Placeholder text

Go to cart

Hopeful Pessimism

By Lugt, Mara van der

Product Image: Hopeful Pessimism

Hopeful Pessimism

- Default Title
Description
Why “hopeful pessimism” is not a contradiction in terms but a powerful source of moral and political commitment The climate debate is rife with calls for optimism. While temperatures rise and disasters intensify, we are asked to maintain optimism and hope, as if the real threat is pessimism and despair. In this erudite and engaging book, Mara van der Lugt argues that this is a mistake: crude optimism can no longer be a virtue in a breaking world, and may well prove to be our besetting vice. In an age of climate change and ecological devastation, the virtue we need is hopeful pessimism. Drawing on thinkers that range from J.R.R.Tolkien and Mary Shelley to Albert Camus and Jonathan Lear, van der Lugt invites us to rethink what we thought we knew about optimism and pessimism, hope and despair, activism and grief. She shows that pessimism is closely linked to a tradition of moral and political activism, and offers a different way to think about pessimism: not as synonymous with despair but as compatible with hope. Gently yet fiercely, van der Lugt argues that what we need to avoid is not pessimism but fatalism or self-serving resignation. Pessimism does not imply the loss of courage or the lack of a desire to strive for a better world; on the contrary, these are the very gifts that pessimism can bestow. What Hopeful Pessimism asks instead is that we strive for change without certainties, without expecting anything from our efforts other than the knowledge that we have done what we are called upon to do as moral agents in a time of change.
Product details
Number of Pages:
255
Release Date:
2025-01-21
Publication Date:
2025-01-21
Publisher:
Princeton Univers. Press
Languages:
Original: English
ISBN10:
0691265607
ISBN13:
9780691265605
GPSR Manufacturer Reference:
[email protected]
Weight:
466 g
Height:
144 cm
Width:
220 cm
Thickness:
27 cm
Buy on Amazon
Currently sold out