This article investigates the role of hope in politics, in the context of the current climate crisis. Hoping for positive transformation may seem naïve and or a way to avoid action, but there is a close connection between hope and democratic action. Understood as a collective political practice, hope can contribute to imagining and articulating alternative futures, and motivate action. The first part of the paper explicates the relevance of the work of Ernst Bloch for the challenges of the Anthropocene. (...) It focuses specifically on learning hope as a collective political practice, the function of utopias in fostering political imagination, and the connection between political agency and hope. The second part of the paper draws on the work of the Dutch Party for the Animals to investigate how political hope can change existing political systems from the inside. In their party program and policies, the Party for the Animals gives central importance to the wellbeing of the earth and all its inhabitants, and demonstrate that a different way of doing politics, based on care and responsibility instead of economic growth, is possible. (shrink)

The language of hope is a ubiquitous part of political life, but its value is increasingly contested. While there is an emerging debate about hope in political philosophy, an assessment of the prevalent scepticism about its role in political practice is still outstanding. The aim of this article is to provide an overview of historical and recent treatments of hope in political philosophy and to indicate lines of further research. We argue that even though political philosophy can draw on recent (...) analyses of hope in analytic philosophy, there are distinct challenges for an account of hope in political contexts. Examples such as racial injustice or climate change show the need for a systematic normative account that is sensitive to the unavoidability of hope in politics as much as its characteristic dangers. (shrink)