“Is there an obligation to hope?” asks Lars Svendsen in his latest book, A Philosophy of Hope. His measured answer is yes, because it’s a condition for living a life that’s genuinely worth living. In this warm and compelling argument, Svendsen, a “renegade pessimist”, offers us an optimistic but cautious understanding of this emotional state. He persuades me that hope is more than just a comfort. Hope fires the imagination and, if you can’t imagine something, you won’t be able to act on it. A Philosophy of Hope convincingly explains how hope offers us the capacity for both imagination and for action. It’s a powerful antidote for a wildly pessimistic era such as ours.
