift from the biological to the mathematical use of the word function, and say that natural operations like breathing and digesting, acquired ones like speech and honesty, are functions of the surroundings as truly as of a person. They are things done by the environment by means of organic structures or acquired dispositions” (MW 14:15).

Chapter 1 1. 8:380. Kant citations refer to Akademie Ausgabe volume and page numbers, with the Critique of Pure Reason cited by its 1781 (“A”) and 1787 (“B”) editions. In English, I cite

166 Notes the Cambridge edition of Kant’s works, noting when translations are emended. In the notes, KrV =​ Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason), KpV =​ Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (Critique of Practical Reason), and KU =​ Kritik der Urteilskraft (Critique of the Power of Judgment). 2. A805/​B833; cf. 11:429, 9:25. Kant also mentions a fourth question, “What is a human being?,” that encompasses the others: see Gershon Weiler, “Kant’s Question ‘What is Man?,’” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 10, no. 1 (March 1980): 1–​23; Martin Heidegger, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1998 [1929]), 187–​188; Robert Louden, “The Second Part of Morals,” in Essays on Kant’s Anthropology, ed. Brian Jacobs and Patrick Kain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 60–​ 84; Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment Against Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 4. 3. When he wrote the KrV, Kant thought of freedom only “negatively,” as the ability to act spontaneously, i.e., not in the thrall of empirical causality; he developed a “positive” conception of freedom as autonomy later, in the Groundwork and the KpV. See Robert Pippin, “Kant on the Spontaneity of Mind,” in Idealism as Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Lewis White Beck, A Commentary on Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 59 ff.; Henry E. Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and Christine Korsgaard, Creating the Kingdom of Ends (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), ch. 6. 4. A805/​B833. 5. A294/​B352. On this subject, see Michelle Grier, Kant’s Doctrine of Transcendental Illusion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 6. Henry E. Allison, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), 26. Kant preferred “critical idealism” over “transcendental idealism” (4:375). 7. Bxvi; Bxiii. 8. See, e.g., A235/​B294-​A260/​B315, 10:341n2, 4:289, and cf. Heidegger, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, 37, and Grier, Kant’s Doctrine of Transcendental Illusion, ch. 3. I avoid the terms “phenomenal world” and “noumenal world,” for speaking of phenomena and noumena as belonging to different “worlds” or “realms” suggests the objects referred to phenomenally and noumenally are fundamentally incommensurate, while Kant denies the possibility of any insight into noumena save for their possibility (what he called a noumenon “in the negative sense” [B307]). I follow Allison in viewing Kant’s categories as “epistemic conditions” for representing experience “in relation to the subjective conditions of human sensibility (space and time),” as opposed to “independently of these conditions, and thus as they are ‘in themselves’ ” (Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, 8). Allison’s reading circumvents the problems arising from the causal interpretation of the relationship between phenomena and noumena, the locus classicus of which is F. H. Jacobi’s 1787 “Beylage” to his David Hume, discussed in Frederick C. Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 124, and which later finds voice in P. F. Strawson, The

Notes  167 Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (London: Routledge, 1990 [1966]), 236–​237. 9. Kant doyen Norman Kemp Smith preferred “that which may be thought alone” to “thing-​ in-​ itself ”; see his Commentary to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003 [1918]), 408ff. 10. A80/​B106, A126, A132/​B171, A50/​B74. 11. A132/​B171, A140/​B179 and passim. In the language of the KU, the schemata are the domain of “determinate” judgment. The change in Kant’s understanding of judgment from a part of the cognitive faculty in the KrV to an independent faculty in the KU is important in its own right; see the “Preface to the First Edition” and both “Introductions” to KU, and Henry E. Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 18–​20. 12. William James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1, ed. Frederick Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981 [1890]), 462. 13. See David W. Tarbet, “The Fabric of Metaphor in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 6, no. 4 (July 1968): 269, and Stanley G. French, “Kant’s Constitutive-​Regulative Distinction,” in Kant Studies Today, ed. Lewis White Beck (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1969), 375–​391. 14. A310–​311/​B367. Cf. A327/​B383–​384, KU 5:466, and 28:995–​997. Kant borrows the term “idea” from Plato (A313/​B370); see Beiser, The Fate of Reason, 37–​43 and T. K. Seung, Kant’s Platonic Revolution in Moral and Political Philosophy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994). 15. A327/​B384; cf. 8:134. 16. A644/​B672. 17. Beck, Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, 264. Beck notes further that the KrV has two “quite different” accounts of transcendental ideas, the first of which makes them the categories themselves when unschematized, and the second of which refers to the various unconditioned objects of thought presumed for reason’s practical use. 18. A643–​4/​B671–​2. 19. Respectively, 23:331, 8:297, A809/​B837, 8:159, 5:430, 5:454, A327/​B384. 20. See Kant’s letter to Garve of August 7, 1783: “there cannot be anything wholly unconditioned among appearances” (10:341). 21. Kant describes Plato’s search for transcendent forms as a daring flight “on the wings of ideas, into the empty space of the pure understanding” (A5/​B9). On Kant’s flight metaphors, among others, see Tarbet, “The Fabric of Metaphor.” 22. See KrV A3/​B7. I later discuss some reasons to think that immortality is not as central to Kant’s practical philosophy as is usually supposed. 23. B21; cf. 5:142 ff. and 6:52. On the “need of reason,” see William James Booth, Interpreting the World: Kant’s Philosophy of History and Politics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), ch. 3 and Pauline Kleingeld, Fortschritt und Vernunft: Zur Geschichtsphilosophie Kants (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1995), ch. 8. 24. This 1786 essay is Kant’s contribution to the Pantheismusstreit. In 1785, F. H. Jacobi claimed that Lessing had, in conversation, confessed himself a Spinozist, adhering to

168 Notes a pantheism that was at the time considered tantamount to atheism. Against the implication that rationalism thus led to irrationality, Moses Mendelssohn later that year defended Lessing in his Morgenstunden, and soon the controversy drew commentary from many major thinkers of the day, including Hamann, Herz, and Kant. See Lewis White Beck, Early German Philosophy: Kant and his Predecessors (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1996 [1969]), 354–​360; Beiser, The Fate of Reason, sec. 4.2; and John H. Zammito, The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), ch. 11. 25. 8:137. Kant’s choice of verständlich intends the intellectual representation of sense-​ experience rather than the a priori conceptualization of reason, for begreiflich [lit. “graspable”] would more closely have captured the sense of “comprehendable” expressed in the claim that “concepts of reason serve for comprehension [zum Begreifen], just as concepts of the understanding serve for understanding [zum Verstehen] (of perceptions)” (A311/​B367; cf. 8:143, 5:350–​351, 7:168–​169). 26. 8:134–​135. Kleingeld notes that Kant’s cartographic analogy reflects the metaphorical nature of the “need of reason,” since for Kant needs are fundamentally empirical and somatic (Fortschritt und Vernunft, 102ff.). Kant’s use of a compass metaphor to describe orientation in his Preisschrift (20:261) reveals an understanding of the ideas of reason as ready-​made tools instead of something dynamically responsive to the growth of knowledge. Paul Feyerabend’s map metaphor stands over against the one offered by Kant: “The wanderer uses the map to find his way but he also corrects it as he proceeds, removing old idealizations and introducing new ones. Using the map no matter what will soon get him into trouble. But it is better to have maps than to proceed without them”; see Paul Feyerabend, Against Method, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 1988), 241. 27. 8:136. 28. I use “theoretical” and “practical” in Kant’s senses, as that which is considered in reflection on nature and that which is realized through freedom, respectively. Insofar as each interest involves practice (one scientific, one moral), both may be considered “practical” in the common sense. 29. A633/​B661. 30. 5:204. Cf. KU 5:209, G 4:413 fn., and MS 6:212. Cf. Jürgen Habermas, Erkenntnis und Interesse (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1968), 244–​252, and Manfred Pascher, Kants Begriff “Vernunftinteresse” (Innsbruck: Verlag des Instituts für Sprachwissenschaft der Universität Innsbruck, 1991). 31. 5:120. 32. 8:139, emphasis in original; cf. 5:142. 33. 8:141. Cf. A770/​B798-​A782/​B810, KpV 5:126 and 5:142, VüR 28:1072, MS 6:354, KrV Bxxii. 34. A771/​B799. 35. Thus Zammito argues that “What is Orientation in Thinking?” reflects a transition from Kant’s earlier, determinate conception of judgment to his later conception of judgment as a faculty with both reflective and determinate aspects; see The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, 237–​241.

Notes  169 36. A687/​B715. 37. In both KrV and KU the ideas extend cognition, but Kant also suggests in KU that thought itself is impossible without the assumption of purposiveness in nature. Varieties of the latter claim find voice elsewhere in Kant’s work (e.g., 4:455: “this concept of a [lawful] nature . . . must itself unavoidably be presupposed if experience . . . is to be possible”), and it seems clear that he entertained both views. What this means in terms of reason’s practical employment is a different matter. This question of whether the transcendental ideas are mere guides to the perfection of thought (the “skeptical” interpretation) or necessary for cognition at all (the “idealist” interpretation) has its source in Smith, A Commentary to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 450–​453. 38. See Zammito, The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, McFarland, Kant’s Concept of Teleology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1970), ch. 1, Robert E. Butts, “Teleology and Scientific Method,” Noûs 24, no. 1 (March 1990): 1–​16, and Paul Guyer, Kant’s System of Nature and Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), part I. On moral and historical teleology, see Michel Despland, Kant on History and Religion (Montreal: McGill-​Queen’s University Press, 1973), ch. 1; Yirmiyahu Yovel, Kant and the Philosophy of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980); Patrick Riley, Kant’s Political Philosophy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1982); Kleingeld, Fortschritt und Vernunft, ch. VII; Allen W. Wood, Kant’s Ethical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), part II; Guyer, Kant’s System of Nature and Freedom, part II. On the intersection of the two, see Friedrich Kaulbach, “Kants Metaphysik der Natur, Weltidee, und Prinzip der Handlung bei Kant,” Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 30, no. 3 (July 1976): 329–​349, and Guyer, Kant’s System of Nature and Freedom, part III. 39. See 5:445 and Butts, “Teleology and Scientific Method,” whence the phrase “research program” (13), and Grier, Kant’s Doctrine of Transcendental Illusion, 289–​290. 40. 5:389. Hence Kant writes “we can boldly say that it would be absurd for humans even to make such an attempt or to hope that there may yet arise a Newton who could make comprehensible even the generation of a blade of grass according to natural laws that no intention has ordered” (5:400, cf. 5:409). 41. 5:388. Kant defines an end as “the object of a concept insofar as the latter is regarded as the causes of the former (the real ground of its possibility); and the causality of a concept with regard to its object is purposiveness (forma finalis)” (5:220; cf. 5:408). 42. 5:397; 5:379. Cf. 5:409–​411 and William A. Galston, Kant and the Problem of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 17–​23. 43. Cf. also 20:293. 44. 20:236; see Butts, “Teleology and Scientific Method,” 7. 45. 5:400. The parenthetical phrase was added in KU’s second edition. 46. See Butts, “Teleology and Scientific Method,” 11. In this regard, Kant’s hypothesis of god is “metaphysical” in the literal sense of underpinning natural laws rather than in the speculative sense of making determinate positive claims about the nature of the objective world. 47. 8:29; emphasis in original.

170 Notes 48. A fact evident in proposition 9 of the “Idea for a Universal History” and sections 82–​ 84 of the KU. Kleingeld pays careful attention to both the theoretical and practical value of historical teleology in Kant; see Fortschritt und Vernunft and cf. Allen W. Wood, “Kant’s Philosophy of History,” in Kant, Toward Perpetual Peace and Other Writings in Politics, Peace, and History, ed. Pauline Kleingeld (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 254–​258. 49. 8:139. 50. 5:122; cf. 5:132, A634/​B662, and 5:11n. 51. See, e.g., A3/​B7, B395n; 5:132; 5:469–​475, and 20:295. 52. As Kant occasionally does, e.g., at VR 28:1083, when he calls moral faith a “practical postulate,” and as Beck does in making anything necessary for the highest good a “postulate” (see A Commentary on Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, 208). In KU, however, Kant calls a broad swath of ideas necessary for practical reason Glaubenssachen: “matters of belief ” or “matters of faith” (5:469). Kant’s consistent and explicit focus nonetheless always remains on the three cardinal postulates; Wood identifies no fewer than eleven different places in Kant’s work where one finds arguments for them; see Kant’s Moral Religion (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1970), 10. 53. 5:108. 54. 5:27. 55. 6:4; a note in “Theory and Practice” makes the point pithily: “without any end [Zweck], there can be no will” (8: 279n.). 56. See John R. Silber, “Kant’s Conception of the Highest Good as Immanent and Transcendent,” Philosophical Review 68, no. 4 (October 1959): 469. 57. 5:472. 58. 5:114; cf. A811/​B839. 59. 5:6. On the fact of reason, see Pawel Łuków, “The Fact of Reason: Kant’s Passage to Ordinary Moral Knowledge,” Kant-​Studien 84, no. 2 (1993): 204–​221, and Onora O’Neill, “Autonomy and the Fact of Reason in the Kritik der praktischen Vernunft,” in Immanuel Kant: Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, ed. Otfried Höffe (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2002), 81–​98. My way of putting Kant’s argument follows Wood’s absurdum practicum reading; see Kant’s Moral Religion, 25–​34, leaning on VR 28:1083. 60. See, e.g., Wood, Kant’s Moral Religion, ch. 3; Klaus Düsing, “Das Problem des höchsten Gutes in Kants praktischer Philosophie,” Kant-​Studien 62, nos. 1–​4 (1971): 5–​42; Yovel, Kant and the Philosophy of History, ch. 1; Steven G. Smith, “Worthiness to be Happy and Kant’s Concept of the Highest Good,” Kant-​Studien 75, no. 2 (1984): 168–​ 190; Gerhard Krämling, “Das höchste Gut als mögliche Welt: Zum Zusammenhang von Kulturphilosophie und systematischer Architektonik bei Kant,” Kant-​Studien 77, no. 3 (1986): 273–​288; Andrews Reath, “Two Conceptions of the Highest Good in Kant,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 26, no. 4 (October 1988): 593–​619; Kleingeld, Fortschritt und Vernunft, ch. 8; David Lindstedt, “Progress in Universal History as a Postulate of Practical Reason,” Kant-​Studien 90, no. 2 (1999): 138–​142. 61. A808/​B836; 5:444. 62. 5:110; 5:450.

Notes  171 63. See 5:113; cf. Despland, Kant on History and Religion, 271, and Yovel, Kant and the Philosophy of History, 98. 64. 5:453, emphasis added. 65. The apparent contingency of this relationship leads Beck to accuse Kant of heteronomy, since his noumenal-​phenomenal distinction appears to preclude the convergence of happiness, an empirical end, with virtue, a moral one, especially in terms of what can appear to be a “reward” for one’s moral character; see Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, 242 ff. This objection, however, assumes a pathological interpretation of Glückseligkeit, contrary to Kant’s broader conception of the term in his discussion of happiness deriving from moral action and his description of the highest good as a system of “self-​rewarding” morality (A809/​B837); see 5:124 and 6:67; Jin Kim, Kants Postulatenlehre, ihre Rezeption durch Ernst Bloch und ihre mögliche Anwendung zur Interpretation des Buddhismus (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1988), 22–​24; and Kleingeld, Fortschritt und Vernunft, 154; but cf. 7:277. 66. See Silber, “Kant’s Conception of the Highest Good.” 67. 5:123 and n. See the critiques in Silber (“Kant’s Conception of the Highest Good,” 473) and Reath (“Two Conceptions of the Highest Good in Kant,” 593). 68. A808/​B836. 69. 6:97–​98. 70. Not to be confused with Armageddon, a regulative idea Kant also terms the “end of all things”; 8:327–​339. See also 8:279n.; cf., e.g., R 6:5, KU 5:450 and Reflection #8077, 19:608. 71. 6:98. 72. 8:30. 73. Some early Neo-​Kantians accordingly held Kant’s political philosophy to amount to socialism. See Karl Vorländer, “Kant und der Sozialismus,” Kant-​Studien 4 (1900): 361–​ 412; Hermann Cohen, Kants Begründung der Ethik, nebst ihren Anwendungen auf Recht, Religion und Geschichte, 2nd ed. (Berlin: B. Cassirer, 1910), 368; and Harry van der Linden, Kantian Ethics and Socialism (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1988), esp. part II. 74. 6:29ff; 6:66, 6:75; see Wood, Kant’s Moral Religion, 118–​119, 232–​244. 75. 28:1091. In KU Kant calls immortality, God and freedom “matters of faith” instead of “articles of faith” (5:469n). Yet why God and freedom are both matters and articles of faith, while immortality is only the former, remains unclear, and Kant describes God, the possibility of contributing to the highest good in the world, and immortality as “articles of confession of pure practical reason” in the Preisschrift (20:298). 76. #8101, 19:644. See the editorial notes by Wood and di Giovanni in Kant, Religion and Rational Theology; 480n77. 77. 6:139, 28:1073. Kant’s moral theology is manifestly Christian in inspiration, but just how “Christian” Kant’s vision is can be nonetheless difficult to ascertain. On the one hand, he writes that Christianity of all religions most approximates natural religion (6:127; 131–​132), lambastes the “crude and changing concepts of the deity” of pre-​Christian religion (A817/​B845), and describes Judaism as “strictly speaking . . . not a religion at all” (6:125). On the other hand, Kant also tells us that

172 Notes in the various faiths “(Jewish, Mohammedan, Christian, Catholic, Lutheran),” “one and the true religion can nevertheless be met with” (6:108), and the image of Christianity Kant has in mind when lauding it is of a reformed cosmopolitanism at odds with contemporary state-​sanctioned religious doctrine under the reactionary Friedrich Wilhelm II (see, e.g., 6:159). Kant’s troubles with the religious censors after the king’s 1786 accession may account for some of his praise of this historical faith, though he also pulls no punches in his criticism of narrow orthodoxy (6:109; see Bettina Stangneth, “‘Kants schädliche Schriften.’ Eine Einleitung,” in Kant, Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft, xi–​ lxxv [Hamburg: Meiner, 2003]). Regardless of Christianity’s place in the genesis and structure of Kant’s philosophy, I see no reason how this of itself can impugn his philosophy’s normative implications, no more than, say, the neo-​Platonism of the early Church Fathers disqualifies their doctrines from consideration. See also Wood, Kant’s Moral Religion, 199–​200, but cf. Philip Rossi, “Kant’s Doctrine of Hope: Reason’s Interest and the Things of Faith,” The New Scholasticism 56, no. 2 (Spring 1982): 228–​238, and “Kant as a Christian Philosopher: Hope and the Symbols of Christian Faith,” Philosophy Today 25, no. 1 (Spring 1981): 24–​ 33. For a very different view, see Michael Mack, German Idealism and the Jew (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), ch. 1. 78. Kant makes this point when he boils the biblical God down to our moral character’s proleptic self-​projection: “through our reason God then becomes himself the interpreter of his will as announced through creation . . . . But that is not the interpretation of a rationating (speculative) reason, but of an efficacious practical reason which, just as in legislating it commands absolutely without further grounds, so it can be considered as the unmediated definition and voice of God through which he gives meaning to the letter of his creation” (8:264). 79. 5:472. 80. A663/​B691. 81. See Yovel, Kant and the Philosophy of History, 97–​103; Rossi, “Kant’s Doctrine of Hope”; and Susan Neiman, The Unity of Reason: Rereading Kant (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 175–​179. 82. 20:294; emphasis added. 83. 20:300; 28:1072; In the language of the KpV, God provides the bridge between the supreme highest good (virtue) and the complete highest good (happiness in proportion to virtue). 84. See 5:403. 85. 5:435. 86. Ibid. 87. Ibid. 88. 5:431; cf. 8:19. 89. 5:399; 7:82. 90. 8:27. So defined, both politics and morality have corresponding chiliastic beliefs that must be assumed for reason’s practical interest, with “philosophical chiliasm” anticipating the achievement of perpetual peace and “theological chiliasm”

Notes  173 anticipating the complete moral improvement of humanity (6:34). In line with the critical nature of his chiliasm, Kant endorses what he calls an “authentic” theodicy, according to which “through our reason God . . . becomes himself the interpreter of his will as announced through creation” (8:264, emphasis added), in contrast to the doctrinal assumptions of “theodicy proper.” As mentioned in an earlier note, an authentic theodicy “is not the interpretation of a ratiocinating (speculative) reason, but of an efficacious practical reason which, just as in legislating it commands absolutely without further grounds, so it can be considered as the unmediated definition and voice of God through which he gives meaning to the letter of his creation. Now I find such an authentic interpretation expressed allegorically in [the book of Job].” Kant praises Job for his “weak” faith, weak by dint of its source in the moral law rather than subordination to doctrinal (i.e., externally given) commands. Since Job “did not found his morality on faith, but his faith on morality,” his faith “alone is of a pure and true kind, i.e., the kind of faith that founds not a religion of supplication, but a religion of good life conduct” (8:267). 91. A805/​B833. 92. Cf. Despland, Kant on History and Religion, 271–​ 281, Joseph J. Godfrey, A Philosophy of Human Hope (Dordrecht: M. Nijhoff, 1987), 85–​101. 93. 6:379, 6:220. 94. 6:231. 95. 6:355. 96. 25:847; cf. 25:1427. 97. 6:101; 6:52, 6:75. Wood therefore calls divine grace a postulate of practical reason (Kant’s Moral Religion, 232). The self-​obscurity of human volition further suggests that the revolution in character necessary for the actualization of moral disposition (6:47) is also a moment of transfiguration. 98. 6:29; 6:72. 99. See Godfrey, A Philosophy of Human Hope, 97. 100. 6:98. 101. 6:94. 102. 6:99; 6:101–​102. 103. 6:103. Kant likens it instead to a family “under a common though invisible moral father.” The invisibility of the father is necessary for the autonomy of the moral law. 104. 6:94; cf 8:366. 105. Kant uses the same term to describe prudence developed according to humanity’s pragmatic predisposition. 106. 5:432–​433; cf. 8:22. See also G. Felicitas Munzel, Kant’s Conception of Moral Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 322–​338. Thus when Kant speaks in the Anthropology of a “necessity to be a member of some civil society” (7:330), he means that only under conditions of public right can humans hope to realize their moral volition. The contemporary distinction between civil society and the state did not exist in Kant’s era; see Manfred Riedel, “Transcendental Politics?: Political Legitimacy and the Concept of Civil Society in Kant,” Social Research 48, no. 3 (Autumn 1981): 581.

174 Notes 107. See Alexander Kaufman, Welfare in the Kantian State (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 122. 108. 8:375–​376n; 7:86. 109. 8:357. See also Munzel, Kant’s Conception of Moral Character, 177. 110. 8:350. 111. 8:297. Cf. Riedel, “Transcendental Politics?,” 597–​604. 112. 8:349–​350, 6:314. 113. See Leslie A. Mulholland, “Kant on War and International Justice,” Kant-​Studien 78, no. 1 (1987): 35. 114. 8:352. 115. Ibid. 116. Volker Gerhardt, Immanuel Kants Entwurf “Zum ewigen Frieden”: eine Theorie der Politik (Darmstadr: WBG, 1995), 89–​90. 117. 8:353. 118. Bernard Manin, The Principles of Representative Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 8. 119. See Gerhardt, Immanuel Kants Entwurf “Zum ewigen Frieden,” 90. 120. 6:314. Kant’s relationship to subaltern groups is addressed in Kleingeld, Fortschritt und Vernunft, 32–​34; Muthu, Enlightenment Against Empire, ch. 4; and Thomas McCarthy, Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), ch. 2. 121. 6:315. This point underscores an overlooked difficulty in appropriating Kant’s arguments for “democratic” peace theory; see Michael W. Doyle, “Kant, Liberal Legacies and Foreign Affairs, Part 1,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 12, no. 3 (Summer 1983): 205–​235, and “Kant Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs, Part 2.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 12, no. 4 (Fall 1983): 323–​353. 122. Something like this interpretation can be found in Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982) which concentrates on the intersubjectivity of the sensus communis in Kant’s account of aesthetic judgment as the key to his political philosophy; cf. Patrick Riley, “Hannah Arendt on Kant, Truth and Politics,” in Essays on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Howard Lloyd Williams (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 305–​323, and Munzel, Kant’s Conception of Moral Character, 57. For more balanced accounts of the role of public reason in Kant, see Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, tr. Thomas Berger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991 [1962]), 102–​117, and Elisabeth Ellis, Kant’s Politics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), ch. 5. 123. See Munzel, Kant’s Conception of Moral Character, 325 ff., for parallels between education and republicanism in Kant. 124. 8:35–​36. 125. 8:41–​42. 126. 8:24; emphasis in original. “Toward Perpetual Peace” offers the opposite view, namely that pacific international relations presuppose republicanism (8:350ff.);

Notes  175 whichever way the causal arrow points, Kant stresses a close link between domestic policy and foreign affairs. 127. See Mulholland, “Kant on War and International Justice”; Gerhardt, Immanuel Kants Entwurf “Zum ewigen Frieden”; Otfried Höffe, ed., Immanuel Kant: Zum ewigen Frieden (Berlin: Akademie-​Verlag, 1995); and James Bohman and Matthias Lutz-​Bachmann, Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant’s Cosmopolitan Ideal (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997). Kant also writes that peace can be in part affected by the “spirit of commerce” (8:368). This claim is presented independently of the argument for peace from republican institutions, and Kant may have had Montequieu in mind; see The Spirit of the Laws, part IV, book 20, chs. 2 and 4. 128. 8:351; cf. 6:345–​346. 129. See Doyle, “Kant, Liberal Legacies and Foreign Affairs, Part 1,” and John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 44–​53. 130. Kant sometimes characterizes this cosmopolitan system as a voluntary “federation of peoples” and sometimes as a mandatory “universal republic” or “world federation”; see Georg Cavallar, “Kant’s Society of Nations: Free Federation or World Republic?,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 32, no. 3 (July 1994): 461–​482, and Pauline Kleingeld, “Approaching Perpetual Peace: Kant’s Defense of a League of States and his Ideal of a World Federation,” European Journal of Philosophy 12, no. 3 (2004): 304–​325. 131. Here my interpretation shares much with Munzel, Kant’s Conception of Moral Character. 132. For Kant on education, see Lewis White Beck, “Kant on Education,” in Essays on Kant and Hume (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978); Erwin Hufnagel, “Kants pädagogische Theorie,” Kant-​Studien 79, nos. 1–​4 (1988): 43–​56; Munzel, Kant’s Conception of Moral Character, ch. 5; and Robert B. Louden, Kant’s Impure Ethics: From Rational Beings to Human Beings (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), ch. 2.) 133. 9:444, 9:441. 134. Beck notes that the authenticity of this work in its present form is dubious, but argues that it is nonetheless valuable as “a compendium of echt-​kantische views on education, even if we cannot be confident that we are reading Kant’s own words and can be generally confident that we are not reading them in an order and context established by Kant himself ” (“Kant on Education,” 196); cf. Hufnagel, “Kants pädagogische Theorie,” 44. 135. 5:431. 136. 5:432, A709/​B737; cf. Munzel, Kant’s Conception of Moral Character, 276–​277. 137. 5:431; A710/​B738. 138. 5:449–​450. Cf. Hufnagel, “Kants pädagogische Theorie,” 46. 139. 9:486, 7:322–​323. 140. 9:486, 7:322–​323. See Patrick Kain, “Prudential Reason in Kant’s Anthropology,” in Essays on Kant’s Anthropology, ed. Brian Jacobs and Patrick Kain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 247–​248.

176 Notes 141. 7:323–​324. 142. 9:486. 143. 9:450, 7:324; cf. 27:471. 144. 9:446; 8:22–​23; 7:327. 145. 8:23; 6:100. 146. 8:23, 9:443. 147. 8:23, 9:446; cf. 8:18–​19. 148. 7:85. 149. 8:40. 150. 8:365. 151. Besides “Toward Perpetual Peace,” which appeared as a pamphlet, the historical and political essays appeared in the Berlinische Monatsschrift, the influential organ of the German Enlightenment. The University of Bielefeld has digitized the full run of the Monatsschrift (1783–​1811) at http://​www.ub.uni-​bielef​eld.de/​dig​lib/​aufkl/​berl​mon/​ index.htm. For more on Kant’s intellectual milieu, see Günther Birtsch, “The Berlin Wednesday Society,” in What is Enlightenment?: Eighteenth-​Century Answers and Twentieth-​Century Questions, ed. James Schmidt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 235–​252. 152. 8:362. 153. Karl Ameriks, “Kant’s Transcendental Deduction as a Regressive Argument,” in Interpreting Kant’s Critiques (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 51–​66. 154. Cf. 8:40, 8:310. 155. See Neiman, The Unity of Reason, 180. 156. 7:82, 8:18; cf. also the remarkable passage at 6:33. 157. 7:83. 158. 8:30. 159. 7:81; cf 8:308. This is evidently one of the earliest uses of the term “terrorism”; see Verena Erlenbusch-​Anderson, Genealogies of Terrorism: Revolution, State Violence, Empire (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 21. 160. 7:82. Wieland was, moreover, editor of the intellectual journal Der Teutsche Merkur and father-​in-​law of Kant’s disciple Reinhold. 161. 7:82; cf. 8:380. 162. 8:307. 163. Moses Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, or On Religious Power and Judaism, tr. Allan Arkush (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 1983 [1783]), 44–​47; original cited by Kant at 8:307–​308. 164. 8:308. 165. 8:309. 166. 8:18. 167. 8:121. 168. 8:309. 169. Ibid. 170. 8:310; 8:40. 171. See 8:160–​163.

Notes  177 172. 7:80; cf. 7:88. Kant’s examples of prophetic history are entirely negative, however: the Jewish prophets foretold their nation’s doom only to become “themselves agents of this fate;” contemporary politicians argue that people cannot live responsibly, ignoring the fact that the people have been made docile “by means of unjust coercion;” and the clergy “occasionally prophesy the complete decline of religion and the imminent coming of the Antichrist while doing precisely what is required to make it so” (7:80). For a more detailed discussion of Kant’s claims, as well as his finer distinction between soothsaying/​prophetic (wahrsagend) and divinatory (weissagend) history, see Susan Shell, “Kant as Soothsayer: The Problem of Progress and the ‘Sign’ of History,” in Kant and the Possibility of Progress, ed. Paul T. Wilford and Samuel A. Stoner (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), 115–​134. I discuss Kantian prophecy more in my “Richard Rorty’s ‘Post-​Kantian’ Philosophy of History.” 173. Kleingeld, “Nature or Providence?” 174. 8:360. 175. 8:363. 176. In KU, Kant also suggests that human inequality is the motor of history (5:432), though he subsumes this explanation to the more general conception of unsocial sociability. 177. 8:363. 178. 8:22. 179. 8:360. 180. 5:433. 181. 8:361n. 182. 28:1103; 8:361n. For a philosophical history of the concept of providence, see Genevieve Lloyd, Providence Lost (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), esp. chs. 7 and 8. 183. 8:30. Taken in its broadest Kantian signification, both nature and providence are aspects of “nature” writ large, namely “the epitome of everything . . . that exists according to laws, the world (as actual so-​called nature) taken together with its highest cause.” On this definition, Kant continues, the study of nature encompasses both physics and metaphysics (8:159). 184. 8:362. Cf. 8:362n.: “It is self-​evident . . . that no one must try to explain a good action (as an event in the world) in [providential] terms, since such an explanation would allegedly be theoretical cognition of the supersensible, which is an incongruous claim.” 185. In his Lectures on the Philosophical Doctrine of Religion, Kant even goes so far as to say that “however disordered and purposeless as history may describe human conduct, yet we should not let this drive us crazy, but should rather believe nevertheless that the human race is grounded on a universal plan according to which it will in the end attain to its highest possible perfection” (28:1103; first emphasis added). 186. Kant’s 1759 Versuch einiger Betrachtungen über den Optimismus is a dogmatic tract influenced by both Leibniz’s theodicy and Pope’s Essay on Man, and reflects what Kant would later have considered a naïve acceptance of progress as constitutive of

178 Notes the world. Late in life, Kant notably told his biographer Borowski to remove from circulation any copies the latter found of this early work; see Ralf Meerbote and David Walford, “Introduction to ‘Optimism,’” in Kant: Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–​ 1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), lvi–​lvii. For a contextualization of this work, see Franz Gabriel Nauen, “Kant as an Inadvertent Precursor of Eighteenth-​Century Neospinozism: On Optimism (1759),” Kant-​Studien 83, no. 3 (1992): 268–​279. 187. Ellis, Kant’s Politics, 68. 188. Ellis, Kant’s Politics, 43. Cf. the functional rather than historical approach to teleology taken in Riley, Kant’s Political Philosophy. 189. 8:360, 8:365, 8:360–​361. 190. 8:311; 7:331; 8:30. 191. 8:362. 192. 8:19; 9:446; 8:365–​367; 7:93; 8:310. 193. 5:144. 194. On this concept, see Andrew Chignell, “Belief in Kant,” Philosophical Review 116, no. 3 (July 2007): 323–​360; Loren Goldman, “In Defense of Blinders: On Kant, Political Hope, and the Need for Practical Belief,” Political Theory 40, no. 4 (August 2012): 497–​523; and Jakob Huber, “Pragmatic Belief and Political Agency,” Political Studies 66, no. 3 (August 2018): 651–​666. Glaube’s translation in Kant often depends on context. In a theological tract like “What is Orientation in Thinking?” “faith” may be more appropriate, and has the added benefit of highlighting the paradoxical air of a “rational faith” Kant refers to in his description of Vernunftglaube as an unusual concept. On the other hand, when Kant uses the term generally as a middle ground between opinion [Meinung] and knowledge [Wissen], as something taken to be true according to subjective sufficiency for conviction without objective sufficiency of demonstration (A822/​B850), “belief ” is clearly preferable. I use “belief ” for Glaube in order to avoid the overly irrational connotations of “faith” in English, but maintain the paradoxical air by referring to the type of assumption Kant has in mind here as “practical belief.” The use of “pragmatic belief ” in reference to Kant’s postulations is misleading, since pragmatic belief is only one species of practical belief, one that concerns the instrumental realization of given ends, not preconditions for the fulfillment of pure practical laws (A824/​B852). 195. See Allen W. Wood, “W.K. Clifford and the Ethics of Belief,” in Unsettling Obligations (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 11–​12. 196. A822/​B850, cf. 9:66ff. 197. A822/​B850. 198. 5:121, A776/​B804. Hence Kant’s letter to Reinhold of May 12, 1789: “[the categories] can be used for practical ideas without stepping outside their proper sphere. This is so just because the limitation of our power of conferring objective reality upon our concepts is not a limitation on the possibility of things” (11:39). 199. 16:374. 200. 16:374.

Notes  179 201. From the Lectures on Religion: “This moral belief is a practical postulate, through which anyone who denies it is brought ad absurdum practicum. An absurdum logicum is an inconsistency in judgments; absurdum practicum, by contrast, is when it is shown that whoever denies this or that would have to be a scoundrel [Bösewicht: lit. ‘evil wight’ or ‘malefactor’]” (28:1083); on this passage, see Wood, Kant’s Moral Religion, 29. 202. See Bernard Williams, “Deciding to Believe,” in Problems of the Self, 136–​151 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973); Barbara Winters, “Believing at Will,” Journal of Philosophy 76, no. 5 (May 1979): 243–​259; Jon Elster, Ulysses and the Sirens: Studies in Rationality and Irrationality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), II.3, and Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), II.2, but cf. J. Thomas Cook, “Deciding to Believe without Self-​Deception,” Journal of Philosophy 84, no. 8 (August 1987): 441–​446. As I explain in a later chapter, James and Peirce thought they found a way out of this conundrum by following Alexander Bain’s definition of belief as a rule for conduct. 203. This tack is plausible when we consider the structure of the Groundwork, which begins with a sketch of the common moral cognition we all share and proceeds to reveal its supposed foundation in the pure practical reason of which practical belief is a central component. 204. 5:471–​472. 205. 5:472, 7:147. 206. 7:149; 7:121. 207. See, e.g., the critical take offered in Heidegger, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, 185 ff., in which Kant is faulted for failing to see that philosophical anthropology cannot answer the “authentic” question of fundamental ontology, versus Ernst Cassirer’s more sympathetic The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1965). 208. See Hans Vaihinger, Die Philosophie des Als Ob, 9th ed. (Leipzig: Meiner, 1927). I write “especially Kant” because of the pains Vaihinger exerts to demonstrate the centrality of fictions to Kant’s enterprise. He dedicates far more space to Kant than any other thinker in this work, including a comprehensive documentation of the latter’s employment of the language of fictions (see part III). The English edition is truncated, and more than half of Vaihinger’s discussion of Kant remains untranslated. For more on Vaihinger, see Matthias Neuber, ed., Fiktion und Fiktionalismus: Beiträge zu Hans Vaihingers ‘Philosophie des Als Ob’ (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2014). 209. Vaihinger, Die Philosophie des Als Ob, 23. 210. Vaihinger, Die Philosophie des Als Ob, 54, 169, 19. 211. “As actual fictions in the strongest sense of the word we include those structures of representation [stellen sich solche Vorstellungsgebilde dar] which do not just contradict reality, but also those that are in themselves contradictory (e.g., the concept of the atom, of the thing-​in-​itself)” (24); cf. Vaihinger’s citation of Lotze (154). 212. Vaihinger, Die Philosophie des Als Ob, 645.

180 Notes 213. Hence Vaihinger’s greater influence in literary studies, despite recent interest in philosophical fictionalism; see, e.g., Mark Eli Kalderon, ed., Fictionalism in Metaphysics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) and Mark Eli Kalderon, Moral Fictionalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), as well as Kwame Anthony Appiah, As If: Idealizations and Ideals (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017). Frank Kermode’s and Paul Ricouer’s use of Vaihinger is notable in this regard; see Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000 [1967]), 39–​41, and Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1., tr. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 214. A97. On the distinction between “inner sense” and “apperception,” see Allison, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, 10 and 266–​273; on the argument of the “Transcendental Analytic,” see Wood, Kant, 46–​50, and J. Michael Young, “Functions of Thought and the Synthesis of Intuitions,” in The Cambridge Companion to Kant, ed. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 101–​122. 215. A104. 216. A108/​B139. 217. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, 54. 218. Ibid. 219. Ibid. 220. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, 46, 64. 221. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, 65–​66. Emil Fackenheim describes Kant’s philosophy of history as giving his moral philosophy a plot; see Fackenheim, “Kant’s Concept of History,” Kant-​Studien 48, nos. 1–​4 (1956): 381–​398. 222. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, 46. 223. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, 47, 71–​73. 224. Paul Ricoeur, “Hope and the Structure of Philosophical Systems,” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 44 (1970): 55–​69. 225. Although he uses the Christian language of love to describe this objectiveless hope, Gabriel Marcel’s analysis bears a striking resemblance to Ricoeur’s mimesis2; see Marcel, Homo Viator. 226. On this point, see also Lear, Radical Hope. 227. On chronic hopers, see H. L. Mencken, “The Cult of Hope,” in Prejudices, vol. 1 (New York: Library of America, 2010).

Chapter 2 1. See Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 67 and passim. 2. For Bloch’s reminscences of Lukács, see Michael Löwy, “Interview with Ernst Bloch,” New German Critique 9 (Autumn 1976): 35–​45. Bloch’s early work on utopianism was also significant for Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia (1936). In the post-​war period, Bloch was the GDR’s most prominent philosopher until his

Notes  181 1961 defection; for Bloch’s activities during his GDR period, see Gerhard Zwerenz, “Zwischenbericht von der hoffnungslosen Lage an der Fakultät der guten Hoffnung,” in Ernst Blochs Wirkung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1975), 208–​217. 3. On liberation theology, see Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope: On the Ground and Implications of a Christian Eschatology, tr. James W. Leitch (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993 [1964]); Gustavo Gutiérrez, Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1988 [1973]); and James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 2nd ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1986); see also Christian Smith, The Emergence of Liberation Theology: Radical Religion and Social Movement Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991, esp. part 1. 4. At seventeen volumes, Bloch’s Gesamtausgabe is longer than either Kant’s or Hegel’s. Citations refer to the 1977 Suhrkamp edition and are given by volume and page number. Where English translations exist, I cite them and provide page numbers after the German; PH =​ The Principle of Hope; SU =​ The Spirit of Utopia. All other translations are my own. 5. “Grosse Bloch Musik” was the original title of Adorno’s 1959 review of a new edition of Bloch’s Traces; it now has the title “Blochs Spuren.” See Adorno, Noten zur Literatur (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974), 233–​250, and cf. Detlev Claussen, Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 408, n.244, and Pierre Bouretz, Witnesses for the Future: Philosophy and Messianism, tr. Michael B. Smith (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 427. 6. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia (New York: NYU Press, 2009), 87. 7. See, e.g., 8:511, cf. 13:13–​15 and 15:11, as well as Hegel’s discussion of Begierde in the Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegels Werke [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1969] 3:139 ff). 8. 5:122, PH 108. 9. 5:728, PH 624. Emphasis in original. 10. 5:1, PH 3; 5:10, PH 12. 11. 5:129, PH 114–​115. 12. 5:130 ff., PH 115. 13. 5:131, PH 116. 14. 5:230, PH 200. Later I relate Bloch’s Front to Gramsci’s war metaphors. Bloch regularly employed the phrase “militant optimism” as a synonym for his philosophy of hope; see, e.g., 5:230, PH 200. 15. See PH ch. 18; here I follow the discussion in Joseph J. Godfrey, A Philosophy of Human Hope (Dordrecht: M. Nijhoff, 1987), 74–​76. 16. 5:264, PH 229. 17. Godfrey, A Philosophy of Human Hope, 75. 18. Kant, Bxxx. 19. 5:264, PH 229. 20. 3:221, SU 175; cf. 3:219–​220, SU 173–​174, and the critique of Kant in Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, tr. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 110–​149. On Bloch and process philosophy, see Wayne Hudson, The Marxist Philosophy of Ernst Bloch (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982), 68–​79.

182 Notes 21. 3:220, SU 174. 22. 3:222, SU 176. 23. Ibid. “Invented” emends “well-​fabricated.” Erdichtung has literary resonance, and is etymologically related to Dichtung, “poetry.” Kant uses the term to describe conceptual creations; see KrV B311. 24. 3:223, SU 177; cf. PH ch. 20 and 15:15 ff. 25. Kant, KrV, Bvii. 26. 3:223, SU 177, emphasis in original. Bloch does not significantly discuss the anthropological, pedagogical, and political writings I explore in the previous chapter that complicate this interpretation of Kant. 27. 3:234, SU 185–​186. 28. Allen W. Wood, Karl Marx, 1st edition (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 190. 29. Ernst Bloch, “Dialectics and Hope,” New German Critique 9 (Autumn 1976): 4; this piece is a translation of the last chapter of Subjekt-​Objekt; see 8:512. 30. 8:132 ff. and 15:123 ff. 31. 8:122. Bloch uses the adjectival nouns Historische and Werdende. 32. 8:121. 33. Ibid. 34. Gustav E. Mueller, “The Hegel Legend of ‘Thesis-​Antithesis-​Synthesis,’” in The Hegel Myths and Legends, ed. Jon Stewart (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 301–​305. 35. 5:122, PH 108. 36. See Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility, tr. Hans Jonas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984 [1979]), ch. 6. This work, Das Prinzip Verantwortung, is a direct response to Bloch’s Das Prinzip Hoffnung. 37. Cited in Paul Ricoeur, “Hope and the Structure of Philosophical Systems,” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 44 (1970): 57. 38. 7:456. 39. 8:124, emphasis in original. 40. Plato, Meno, 85d-​e. 41. Cf. Hudson, The Marxist Philosophy of Ernst Bloch, 78–​79. 42. 5:321, PH 201. 43. Hudson, The Marxist Philosophy of Ernst Bloch, 117. 44. 5:232–​233, PH 202–​203. 45. See Subjekt-​Objekt, ch. 23, “Hegel und Anamnesis; contra Bann der Anamnesis” (8:473–​488). 46. Cf. Marx’s claim that “the mystification which the dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands” needs to be “inverted,” Capital, vol. 1, tr. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin/​NLR, 1981), 103. 47. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Werke, 3:431. 48. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, tr. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 371 (§340); cf. Werke 7:503. 49. See, e.g., Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, in Werke, 6:452.

Notes  183 50. 8:135. 51. 13:95; cf. Friedrich Engels, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, in The Marx-​Engels Reader, ed. and tr. Robert Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), 683–​717, and Part III of “The Communist Manifesto,” in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, rev. ed., ed. and tr. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 245–​271. 52. 5:271, PH 235. 53. 8:29. 54. 8:424. Cf. Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, ed. Allan Bloom, tr. James H. Nichols Jr (New York: Basic, 1969), ch. 1–​2. Bloch also cites Lenin’s statement that “intelligent idealism is nearer to intelligent materialism than stupid materialism” (8:431). 55. 8:519. 56. 15:28. Bloch says that metaphysics should study “Being in general” or the “formal relationships of Being,” Aristotle’s “practically empirical” categories of material, formal, final and efficient causality (7:450–​451). 57. 5:236, PH 206. 58. 5:228, PH 198. The claims here are stronger than what can be gleaned from the Feuerbach Theses, since Bloch posits a latent tendency in the world rather than merely taking on Marx’s conception of the unity of theory and praxis. 59. 8th Thesis on Feuerbach. Cf. PH ch. 19. 60. 5:315, PH 271. 61. 15:121. 62. 15:127. 63. Equating Bloch’s concern with a worry about a historical bloc makes sense of Bloch’s metaphor of the “front” of history (7:467), especially when considered in light of Gramsci’s military metaphors; see Antonio Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks, vol. 2, ed. and tr. Joseph A. Buttigieg (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992),174. 64. See Loren Goldman, “Left Hegelian Variations: On the Matter of Revolution in Marx, Bloch, and Althusser,” Praktyka Teoretyczna 35, no. 1 (April 2020): 51–​74. 65. Karl Marx, The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature, in The First Writings of Karl Marx, ed. Paul Schafer (Brooklyn: Ig Press, 2006), 103ff. Marx meant them to represent different camps of Hegelians; see Warren Breckman, Marx, The Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 259–​271. 66. See Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, tr. Alicia Stallings (London: Penguin, 2007), II:243 ff., and Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (New York: Norton, 2011). 67. Marx, Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy, 115. 68. Marx, Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy, 103; the translation is from Seneca, Letter XII:10, in Seneca, Volume IV: Epistles 1–​65, tr. Richard M. Gummere (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1917), 71. 69. Marx, Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy, 117.

184 Notes 70. Marx, Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy, 118. Marx follows Diogenes Laertius; see his Lives of Eminent Philosophers, vol. II, Books 6–​10, tr. R. D. Hicks (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925), X:150. 71. Marx, Difference between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy, 145. 72. 15:139. 73. Hudson, The Marxist Philosophy of Ernst Bloch, 137–​138. 74. See Cat Moir’s fantastic Bloch’s Speculative Materialism: Ontology, Epistemology, Politics (Leiden: Brill, 2019). 75. 7:471. 76. 7:456. 77. In place of Kant’s regulative unity of the laws of nature, Bloch writes of “a material Logikon . . . that becomes especially visible in the connection of logical principles with the real categories of process” (15:243). 78. See Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 149–​255. 79. Auszugsgestalten is Bloch’s term for the preappearances of utopia in cultural artifacts. 80. 7:469. This passage is italicized in the original. 81. 17:409. 82. 7:467, 15:129. Cf. Loren Goldman, “The Matter of Bloch’s Philosophy of Nature in the Shadow of Idealism,” in Rethinking Bloch, ed. Henk de Berg and Cat Moir (Leiden: Brill, 2023). 83. Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, rev. ed., ed. David McLellan (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2000), 172. 84. Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts,” in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan, 90. 85. See 5:802–​807, PH 686–​691. 86. Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” 83. 87. 5:226, PH 197; Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno, “Something’s Missing: A Discussion between Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing,” in Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, tr. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenberg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 12. 88. 5:228, PH 198. 89. 5:226, PH 197. 90. Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1032b1–​2. 91. See Metaphysics, 1045b17ff. Makin notes that a better translation of dynamis is “power” rather than the standard “potentiality”; see ibid., 22. 92. 1048b29, 17:409. 93. Bloch, Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left, tr. Loren Goldman and Peter Thompson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 43–​44. 94. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 189. 95. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 148. 96. Silvia Markun, Ernst Bloch in Selbtszeugnissen und Bilddokumenten (Berlin: Rohwolt, 1977), 60ff. 97. 15:121. 98. See PH chs. 15 and 18.

Notes  185 99. 5:1604, PH 1356; cf. 5:1113, PH 948, and 5:1608, 1359. 100. 5:303, PH 262. 101. Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 65, 69; Bouretz, Witnesses for the Future, 427. 102. Ernst Bloch and Rudi Dutschke, “Geht der Himmel mit den stärksten Flinten?,” in Ernst Blochs Wirkung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1975), 221–​228. 103. For reflections on Bloch’s political naïveté by his own son, see Jan Robert Bloch and Capers Rubin, “How Can We Understand the Bends in the Upright Gait?,” New German Critique 45 (Autumn 1988): 9–​39. 104. See Ricoeur, “Hope and the Structure of Philosophical Systems;” a similar link between hope and agency is drawn by Jonathan Lear in Radical Hope (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 105. 5:1628; PH 1376.

Chapter 3 1. Joseph Margolis, “The First Pragmatists,” in The Blackwell Guide to American Philosophy, ed. Armen Marsoobian and John Ryder (London: Blackwell, 2004), 39; see also Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), ch. 1. 2. James, for example, credited the English F. C. S. Schiller and the Italian Giovanni Papini with aiding in developing the doctrine; see William James, Pragmatism, ed. Fredson Bowers and Ignas K. Skrupskelis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 32, 34ff. Peirce dedicated part of his 1905 essay on pragmatism to differentiating himself from both thinkers; see his “Pragmatism,” in The Essential Peirce, vol. 2, ed. The Peirce Edition Project (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998): 398–​400. The relationship between Dewey’s pragmatism and British political thought of his era is explored in James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–​1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), Alan Ryan, John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism (New York: Norton, 1995), and Marc Stears, Progressives, Pluralists, and the Problems of the State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). On pragmatism’s relationship to German thought, see Hans Joas, Pragmatismus und Gesellschaftstheorie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1992), 96–​145; I trace some of the connections between these traditions in Loren Goldman, “Richard Rorty’s ‘Post-​Kantian’ Philosophy of History,” Journal of the Philosophy of History 9, no. 3 (November 2015): 410–​443; see also James Tartaglia, “Rorty’s Ambivalent Relationship to Kant,” Contemporary Pragmatism 13, no. 3 (2016): 298–​318. 3. For an overview, see Loren Goldman, “Pragmatism,” The Encyclopedia of Political Thought (London: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2014).

186 Notes 4. I follow Bruce Kuklick, A History of Philosophy in America, 1720–​2000 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), chs. 8–​10. 5. Cited in Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James (Boston: Little, Brown, 1935), 2:521. 6. Charles S. Peirce, “Grounds of Validity of the Laws of Logic,” in The Essential Peirce, vol. 1, ed. Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 82. 7. Dewey wrote his (now missing) dissertation on Kant’s psychology. The early essay “Kant and Philosophic Method” (EW 1, 34–​47) indicates that Dewey saw himself (at least at this stage of his career) as wrestling with the implications of transcendental subjectivity. For discussions of pragmatism and Kant, see Murray Murphey, “Kant’s Children: The Cambridge Pragmatists,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 4, no. 1 (Winter 1968): 3–​33; Elisabeth Flower and Murray Murphey, A History of Philosophy in America (New York: Capricorn Books, 1977); Sidney Axinn, “The First Western Pragmatist: Immanuel Kant,” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 33, no. 1 (February 2006): 83–​ 94; Thomas Carlson, “James and the Kantian Tradition,” in The Cambridge Companion to William James, ed. Ruth Anna Putnam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 363–​ 381; Goldman, “Richard Rorty’s ‘Post-​Kantian’ Philosophy of History,” and Tartaglia, “Rorty’s Ambivalent Relation to Kant.” 8. James, “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results,” in Pragmatism, 258–​ 259. Dewey noted that readers who follow James’s advice and look to Peirce’s “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” for pragmatism’s origin “have not, however, found the word there”; see MW 10:71, 10:366, and cf. Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (New York: MacMillan, 2002), ch. 9. 9. James, Pragmatism, 28. 10. Charles S. Peirce, Collected Papers, ed. Paul Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 2:113. Unless otherwise noted, I cite Peirce’s essays from the two-​volume The Essential Peirce, ed. Nathan Houser, Christian Kloesel, and The Peirce Edition Project (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992 and 1998). For works not included in The Essential Peirce, references are to the ten-​ volume Harvard edition of Peirce’s Collected Papers. 11. “I devoted two hours a day to the study of Kant’s Critic of the Pure Reason for more than three years, until I almost knew the whole book by heart, and had critically examined every section of it” (Peirce, Collected Papers, 1:4). In his 1903 lectures on pragmatism, Peirce places himself among those “sufficiently soaked in the Critic of Pure Reason”; see “The Three Normative Sciences,” in The Essential Peirce, vol. 2, 199. 12. Peirce, Collected Papers, 8:213. The essay is “On a New List of Categories,” in The Essential Peirce, vol. 1, 1–​10. 13. Peirce, “Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man,” in The Essential Peirce, vol. 1, 17–​18n. Cf. “Fraser’s The Works of George Berkeley,” in The Essential Peirce, vol. 1, 90ff. 14. Peirce, “What Pragmatism Is,” in The Essential Peirce, vol. 2, 332. James differs from Peirce on the appropriateness of the Greek πραγμα.

Notes  187 15. Peirce, “What Pragmatism Is,” 332–​333. That same year Peirce wrote that “the present writer was a pure Kantist until he was forced by successive steps into Pragmaticism. The Kantist has only to abjure from the bottom of his heart the proposition that a thing-​in-​itself can, however indirectly, be conceived; and then correct the details of Kant’s doctrine accordingly, and he will find himself to have become a Critical Common-​sensist” (Peirce, “Issues of Pragmaticism,” in The Essential Peirce, vol. 2, 353–​354). Critical common-​sensism was Peirce’s later name for his brand of epistemology deriving from both and Kant (critical) and Thomas Reid (common sense); see “Issues of Pragmaticism,” 346. 16. Kant, KrV, A824/​B852. 17. On Kant’s Anthropology in the scheme of his moral writings, see Louden, “The Second Part of Morals.” 18. James and Dewey both worked early on in laboratory settings to pursue psychological research, the fruits of which were James’s Principles of Psychology and Dewey’s Psychology—​each their respective author’s first book. Peirce was party to a number of expeditions to verify predictions of solar eclipses on behalf of the Harvard Observatory and the US Coastal Survey. 19. Murphey, “Kant’s Children,” 5–​7. 20. Peirce, “Pragmatism,” in The Essential Peirce, vol. 2, 399; cf. Murray G. Murphey, The Development of Peirce’s Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 160–​163. Though Peirce retrospectively noted the connection between pragmatism and Bain’s psychology, James first worked out the implications of this transformation. James approvingly cites Bain’s conception of belief from The Emotions and the Will in an 1868 review, and an “extensively scored and annotated” copy of Bain’s Senses and Intellect is in James’s personal library at Harvard; see Max H. Fisch, “Alexander Bain and the Genealogy of Pragmatism,” in Peirce, Semeiotic, and Pragmatism (Bloomington: Indiana University press, 1986), 88–​89. 21. Alexander Bain, The Emotions and the Will, 3rd ed. (New York: D. Appleton, 1886), 505. 22. Bain, The Emotions and the Will, 507. 23. William James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Practical Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 14. 24. Peirce, Collected Papers, 5.589, and “The Fixation of Belief,” in The Essential Peirce, vol. 1, 114. 25. Bain, The Emotions and the Will, 505–​506. 26. Bain, The Emotions and the Will, 530. 27. Bain, The Emotions and the Will, 506. 28. Bain, The Emotions and the Will, 509. 29. Murphey, The Development of Peirce’s Philosophy, 161. 30. Peirce, “Philosophy and the Conduct of Life,” in The Essential Peirce, vol. 2, 33; cf. Peirce, “Pearson’s Grammar of Science,” in The Essential Peirce, vol. 2, 58. 31. Peirce, “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities,” in The Essential Peirce, vol. 1, 29, Peirce, “The Fixation of Belief,” in The Essential Peirce, vol. 1, 112; cf. Peirce, “The

188 Notes Order of Nature,” in The Essential Peirce, vol. 1, 181, and Peirce, “Grounds of Validity of the Laws of Logic,” in The Essential Peirce, vol. 1, 75. 32. Dewey, “The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy,” MW 4:3. 33. Dewey, “The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy,” MW 4:10. 34. Dewey, “The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy,” MW 4:14. 35. Dewey, “The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy,” MW 4:11. 36. The Essential Peirce, vol. 1, 82. 37. See, e.g., Cheryl Misak, Truth, Politics, Morality: Pragmatism and Deliberation (London: Routledge, 2000), chs. 2–​3; Robert Talisse, A Pragmatist Philosophy of Democracy (London: Routledge, 2008); and Hilary Putnam, “A Reconsideration of Deweyan Democracy,” in Renewing Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 180–​202, and “Between the New Left and Judaism,” in The American Philosopher: Conversations, ed. Giovanna Borradori (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 61–​62. 38. Peirce, “What Pragmatism Is,” 335. 39. Peirce, Collected Papers, 1.575.; cf. A. J. Ayer, The Origins of Pragmatism (London: MacMillan, 1968), 14, and Jürgen Habermas, Erkenntnis und Interesse (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1968), 119–​120. Peirce defines logical classes by their final ends; see “On Science and Natural Classes,” in The Essential Peirce, vol. 2, 120. 40. Peirce, Collected Papers, 1.575.; see also Peirce, “The Three Normative Sciences,” and Vincent Potter, S.J., “Peirce’s Analysis of Normative Science,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 2, no. 1 (Spring 1966): 5–​32, and “Normative Science and the Pragmatic Maxim,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 5, no. 1 (January 1967): 41–​53. 41. Peirce, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” in The Essential Peirce, vol. 1, 129. 42. Ibid. 43. See Richard Bernstein, “Action, Conduct, and Self-​Control,” in Perspectives on Peirce, ed. Richard J. Bernstein (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1965), 66–​91. 44. Peirce, “What Pragmatism Is,” 337. 45. Peirce, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” 132. I cite the first formulation of the maxim for its familiarity. Peirce later worried that this phrasing did not convey the doctrine that meaning is a function of the habits involved in the practical application of a concept; see Collected Papers, 5.402n3, and Murphey, “Kant’s Children,” 10. 46. Peirce, “What Pragmatism Is,” 335. 47. Peirce, “The Fixation of Belief,” in The Essential Peirce, vol. 1, 116. 48. Peirce, “The Fixation of Belief,” 117. 49. Peirce, “The Fixation of Belief,” 117–​118. 50. Peirce, “The Fixation of Belief,” 119. 51. Ibid. 52. Peirce, “The Fixation of Belief, 121, 120. 53. Peirce, “The Fixation of Belief,” 120. 54. Ibid. 55. Peirce, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” 140.

Notes  189 56. Peirce, “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities,” 29, emphasis in original. 57. Peirce, “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities,” 54; cf. 52. 58. Peirce, “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities,” 29. 59. “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” 139. “Fated” means “that which is sure to come true, and can nohow be avoided.” 60. Peirce, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” 138; cf. Peirce, “Fraser’s The Works of George Berkeley,” 89. 61. Peirce, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” 139. 62. Peirce, “The Nature of Meaning,” in The Essential Peirce, vol. 2, 212. 63. See Jorge Luis Borges, “The Total Library,” in The Total Library: Non-​Fiction 1922–​ 1986. (New York: Penguin, 2007), 214–​216. 64. Peirce, “The Doctrine of Chances,” in The Essential Peirce, vol. 1, 150. 65. Peirce, “Issues of Pragmaticism,” in The Essential Peirce, vol. 2, 358. 66. Peirce, “The Probability of Induction,” in The Essential Peirce, vol. 1, 169. Cf. “What Makes a Reasoning Sound?,” in The Essential Peirce, vol. 2, 242–​257, and “The Maxim of Pragmatism,” in The Essential Peirce, vol. 2, 137. 67. Peirce, “The First Rule of Logic,” in The Essential Peirce, vol. 2, 44. 68. Peirce, “Immortality in the Light of Synechism,” in The Essential Peirce, vol. 2, 2. Cf. Carl R. Hausman, Charles S. Peirce’s Evolutionary Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 14–​18, and ch. 4; and Kelly Parker, The Continuity of Peirce’s Thought (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1998), part 1. 69. Peirce, “The Architecture of Theories,” in The Essential Peirce, vol. 1, 293. 70. Peirce, “The Maxim of Pragmatism,” 143–​144. 71. See Peirce, “The Categories Defended.” 72. Peirce, “A Guess at the Riddle,” in The Essential Peirce, vol. 1, 248. Cf. Bernstein’s examples of Firstness in “Action, Conduct, and Self-​Control,” 71. 73. Peirce, “A Guess at the Riddle,” 249. 74. Peirce, “The Categories Defended,” 160; Peirce, “A Guess at the Riddle,” 249. 75. Peirce, “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities,” 54; Peirce, “On a New List of Categories,” 5; cf. “Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man,” 24. 76. Peirce, “The Seven Systems of Metaphysics,” in The Essential Peirce, vol. 2, 183, emphasis in original. Later in life, Peirce came to think of himself as a “scholastic realist” following in Duns Scotus’s footsteps. See John Boler, Charles Peirce and Scholastic Realism: A Study of Peirce’s Relationship to Duns Scotus (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1963). 77. “The Nature of Meaning,” 212; cf. 223. 78. Peirce, “Immortality in the Light of Synechism,” 2. 79. Murphey, “Kant’s Children,” 12. 80. As Peirce writes to James, “it is plain that every conceivable thing is either a May-​ by, an Actual, or a Would-​be”; “Letter to William James, 25 December 1909,” in The Essential Peirce, vol. 2, 501. 81. Peirce, “Philosophy and the Conduct of Life,” 29. 82. Peirce, “Philosophy and the Conduct of Life,” 31. 83. Peirce, “Philosophy and the Conduct of Life,” 34.

190 Notes 84. Peirce, “Philosophy and the Conduct of Life,” 35. 85. See Christopher Hookway, Peirce (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), 74–​77. 86. Peirce, “The Three Normative Sciences,” 200–​201; cf. Potter, “Peirce’s Analysis of Normative Science.” 87. Peirce, “The Three Normative Sciences,” 201. 88. Peirce, “The Three Normative Sciences,” 202–​203. 89. Peirce, “What Pragmatism Is,” 343. 90. Peirce, Collected Papers, 5:3.; cf. 1.602, 1.615, 5.121. 91. Peirce, “On Science and Natural Classes,” 131. 92. Peirce, “Evolutionary Love,” in The Essential Peirce, vol. 2, 356, 354. For the utility of Dickens for democracy, see Martha Nussbaum, Poetic Justice, ch. 1–​2, and Rorty, “Heidegger, Kundera, and Dickens.” 93. Peirce, “Fraser’s The Works of George Berkeley,” 105; cf. Peirce’s mockery of Harvard’s pretension in “The First Rule of Logic,” 50. 94. Peirce, “Philosophy and the Conduct of Life,” 32. 95. Peirce, “The Fixation of Belief,” 121. 96. Peirce, Letter to Victoria, Lady Welby, December 23, 1908, in Peirce, Letters to Lady Welby, ed. Irwin C. Leib (New Haven, CT: Whitlock’s, 1953), 28; cf. Hookway, Peirce, 74. 97. Peirce, “Pythagorics,” The Open Court 6, no. 263 (September 8, 1892), 3377; see also Robert Westbrook, Democratic Hope (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 21–​51. 98. Joseph Brent, Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 61; cf. Misak, Truth, Politics, Morality, 48. 99. Cheryl J. Misak, Truth and the End of Inquiry: A Peircean Account of Truth. 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), ch. 2. 100. See W. B. Gallie, “Essentially Contested Concepts,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 56 (1955–​1956): 167–​198. For the turn to indisputable truth as a turn away from politics, see Cynthia Farrar, “Ancient Greek Political Theory as a Response to Democracy,” in Democracy: The Unfinished Journey, ed. John Dunn (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 1993), 17–​40; Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993); and cf. Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985 [1972]). 101. Habermas, Erkenntnis und Interesse, 178–​179. 102. See Mike Hawkins, Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860–​ 1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), esp. 118–​119. 103. Peirce, “Immortality in the Light of Synechism,” 3. 104. Peirce, “Evolutionary Love,” 357 105. Peirce, “Evolutionary Love,” 364. 106. Ibid. 107. William James, A Pluralistic Universe, ed. Frederick Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 81. 108. While he is now considered a liberal or an anarchist democrat, earlier generations of scholars saw in his decisionism the core of fascism: Mussolini remarked that James

Notes  191 was one of his greatest influences; on the vicissitudes of James’s political reception, see Loren Goldman, “Another Side of William James: On Radical Approaches to a ‘Liberal’ Philosopher,” William James Studies 8, no. 1 (Winter 2012), 34–​64. For James and contemporary anarchists, see Rosie Dubrin, “ ‘He Finds Us Wanting’: Morrison I. Swift and the Anarchism of William James,” American Political Thought 11, no. 3 (Summer 2022), 291–​319. 109. Brent, Peirce: A Life, 315. Colin Koopman is one of the only scholars who respects Peirce’s wishes and refers to him as “Charles Santiago Peirce”; see Koopman, Pragmatism as Transition: Historicity and Hope in James, Dewey, and Rorty (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 2 and passim. 110. Peirce, “What Pragmatism Is,” 334. Rorty claims that Peirce’s contribution to pragmatism “was merely to have given it a name, and to have stimulated James”; see Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 161. 111. Peirce, “The Maxim of Pragmatism,” 134; cf. Peirce, “Pragmatism,” 400–​401. 112. Peirce, “A Sketch of Logical Critics,” in The Essential Peirce, vol. 2, 457. 113. For a clear assessment, see Christopher Hookway, “Logical Principles and Philosophical Attitudes: Peirce’s Response to James’s Pragmatism,” in The Cambridge Companion to William James, ed. Ruth Anna Putnam (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1997), 145–​165. 114. James, The Principles of Psychology, I:219, 462. 115. James, The Principles of Psychology, I:236. 116. James, The Principles of Psychology, I:109, 130. 117. James, The Principles of Psychology, I:424, II:948; cf. James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, ed. Frederick Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 14. 118. James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, ed. Fredson Bowers and Ignas K. Skrupskelis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 4. 119. James, The Principles of Psychology, I:ch. X. 120. James, The Principles of Psychology, I:282, emphasis in original. 121. James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, 22. 122. Ibid., emphasis in original. 123. James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, 4. 124. James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, 71; cf. Gustav E. Mueller, “On William James’s ‘Radical Empiricism,’” in The Philosophy of William James, ed. Walter Robert Corti (Hamburg: Meiner, 1976), 148, and, pithily, Loren Goldman, “James on Radical Empiricism,” in Understanding William James, Understanding Modernism, ed. David Evans (London, Bloomsbury, 2017), 293–​294. 125. James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, 99. See also F. C. S. Schiller, Studies in Humanism: Philosophical Essays (London: MacMillan, 1912). 126. James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, 128. 127. S. Morris Eames, “The Meaning of Truth in James,” in The Philosophy of William James, ed. Corti, 159; see also Hilary Putnam, “James’s Theory of Truth,” in The Cambridge

192 Notes Companion to William James, ed. Ruth Anna Putnam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 166–​185. 128. James, Pragmatism, 97, 34; cf. Murphey, “Kant’s Children,” 17. 129. James, The Will to Believe, 49. 130. James, Pragmatism, 96. 131. James, Pragmatism, 42, emphasis in original. 132. See Putnam, “James’s Theory of Truth,” 167–​171. 133. As James writes in Essays in Radical Empiricism, “I am perfectly willing to admit any number of noumenal beings or events into philosophy if only their pragmatic value can be shown” (123); see also James, The Will to Believe, 222–​241, and James, Essays in Psychical Research, ed Fredson Bowers and Ignas K. Skrupskelis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986). On James and the paranormal, see Gerald E. Myers, William James, His Life and Thought (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 370; Linda Simon, Genuine Reality: A Life of William James (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999), 198–​202; Krister Dylan Knapp, William James: Psychical Research and the Challenge of Modernity (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2017); and Loren Goldman, “William James, Energy, and the Pluralist Ethic of Reciprocity,” Theory & Event 23, no. 3 (July 2020), 706–​733. 134. James, A Pluralistic Universe, 117. 135. James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, 39; cf. The Will to Believe, 23, 26. 136. James, Pragmatism, 96. 137. James, The Will to Believe, 160. 138. James, The Will to Believe, 49. 139. James, The Principles of Psychology, II: 949, emphasis in original. 140. James, The Will to Believe, 29. 141. Ibid. 142. James, The Will to Believe, 161. 143. James, The Will to Believe, 29. 144. James, The Will to Believe, 84. 145. James, The Will to Believe, 115. 146. James, The Will to Believe, 13. For controversies, see Peter Kauber and Peter H. Hare, “The Right and Duty to Will to Believe,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy IV, no. 2 (December 1974): 327–​343; Van A. Harvey, “The Ethics of Belief Reconsidered,” Journal of Religion 59, no. 4 (October 1979): 406–​420; Richard M. Gale, “William James and the Ethics of Belief,” American Philosophical Quarterly 17, no. 1 (January 1980): 1–​14; Jack W. Meiland, “What Ought We to Believe? Or the Ethics of Belief Revisited,” American Philosophical Quarterly 17, no. 1 (January 1980): 15–​24; Gregory F. Pappas, “William James and the Logic of Faith,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 28, no. 4 (Fall 1992): 781–​808; and Wood, “W.K. Clifford and the Ethics of Belief,” 14–​16. 147. James, The Will to Believe, 14. 148. Ibid. 149. James, The Will to Believe, 15.

Notes  193 150. James, The Will to Believe, 27. 151. James, The Will to Believe, 18. 152. Flower and Murphey, A History of Philosophy in America, 674; cf. Carlson, “James and the Kantian Tradition,” 365. James also talks of the will to believe in terms of “pure ideas” of experience, a term he takes from Kant; see James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, ed. Frederick Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 52. 153. James, The Will to Believe, 155. 154. James, The Will to Believe, 157. Sarin Marchetti argues for reading James not as a traditional moral philosopher but as a philosopher of the mode of moral thinking; see Sarin Marchetti, Ethics and Philosophical Critique in William James (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015), and the symposium on this work edited by Marianne Janack in Syndicate: Philosophy, including my commentary, “Ethics and the Limits of Critique in William James.” 155. Carlson, “James and the Kantian Tradition,” 381. 156. James, Talks to Teachers on Psychology, ed. Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 134. 157. James, Talks to Teachers, 138, 132; cf. Goldman, “William James, Energy, and the Pluralist Ethic of Receptivity.” 158. James, Talks to Teachers, 113. 159. James, Talks to Teachers, 114–​115. 160. James, Talks to Teachers, 114. 161. James, The Will to Believe, 47. 162. James, The Will to Believe, 53 163. James, Talks to Teachers, 153. 164. James, The Will to Believe, 161. 165. James, Talks to Teachers, 154. 166. James, Talks to Teachers, 162. 167. James, Talks to Teachers, 144. 168. James, Talks to Teachers, 126. Here James’s predilection for action as the first step in belief is particularly clear . 169. On James as a public intellectual, see George Cotkin, William James, Public Philosopher (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994) and Alexander Livingston, Damn Great Empires! (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 170. See “A Strong Note of Warning Regarding the Lynching Epidemic” and “Epidemic of Lynching,” in Essays, Comments, and Reviews, ed. Frederick Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 170–​176. James’s classism and great man view of history are also at work here; poor whites who participate in lynchings are “victims” of the leaders of the mobs; get rid of the leaders, and you get rid of the mobs. 171. James, “The Moral Equivalent of War,” in Essays in Religion and Morality, ed. Frederick Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 162–​173.

194 Notes 172. See J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (London: James Nisbet & Co., 1902), and V. I. Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (New York: International Publishers, 1969 [1917]). 173. Cotkin, William James, Public Philosopher, 136. 174. James, Talks to Teachers, 145. 175. Ibid. 176. See James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lecture II. 177. See Charles Taylor, Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), ch. 1. 178. For the classic statement of this line of criticism, see M. C. Otto, “On a Certain Blindness in William James,” Ethics 53, no. 3 (April 1943), 184–​191. 179. James, “The Moral Equivalent of War,” 170. 180. James, The Will to Believe, 164. 181. James, The Will to Believe, 168. James lived before the discovery of genes, let alone the possibility of genetic engineering. 182. Ibid. 183. James, The Will to Believe, 170. 184. Ibid. 185. James, The Will to Believe, 172. 186. James, The Will to Believe, 194. 187. James, “The Social Value of the College-​Bred,” in Essays, Comments, and Reviews, 108. For a critique of James’s essay with regard to the present system of higher education in America, see Loren Goldman, “Revisiting the Social Value of College-​Breeding,” in Pragmatism Applied, ed. Michael Levine and Cliff Stagoll (Albany: SUNY Press, 2019), 31–​56. 188. James, “The Social Value of the College-​Bred,” 109. 189. James, “The Social Value of the College-​Bred,” 111. 190. James, “The Social Value of the College-​Bred,” 110. Thus James’s student and colleague Ralph Barton Perry wrote that “the root of James’s politics is to be found not in his ethics and philosophy, but in the fact that he belonged to the educated class.” The Thought and Character of William James, 2:290. 191. James, The Will to Believe, 154–​157.

Chapter 4 1. MW 8:204. 2. Notable exceptions are Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope (New York: Penguin, 1999); Jeffrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Patrick Deneen, Democratic Faith (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Robert B. Westbrook, Democratic Hope: Pragmatism and the Politics of Truth (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005); Robert Lacey, American Pragmatism and Democratic Faith (De Kalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press,

Notes  195 2007); Judith Green, Pragmatism and Social Hope (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); Colin Koopman, Pragmatism as Transition: Historicity and Hope in James, Dewey, and Rorty (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009); and Alan Mittleman, Hope in a Democratic Age: Philosophy, Religion, and Political Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 3. Stout, Democracy and Tradition, 58; Westbrook, Democratic Hope, 17. 4. Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 82, 203. 5. The phrase is from Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven (New York: Norton, 1991), 81, cited in Westbrook, Democratic Hope, 17. 6. Patrick Deneen, “The Politics of Hope and Optimism: Rorty, Havel and the Democratic Faith of John Dewey,” Social Research 66, no. 2 (Summer 1999): 577–​609. 7. Lewis Feuer describes Dewey as writing “lay sermons” (LW 15:xxxiii); cf. Alan Ryan, John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism (New York: Norton, 1995), 365–​366. 8. See Stephen Fishman and Lucille McCarthy, John Dewey and the Philosophy and Practice of Hope (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), part 1. Fishman reconstructs Dewey’s theory of hope, while McCarthy offers a Deweyan analysis of Fishman’s college courses on hope theory. 9. Fishman and McCarthy, John Dewey and the Philosophy and Practice of Hope, 18–​19. 10. Fishman and McCarthy, John Dewey and the Philosophy and Practice of Hope, 5. 11. Patrick Shade, Habits of Hope: A Pragmatic Theory (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2001) 12. MW 14:24. Dewey nonetheless wrote an introduction to Alexander’s Man’s Supreme Inheritance and appears to have himself benefited from its practice (MW 11:350–​355). 13. George Orwell, “Charles Dickens,” in A Collection of Essays (New York: Mariner, 1970), 65; cf. Loren Goldman, “Dewey’s Pragmatism from an Anthropological Point of View,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 48, no. 1 (Winter 2012): 1–​30. 14. See Jason Kosnoski, “Artful Discussion: John Dewey’s Classroom as a Model of Deliberative Association,” Political Theory 33, no. 5 (October 2005): 654–​ 677, and Loren Goldman, “Education and Its Contexts,” in Dewey’s Democracy and Education: A Centennial Handbook, ed. Leonard Waks and Andrea English (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 23–​30. 15. See Herbert Croly, The Promise Of American Life (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989 [1909]); Walter E. Weyl, The New Democracy (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2004 [1912]); Walter Lippmann, A Preface to Politics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965 [1913]) and Drift and Mastery (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986 [1914]); and Marc Stears, Progressives, Pluralists, and the Problems of the State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), ch. 2. 16. MW 14:9. 17. MW 11:48; cf. LW 14:227. 18. MW 10:5. See also John E. Smith, The Spirit of American Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), 4; John E. Smith, Purpose and Thought: The Meaning of Pragmatism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 145–​158; John E. Smith,

196 Notes “The Reconception of Experience in Peirce, James and Dewey,” in America’s Philosophical Vision (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 17–​36; Richard Bernstein, Praxis and Action: Contemporary Philosophies of Human Activity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999 [1971]), 200–​213; S. Morris Eames, Experience and Value: Essays on John Dewey & Pragmatic Naturalism, ed. Richard W. Field and Elizabeth R. Eames (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002), 1; Martin Jay, Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 287–​299; and Eddie Glaude Jr., In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), ch. 1. 19. MW 10:5–​6; MW 12:125–​129. 20. LW 1:3–​4. 21. Calling it most often an “empiricist naturalism,” Dewey was equally satisfied with the monikers “naturalist empiricism” or “naturalist humanism,” the last referring to F. C. S. Schiller; LW 1:10. 22. See Dewey, “The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy” (MW 4:3–​14); Raymond Boisvert, Dewey’s Metaphysics (New York: Fordham University Press, 1988), ch. 2; Jerome A. Popp, Evolution’s First Philosopher: John Dewey and the Continuity of Nature (Albany: SUNY Press, 2008); and Melvin Rogers, The Undiscovered Dewey: Religion, Morality, and the Ethos of Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008) ch. 1. 23. MW 10:6. 24. MW 10:26; cf. MW 10:9. 25. MW 10:10. 26. MW 10:9. 27. LW 1:43–​44. 28. LW 1:34, emphasis in original; cf. LW 1:51 and MW 14:122–​123. 29. LW 1:59. 30. See MW 6:236–​237, LW 12:105–​122. 31. MW 10:367. 32. LW 12:16–​17. Immediately after his first discussion of warranted assertability, Dewey characterizes his conception of the world as a place of potentiality rather than actuality (LW 12:16–​17); see Boisvert, Dewey’s Metaphysics, 102–​106, and Rogers, The Undiscovered Dewey, 62–​66. Dewey’s conception of experience is related to the “dynamic and teleological Aristotelian organicism” of his teacher G. S. Morris, inspired by F. A. Trendelenberg; see Gérard Deledalle, L’idée d’expérience dans la philosophie de John Dewey (Paris: PUF, 1967), 37–​39, and Gershon George Rosenstock, F.A. Trendelenburg, Forerunner to John Dewey (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1964). 33. MW 14:159. See Bloch’s similar complaint in Tendenz-​Latenz-​Utopie, 17:409–​413. 34. MW 14:28. 35. Naoko Saito, The Gleam of Light, Moral Perfectionism and Education in Dewey and Emerson (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 75, citing MW 9:113; cf. MW 14: 179.

Notes  197 36. LW 1:88, MW 14:28. 37. LW 1:76. 38. Shade, Habits of Hope, 15. 39. MW 10:9. 40. LW 9:33. 41. Cf. Max Horkheimer’s comments on the development of sense-​experience according to social practice in “Traditional and Critical Theory,” in Critical Theory: Selected Essays, tr. Matthew J. O’Connell (New York: Continuum, 1982), 200 ff. 42. MW 10:9. Cf. Bloch, PH, part I, “Little Daydreams.” 43. LW 1:272. 44. LW 1:85. 45. LW 12: 220. 46. I draw almost verbatim from Steven Fesmire, John Dewey and Moral Imagination (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 65. 47. Thomas Alexander, “Pragmatic Imagination,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 26, no. 3 (Summer 1990): 341; cf. Fesmire, John Dewey and Moral Imagination, 64–​68. 48. MW 10:10; cf. LW 10:276. 49. MW 14:18–​19. 50. Dewey uses these terms interchangeably; see MW 14:75n. 51. Dewey never makes a snappy summation like this, but cf. MW 14:65 and Kant, KrV A51/​B75: “thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.” 52. MW 14:65, emphasis added. 53. MW 14:21. 54. MW 14:32. 55. MW 14:44; cf. LW 2:335. 56. LW 2:334. 57. MW 14:45. 58. MW 14:29. 59. MW 14:91. 60. MW 14:60. 61. See Popp, Evolution’s First Philosopher, and Tibor Solymosi and John Shook, eds., Pragmatist Neurophilosophy (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). 62. MW 13:351; cf. LW 1:42. 63. LW 1:361–​364. 64. LW 13:67. 65. Ibid. 66. LW 13:72. 67. LW 13:75. 68. See Richard Shusterman, “Bourdieu and Anglo-​ American Philosophy,” in Bourdieu: A Critical Reader, ed. Richard Shusterman (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 20–​ 21, and Todd Lekan, Making Morality: Pragmatist Reconstruction in Ethical Theory (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2003), 180n13.

198 Notes 69. MW 14:86. 70. Franz Boas, “The Methods of Ethnology,” American Anthropologist 22, no. 4 (December 1920): 316. 71. Boas, “The Methods of Ethnology,” 320. For more on the relationship between Dewey and anthropology, see Goldman, “Dewey’s Pragmatism from an Anthropological Point of View”; Gabriel Alejandro Torres Colon and Charlie Hobbs, “The Intertwining of Culture and Nature: Franz Boas, John Dewey, and Deweyan Strands of American Anthropology,” Journal of the History of Ideas 76, no. 1 (January 2015): 139–​162; and Herbert S. Lewis, “Boas, Darwin, Science, and Anthropology,” Current Anthropology 42, no. 3 (June 2001): 381–​406. 72. MW 14:10. 73. MW 14:25. 74. MW 10:234. 75. MW 10:236. 76. Dewey goes so far to say that “the pragmatic lesson” is “the use of intelligence to liberate and liberalize action” (MW 10:45). 77. MW 10:16. 78. This is the thrust of Horkheimer’s criticisms of Dewey. For correctives, see James Gouinlock, John Dewey’s Philosophy of Value (New York: Humanities Press, 1972), ch. VII, and Goldman, “Dewey’s Pragmatism from an Anthropological Point of View,” 20–​21. 79. Randolph Bourne, “The War and the Intellectuals” and “Twilight of Idols,” both in The Radical Will (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 316 and 342, resp. Bourne was responding to Dewey’s support for WWI, and he accuses Dewey of lining up “in service of the war-​technique” (342); for Bourne’s more sympathetic take on Dewey in the same volume, see “John Dewey’s Philosophy” (331–​335). 80. MW 10:45. For a detailed treatment of this issue, see Larry Hickman, John Dewey’s Pragmatic Technology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992). 81. Niebuhr’s influential critique is in the Introduction to Moral Man and Immoral Society (New York: Scribner, 1960 [1932]), xi–​xxv. 82. For Niebuhr, Dewey’s philosophy is hence psychologically impotent, for “a motive force will be required to nerve [workers] for their task which is not easily derived from the cool objectivity of science” (Moral Man and Immoral Society, xv). 83. Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, xiv. 84. LW 9:109–​110. 85. LW 9:109. 86. In other words, pragmatism is a “traditional” and not a “critical” theory; see Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” 188 and 193. Eclipse of Reason contributed to pragmatism’s cold reception in post-​war Germany and subsequent critical theory; see Joas, “Die unterschätzte Alternative” and “Amerikanischer Pragmatismus und deutsches Denken.” 87. Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (New York: Continuum, 2004 [1947]), 34. 88. Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought, expanded ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 517–​518.

Notes  199 89. See, e.g., Stanley Aronowitz, The Knowledge Factory: Dismantling the Corporate University and Creating True Higher Learning (Boston: Beacon, 2000); Christopher Newfield, Ivy and Industry: Business and the Making of the American University, 1880–​1980 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); and Jennifer Washburn, University, Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education (New York: Basic Books, 2005). 90. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 510. 91. LW 13:90. 92. LW 13:79. 93. MW 14:144. On conscientiousness as a moral ideal, see Gregory F. Pappas, John Dewey’s Ethics: Democracy as Experience (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 196 ff. 94. MW 14:183. 95. MW 14:189. 96. LW 9:53; cf. MW 14:175. 97. MW 6:135. 98. See Joshua Foa Dienstag, Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 17–​18. 99. Sidney Hook, “John Dewey—​Philosopher of Growth,” in Dewey and His Critics: Essays from The Journal of Philosophy, ed. Sidney Morgenbesser (New York: The Journal of Philosophy, Inc., 1977), 12. 100. LW 10:20. 101. See Matthew Festenstein, Pragmatism and Political Theory: From Dewey to Rorty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 52–​58, for a critical appraisal of the term. Robert Talisse likewise argues that the indeterminacy of “growth” makes it a poor guide for pragmatist politics; see A Pragmatist Philosophy of Democracy, ch. 2. 102. LW 13:87. 103. LW 2:325. 104. LW 2:328. 105. Ibid. 106. Ibid. 107. Ibid. 108. Ibid. 109. LW 2:326. 110. Ibid. 111. LW 2:327. 112. See, e.g., LW 13:67. 113. MW 9:105; see, e.g., Kosnoski, “Artful Discussion,” 671. 114. LW 2:213. 115. LW 2:368. 116. LW 2:327. 117. LW 2:245–​246; cf. 2:244, 2:283. 118. Hilary Putnam, “A Reconsideration of Deweyan Democracy,” in Renewing Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 180. The word “full”

200 Notes bears special weight in this sentence, for Dewey does not deny that intelligence can exist in other social arrangements (see, e.g., LW 2:282–​283). 119. See Jack Knight and James Johnson, “Political Consequences of Pragmatism,” Political Theory 24, no. 1 (February 1996): 68–​96; Axel Honneth, “Democracy as Reflexive Cooperation: John Dewey and the Theory of Democracy Today,” Political Theory 26, no. 6 (December 1998): 763–​783; and Westbrook, Democratic Hope, ch. 7. 120. Cf. Peter T. Manicas, “Democratic Hope (Review of Westbrook [2005]),” in Rescuing Dewey: Essays in Pragmatic Naturalism (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2008), 283–​285, and David K. Cohen, “Dewey’s Problem,” The Elementary School Journal 98, no. 5 (May 1998): 427–​446. 121. MW 14:132. 122. LW 2:327. 123. LW 14:367–​368. 124. LW 2:370. 125. See Dewey’s autobiographical “From Absolutism to Experimentalism” (LW 5:147–​160). 126. Festenstein, Pragmatism and Political Theory, 59. 127. Ibid. 128. Michael Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 208 and passim. 129. LW 14:226. 130. MW 14:144. 131. LW 5:102. 132. Bernstein, Praxis and Action, 220. 133. LW 2:365. 134. Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, tr. William Rehg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 316. 135. LW 2:355. 136. LW 2:366. 137. LW 2:367. 138. MW 14:5. 139. Ibid. 140. See, e.g., LW 5:90–​98 and LW 11:56–​58. 141. LW 10:346. 142. LW 10:345. 143. For Dewey on industrial democracy, see “The Ethics of Democracy” (EW 1:246ff.). 144. LW 11:64. Dewey’s perception of Marx’s reduction of all social conflicts to class conflict and the comfort of contemporary communists with violence are the two overriding reasons why Dewey rejects Marxism; see “Why I Am Not a Communist” (LW 9: 91–​95). See also Dewey’s exchange with Trotsky: Trotsky’s “Their Morals and Ours” was published in the June 1938 issue of The New International and Dewey’s “Means and Ends” appeared in the August 1938 issue (LW 13: 349–​354); see also James T. Farrell, “Dewey in Mexico,” in John Dewey: Philosopher of Science and Freedom, ed. Sidney Hook (New York: Dial Press, 1950), 351–​377.

Notes  201 145. LW 11:63. 146. For complaints on this count, see Ryan, John Dewey, 201, and John J. Stuhr, “Dewey’s Social and Political Philosophy,” in Reading Dewey, ed. Larry A. Hickman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 82–​99. 147. LW 2:325. 148. Wolin describes Dewey as “perhaps the most outstanding example of the public intellectual and indisputably the dominant voice in political theory during the interwar years” (Politics and Vision, 503); for the details of Dewey’s political life, see Robert Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993). 149. See Alan R. Lawson, The Failure of Independent Liberalism, 1930–​1941 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1971), ch. 1, and Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin & The Great Depression (New York: Vintage, 1983), 229–​230. 150. A parallel to Kant is in order, for just as Kant held that hope for moral progress rested in part on the salutary consequences of domestic and international republicanism, Dewey’s activism for the democratization of the state followed on the heels of his participation in the post-​WWI outlawry of war movement, influenced by his friend Jane Addams; see Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy, 260–​274, and Ryan, John Dewey, 212–​215. 151. For the details of Dewey’s activism, see Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy; more specifically on Dewey’s work with the NAACP, see Susan Carle, Defining the Struggle: National Organizing for Racial Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 255ff. 152. MW 14:52. 153. See Goldman, “Education and Its Contexts.” 154. LW 2:360. 155. See Katherine Camp Mayhew, The Dewey School (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2006). 156. See Thomas Alexander, “The Art of Life: Dewey’s Aesthetics,” in Reading Dewey, ed. Larry Hickman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 1–​22. 157. LW 10:346. 158. For a critique of inhumane design in public space, see Robert Rosenberger, Callous Objects: Designs Against the Homeless (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017); and Robert Rosenberger, “On Hostile Design: Theoretical and Empirical Prospects,” Urban Studies 57, no. 4 (2020), 883–​893.

Conclusion 1. Cited in Kristin Ross, The Emergence of Social Space (London: Verso, 2008 [1988]), 21. 2. Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, tr. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 35–​37.

202 Notes 3. Koselleck, Futures Past, 39. 4. See Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Use and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale, tr. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 57–​124. 5. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt and tr. Harry Zohn (New York: Mariner, 2019 [1968]), 205. 6. Ibid. 7. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 208. 8. See Carl J. Friedrich, Inevitable Peace (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948), 37. 9. See Cotkin, William James; Robert Richardson, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (New York: Mariner, 2006); Livingston, Damn Great Empires!; Paul Stob, William James and the Art of Popular Statement (Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013); and Paul Croce, Young William James Thinking (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017). 10. See practically all the selections in Gerard Delanty and Piet Strydom, eds., Philosophies of Social Science: The Classic and Contemporary Readings (London: Open University Press, 2003). For challenges to the idealized laboratory model, see Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-​Pump (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011 [1985]), and Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986). 11. See, e.g., The Oxford English Dictionary’s definition 2: “a tentative procedure; a method, system of things, or course of action, adopted in uncertainty whether it will answer the purpose.” 12. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia (New York: NYU Press, 2009), 83. 13. Christopher Ansell, “What Is a ‘Democratic Experiment’?,” Contemporary Pragmatism 9, no. 2 (December 2012): 159–​180, and Pragmatist Democracy: Evolutionary Learning as Public Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); and Michael C. Dorf and Charles F. Sabel, “A Constitution of Democratic Experimentalism,” Columbia Law Review 98, no. 2 (March 1998): 267–​473. For experiments in self-​government around the globe, see Eric Olin Wright and Archon Fung, eds., Deepening Democracy (London: Verso, 2003). 14. Ansell, “What Is a ‘Democratic Experiment’?,” 163. 15. Ansell, “What Is a ‘Democratic Experiment’?,” 163–​164. 16. Ansell, “What Is a ‘Democratic Experiment’?,” 164. 17. Ansell, “What Is a ‘Democratic Experiment’?,” 167. 18. As an indication of James’s appreciation of experimentation in life, he dedicated Pragmatism to Mill, “from whom,” he writes, “I first learned the pragmatic openness of mind and whom my fancy likes to picture as our leader were he alive today” (Pragmatism, 4). 19. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, in On Liberty and Other Writings, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 57. 20. Mill, On Liberty, 61. Several qualifications: as I note in my introduction, Mill’s views on individuality comes prepackaged with a developmentalist philosophy of history.

Notes  203 Hence he says that experiments in living are more likely to be successful in Europe thanks to its intellectually pluralist history, which has yielded a more energetic population, and will likely fall flat in cultures where the “despotism of Custom is complete” like “the whole East” (70). Moreover, experiments are not within everyone’s capacity; they are reserved for “persons of genius,” of “originality in thought and action,” who are but a small minority in any society (65), and among whom Mill undoubtedly counted himself. 21. Elizabeth Anderson, “John Stuart Mill and Experiments in Living,” Ethics 102, no. 1 (October 1991): 4–​26. 22. Mill, On Liberty, 63. 23. In a study of the materiality of collective social action, anthropologist Inger Sjørslev describes the subject’s self-​constitution as a political agent through participation in public manifestations; see Inger Sjørslev, “The Material Subject as Political: Style and Pointing in Public Performance,” Anthropological Theory 12, no. 2 (June 2012), 209–​228. 24. See, e.g., George Katsiaficas, The Subversion of Politics (Oakland: AK Press, 2006), and Çigdem Çidam, In the Street: Democratic Action, Theatricality, and Political Friendship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). 25. James Scott, Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 1–​7. 26. See, e.g., Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, and Benjamin Korstvedt, Listening for Utopia in Ernst Bloch’s Musical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 27. Bloch, Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left, 43. 28. Theatrum Mundi is a conceptual portmanteau of the Roman amphitheater and the Christian idea of heaven; see Richard Bernheimer, “Theatrum Mundi,” The Art Bulletin 38, no. 4 (December 1956): 225–​247, and Harriett Bloker Hawkins, ‘All the World’s a Stage’: Some Illustrations of the Theatrum Mundi,” Shakespeare Quarterly 17, no. 2 (Spring 1966): 174–​178. 29. Fredric Jameson, Brecht and Method (London: Verso, 1998), 25. 30. Giorgio Battistelli, Experimentum Mundi, Stradivarius STR 33730, 2005, CD. 31. Jill Dolan, Utopia in Performance, and Emily Beausoleil, “The Politics, Science, and Art of Receptivity,” Ethics & Global Politics 7, no. 1 (March 2014): 19–​40. Claire Bishop, however, has challenged the emancipatory potential of art; see her Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012). 32. On the dramaturgical sensibility, see Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Anchor, 1959), ch. 1; on the role of theater in Havel’s political thought, see Robert Pirro, “Vaclav Havel and the Political Uses of Tragedy,” Political Theory 30, no. 2 (April 2002), 228–​258. Havel also held a deep conviction in the transformability of the world, although his main influence was the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka rather than Kant; see Edward Findlay, “Classical Ethics and Postmodern Critique: Political Philosophy in Vaclav Havel and Jan Patocka,” Review of Politics 61, no. 3 (Summer 1999): 403–​438, and James Pontuso, Vaclav Havel: Civic Responsibility in the Postmodern Age (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), ch. 2.

204 Notes 33. Vaclav Havel, “The Power of the Powerless,” in Havel et al., The Power of the Powerless, ed. John Keane (London: Routledge, 1985), 41. 34. Ibid. 35. Havel, “The Power of the Powerless,” 41–​42. 36. Havel, “The Power of the Powerless,” 84. 37. Havel, “The Power of the Powerless,” 122. 38. Bloch, 5:1, PH 5. 39. Muñoz, for example, worries that minority subjects in particular are cast in a hopeless world (Cruising Utopia, 97). 40. See Erin McKenna, The Task of Utopia: A Pragmatist and Feminist Perspective (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001). On efficacy as a goal in normative political theory, see Carole Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), ch. 3.

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W. Noten zur Literatur. Gesammelte Schriften 2. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974. Aeschylus. Prometheus Bound. Translated by James Scully and C. John Herington. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Agacinski, Sylvie. Time Passing: Modernity and Nostalgia. Translated by Jody Gladding. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge, 2004. Alexander, Thomas M. John Dewey’s Theory of Art, Experience, and Nature. Albany: SUNY Press, 1987. Alexander, Thomas M. “Pragmatic Imagination.” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 26, no. 3 (Summer 1990): 325–​348. Alexander, Thomas M. “The Art of Life: Dewey’s Aesthetics.” In Reading Dewey: Interpretations for a Postmodern Generation, edited by Larry Hickman, 1–​ 22. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. Allen, Amy. The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. Allison, Henry E. Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983. Allison, Henry E. Kant’s Theory of Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Allison, Henry E. Kant’s Theory of Taste. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Ameriks, Karl. “Kant’s Transcendental Deduction as a Regressive Argument.” In Interpreting Kant’s Critiques, 51–​66. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Anderson, Elizabeth. “John Stuart Mill and Experiments in Living.” Ethics 102, no. 1 (October 1991): 4–​26. Ansell, Christopher. Pragmatist Democracy: Evolutionary Learning as Public Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Ansell, Christopher. “What Is a ‘Democratic Experiment’?” Contemporary Pragmatism 9, no. 2 (December 2012): 159–​180. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. As If: Idealizations and Ideals. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017. Arendt, Hannah. Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, edited by Ronald Beiner. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Arendt, Hannah. The Promise of Politics, edited by Jerome Kohn. New York: Schocken Books, 2005. Aristotle. Politics. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. In The Complete Works of Aristotle, Volume Two, edited by Jonathan Barnes, 1986–​ 2129. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. Aristotle. Metaphysics: Books Z and H. Translated with a commentary by David Bostock. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994.

206  Works Cited Aristotle. Metaphysics: Book Theta. Translated with a commentary by Stephen Makin. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006. Aronowitz, Stanley. The Knowledge Factory: Dismantling the Corporate University and Creating True Higher Learning. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000. Aronson, Ronald. Dialectics of Disaster: A Preface to Hope. London: New Left Books, 1983. Aronson, Ronald. We: Reviving Social Hope. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. Axinn, Sidney. “The First Western Pragmatist: Immanuel Kant.” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 33, no. 1 (February 2006): 83–​94. Ayer, A. J. The Origins of Pragmatism. London: Macmillan, 1968. Babrius. Fables: Babrius and Phaedrus. Translated by Ben Edwin Perry. Loeb Classical Library 436. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965. Bailey, Joe. Pessimism. London: Routledge, 1988. Bain, Alexander. The Emotions and the Will. 3rd ed. New York: D. Appleton, 1886. Battistelli, Giorgio. Experimentum Mundi. Stradivarius STR 33730, 2005, CD. Beausoleil, Emily. “The Politics, Science, and Art of Receptivity.” Ethics & Global Politics 7, no. 1 (March 2014): 19–​40. Beck, Lewis White. A Commentary on Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963. Beck, Lewis White. “Kant on Education.” In Essays on Kant and Hume, 188–​204. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978. Beck, Lewis White. Early German Philosophy: Kant and His Predecessors. Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1996 [1969]. Beiser, Frederick C. The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History” [German: “On the Concept of History”]. In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, 196–​209. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Mariner Books, 2019. Benjamin, Walter. “Left-​Wing Melancholy (On Erich Kästners New Book of Poems).” Screen 15, no. 2 (Summer 1974): 28–​32. Bercovitch, Sacvan. The American Jeremiad. Anniversary ed. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012 [1978]. Bernheimer, Richard. “Theatrum Mundi.” The Art Bulletin 38, no. 4 (December 1956): 225–​247. Bernstein, Richard J. “Action, Conduct, and Self-​Control.” In Perspectives on Peirce, edited by Richard J. Bernstein, 66–​91. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1965. Bernstein, Richard J. Praxis and Action: Contemporary Philosophies of Human Activity. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999 [1971]. Birtsch, Günther. “The Berlin Wednesday Society.” In What is Enlightenment?: Eighteenth-​ Century Answers and Twentieth-​Century Questions, edited by James Schmidt, 235–​252. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Bishop, Claire. Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London: Verso, 2012. Bloch, Ernst. A Philosophy of the Future. Translated by John Cumming. New York: Herder and Herder, 1970. Bloch, Ernst. “Dialectics and Hope.” Translated by Mark Ritter. New German Critique 9 (Autumn 1976): 3–​10. Bloch, Ernst. Gesamtausgabe. 16 vols. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1977.

Works Cited  207 Bloch, Ernst. “Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to Its Dialectics.” Translated by Mark Ritter. New German Critique no. 11 (Spring 1977): 22–​38. Bloch, Ernst. Tendenz, Latenz, Utopie. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1979. Bloch, Ernst. Atheism in Christianity. Translated by J. T. Swann. London: Verso, 1986. Bloch, Ernst. The Principle of Hope. 3 vols. Translated by Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986. Bloch, Ernst. The Spirit of Utopia. Translated by Anthony A. Nassar. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. Bloch, Ernst. Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left. Translated by Loren Goldman and Peter Thompson. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. Bloch, Ernst, and Theodor W. Adorno. “Something’s Missing: A Conversation between Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing.” In Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, 1–​18. Translated by Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenberg. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988. Bloch, Ernst, and Rudi Dutschke. “Geht der Himmel mit den stärksten Flinten?” In Ernst Blochs Wirkung, 221–​228. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1975. Bloch, Jan Robert. “How Can We Understand the Bends in the Upright Gait?” Translated by Capers Rubin. New German Critique 45 (Autumn 1988): 9–​39. Blumenberg, Hans. The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. Translated by Robert M. Wallace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985. Boas, Franz. “The Methods of Ethnology.” American Anthropologist 22, no. 4 (December 1920): 311–​321. Bohman, James, and Matthias Lutz-​Bachmann, eds. Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant’s Cosmopolitan Ideal. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997. Boisvert, Raymond D. Dewey’s Metaphysics: Form and Being in the Philosophy of John Dewey. New York: Fordham University Press, 1988. Boldyrev, Ivan. Ernst Bloch and His Contemporaries: Locating Utopian Messianism. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Boler, John. Charles Peirce and Scholastic Realism: A Study of Peirce’s Relationship to Duns Scotus. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1963. Booth, William James. Interpreting the World: Kant’s Philosophy of History and Politics. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986. Borges, Jorge Luis. “The Total Library.” In The Total Library: Non-​Fiction 1922–​1986, 214–​ 216. New York: Penguin, 2007. Bouretz, Pierre. Witnesses for the Future: Philosophy and Messianism. Translated by Michael B. Smith. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. Bourne, Randolph. The Radical Will: Selected Writings 1911–​1918. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Bovens, Luc. “The Value of Hope.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 59, no. 3 (September 1999): 667–​681. Brecht, Bertolt. Schriften zum Theater. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2000 [1955]. Breckman, Warren. Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Brent, Joseph. Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. Brinkley, Alan. Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin & The Great Depression. New York: Vintage, 1983. Brown, Wendy. Politics Out of History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.

208  Works Cited Brown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. London: Zone Books, 2016. Brown, Wendy. “Where the Fires Are: Wendy Brown talks to Jo Littler.” Soundings 68 (Spring 2018): 14–​25. Butts, Robert E. “Teleology and Scientific Method in Kant’s Critique of Judgment.” Noûs 24, no. 1 (March 1990): 1–​16. Cabet, Étienne. Travels in Icaria. Translated by Leslie Roberts. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2003 [1840]. Campanella, Tommaso. The City of the Sun: A Poetical Dialogue. Translated with an introduction and notes by Daniel J. Donno. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981 [1602]. Carle, Susan. Defining the Struggle: National Organizing for Racial Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Carlson, Thomas. “James and the Kantian Tradition.” In The Cambridge Companion to William James, edited by Ruth Anna Putnam, 363–​381. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Cassirer, Ernst. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. 3 vols. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1965. Cavallar, Georg. “Kant’s Society of Nations: Free Federation or World Republic?” Journal of the History of Philosophy 32, no. 3 (July 1994): 461–​482. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Chignell, Andrew. “Belief in Kant.” Philosophical Review 116, no. 3 (July 2007): 323–​360. Çidam, Çigdem. In the Street: Democratic Action, Theatricality, and Political Friendship. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Claussen, Detlev. Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. Cohen, David K. “Dewey’s Problem.” The Elementary School Journal 98, no. 5 (May 1998): 427–​446. Cohen, G. A. Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence. Expanded ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000 [1978]. Cohen, G. A. If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich? Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Cohen, Hermann. Kants Begründung der Ethik: nebst ihren Anwendungen auf Recht, Religion und Geschichte. 2nd ed. Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1910. Colón, Gabriel Alejandro Torres, and Charlie Hobbs. “The Intertwining of Culture and Nature: Franz Boas, John Dewey, and Deweyan Strands of American Anthropology.” Journal of the History of Ideas 76, no. 1 (January 2015): 139–​162. Condorcet, Jean-​Antoine-​Nicolas Caritat, marquis de. “Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind: Tenth Epoch.” Translated by Keith Michael Baker. Daedalus 133, no. 3 (Summer 2004 [1795]): 65–​82. Cone, James H. A Black Theology of Liberation. 2nd ed. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1986 [1970]. Conklin, Paul. Puritans and Pragmatists: Eight Eminent American Thinkers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976. Cook, J. Thomas. “Deciding to Believe without Self-​Deception.” Journal of Philosophy 84, no. 8 (August 1987): 441–​446.

Works Cited  209 Cotkin, George. William James, Public Philosopher. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. Croce, Paul. Young William James Thinking. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. Croly, Herbert. The Promise Of American Life. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989 [1909]. Cusset, François. How the World Swung to the Right: Fifty Years of Counterrevolutions. Translated by Noura Wedell. South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2018. Danto, Arthur C. Analytical Philosophy of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965. Day, J. P. “Hope.” American Philosophical Quarterly 6, no. 2 (April 1969): 89–​102. Day, J. P. “The Anatomy of Hope and Fear.” Mind 79, no. 315 (July 1970): 369–​384. De Berg, Henk, and Cat Moir, eds. Rethinking Bloch. Leiden: Brill, 2023. Delanty, Gerard, and Piet Strydom, eds. Philosophies of Social Science: The Classic and Contemporary Readings. London: Open University Press, 2003. Deledalle, Gérard. L’idée d’expérience dans la philosophie de John Dewey. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967. Deneen, Patrick. “The Politics of Hope and Optimism: Rorty, Havel and the Democratic Faith of John Dewey.” Social Research 66, no. 2 (Summer 1999): 577–​609. Deneen, Patrick. Democratic Faith. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. Despland, Michel. Kant on History and Religion: With a Translation of Kant’s “On the Failure of All Attempted Philosophical Theodicies.” Montreal: McGill-​Queen’s University Press, 1973. Dewey, John. The Early Works, 1882–​ 1898. 5 vols., edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969–​1972. Dewey, John. The Middle Works, 1899–​1924. 15 vols., edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1976–​1983. Dewey, John. The Later Works, 1925–​ 1953. 17 vols., edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981–​1992. Dienstag, Joshua Foa. Dancing in Chains: Narrative and Memory in Political Theory. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997. Dienstag, Joshua Foa. Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. Diogenes Laertius. Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Volume II, Books 6–​10. Translated by R. D. Hicks. Loeb Classical Library 185. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925. Dolan, Jill. Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Dorf, Michael C., and Charles F Sabel. “A Constitution of Democratic Experimentalism.” Columbia Law Review 98, no. 2 (March 1998): 267–​473. Doyle, Michael W. “Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs, Part 1.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 12, no. 3 (Summer 1983): 205–​235. Doyle, Michael W. “Kant Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs, Part 2.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 12, no. 4 (Fall 1983): 323–​353. Dubrin, Rosie. “‘He Finds Us Wanting’: Morrison I. Swift and the Anarchism of William James.” American Political Thought 11, no. 3 (Summer 2022): 291–​319. Dunn, John, ed. Democracy: The Unfinished Journey, 508 BC to AD 1993. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

210  Works Cited Düsing, Klaus. “Das Problem des höchsten Gutes in Kants praktischer Philosophie.” Kant-​Studien 62, nos. 1–​4 (1971): 5–​42. Dussel, Enrique. “Eurocentrism and Modernity (Introduction to the Frankfurt Lectures).” boundary 2 20, no. 3 (Autumn 1993): 65–​76. Eames, S. Morris. “The Meaning of Truth in James.” In The Philosophy of William James, edited by W. R. Corti, 157–​177. Hamburg: Meiner Verlag, 1976. Eames, S. Morris. Experience and Value: Essays on John Dewey & Pragmatic Naturalism, edited by Richard W. Field and Elizabeth R. Eames. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002. Erlenbusch-​Anderson, Verena. Genealogies of Terrorism: Revolution, State Violence, Empire. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. Ellis, Elisabeth. Kant’s Politics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005. Elster, Jon. Ulysses and the Sirens: Studies in Rationality and Irrationality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Elster, Jon. Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Engels, Friedrich. Socialism, Utopian and Scientific. In The Marx-​Engels Reader, edited and translated by Robert Tucker, 683–​717. New York: Norton, 1978. Ernst Blochs Wirkung: ein Arbeitsbuch zum 90. Geburtstag. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1975. Fackenheim, Emil L. “Kant’s Concept of History.” Kant-​Studien 48, nos. 1–​4 (1956): 381–​398. Farrar, Cynthia. “Ancient Greek Political Theory as a Response to Democracy.” In Democracy: The Unfinished Journey, 508 BC to AD 1993, edited by John Dunn, 17–​40. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Farrell, James T. “Dewey in Mexico.” In John Dewey: Philosopher of Science and Freedom, edited by Sidney Hook, 351–​377. New York: Dial Press, 1950. Fesmire, Steven. John Dewey and Moral Imagination: Pragmatism in Ethics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. Festenstein, Matthew. Pragmatism and Political Theory: From Dewey to Rorty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Feuer, Lewis. “Introduction.” In Dewey, LW 15: xi–​xxxiv. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989. Feyerabend, Paul. Against Method. 2nd ed. London: Verso, 1988. Findlay, Edward. “Classical Ethics and Postmodern Critique: Political Philosophy in Vaclav Havel and Jan Patocka.” Review of Politics 61, no. 3 (Summer 1999): 403–​438. Fisch, Max H. “Alexander Bain and the Genealogy of Pragmatism.” In Peirce, Semeiotic, and Pragmatism, 79–​109. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Fishman, Stephen, and Lucille McCarthy. John Dewey and the Philosophy and Practice of Hope. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007. Flower, Elizabeth, and Murray G. Murphey. A History of Philosophy in America, Volume II. New York: Capricorn Books, 1977. Forster, Michael. Kant and Skepticism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008. Fourier, Charles. The Theory of the Four Movements, edited by Gareth Stedman Jones and Ian Patterson. Translated by Ian Patterson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996 [1808]. Freeden, Michael. Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Works Cited  211 French, Stanley G. “Kant’s Constitutive-​Regulative Distinction.” In Kant Studies Today, edited by Lewis White Beck, 375–​391. La Salle, IL: Open Court Publishing, 1969. Friedrich, Carl J. Inevitable Peace. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948. Fukuyama, Francis. “The End of History?” The National Interest 16 (Summer 1989): 3–​18. Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: The Free Press, 1992. Gale, Richard M. “William James and the Ethics of Belief.” American Philosophical Quarterly 17, no. 1 (January 1980): 1–​14. Gallie, W. B. “Essentially Contested Concepts.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 56 (1955–​1956): 167–​198. Galston, William A. Kant and the Problem of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975. Geoghegan, Vincent. Ernst Bloch. London: Routledge, 1996. Geras, Norman. Solidarity in the Conversation of Humankind: The Ungroundable Liberalism of Richard Rorty. London: Verso, 1995. Gerhardt, Volker. Immanuel Kants Entwurf “Zum ewigen Frieden”: eine Theorie der Politik. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1995. Glaude Jr., Eddie. Exodus!: Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth Century Black America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Glaude Jr., Eddie. In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Glaude Jr., Eddie. Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul. New York: Crown, 2016. Godfrey, Joseph J. A Philosophy of Human Hope. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987. Godwin, William. An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, edited by Mark Philp. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013 [1793]. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books, 1959. Goldman, Loren. “Another Side of William James: On Radical Approaches to A ‘Liberal’ Philosopher.” William James Studies 8, no. 1 (Winter 2012): 34–​64. Goldman, Loren. “Dewey’s Pragmatism from an Anthropological Point of View.” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 48, no. 1 (Winter 2012): 1–​30. Goldman, Loren. “In Defense of Blinders: On Kant, Political Hope, and the Need for Practical Belief.” Political Theory 40, no. 4 (August 2012): 497–​523. Goldman, Loren. “Pragmatism.” The Encyclopedia of Political Thought, editor-​in-​chief Michael T. Gibbons; associate editors Diana Coole, Elisabeth Ellis, and Kennan Ferguson, 2978–​2989. London: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2014. Goldman, Loren. “Richard Rorty’s ‘Post-​Kantian’ Philosophy of History.” Journal of the Philosophy of History 9, no. 3 (November 2015): 410–​443. Goldman, Loren. “Education and Its Contexts.” In Dewey’s Democracy and Education: A Centennial Handbook, edited by Leonard Waks and Andrea English, 23–​ 30. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Goldman, Loren. “James on Radical Empiricism.” In Understanding William James, Understanding Modernism, edited by David H. Evans, 293–​294. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Goldman, Loren. “Ethics and the Limits of Critique in William James.” Syndicate: Philosophy. August 6, 2018. Symposium on Sarin Marchetti, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy in James, edited by Marianne Janack. http://​syndic​ate.netw​ork/​ sympo​sia/​phi​loso​phy/​eth​ics-​and-​philos​ophi​cal-​criti​que-​in-​will​iam-​james/​.

212  Works Cited Goldman, Loren. Introduction to Ernst Bloch, Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left. Translated by Loren Goldman and Peter Thompson, xi–​xxvi. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. Goldman, Loren. “Revisiting the Social Value of College-​Breeding.” In Pragmatism Applied, edited by Michael Levine and Cliff Stagoll, 31–​56. Albany: SUNY Press, 2019. Goldman, Loren. “Richard Rorty, Homo Academicus Politicus.” Analyse und Kritik 41, no. 1 (May 2019): 31–​69. Goldman, Loren. “Left Hegelian Variations: On the Matter of Revolution in Marx, Bloch, and Althusser.” Praktyka Teoretyczna 35, no. 1 (April 2020): 51–​74. Goldman, Loren. “William James, Energy, and the Pluralist Ethic of Reciprocity.” Theory & Event 23, no. 3 (July 2020): 706–​733. Goldman, Loren. “Reading Wendy Brown in Ludwigshafen.” In Power, Neoliberalism, and the Reinvention of Politics: The Critical Theory of Wendy Brown, edited by Amy Allen and Eduardo Mendieta, 63–​79. State College: Penn State University Press, 2022. Goldman, Loren. “The Matter of Bloch’s Philosophy of Nature in the Shadow of Idealism.” In Rethinking Bloch, edited by Henk de Berg and Cat Moir. Leiden: Brill, 2023. Gouinlock, James. John Dewey’s Philosophy of Value. New York: Humanities Press, 1972. Graham, David A. “The Wrong Side of ‘the Right Side of History,’” The Atlantic, December 21, 2015. https://​www.thea​tlan​tic.com/​polit​ics/​arch​ive/​2015/​12/​obama-​right-​side-​of-​ hist​ory/​420​462/​. Gramsci, Antonio. Prison Notebooks, Volume 2, edited and translated by Joseph A. Buttigieg. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. Gray, John. “An Illusion with a Future.” Daedalus 133, no. 3 (Summer 2004): 10–​17. Green, Judith M. Pragmatism and Social Hope: Deepening Democracy in Global Contexts. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. Greenblatt, Stephen. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. New York: Norton, 2011. Grier, Michelle. Kant’s Doctrine of Transcendental Illusion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Gunning, Jeroen, and Ilan Zvi Baron. Why Occupy a Square: People, Protests and Movements in the Egyptian Revolution. London: Hurst & Company, 2013. Gutiérrez, Gustavo. A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1988. Guyer, Paul. “Reason and Relective Judgment: Kant on the Significance of Systematicity.” In Kant’s System of Nature and Freedom, 11–​ 37. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Habermas, Jürgen. Erkenntnis und Interesse. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1968. Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Translated by Thomas Berger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991 [1962]. Habermas, Jürgen. Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy. Translated by William Rehg. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998. Hartog, François. Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time. Translated by Saskia Brown. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Harvey, Van A. “The Ethics of Belief Reconsidered.” Journal of Religion 59, no. 4 (October 1979): 406–​420. Hausman, Carl R. Charles S. Peirce’s Evolutionary Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Works Cited  213 Havel, Vaclav. “The Power of the Powerless.” In Vaclav Havel et al, The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central-​Eastern Europe, edited by John Keane, 23–​96. London: Routledge, 1985. Hawkins, Harriet Bloker. “‘All the World’s a Stage’: Some Illustrations of the Theatrum Mundi.” Shakespeare Quarterly 17, no. 2 (Spring 1966): 174–​178. Hawkins, Mike. Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860–​1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Werke. 20 vols. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1969. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Elements of the Philosophy of Right, edited by Allen W. Wood. Translated by H. B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Heidegger, Martin. Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1998. Hernandez, Jill Graper. Gabriel Marcel’s Ethics of Hope: Evil, God, and Virtue. New York: Continuum, 2011. Hesiod. Theogony. Works and Days. Testimonia, edited and translated by Glenn W. Most. Loeb Classical Library 57. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. Hickman, Larry A. John Dewey’s Pragmatic Technology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. Hobson, J. A. Imperialism: A Study. London: James Nisbet & Co., 1902. Höffe, Otfried, ed. Immanuel Kant: Zum ewigen Frieden. Berlin: Akademie-​Verlag, 1995. Honig, Bonnie. Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993. Honneth, Axel. “Democracy as Reflexive Cooperation: John Dewey and the Theory of Democracy Today.” Political Theory 26, no. 6 (December 1998): 763–​783. Hook, Sidney. “John Dewey—​Philosopher of Growth.” In Dewey and His Critics: Essays from The Journal of Philosophy, edited by Sidney Morgenbesser, 9–​17. New York: The Journal of Philosophy, Inc. 1977. Hookway, Christopher. Peirce. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985. Hookway, Christopher. “Logical Principles and Philosophical Attitudes: Peirce’s Response to James’s Pragmatism.” In The Cambridge Companion to William James, edited by Ruth Anna Putnam, 145–​165. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Horkheimer, Max. “Traditional and Critical Theory.” Translated by Matthew J. O’Connell. In Critical Theory: Selected Essays, 188–​243. New York: Continuum, 1982. Horkheimer, Max. Eclipse of Reason. New York: Continuum, 2004 [1947]. Huber, Jakob. “Pragmatic Belief and Political Agency.” Political Studies 66, no. 3 (August 2018): 651–​666. Hudson, Wayne. The Marxist Philosophy of Ernst Bloch. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982. Hufnagel, Erwin. “Kants pädagogische Theorie.” Kant-​Studien 79, nos. 1–​4 (1988): 43–​56. Jähner, Harald. Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945–​1955. Translated by Shaun Whiteside. New York: Knopf, 2022. James, William. Pragmatism, edited by Fredson Bowers and Ignas K. Skrupskelis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975. James, William. Essays in Radical Empiricism, edited by Fredson Bowers and Ignas K. Skrupskelis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976. James, William. A Pluralistic Universe, edited by Fredson Bowers and Ignas K. Skrupskelis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977. James, William. The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Practical Philosophy, edited by Frederick Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979.

214  Works Cited James, William. The Principles of Psychology, Volume. I, edited by Frederick Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981. James, William. The Principles of Psychology, Volume. II, edited by Frederick Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981. James, William. “The Moral Equivalent of War.” In Essays in Religion and Morality, edited by Frederick Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis, 162–​173. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982. James, William. Talks to Teachers on Psychology, edited by Frederick Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983. James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience, edited by Frederick Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985. James, William. Essays in Psychical Research, edited by Fredson Bowers and Ignas K. Skrupskelis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986. James, William. “A Strong Note of Warning Regarding the Lynching Epidemic.” In Essays, Comments, and Reviews, edited by Frederick Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis, 170–​173. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987. James, William. “Epidemic of Lynching.” In Essays, Comments, and Reviews, edited by Frederick Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis, 173–​176. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987. James, William. “The Social Value of the College Bred.” In Essays, Comments, and Reviews, 106–​112. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. Jameson, Fredric. Brecht and Method. London: Verso, 1998. Janack, Marianne, ed. Symposium on Sarin Marchetti, Ethics and Philosophical Critique in William James. Syndicate: Philosophy. August 6, 2018. http://​syndic​ate.netw​ork/​sympo​ sia/​phi​loso​phy/​eth​ics-​and-​philos​ophi​cal-​criti​que-​in-​will​iam-​james/​. Jay, Martin. Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Joas, Hans. “Amerikanischer Pragmatismus und deutsches Denken. Zur Geschichte eines Mißverständnisses.” In Pragmatismus und Gesellschaftstheorie, 114–​145. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1992. Joas, Hans. “Die unterschätzte Alternative. Amerika und die Grenzen der ‘Kritischen Theorie.’ ” In Pragmatismus und Gesellschaftstheorie, 96–​113. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1992. Jonas, Hans. The Imperative of Responsibility. Translated by Hans Jonas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Jütten, Timo. “Adorno on Hope.” Philosophy & Social Criticism 45, no. 3 (March 2019): 284–​306. Kain, Patrick. “Prudential Reason in Kant’s Anthropology.” In Essays on Kant’s Anthropology, edited by Brian Jacobs and Patrick Kain, 230–​265. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Kalderon, Mark Eli. Moral Fictionalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Kalderon, Mark Eli, ed. Fictionalism in Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Works Cited  215 Kant, Immanuel. Philosophical Correspondence, 1759–​ 99, edited by Arnulf Zweig. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967. Kant, Immanuel. Werke. 23 vols. Akademie Textausgabe. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1968. Kant, Immanuel. Practical Philosophy, edited by Mary J. Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Kant, Immanuel. Religion and Rational Theology, edited by Allen W. Wood and George di Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Kant, Immanuel. Lectures on Ethics, edited by Peter Heath and J. B. Schneewind. Translated by Peter Heath. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason, edited and translated by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judgment, edited and translated by Paul Guyer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Kant, Immanuel. Lectures on Logic, edited and translated by J. Michael Young. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Kant, Immanuel. Toward Perpetual Peace and Other Writings on Politics, Peace, and History, edited by Pauline Kleingeld. Translated by David Colclasure. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006. Katsiaficas, George. The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life. Oakland: AK Press, 2006. Kauber, Peter, and Peter H. Hare. “The Right and Duty to Will to Believe.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy IV, no. 2 (December 1974): 327–​343. Kaufman, Alexander. Welfare in the Kantian State. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Kaulbach, Friedrich. “Welchen Nutzen Gibt Kant der Geschichtsphilosophie?” Kant-​ Studien 66, no. 1 (1975): 65–​84. Kaulbach, Friedrich. “Kants Metaphysik der Natur, Weltidee, und Prinzip der Handlung bei Kant.” Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 30, no. 3 (July 1976): 329–​349. Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000 [1967]. Kim, Jin. Kants Postulatenlehre, ihre Rezeption durch Ernst Bloch und ihre mögliche Anwendung zur Interpretation des Buddhismus. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1988. Klein, Naomi. NO LOGO: Tenth Anniversary Edition. New York: Picador, 2009. Kleingeld, Pauline. Fortschritt und Vernunft: Zur Geschichtsphilosophie Kants. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1995. Kleingeld, Pauline. “Nature or Providence?: On the Theoretical and Moral Importance of Kant’s Philosophy of History.” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 75 (2001): 201–​219. Kleingeld, Pauline. “Approaching Perpetual Peace: Kant’s Defense of a League of States and his Ideal of a World Federation.” European Journal of Philosophy 12, no. 3 (2004): 304–​325. Kleingeld, Pauline. Kant and Cosmopolitanism: The Philosophical Ideal of World Citizenship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Kloppenberg, James T. Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–​1920. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Knapp, Krister Dylan. William James: Psychical Research and the Challenge of Modernity. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017.

216  Works Cited Knight, Jack, and James Johnson. “Political Consequences of Pragmatism.” Political Theory 24, no. 1 (February 1996): 68–​96. Kojève, Alexandre. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, assembled by Raymond Queneau, edited by Allan Bloom. Translated by James H. Nichols, Jr. New York: Basic Books, 1969. Koopman, Colin. Pragmatism as Transition: Historicity and Hope in James, Dewey, and Rorty. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Korsgaard, Christine M. Creating the Kingdom of Ends. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Korstvedt, Benjamin. Listening for Utopia in Ernst Bloch’s Musical Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Koselleck, Reinhart. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Translated by Keith Tribe. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Kosnoski, Jason. “Artful Discussion: John Dewey’s Classroom as a Model of Deliberative Association.” Political Theory 33, no. 5 (October 2005): 654–​677. Krämling, Gerhard. “Das höchste Gut als mögliche Welt. Zum Zusammenhang von Kulturphilosophie und systematischer Architektonik bei Kant.” Kant-​Studien 77, no. 3 (1986): 273–​288. Kuklick, Bruce. Churchmen and Philosophers: From Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985. Kuklick, Bruce. A History of Philosophy in America, 1720–​2000. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003. Kurzweil, Ray. The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. New York: Penguin, 2005. Lacey, Robert. American Pragmatism and Democratic Faith. De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007. Lafargue, Paul. The Right to be Lazy. Chicago: C. H. Kerr Publishing Company, 1975. Lamb, Michael. “Aquinas and the Virtues of Hope: Theological and Democratic.” Journal of Religious Ethics 44, no. 2 (June 2016): 300–​332. Lamb, Michael. “Between Presumption and Despair: Augustine’s Hope for the Commonwealth.” American Political Science Review 112, no. 4 (November 2018): 1036–​1049. Lasch, Christopher. The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics. New York: Norton, 1991. Latour, Bruno and Steve Woolgar. Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986. Lawson, R. Alan. The Failure of Independent Liberalism, 1930–​1941. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1971. Le Goff, Jacques. Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Lear, Jonathan. Radical Hope. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Lekan, Todd. Making Morality: Pragmatist Reconstruction in Ethical Theory. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2003. Lenin, V[ladimir] [I]l’ich. Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. New York: International Publishers, 1969 [1917]. Lewis, Herbert S. “Boas, Darwin, Science, and Anthropology.” Current Anthropology 42, no. 3 (June 2001): 381–​406.

Works Cited  217 Lindstedt, David. “Kant: Progress in Universal History as a Postulate of Practical Reason.” Kant-​Studien 90, no. 2 (1999): 129–​147. Lippmann, Walter. A Preface to Politics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965 [1913]. Lippmann, Walter. Drift and Mastery. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986 [1914]. Livingston, Alexander. Damn Great Empires!: William James and the Politics of Pragmatism Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Lloyd, Genevieve. Providence Lost. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. Louden, Robert B. Kant’s Impure Ethics: From Rational Beings to Human Beings. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Louden, Robert B. “The Second Part of Morals.” In Essays on Kant’s Anthropology, edited by Brian Jacobs and Patrick Kain, 60–​84. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Löwith, Karl. Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957 [1949]. Löwy, Michael. “Interview with Ernst Bloch.” New German Critique 9 (Autumn 1976): 35–​45. Lucretius. The Nature of Things. Translated by Alicia Stallings. London: Penguin, 2007. Lukács, Georg. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972 [1923]. Łuków, Pawel. “The Fact of Reason: Kant’s Passage to Ordinary Moral Knowledge.” Kant-​ Studien 84, no. 2 (1993): 204–​221. Lutz-​Bachmann, Matthias. Geschichte und Subjekt: zum Begriff der Geschichtsphilosophie bei Immanuel Kant und Karl Marx. Freiburg (Breisgau): Alber, 1988. Mack, Michael. German Idealism and the Jew. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Manicas, Peter T. “Democratic Hope (Review of Westbrook [2005]).” In Rescuing Dewey: Essays in Pragmatic Naturalism, 283–​ 285. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005. Manin, Bernard. The Principles of Representative Government. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Mankovitz, Zeev W. Life Between Memory and Hope: The Survivors of the Holocaust in Occupied Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Mannheim, Karl. Ideology and Utopia: an Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1936. Marasco, Robyn. The Highway of Despair: Critical Theory After Hegel. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Marcel, Gabriel. Homo Viator. Aubier: Éditions Montaigne, 1944. Marcell, David W. Progress and Pragmatism: James, Dewey, and Beard, and the American Idea of Progress. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1974. Marchetti, Sarin. Ethics and Philosophical Critique in William James. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Margolis, Joseph. “The First Pragmatists.” In The Blackwell Guide to American Philosophy, edited by Armen Marsoobian and John Ryder, 35–​51. London: Blackwell, 2004. Markun, Sylvia. Ernst Bloch in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten. Berlin: Rohwolt Verlag, 1977. Martin, Adrienne. How We Hope: A Moral Psychology. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014.

218  Works Cited Marx, Karl. Capital, Volume 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin/​New Left Review Books, 1981. Marx, Karl. The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature. In The First Writings of Karl Marx, edited by Paul M. Schafer, 84–​184. Brooklyn: Ig Publishing, 2006. Marx, Karl. “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts.” In Karl Marx: Selected Writings, revised ed., edited by David McLellan, 83–​121. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Marx, Karl. “Theses on Feuerbach.” In Karl Marx: Selected Writings, revised ed., edited by David McLellan, 171–​174. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. “The Communist Manifesto.” In Karl Marx: Selected Writings, revised ed., edited by David McLellan, 245–​272. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Mayhew, Katherine Camp. The Dewey School. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2006. McCarthy, Thomas. Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. McFarland, John D. Kant’s Concept of Teleology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1970. McKenna, Erin. The Task of Utopia: A Pragmatist and Feminist Perspective. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001. McManus, Susan. Fictive Theories: Toward a Deconstructive and Utopian Political Imagination. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Meerbote, Ralf, and David Walford. “Introduction to ‘Optimism.’” In Kant: Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–​1770, liv–​lvii. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Meiland, Jack W. “What Ought We to Believe? Or the Ethics of Belief Revisited.” American Philosophical Quarterly 17, no. 1 (January 1980): 15–​24. Menand, Louis. The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2002. Mencken, H[enry] L[ouis]. “The Cult of Hope.” In Prejudices, Volume 1. New York: Library of America, 2010. Mendelssohn, Moses. Jerusalem: Or on Religious Power and Judaism. Translated by Allan Arkush. Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 1983. Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty and Other Writings, edited by Stefan Collini. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Mirsepassi, Ali. Political Islam, Iran, and the Enlightenment: Philosophies of Hope and Despair. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Misak, Cheryl J. Truth, Politics, Morality: Pragmatism and Deliberation. London: Routledge, 2000. Misak, Cheryl J. Truth and the End of Inquiry: A Peircean Account of Truth. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004. Mittleman, Alan. Hope in a Democratic Age: Philosophy, Religion, and Political Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Miyazaki, Hirokazu. The Method of Hope: Anthropology, Philosophy, and Fijian Knowledge. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004. Moir, Cat. Ernst Bloch’s Speculative Materialism: Ontology, Epistemology, Politics. Leiden: Brill, 2019. Moltmann, Jürgen. Theology of Hope: On the Ground and Implications of a Christian Eschatology. Translated by James W. Leitch. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993 [1964].

Works Cited  219 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, baron de. The Spirit of the Laws, edited and translated by Anne M. Cohler, Basia C. Miller, and Harold S. Stone. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989 [1748]. More, Thomas. Utopia, edited by George M. Logan. Translated by Robert M. Adams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016 [1516]. Mueller, Gustav E. “On William James’s ‘Radical Empiricism.’” In The Philosophy of William James, edited by Walter Robert Corti, 147–​156. Hamburg: Meiner Verlag, 1976. Mueller, Gustav E. “The Hegel Legend of ‘Thesis-​Antithesis-​Synthesis.’” In The Hegel Myths and Legends, edited by Jon Stewart, 301–​305. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996. Mulholland, Leslie A. “Kant on War and International Justice.” Kant-​Studien 78, no. 1 (1987): 25–​41. Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: NYU Press, 2009. Munzel, G. Felicitas. Kant’s Conception of Moral Character: The “Critical” Link of Morality, Anthropology, and Reflective Judgment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Murphey, Murray G. The Development of Peirce’s Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961. Murphey, Murray G. “Kant’s Children: The Cambridge Pragmatists.” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 4, no. 1 (Winter 1968): 3–​33. Muthu, Sankar. Enlightenment Against Empire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003. Myers, Gerald E. William James, His Life and Thought. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986. Nauen, Franz Gabriel. “Kant as an Inadvertent Precursor of Eighteenth-​ Century Neospinozism: On Optimism (1759).” Kant-​Studien 83, no. 3 (1992): 268–​279. Neiman, Susan. The Unity of Reason: Rereading Kant. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Neuber, Matthias, ed. Fiktion und Fiktionalismus: Beiträge zu Hans Vaihingers ‘Philosophie des Als Ob.’ Würzburg: Verlag Königshausen & Neumann, 2014. Newfield, Christopher. Ivy and Industry: Business and the Making of the American University, 1880–​1980. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Niebuhr, Reinhold. Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics. New York: Scribner, 1960 [1932]. Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On the Use and Disadvantages of History for Life.” In Untimely Meditations, edited by Daniel Breazeale, 57–​124. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Nussbaum, Martha C. Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life. Boston: Beacon Press, 1997. O’Neill, Onora. Constructions of Reason: Explorations of Kant’s Practical Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. O’Neill, Onora. “Autonomy and the Fact of Reason in the Kritik der praktischen Vernunft.” In Immanuel Kant: Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, edited by Otfried Höffe, 81–​98. Berlin: Akademie-​Verlag, 2002. Orwell, George. “Charles Dickens.” In A Collection of Essays, 48–​103. New York: Mariner Books, 1970. Otto, M. C. “On a Certain Blindness in William James,” Ethics 53, no. 3 (April 1943): 184–​191.

220  Works Cited Pappas, Gregory F. “William James and the Logic of Faith.” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 28, no. 4 (Fall 1992): 781–​808. Pappas, Gregory F. John Dewey’s Ethics: Democracy as Experience. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. Parker, Kelly. The Continuity of Peirce’s Thought. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1998. Pascher, Manfred. Kants Begriff “Vernunftinteresse.” Innsbruck: Verlag des Instituts für Sprachwissenschaft der Universität Innsbruck, 1991. Pateman, Carole. Participation and Democratic Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970. Peirce, Charles S. Collected Papers. 10 vols., edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960. Peirce, Charles S. The Essential Peirce, Volume 1: Selected Philosophical Writings (1867–​ 1893), edited by Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. Peirce, Charles S. The Essential Peirce, Volume 2: Selected Philosophical Writings (1893–​1913), edited by the Peirce Edition Project. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. Peirce, Charles S. “Pythagorics.” The Open Court Publishing 6, no. 263 (September 8, 1892): 3375–​3377. Peirce, Charles S. Letters to Lady Welby, edited by Irwin C. Leib. New Haven, CT: Whitlock’s, for the Graduate Philosophy Club of Yale University, 1953. Perry, Ralph Barton. The Thought and Character of William James. 2 vols. Boston: Little, Brown, 1935. Pieper, Josef. Über die Hoffnung. München: Kösel, 1962 [1935]. Pindar. Nemean Odes, edited and translated by William H. Race. Loeb Classical Library 485. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Pindar. Olympian Odes, edited and translated by William H. Race. Loeb Classical Library 56. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Pinker, Steven. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. New York: Penguin, 2011. Pinker, Steven. Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. New York: Penguin, 2018. Pippin, Robert B. “Kant on the Spontaneity of Mind.” In Idealism as Modernism, 29–​55. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pirro, Robert. “Vaclav Havel and the Political Uses of Tragedy.” Political Theory 30, no. 2 (April 2002): 228–​258. Pitkin, Hanna Fenichel. Wittgenstein and Justice: On the Significance of Ludwig Wittgenstein for Social and Political Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985 [1972]. Plato. The Collected Dialogues of Plato, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. Polybius. The Histories, Volume III: Books 5–​8. Translated by W. R. Paton. Revised by F. W. Wallbank and Christian Habicht. Loeb Classical Library 138. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Pontuso, James. Vaclav Havel: Civic Responsibility in the Postmodern Age. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004.

Works Cited  221 Popp, Jerome A. Evolution’s First Philosopher: John Dewey and the Continuity of Nature. Albany: SUNY Press, 2008. Post, Dror. “Heraclitus’s Hope for the Unhoped.” Epoché 13, no. 2 (2009): 229–​240. Postone, Moishe. Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Potkay, Adam. Hope: A Literary History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Potter, Vincent G. “Peirce’s Analysis of Normative Science.” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 2, no. 1 (Spring 1966): 5–​32. Potter, Vincent G. “Normative Science and the Pragmatic Maxim.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 5, no. 1 (January 1967): 41–​53. Putnam, Hilary. “A Reconsideration of Deweyan Democracy.” In Renewing Philosophy, 180–​202. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. Putnam, Hilary. “Between the New Left and Judaism.” In The American Philosopher: Conversations, edited by Giovanna Borradori, 55–​69. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Putnam, Hilary. “James’s Theory of Truth.” In The Cambridge Companion to William James, edited by Ruth Anna Putnam, 166–​85. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Quijano, Anibal. “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America.” Nepantla: Views from the South 1, no. 3 (2000): 533–​580. Quijano, Anibal. “Coloniality and Modernity/​Rationality.” Cultural Studies 21, nos. 2–​3 (March/​May 2007): 168–​178. Rawls, John. The Law of Peoples. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Reath, Andrews. “Two Conceptions of the Highest Good in Kant.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 26, no. 4 (October 1988): 593–​619. Reed Jr., Adolph. “Nothing Left.” Harper’s Magazine, March 2014. Richardson, Robert. William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism. New York: Mariner Books, 2006. Ricoeur, Paul. “Hope and the Structure of Philosophical Systems.” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 44 (1970): 55–​69. Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative, Volume 1. Translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Riedel, Manfred. “Transcendental Politics?: Political Legitimacy and the Concept of Civil Society in Kant.” Social Research 48, no. 3 (Autumn 1981): 588–​613. Riley, Patrick. Kant’s Political Philosophy. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1982. Riley, Patrick. “Hannah Arendt on Kant, Truth and Politics.” In Essays on Kant’s Political Philosophy, edited by Howard Lloyd Williams, 305–​ 323. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Rogers, Melvin L. The Undiscovered Dewey: Religion, Morality, and the Ethos of Democracy. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. Rogger, Basil. “PROTEST. The Aesthetics of Resistance.” In PROTEST: The Aesthetics of Resistance, edited by Basil Rogger, Jonas Voegeli, Ruedi Widmer, and Museum for Gestaltung Zürich, 32–​50. Zürich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2018. Rorty, Richard. Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982. Rorty, Richard. “Heidegger, Kundera, and Dickens.” In Essays on Heidegger and Others, 66–​80. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and Social Hope. New York: Penguin, 1999.

222  Works Cited Rosenberger, Robert. Callous Objects: Designs Against the Homeless. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. Rosenberger, Robert. “On Hostile Design: Theoretical and Empirical Prospects.” Urban Studies 57, no. 4 (2020): 883–​893. Roseneil, Sasha. Disarming Patriarchy: Feminism and Political Action at Greenham. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press, 1995. Rosenstock, Gershon George. F.A. Trendelenburg, Forerunner to John Dewey. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1964. Rösling, Hans. Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—​and Why Things are Better Than You Think. New York: Flatiron Books, 2018. Ross, Kristin. The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune. London: Verso, 2008 [1988]. Rossi, Philip. “Kant as a Christian Philosopher: Hope and the Symbols of Christian Faith.” Philosophy Today 25, no. 1 (Spring 1981): 24–​33. Rossi, Philip. “Kant’s Doctrine of Hope: Reason’s Interest and the Things of Faith.” The New Scholasticism 56, no. 2 (Spring 1982): 228–​238. Ryan, Alan. John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism. New York: Norton, 1995. Saito, Naoko. The Gleam of Light: Moral Perfectionism and Education in Dewey and Emerson. New York: Fordham University Press, 2006. Sandel, Michael J. Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Schiller, F.C.S. Studies in Humanism. London: Macmillan, 1912. Scott, James C. Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012. Scruton, Roger. The Uses of Pessimism: And the Danger of False Hope. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Seligman, Martin. The Hope Circuit: A Psychologist’s Journey from Helplessness to Optimism. New York: Public Affairs Press, 2018. Seneca. Seneca, Volume IV: Epistles 1–​65. Translated by Richard M. Gummere. Loeb Classical Library 75. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1917. Seung, T. K. Kant’s Platonic Revolution in Moral and Political Philosophy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. Shade, Patrick. Habits of Hope: A Pragmatic Theory. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2001. Shapin, Steven, and Simon Schaffer. Leviathan and the Air-​Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011 [1985]. Shell, Susan. “Kant as Soothsayer: The Problem of Progress and the ‘Sign’ of History.” In Kant and the Possibility of Progress, edited by Paul T. Wilford and Samuel A. Stoner, 115–​134. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. Shulman, George. American Prophecy: Race and Redemption in American Political Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Shusterman, Richard. Practicing Philosophy: Pragmatism and the Philosophical Life. New York: Routledge, 1997. Shusterman, Richard. “Bourdieu and Anglo-​American Philosophy.” In Bourdieu: A Critical Reader, edited by Richard Shusterman, 14–​28. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999. Silber, John R. “Kant’s Conception of the Highest Good as Immanent and Transcendent.” Philosophical Review 68, no. 4 (October 1959): 469–​492. Simon, Linda. Genuine Reality: A Life of William James. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1998.

Works Cited  223 Sjørslev, Inger. “The Material Subject as Political: Style and Pointing in Public Performance.” Anthropological Theory 12, no. 2 (June 2012): 209–​228. Smith, Christian. The Emergence of Liberation Theology: Radical Religion and Social Movement Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Smith, John E. The Spirit of American Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1963. Smith, John E. Purpose and Thought: The Meaning of Pragmatism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Smith, John E. “The Reconception of Experience in Peirce, James and Dewey.” In America’s Philosophical Vision, 17–​36. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Smith, Norman Kemp. A Commentary to Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason.’ London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003 [1918]. Smith, Steven G. “Worthiness to Be Happy and Kant’s Concept of the Highest Good.” Kant-​Studien 75, no. 2 (1984): 168–​190. Sollors, Werner. The Temptation of Despair: Tales of the 1940s. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. Solymosi, Tibor, and John Shook, eds. Pragmatist Neurophilosophy: American Philosophy and the Brain. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Spitzer, Alan B. “The Historical Problem of Generations.” American Historical Review 78, no. 5 (December 1973): 1353–​1385. Stangneth, Bettina. “‘Kants schädliche Schriften.’ Eine Einleitung.” In Immanuel Kant, Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft, xi–​lxxv. Hamburg: Meiner Verlag, 2003. Stears, Marc. Progressives, Pluralists, and the Problems of the State: Ideologies of Reform in the United States and Britain, 1909–​1926. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Stern, Fritz. The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of Germanic Ideology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974 [1961]). Stine, Alison. “Hegel and Colonialism.” Hegel Bulletin 41, no. 2 (June 2017): 247–​270. Stob, Paul. William James & The Art of Popular Statement. Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013. Stout, Jeffrey. Democracy and Tradition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. Strawson, P. F. The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. London: Routledge, 1990 [1966]. Strong, Tracy. Politics Without Vision: Thinking Without a Banister in the Twentieth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Stuhr, John J. “Dewey’s Social and Political Philosophy.” In Reading Dewey, edited by Larry A. Hickman, 82–​99. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. Talisse, Robert B. A Pragmatist Philosophy of Democracy. London: Routledge, 2008. Tarbet, David W. “The Fabric of Metaphor in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 6, no. 4 (July 1968): 257–​270. Tartaglia, James. “Rorty’s Ambivalent Relationship to Kant,” Contemporary Pragmatism 13, no. 3 (2016): 298–​318. Taylor, Charles. Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Terkel, Studs. Hope Dies Last: Keeping the Faith in Difficult Times. New York: New Press, 2003. Thompson, Peter and Slavoj Zizek, eds. The Privatization of Hope: Ernst Bloch and the Future of Utopia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013.

224  Works Cited Thucydides. The Peloponnesian War. Translated by Thomas Hobbes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Tibebu, Teshale. Hegel and the Third World: The Making of Eurocentrism in World History. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2011. Traverso, Enzo. Left-​Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. Trotsky, Leon. “Their Morals and Ours.” The New International IV, no. 6 (June 1938): 163–​173. Vaihinger, Hans. Die Philosophie des Als Ob. 9th ed. Leipzig: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1927. Van der Linden, Harry. Kantian Ethics and Socialism. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1988. Vázquez-​Arroyo, Antonio. Political Responsibility: Responding to Predicaments of Power. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. Vorländer, Karl. “Kant und der Sozialismus.” Kant-​Studien 4 (1900): 361–​412. Washburn, Jennifer. University, Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education. New York: Basic Books, 2005. Waterworth, Jayne M. A Philosophical Analysis of Hope. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Weiler, Gershon. “Kant’s Question ‘What is Man?’” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 10, no. 1 (March 1980): 1–​23. West, Cornel. The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989. West, Cornel. Prophesy Deliverance!: An Afro-​ American Revolutionary Christianity. Anniversary ed. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002 [1982]. Westbrook, Robert B. John Dewey and American Democracy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993. Westbrook, Robert B. Democratic Hope: Pragmatism and the Politics of Truth. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. Weyl, Walter E. The New Democracy: An Essay on Certain Political and Economic Tendencies in the United States. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2004 [1912]. Wheatley, J. M. O. “Wishing and Hoping.” Analysis 18, no. 6 (June 1958): 121–​131. White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-​Century Europe. 40th Anniversary ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Wieland, Christoph Martin. Geschichte der Abderiten. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1986 [1774]. Wiggershaus, Rolf. The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance. Translated by Michael Robertson. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994. Wilde, Oscar. The Soul of Man Under Socialism. Boston: J. W. Luce and Company, 1918. Williams, Bernard. “Deciding to Believe.” In Problems of the Self, 136–​151. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973. Winters, Barbara. “Believing at Will.” Journal of Philosophy 76, no. 5 (May 1979): 243–​259. Winters, Joseph R. Hope Draped in Black: Race, Melancholy, and the Agony of Progress. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Wolin, Sheldon S. Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought. Expanded ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. Wood, Allen W. Kant’s Moral Religion. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1970. Wood, Allen W. Karl Marx. 1st ed. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981.

Works Cited  225 Wood, Allen W. “General Introduction.” In Immanuel Kant, Religion and Rational Theology, xi–​xxiv. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Wood, Allen W. Kant’s Ethical Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Wood, Allen W. “W. K. Clifford and the Ethics of Belief.” In Unsettling Obligations, 1–​40. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. Wood, Allen W. Kant. Malden, MA: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2004. Wood, Allen W. “Kant’s Philosophy of History.” In Immanuel Kant, Toward Perpetual Peace and Other Writings on Politics, Peace, and History, edited by Pauline Kleingeld, 243–​262. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006. Woźniak, Monika, Karolina Jesień, Adam Klewenhagen, eds. Praktika Teoretyczna 35, no. 1 (April 2020): Special Issue: “Dreams of a Better Life: Ernst Bloch.” Wright, Eric Olin, and Archon Fung, eds. Deepening Democracy: Institutional Innovations in Empowered Participatory Governance. London: Verso, 2003. Young, J. Michael. “Functions of Thought and the Synthesis of Intuitions.” In The Cambridge Companion to Kant, edited by Paul Guyer, 101–​122. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Yovel, Yirmiyahu. Kant and the Philosophy of History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980. Zammito, John H. The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Zournazi, Mary, ed. Hope: New Philosophies for Change. London: Routledge, 2002. Zwerenz, Gerhard. “Zwischenbericht von der hoffnungslosen Lage an der Fakultät der guten Hoffnung.” In Ernst Blochs Wirkung, 208–​217. Frankfurt: Suhrhamp, 1975.

Index For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–​53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. action, 2, 6–​7, 10–​11, 12–​16, 17, 21–​22, 34–​35, 43–​44, 47–​48, 57, 58–​61, 63, 64–​65, 67, 71–​72, 73–​74, 77–​79, 82, 83–​85, 86–​87, 89–​90, 93, 106–​8, 111–​12, 117, 122–​23, 124–​27, 134–​35, 138–​39, 141–​42, 149, 150, 153, 155–​56 Adorno, Theodor, 3–​4, 13–​14, 62 Ahmed, Sara, 11–​12 Alexander, Thomas, 128 Allison, Henry, 22, 166–​67n.8 American Civil Liberties Union, 147 anacyclosis, 162n.43 Anderson, Elizabeth, 154–​55 Ansell, Christopher, 153–​54 anticipation, 7, 9–​10, 12–​13, 14–​15, 17, 19, 35, 46–​47, 58–​59, 60, 63–​64, 65–​66, 69–​70, 81–​82, 84–​85, 96–​ 97, 120, 126–​28, 133, 150 Aquinas, Thomas, 13–​14 Arendt, Hannah, 3–​4, 6–​7, 12–​14, 174n.122 miracles, 12–​13, 14 Aristotle, 17, 63, 78, 79–​81, 98, 152, 162n.43, 183n.56 entelechy, 79–​81, 126–​27 (see also Bloch) Metaphysics, 79–​80 Nicomachean Ethics, 98 potentiality and actuality, 78, 79–​81 Armageddon, 171n.70 art and aesthetics, 8, 15, 19, 98–​99, 145, 148–​49, 153. See also Bloch as-​if, 56–​57, 67, 107–​8. See also Kant atom, 55, 75–​77, 100–​1, 105, 108–​9 Augustine, 13–​14

Babrius, 7 Bain, Alexander, 89–​90, 104, 116–​17 Baldwin, James, 13–​14 Bataille, Georges, 3–​4 Battistelli, Giorgio, 155–​56 Beausoleil, Emily, 155–​56 Beck, Lewis White, 24 belief, 2, 9, 14, 22, 31–​32, 52–​54, 55–​56, 58–​59, 89–​91, 116–​17, 178n.194. See also Glaube; James; Peirce Benjamin, Walter, 4–​5, 15, 151–​52 Bergson, Henri, 70–​71 Bernstein, Richard, 143–​44 Bloch, Ernst, 2, 5, 6–​7, 8, 10–​11, 12–​16, 17, 19, 62–​85, 86–​87, 96–​97, 116–​17, 119, 132, 138, 149, 150–​51, 152–​ 53, 155–​56, 157 abstract and concrete, 2, 12, 14–​15, 19, 63, 64, 68, 72–​73, 74, 77–​78, 79, 81–​85, 86–​87, 119, 150 anamnesis, 70–​71, 74, 78 art and aesthetics, 15, 17, 62–​63, 65–​66, 81–​82, 155–​56 Avicenna (Ibn Sina), 155–​56 Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left, 80, 81–​82 Avicennan concept of matter (see matter: dialectical concept) cold and warm streams, 6–​7, 150–​ 51, 157 “front,” 64–​65, 181n.14, 183n.63 layers of possibility, 12, 17, 65, 79, 80, 81–​82 Marx and Marxism, 6–​7, 17, 62, 63–​64, 65–​66, 67–​68, 70, 72, 73–​77, 78–​ 79, 82–​83, 183n.58

228 Index Bloch, Ernst (cont.) materialism historical, 65–​66, 75, 77–​78, 83–​85 “speculative,” 76–​78, 82–​83, 86 matter dialectical concept, 14–​15, 17, 63, 73, 74, 77–​85, 152 mechanistic concept, 70–​71, 76–​ 77, 79 Das Materialismusproblem, 75, 77–​78 Experimentum Mundi, 77–​78, 155–​56 neo-​Aristotelian concept of matter (see matter: dialectical concept ) non-​synchronicity, 5 not-​yet, 10–​11, 14–​15, 63–​65, 67, 68, 81–​82 not-​yet-​conscious, 64–​65, 75 not-​yet-​existent, 64, 65, 75, 78 novelty, 68, 69–​72, 74, 76–​77, 78–​79, 81–​82, 84–​85, 98 “objectively-​real” possibility, 63, 65, 67–​68, 72, 75, 79, 80, 81–​82, 83, 84–​85, 155–​56 ontology (see matter: materialism) open entelechy, 78, 80–​81 open system, 15, 74, 80–​81 potentiality and actuality, 17, 71–​72, 78, 79–​81 The Principle of Hope, 12, 62, 64–​65, 75, 81–​82, 83–​85 The Spirit of Utopia, 12–​13, 62, 65–​66 “transcending without any heavily transcendence,” 12 “what-​is-​considered-​possible” and “what-​may-​become-​ possible,” 17, 80 Boas, Franz, 131–​32 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 156–​57 Bossuet, Jacques-​Bénigne, 7–​8 Bourdieu, Pierre, 131–​32 Bourne, Randolph, 133–​34, 135–​36 Brecht, Bertolt, 11, 14, 19, 152, 155–​56 Brown, Wendy, 3–​5, 6–​7 Butts, Robert, 26–​27 Cabet, Étienne, 162n.47 Campanella, Tommaso, 162n.47

capitalism, 3–​4, 7–​8, 14–​15, 18–​19, 75, 78–​ 79, 112–​13. See also Dewey Cassirer, Ernst, 54 Christianity, 2–​3, 7–​8, 9–​10, 65–​66, 69–​70, 101–​3, 104, 124, 171–​72n.77 Condorcet, Jean-​Antoine-​Nicolas Caritat, marquis de, 60–​61 Croly, Herbert, 122–​23 Danto, Arthur, 5 Darwin, Charles, 91, 101–​2, 114 deciding to believe, 53, 55–​56, 58–​59 deliberative democracy, 17–​18, 100–​1, 141–​42, 144 Democritus, 75 Deneen, Patrick, 120 Descartes, René, 70, 90–​91, 104–​5 despair, 1, 3–​5, 6, 11, 152–​53. See also Kant Dewey, John, 1–​2, 12–​16, 17–​19, 86–​88, 89, 91, 92, 117–​18, 119–​49, 150–​ 51, 152–​54 “agent-​patients,” 18–​19, 124–​25, 128, 152–​53 Alexander technique, 121–​22, 195n.12 architecture, 18–​19, 145, 148–​49 belief, 125–​26 capitalism, 14–​15, 18–​19, 134, 135–​ 36, 145–​47 A Common Faith, 137–​38 conscientiousness, 136, 148 culture, 130–​32, 136 Culture and Nature, 130–​31 democracy epistemological justification of, 141–​42 as ideal, 1, 18–​19, 119, 120, 138–​42, 145, 146–​47, 149 industrial democracy, 139, 146 as institution, 14–​15, 119, 139–​ 42, 146–​47 Democracy and Education, 140–​41 ecological concept of the self, 18–​ 19, 122–​23 education, 18–​19, 122, 132, 148, 153 ends-​in-​view, 15, 126–​27, 133, 134–​ 35, 137

Index  229 engineering, 132, 137, 142–​43 evolution, 91 experience, 120–​21, 122–​28, 133, 137–​ 39, 141–​42 Experience and Nature, 18–​19, 125, 130–​31 experimentation, 1, 2, 18–​19, 120, 122–​ 23, 124–​26, 138, 149, 150, 153 Freedom and Culture, 130–​31, 136 Great Society versus Great Community, 141–​43 “growth,” 138–​39, 141–​42, 143–​44, 146, 149 habit, 18–​19, 86–​87, 119, 120–​21, 122–​ 23, 128, 129–​32, 133, 136, 138–​39, 140–​41, 142–​44, 148 Human Nature and Conduct, 18–​19, 123, 129, 132, 137, 145 imagination, 1, 127–​28, 138–​39, 141, 148–​49 inquiry, 125–​26, 127–​28, 130–​31, 134, 135–​36, 141, 144 intelligence, 18–​19, 86–​87, 119, 120, 122–​23, 125, 126–​27, 128, 129, 133–​39, 141–​44, 145, 149, 157 Laboratory School, 148 Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, 125–​ 26, 127–​28 Marx and Marxism, 126–​27, 145, 200n.144 mastery, 133–​34, 137 “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy,” 126–​27 oligarchy, 145 philosophical anthropology, 18–​19, 130–​32, 137 pluralism, 14–​15, 132, 141 political activism, 18–​19, 117, 122–​23, 147–​48, 153 possibility and actuality, 127–​28 progress, 1–​2, 132–​33, 137–​38, 150 public, 12, 18–​19, 122–​23, 140–​42, 144, 153–​54, 155 The Public and Its Problems, 139, 140–​ 41, 144 science, 133–​34, 135–​36, 137–​38 temporality, 127–​28, 133, 137–​38

transactionalism, 14, 125–​27, 141, 150, 152 “warranted assertability,” 125–​26 dialectics, 14, 68–​73, 74, 132 Dickens, Charles, 122, 143–​44 Dienstag, Joshua, 3–​5, 6–​7, 165n.78 Diogenes Laertius, 75 Dolan, Jill, 11, 12, 155–​56 Dorf, Michael, 153–​54 Du Bois, W. E. B. 147 Dussel, Enrique, 2–​3 Dutschke, Rudi, 83 Ellis, Elisabeth, 50–​51 empiricism British, 9, 124 radical (see James) Engels, Friedrich, 72 Enlightenment, The, 1–​3, 7–​8, 14–​15, 176n.151 Epicurus, 75–​77 evolution, 87, 90–​91. See also Dewey; James; Peirce experimentation, 1, 2, 5–​6, 17–​18, 19, 86, 95, 100–​1, 108, 116–​17, 153, 157. See also Dewey and James competing models of, 19, 153–​ 54, 155–​57 “experiments in living,” 19, 154–​55 faith, 1, 7–​8, 12, 14, 32, 44, 52–​53, 65–​66, 87, 93–​94, 107–​8, 109, 111–​13, 120, 122, 132–​34, 146, 149, 151–​ 52, 178n.194. See also Glaube Fanon, Frantz, 3–​4, 6–​7 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 76 Feyerabend, Paul, 167n.16 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 68–​69, 74, 77–​78 fictionalism, 44, 46–​47, 54–​56, 58, 180n.213. finitude, 6–​7, 12, 16–​17, 20–​21, 28, 29, 32–​ 33, 35, 42, 51–​52, 60, 63–​64, 137 first-​person versus third-​person perspective, 104. See also Kant First World War, 1, 132–​33 Fishman, Stephen, 120–​21 Foucault, Michel, 3–​4

230 Index Fourier, Charles, 162n.47 Frankfurt School, 15, 62, 155–​56 French Revolution, 42 Freud, Sigmund, 3–​4, 64–​65, 70 Friedrich II, 38–​39 Fukuyama, Francis, 1–​3 Geist, 1, 63, 68, 70–​72, 73, 74, 76, 82 German Democratic Republic, 180–​81n.2 German idealism, 13–​15 Glaube, 21–​22, 32, 52–​53, 65–​66, 88–​89, 116–​17, 178n.194 Glaude, Jr., Eddie, 159n.5 Godfrey, J. J. 65 Godwin, William, 159–​60n.8 Gramsci, Antonio, 75, 181n.14, 183n.63 Green, Nicholas St. John, 89–​90 Habermas, Jürgen, 17, 92, 100–​1, 144 habit, 17–​19, 54, 86–​87, 90, 117–​18, 121, 128, 129, 153–​54, 155–​56. See also Dewey; James; Peirce habitus, 53–​54, 131–​32 Hartog, François, 5–​6 Harvard University, 86, 88, 112–​13 Havel, Vaclav, 156–​57 “The Power of the Powerless,” 156 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 2–​4, 17, 48, 60–​61, 63–​64, 67–​74, 75, 77, 82, 83–​84, 86, 96–​97, 126–​27, 132 Heidegger, Martin, 3–​4, 6–​7, 54 Heraclitus, 7 Herko, Fred, 81–​82, 154–​55 Hesiod, 7 Hess, Moses, 74 highest good, 55, 63–​64, 69–​70, 107–​8, 109. See also Kant history contingency of, 12, 14–​15 cyclical, 7–​8, 151 developmentalism, 2–​3 messianic, 2–​3, 7–​8, 83 progressive, 6–​7, 27–​28, 47, 151, 157 teleological, 12, 84–​85, 149, 157 Hobson, J. A. 112–​13 Hook, Sidney, 138–​39 hope as affect, 9–​12, 137–​38, 150

definition of, 4–​5, 6, 8–​10 democratic hope, 9, 15–​16, 18–​19, 120–​ 21, 122–​23, 148, 149 elpis, 7–​8 moral hope, 35–​36 as performance, 8, 10–​11, 12, 150, 152–​53 political hope, 1, 2–​3, 6–​7, 9, 12, 16–​17, 21–​22, 31–​32, 35, 60, 75, 83–​84, 86–​87, 114, 117–​18, 119–​20, 123, 129, 138 psychological and metaphysical, 6–​7, 10–​11, 15–​16, 17–​18, 20–​21, 29, 35–​36, 44, 46–​47, 51–​52, 69–​ 70, 119 radical hope, 9–​10 social hope, 6, 10–​11, 116–​17 subjective aspiration, objective possibility, 15–​16, 65, 68–​70, 74, 83, 116–​17, 119, 122–​23, 124–​25, 133–​34, 138, 150 as theological virtue, 7–​8 Horkheimer, Max, 135–​36 Hudson, Wayne, 70–​71, 77 idealism/​realism debate, 165n.78 ideals, 1, 6–​7, 12–​13, 55–​56, 58, 60, 67, 70–​ 71, 77–​78, 108–​10, 112–​13, 128, 138. See also real versus ideal imagination, 1, 5–​6, 11, 12, 22–​23, 56–​57, 67, 76, 79, 81–​82, 117–​18, 128, 137–​39, 140–​41 inquiry, 2, 5–​7, 13–​14, 26, 33, 90, 92, 116–​17, 153–​54. See also Dewey and Peirce Jacobi, F. H. 166–​67n.8, 167–​68n.24 James, William, 2, 6–​7, 12–​16, 17–​18, 19, 22–​23, 86–​88, 89–​90, 92, 103–​18, 119, 121, 124–​25, 131–​33, 136, 138, 149, 150–​51, 152–​53, 154 anarchism, 103–​4, 112 anti-​imperialism, 112–​13, 152–​53 belief, 14, 106–​9, 111–​12, 119 concept of self, 104–​5 elitism, 114–​15, 119 evolution, 87, 103–​4, 107–​8, 114–​ 16, 117

Index  231 experimentation, 17–​18, 107–​8, 109, 115–​17, 152–​53 genius, 109–​10, 114, 117 genuine options, 108–​9 God, 108–​9 habit, 86–​87, 104–​5, 108–​9, 112–​13, 121 heroism, 111–​14 individualism, 14–​15, 17–​18, 86–​87, 109–​10, 112–​16, 117 “Is Life Worth Living?,” 111–​12 moral blindness, 109–​10, 112–​ 13, 117–​18 “The Moral Equivalent of War,” 112–​13 moral faith, 87, 107–​9, 111–​12 “moral holiday,” 6 moral ideals, 108–​10, 111–​12, 114–​ 16, 117–​18 moral life, 12–​13, 17–​18, 108–​9, 111–​ 12, 138 “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” 43–​44 paranormal research, 106–​7 “Philosophical Reflections and Practical Results,” 88 pluralism, 17–​18, 86–​87, 103–​5, 106–​ 12, 115–​18, 119 The Principles of Psychology, 104–​5, 121, 131–​32 progress, 109–​10, 112, 114–​16 as public intellectual, 112–​13, 152–​53 radical empiricism, 105–​6, 124–​25, 152 science and morality, 106–​9, 117 “The Social Value of the College Bred,” 114–​15 strenuous mood, 17–​18, 107–​ 10, 111–​12 “tender-​minded” and “tough-​minded,” 6–​7, 89–​90 train robbery, 14, 107–​8 “vital secret,” 109–​10, 112–​13 will to believe, 14, 87, 108–​9 “The Will to Believe,” 108, 111–​12 Jameson, Fredric 155–​56 Job, 172–​73n.90 John Paul II (Pope), 62 Kant, Immanuel, 2, 6, 8, 12–​17, 20–​61, 63–​64, 65–​70, 71–​72, 74, 76–​77,

83–​85, 86–​87, 88–​89, 90–​91, 96, 103–​5, 108–​9, 116–​17, 119, 129, 138, 149, 150–​51, 152–​53 abderitism, 16–​17, 45–​47, 176n.160 “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?,” 38–​39, 42, 152–​53 Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 41, 54, 88–​89 as-​if, 12, 33, 46–​47, 58–​59 chiliasm, 34, 43, 47–​48, 172–​73n.90 citizenship, 38 civil society, 37, 38–​39, 49 civic constitution, 37–​40, 41–​42, 49 community, political and ethical, 36–​39 The Conflict of the Faculties, 12–​13, 16–​ 17, 44–​48 Copernican Revolution, 22 cosmopolitanism, 37, 39–​40 critical system, 16–​17, 20, 21–​26, 43, 50 Critique of the Power of Judgment, 16–​ 17, 26–​28, 32, 33, 40–​41, 45 Critique of Practical Reason, 16–​17, 20, 25, 29–​30, 31–​32, 35–​36, 46–​47 Critique of Pure Reason, 16–​17, 20–​21, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27–​28, 40–​41, 43, 52–​53, 54–​55, 56, 88 despair, 31, 58–​59 determinism, 33–​34, 43–​44 dogmatism, 23, 26–​27, 32, 34, 42, 43–​ 45, 50–​53, 60–​61, 177–​78n.186 education, 35, 38–​39, 40–​42, 58–​ 60, 117 enlightenment, 38–​39, 42, 47, 55–​56 eye, 26–​28, 48 final end, 25–​27, 28, 29, 31–​33, 34–​35, 37, 52, 53–​54, 58, 60–​61 (see also Kant: teleology) first-​person versus third-​person perspective in, 43–​44, 51–​52, 60 focus imaginarius, 24, 66 freedom, 12, 25, 28, 31–​32, 37–​39, 49, 50, 54, 59–​61, 77, 152 God, 21–​22, 25, 26–​27, 28, 30–​34, 35–​36, 43–​44, 49–​50, 51–​52, 109, 172n.78 Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals, 20

232 Index Kant, Immanuel (cont.) happiness and virtue, 29–​31, 32–​33, 35–​ 36, 69–​70, 109 “heuristic fiction,” 26–​27, 51 highest good, 20, 25–​26, 28, 29–​36, 41–​ 42, 43, 46–​47, 52–​53, 55, 58–​59, 60, 63–​64, 69–​70, 109 peace as highest political good, 35, 39–​40, 49 political versus moral interpretation, 29 social versus individual interpretation, 29–​33, 35–​36 “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Perspective,” 27–​28, 39, 45, 49–​50, 170n.48 immortality, 25, 28, 30, 31–​33, 35–​ 36, 109 international affairs, 37, 39–​40 judgment, 22–​23, 26–​27 Lectures on Logic, 52–​53 Lectures on Pedagogy, 40–​41 Lectures on the Philosophical Doctrine of Religion, 31–​32, 177n.185, 179n.201 metaphor, 35, 48, 168n.26 metaphysical dualism, 2, 13–​14, 16–​17, 59–​60, 63, 65, 68, 71–​72, 77, 83, 119, 152 Metaphysics of Morals, 20, 38 moral disposition, 12, 33–​34, 38–​39 moral terrorism, 45–​46, 176n.159 moral vocation, 21–​22, 35, 40–​41, 43, 47, 88–​89 nature, 20, 26–​28, 32–​34, 48–​50, 51–​52, 59–​60, 76–​77, 152 laws of, 24, 26–​27, 33, 48, 49–​50 versus providence, 48–​50, 51–​52 “On the Common Saying: That May Be Correct in Theory, But it is of No Use in Practice,” 30–​31, 45–​46 peace, 12–​13, 16–​17, 35, 37, 43, 45–​ 46, 49, 51 phenomenal/​noumenal distinction, 22, 23, 25–​26, 33, 47, 49–​50, 53, 71–​72, 166–​67n.8 philosophical anthropology, 16–​17, 44, 53–​58

politics versus morality, 34–​36 practical belief, 12, 16–​17, 21–​22, 26–​ 27, 32, 33, 34, 42–​44, 50–​54, 58–​60, 61, 88–​89, 108–​9, 116–​17, 149, 178n.194 Preisschrift, 32–​33 principle, 20–​21, 23, 24, 25, 26–​27, 33, 37–​38, 47, 53–​54 progress, 12, 16–​17, 21–​22, 27–​28, 31–​32, 33–​34, 35–​36, 37, 38–​39, 41–​50, 51–​52, 58–​61 prophecy, 12–​13, 16–​17, 43–​44, 47–​ 48, 58–​59 providence, 21–​22, 28, 34, 46–​47, 48, 49–​50, 55, 117 radical evil, 31–​32, 35–​36 reason, 23, 24 “hypotheses of reason” and “postulates of reason,” 26–​29, 30, 32–​33, 35–​36, 41–​42, 44, 46–​47, 52–​53, 54–​55, 58–​59, 66, 67–​ 68, 69–​70 ideas of reason, 22, 23–​25, 26–​27, 28, 43, 44, 52–​53, 55, 58–​59, 66, 86 interest of reason, 20–​21, 25–​29, 45, 48, 49–​50, 51, 52–​53 need of reason, 25–​26, 28, 45–​ 46, 48 practical reason versus theoretical reason, 14–​15, 21–​22, 23, 25, 26–​28, 32, 33, 42, 46–​47, 51–​53, 55, 58–​60, 65–​66, 83–​85, 88–​89, 108–​9, 152 regime type, 35, 37–​40, 41–​42 regressive argument, 44–​46, 58–​59 regulative and constitutive, 16–​17, 21–​22, 23, 24, 25, 26–​28, 32–​33, 35, 43–​48, 51–​52, 60–​61, 76–​77, 83–​85, 96 religion, 16–​17, 20, 24, 30–​32, 35–​36, 41–​42, 58–​60, 171–​72n.77 Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, 20, 30–​32, 35–​36, 44–​ 45, 65–​66 teleology, 24, 26–​28, 33–​34, 42, 51 teleological history, 12, 16–​17, 25–​26, 27–​28, 33–​34, 42–​45, 48, 49–​52, 60, 83–​84, 151

Index  233 three-​fold synthesis, 56–​58 “Toward Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch,” 12–​13, 16–​ 17, 38, 39–​40, 49–​50, 51, 152–​53 transcendental illusion, 20–​21, 23 understanding, 22–​23, 24 categories of the understanding, 20–​ 21, 22–​23, 24, 66 unsocial sociability, 48–​49 Versuch einiger Betrachtungen über den Optimismus, 177–​78n.186 war, 37, 39–​40, 49 “What is Orientation in Thinking?,” 25, 26, 178n.194 Kierkegaard, Søren, 3–​4, 69–​70 Kleingeld, Pauline, 48, 168n.26 Koopman, Colin, 191n.109 Kracauer, Siegfried, 83 Lafargue, Paul, 160n.9 League for Independent Political Action, 147 Lear, Jonathan, 9–​10 Left Hegelians, 73–​77 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 68–​69, 177–​78n.186 Lenin, Vladimir Ilich, 112–​13 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 81–​82, 155–​ 56, 167–​68n.24 liberalism, 3–​4, 14–​15, 100 liberation theology, 62, 69–​70 Lippmann, Walter, 122–​2 3, 137, 140–​4 1 Löwith, Karl, 7–​8 Lucretius, 75 Lukács, Georg, 62 Mandeville, Bernard, 48 Marasco, Robyn, 3–​5, 6–​7 Marcel, Gabriel, 9–​10, 13–​14 Marchetti, Sarin, 193n.154 Margolis, Joseph, 86 Martin, Adrienne, 9 Marx, Karl, 17, 126–​27 The Difference between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature, 75 ontological materialism, 75–​77

“Theses on Feuerbach,” 75, 78–​79 Marxism, 6–​7, 14–​15. See also Bloch and Dewey Mead, George Herbert, 131–​32 Mendelssohn, Moses, 16–​17, 46–​47, 167–​68n.24 Metaphysical Club, 88, 89–​90 metaphysical dualism, 2, 13–​14, 104–​5, 138–​39, 149 Mill, John Stuart, 2–​3, 19, 154–​55 Misak, Cheryl, 92, 100–​1 Miyazaki, Hirokazu, 10–​11, 12 Moltmann, Jürgen, 62 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, baron de, 6–​7 More, Thomas, 162n.47 Moscow Show Trials, 83 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 81–​82 Mumford, Lewis, 147 Mussolini, Benito, 190–​91n.108 Muñoz, José Esteban, 63, 81–​82, 153, 154–​56 Murphey, Murray, 90, 97 narrative, 5, 56–​58, 83–​84, 105, 127–​28, 141–​42, 151 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 148 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 134–​36 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 3–​4, 7–​8, 54–​55, 151 Nostradamus, 62 not-​yet, 10–​11, 13–​15. See also Bloch Obama, Barack. See rhetoric of hope in politics Occupy Wall Street, 155 ontology, 10–​11, 13–​15, 17–​18, 75. See also process ontology optimism, 1–​2, 4–​5, 6–​7, 14–​15, 120, 150 Orwell, George, 122, 144 Pandora myth, 7 Pantheismusstreit, 167–​68n.24 Papini, Giovanni, 185n.2 Paul of Tarsus, 7–​8 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 2, 12, 13–​16, 17–​ 18, 86–​105, 106–​7, 108, 114, 116–​ 18, 119, 138, 149, 150–​51, 152–​53

234 Index Peirce, Charles Sanders (cont.) belief, 17–​18, 87, 89–​91, 93–​94, 96, 100–​ 1, 116–​17 “Charles Santiago Sanders Peirce,” 103–​ 4, 152–​53, 191n.109 community of inquiry, 14–​15, 17–​18, 87, 90–​91, 92, 95–​98, 100–​1, 116–​ 18, 152–​54 conservatism, 99–​101, 103–​4 doubt, 90–​91, 93–​94, 96–​97 habit, 17–​18, 86–​87, 93, 96–​97 elitism, 92, 93–​94, 99–​103, 117 evolution, 17–​18, 87, 90–​91, 98–​99, 101–​3, 117 “agapistic” versus “tychastic,” 17–​ 18, 101–​3 “Firstness,” “Secondness,” and “Thirdness,” 96–​97, 101–​2 “The Fixation of Belief,” 92, 93–​94, 95, 99–​100 “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” 92 inquiry, 2, 14–​15, 93–​94, 95, 96, 98, 100–​1, 150–​51 logic, 17–​18, 86–​87, 93, 97, 98–​99, 101–​ 4, 116–​17, 150 “Philosophy and the Conduct of Life,” 98 pragmatic maxim, 88–​89, 93–​104 “pragmaticism,” 92, 103–​4, 187n.15 probability, 17–​18, 96–​97, 98 rationality versus sentiment, 92, 98–​100 Scholastic realism, 97, 98, 101–​2 science, 14–​15, 17–​18, 88, 93–​97, 98–​ 99, 100–​1 self-​control, 86–​87, 93–​94, 98–​99, 117 synechism, 96–​98, 101–​2, 152 truth, 17–​18, 86–​87, 95–​97, 98, 100–​1 “vital matters,” 92, 98, 99, 103–​4, 117–​18 “What Pragmatism Is,” 88 Perry, Ralph Barton, 194n.190 pessimism, 3–​8 phenomenology, 9–​10, 43, 57, 60, 68, 70, 73, 78 philosophical anthropology, 16–​17, 18–​19, 44, 58–​59. See also Dewey and Kant Pindar, 7

Plato, 70, 124, 162n.43, 167n.14, 167n.21, 171–​72n.77 possibility v, 1–​2, 4–​6, 9–​10, 12, 14, 15–​16, 17–​18, 29, 30–​33, 34, 35, 36, 42, 47–​48, 53–​54, 58–​61, 65, 67, 74–​ 75, 78–​79, 80, 82, 83–​85, 90, 107–​8, 122–​23, 128, 141, 149, 151–​52, 155. See also Bloch practical belief. See Kant practice, 1, 9, 10–​11, 17–​18, 59–​60, 67–​68, 71–​72, 73, 74, 75, 77–​79, 81–​82, 83, 86, 88, 99–​101, 103–​5, 106–​7, 112–​13, 117, 122–​23, 124, 128, 129, 135–​36, 138, 142–​43, 144, 146, 155, 157 pragmatism, 2, 3–​4, 5–​6, 8, 12–​15, 17–​18, 19, 86–​91, 92, 103–​4, 106–​7, 119, 121, 124, 128, 132, 135–​36 presentism, 5–​6 principle, 1–​2, 6–​7, 12, 13–​14, 20–​21, 23, 24, 25, 26–​27, 33, 47, 53–​54, 83–​84, 90–​91, 92, 97, 142–​43. See also Kant process ontology, 14, 17–​19, 68–​69, 77–​78, 79, 152 progress, 1–​3, 5, 6–​8, 12, 33–​34, 60–​61, 101–​4, 117, 150, 151, 154. See also Dewey; James; Kant critiques of, 3–​4, 6–​8 Enlightenment notions of, 1–​3, 7–​8 Progressive era, 1, 122–​23 prophecy, 12–​13, 63, 68, 75. See also Kant Providence, 7–​8, 14–​15, 55. See also Kant Putnam, Hilary, 92, 141 Quijano, Anibal, 2–​3 Quixote, Don, 67–​68, 71–​72 Ratzinger, Joseph (Pope Benedict XVI), 62 real versus ideal, 61, 64, 71–​72, 73 Reed, Jr., Adoph, 159n.5 regulative ideas, 83–​84, 92, 98, 100–​1, 108, 120, 137, 139–​40, 151. See also Kant revolution, 63–​64, 75, 77–​78, 117 rhetoric of hope in politics, 1–​2, 159n.5 Ricoeur, Paul, 54, 56–​58, 83–​84, 127–​28

Index  235 Rimbaud, Arthur, 150 Roosevelt, Theodore, 112–​13 Rorty, Richard, 13–​14, 120, 164n.72 Rousseau, Jean-​Jacques, 3–​4, 37–​38, 42, 48 Sabel, Charles, 153–​54 Saito, Naoko, 126–​27 Scheler, Max, 83 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 17 Schiller, F. C. S. 185n.2 Schmitt, Carl, 3–​4 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 3–​4, 6–​8, 54–​55 scientific method, 86, 89, 134, 136, 153 Scott, James C. 15, 155 Scotus, John Duns, 189n.76 Seneca, 75, 76 Shade, Patrick, 121 skepticism, 23, 44–​45, 46–​47, 53, 55, 90–​ 91, 116–​17 slavery, 70, 80, 93–​94, 100 social Darwinism, 101–​2, 114 socialism, 3–​4, 82, 146, 147, 171n.73 Socrates, 68–​69, 70 Spencer, Herbert, 114 Strong, Tracy, 3–​4, 6–​7 Talisse, Robert, 92 Taylor, Charles, 112–​13 teleology, 15–​16, 60–​61, 63, 78, 80–​81, 83–​ 84, 126–​27, 138. See also Kant temporality, 2–​3, 5, 7–​8, 9–​10, 11, 12, 56–​ 57, 64–​65, 70–​71. See also Dewey

“church time” and “merchant’s time,” 162n.47 eschatological time, 2–​3, 69–​70 Thompson, Peter, 80 Thucydides, 120 Tiananmen Square, 154–​55 Traverso, Enzo, 5–​6 Unamuno, Miguel de, 3–​4 University of Chicago, 86, 131–​32, 148 utopia, 1, 2, 5–​6, 11, 12, 14–​15, 17, 19, 60–​61, 62–​64, 65–​67, 72–​73, 74, 75, 78–​79, 80, 81–​82, 83–​85, 86–​87, 150–​51, 152–​53, 154–​56, 157, 169n.47, 172n.78, 180–​81n.2, 184n.79. See also Bloch Vaihinger, Hans, 54–​56, 58 Victoria, Lady Welby, 99–​100 war, 1, 112–​13. See also Kant Waterworth, Jayne, 9 Weber, Max, 3–​4, 83 Westbrook, Robert, 120 Weyl, Walter, 122–​23 Wilde, Oscar, 165n.78 wish, 9, 58–​59 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 96–​97 Wolin, Sheldon, 135–​36 Wood, Allen, 68–​69 Zeno, 103–​4