While political philosophers often assume that we need to imagine a better future in order to hope for it, philosophers of hope doubt that hope and imagination are constitutively intertwined. In order to solve this puzzle, the article introduces a particular kind of hope in which we imaginatively inhabit a desired future. Combining insights from the philosophy of hope and of imagination, I unpack what imaginative hope is and why it is particularly significant in political contexts. I contend that in (...) cases where we pursue a goal the realization of which requires collective action over a long time-scale (as it is paradigmatically the case in politics), the imagination has the potential to bolster the practical value of hope, i.e., its power to guide and sustain our agency. (shrink)

The relationship of Marxist thought to the phenomena of everyday life and utopia, both separately and in terms of their intersection, is a complex and often ambiguous one. In this article, I seek to trace some of the theoretical filiations of a critical Marxist approach to their convergence (as stemming mainly from a Central European tradition), in order to tease out some of the more significant ambivalences and semantic shifts involved in its theorization. This lineage originates in the work of (...) Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, then stretches to Georg Lukács and the so-called ‘Gnostic Marxism’ of Walter Benjamin (as mediated by the important figure of Georg Simmel), and culminating most recently in the work of Agnes Heller. Such a Marxist theory is inseparable from a political project that seeks to unveil and critique what it takes to be the debased, routinized and ideological qualities of daily existence under the auspices of modern capitalist society, but also attempts to locate certain emancipatory tendencies within this selfsame terrain, an orientation that can be summed up in the phrase ‘everyday utopianism’. Although there are occasional lapses into dualistic modes of thinking in the work of these writers, the key insight they present to us is the need to overcome the pervasive dichotomy between the everyday/immanent and the utopian/transcendental, of a sort that has bedevilled the work of many other theorists and intellectual traditions. (shrink)