Hope without Optimism by Terry Eagleton (review)

As his title suggests, Terry Eagleton aims to make a distinction between two concepts that are often used interchangeably: hope and optimism. The latter, he suggests, comes in various forms, all of which are more or less spurious. There is, for instance, a sort of constant optimism, a wearing of "rose-colored" glasses. There is a Panglossian "optimalism" that holds we live in the best of all possible worlds. And then there is a future-oriented optimism, which believes that a better world is steadily and discernably unfolding, albeit with some snags along the way. This last form of optimism, Eagleton suggests, is particularly widespread in modernity. As Eagleton explains, such optimism is not a matter of recognizing concrete progress in various domains, such as antibiotics in medicine, but of comprehensive faith in capitalized "Progress," the belief that "history as such is climbing upward" (7).

The problem with optimism in general is that it tends to downplay the contingency of existence, to avoid, minimize, look past, or rationalize calamity. Hope, on the other hand, or at least the sort of hope that occupies Eagleton for much of this study, "acknowledges the realities of failure and defeat, but refuses to capitulate in the face of them and preserves an unspecified, non-purposive openness to the future" (65). Because it reckons with failure and disaster, this sort of hope, unlike optimism, is closely connected to a cluster of other virtues: "patience, trust, courage, tenacity, resilience, forbearance, perseverance, long-suffering, and the like" (59).

Eagleton critiques both liberals and socialists for their optimistic faith in Progress. He agrees with liberals like Matt Ridley and Steven Pinker, for instance, that modernity has seen advances in many areas and that markets often deserve the credit for this. He is wary, though, of how they downplay the chronic problems of modernity. He notes, for instance, that both Ridley and Pinker are particularly dismissive of the threats of nuclear war and environmental catastrophe. Eagleton argues for a more complex assessment of modernity:

A judicious apologist for market forces would point to their role in the rapid accumulation of wealth, as well as in the general advance of global civilization, while acknowledging that this has involved not only poverty and inequality but a crassly instrumentalist rationality, ruthless acquisitiveness, economic instability, selfish individualism, destructive military adventures, the withering of social and civic bonds, pervasive cultural banality, and the philistine erasure of the past (16).

Eagleton (who published a book in 2011 called Why Marx was Right) argues that Marx holds such a complex view and that, properly read, his works do not necessitate a belief in Progress. Still, Eagleton devotes much of his study to critiquing the widespread optimism among Marxists who did not read the master in this way. For Marxists have often tried to "immanentize the eschaton" (as conservatives in the wake of Eric Voegelin have charged), and they have often been willing to systematically purge those standing in its way. Eagleton, to his credit, does not shy away from this violence or the ways in which communist regimes failed to deliver on their promises of Progress. Commenting on the rhapsodic closing of Trotsky's Literature and Revolution (1924), Eagleton wryly notes, "Soviet bank clerks failed to run for buses like ballet dancers, few shopkeepers learned how to control the circulation of their blood, while the voices that barked orders in the labor camps were not always melodious" (27). Eagleton spends a full chapter critiquing the Marxist Ernst Bloch's optimistic tome The Principle of Hope (1954–59).

In Hope without Optimism, Walter Benjamin is the main foil for Bloch on the Left. Benjamin rejects Progress in favor of an oracular messianism, one in which the messianic event promises to break into the wreckage of history. Eagleton much prefers Benjamin to Bloch but notes that there is still a danger in the former's apocalypticism. It can make the disjunction between history and hope too radical. Here Eagleton, with his idiosyncratic fusion...