Abstract
Philosophers and intellectual historians generally recognize pragmatism as a philosophy
of progress. For many commentators, pragmatism is tied to a notion of progress
through its embrace of meliorism – a forward-looking philosophy that places hope in
the future as a site of possibility and improvement. I complicate the progressive image
of hope generally attributed to pragmatism by outlining an alternative account of
meliorism in the work of William James. By focusing on the affectivity and temporality
of James’s meliorism, I argue that James offers a non-progressivist version of hope that
is affectively tempered by melancholy and oriented temporally toward the present.