Lesson · 4 min Stretch
Radical Hope
In one line Hope is not the same as optimism. Lear’s radical hope is commitment to a good future you cannot yet picture.
Optimism expects things to turn out well. Hope is different: it wants a good outcome while admitting it may not come, and it keeps acting toward it. Philosophers have often been wary of hope. In the Greek myth, hope was left in Pandora’s jar among the evils, and Spinoza called it unsteady, always mixed with fear.
Jonathan Lear, in Radical Hope from 2006, studied Plenty Coups, a chief of the Crow Nation. When the buffalo vanished and his people’s way of life collapsed, he said that after this nothing happened. Yet he led the Crow toward a future they could not yet understand, holding to the hope that they would flourish again in some new form.
Lear calls this radical hope: commitment to a good future even when you lack the concepts to imagine it.
Go deeper
Gabriel Marcel described hope as a refusal to treat the present situation as final, rooted in relationship rather than calculation. Václav Havel described hope as a sense that something is worth doing whether or not it succeeds. Critics warn that hope can be used to keep people waiting rather than acting.
The closing factory
When the town’s only factory closes, Dev’s neighbors split. Some insist it will reopen soon. Others say the town is finished.
Dev cannot picture what the town will become, but he joins a group retraining workers and starting small businesses. He is not optimistic, and he is not resigned. He keeps acting toward a good he cannot yet see clearly.
Try this today Name one thing you hope for that you cannot be sure of. Write one small act that keeps the hope honest.
Cite or share this lesson
A plain reference you can paste into notes or an essay:
Quest2Reason. “Radical Hope.” https://quest2reason.com/learn/lesson/radical-hope. Accessed 13 November 2026.
Sources
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Hope” — Covers hope and optimism, Spinoza, Marcel and Lear.
- Wikipedia, “Plenty Coups” — Describes the Crow chief whose story is at the heart of Lear’s book.
- Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (2006) — Lear’s reading of Plenty Coups and of “after this nothing happened.”
- Václav Havel, Disturbing the Peace (1990) — Hope as the sense that something is worth doing however it turns out.