Abstract
The aim is to theorise hope from a sociology of emotion perspective and propose a general framework for the analysis of discrete emotions – the emotive-cognitive chain of evaluation – that can be applied by analysing different types of hope. Hope is defined as the emotion of future possibility, distinct from self-confidence, faith and trust. Hope as a foreground emotion, subject to emotive-cognitive evaluation, arises in a bad present (target) as an outcome of past failed hopes. The object of hope is future improvement. Given limited agency in fundamentally uncertain circumstances, an external source of hope is located. Background import informs the assessment of the present as bad, what improvement to hope for (object) and the identification of sources. I argue that fear is a companion emotion of hope, and that a reasonable balance between hope and fear can make hope more in tune with real circumstances. Elaborating on the action continuum of hope, I propose that hope is never truly passive and that action itself generates hope. As a collective emotion, hope becomes collectively evaluated and mutually supported in a responsive social context. Responsive hope may, however, also be delusional. Different hope constructs are illustrated, drawing on findings in a project on the post-apocalyptic environmental movement. Theorising hope in the context of the climate crisis highlights the specific quality of hope as an emotion of future possibility and the significance of hope for present action and future object outcomes, its potential for social change and how we collectively create the future.
Introduction
The topic of hope is currently gaining increased interest among social scientists. In their review of contemporary sociological empirical work, Cook and Cuervo (2019) contribute to a sociological theory of hope where hope is theorised as a distinct social phenomenon that is context-bound, dependent on structural inequality, and can vary in character with the clarity of the object and the degree of perceived agency. Hope can be built bottom-up, in collective practice, and it can be produced top-down, as an unequally distributed resource (Hage, 2003), or as argued by Herz et al (2022) it can be a technology of governance.
Cook and Cuervo’s work on hope highlights empirically grounded dimensions of hope, recognising hope as wholly or partly emotional, but a lot remains to be explored concerning hope as emotion. How does it relate to other emotions projecting the self into the future? How does individual hope become collective hope? How can we distinguish between different kinds of hope? This article aims to engage with these issues, theorising hope from an emotion-sociological perspective and proposing a theoretical framework for analysing different types of hope as an emotion.
My interest in hope originates in a research project (2020–23) about emotions and narratives of post-apocalyptic environmental activism, in which we were three researchers exploring two post-apocalyptic groups – the Transition Movement Sweden and the Swedish ‘collapsologists’. Cassegård and Thörn (2018: 3) define postapocalyptic environmental activism as ‘based on a catastrophic loss experienced as already having occurred, as ongoing […] rather than as a future risk or threat’. Such groups began to emerge more than a decade ago; for instance, the Dark Mountain Project, which is loosely associated with the Swedish collapsologists, and the Transition Network in the UK, which inspired the Transition Movement Sweden. We collected data during 2020–21, resulting in 32 loosely structured qualitative in-depth interviews (19 transitioners, 13 collapsologists).1 We aimed to analyse the emotions and time perspectives of the two groups given their belief that our late capitalist industrial civilisation is collapsing. We were interested in what kinds of emotions would be associated with their experience of current loss and future uncertainty.
In previous research (for example, Kleres and Wettergren, 2017) we had found that hope was crucial for climate activists mobilising to avert civilisational collapse, so we were also curious about the selected groups’ approach to hope. It turned out that interviewees articulated strong ideas about hope (Cassegård, 2023; Malmqvist, 2024), rejecting what they consider ‘passive ecomodernist hope’ (hope in technological solutions and green growth; see for example, Cassegård et al, 2017) held by the majority population. Collapsologists considered hope per se delusional, asserting that they have no hope, while transitioners advanced ‘active hope’ as an alternative to passive ecomodernist hope. While we analysed the forms of hope emerging in the data, my decision to elaborate on hope theoretically derived from reviewing the literature on hope without finding a clear emotion-sociological framework. The present theoretical article, therefore, sets out to offer what I found missing. I will use literature that has treated hope as an emotion and a social phenomenon, but most of it based on a psychological approach to emotions. In theorising collective hope, I am inspired by the project results and use some to illustrate my theoretical points. From a sociology of emotions perspective, the question is, what kind of emotion is hope and what does it do to social life?
Mische (2014: 438) argues that climate change is a ‘site of hyper-projectivity’ ideal for the study of future projections. I also believe it is ideal for the study of the emotions informing these future projects. Hope, I argue, is the minimal but crucial ‘affective motor’ (Dewey, 2008) of future projectivity; it provides the action energy needed to continue engaging with the future when other future-oriented emotions, such as self-confidence, trust or faith, have proved inadequate (McGeer, 2004). In real life, and particularly in ordinary situations, trust, faith and hope are often hard to separate from each other and hope can even appear entangled with self-confidence (for example, Ortony et al, 2022). Under extreme conditions – arguably the global present threatened by rampant climate change and associated social upheaval – characterised by heightened uncertainty relating to both external circumstances and to the individual or collective actor’s capacity to steer the course of events, hope emerges as the most salient ‘foreground emotion’ (Barbalet, 1998): namely, an emotion subject to an actor’s conscious evaluation and emotion management (see Lear, 2006; Stuart, 2020; Halperin, 2023).
This article contributes to the rapidly expanding sociological research on hope by theorising hope as an emotion of future possibility (see also Eagleton, 2015; Bryant and Knight, 2019) and exploring its analytical components. What I call the emotive-cognitive chain of evaluation links emotion to action and temporality. I will argue that hope as foreground emotion is premised on a bad present and oriented towards the future. The ‘bad present’ is an outcome of past failed hopes concerning past presents. Hope is informed by ‘background import’ – matters of care (Helm, 2009), interests and stocks of knowledge (Schütz, 1951). It can therefore be very different for different people, despite the shared understanding of the present badness. The emotive-cognitive chain of evaluation helps to analyse how disappointed past hope regarding a particular and remaining bad present is re-evaluated in terms of hope’s source and (future) object. The elaboration of an emotive-cognitive chain of evaluation of emotion contributes more generally to the broader sociological study of discrete (particular) emotions and their relation to temporality and action.
Theorising hope from an emotion-sociological perspective shows how hope differs from other future-oriented emotions, such as self-confidence, and that hope as foreground emotion is entwined with fear as foreground emotion (Kleres and Wettergren, 2017). The coexistence of fear and hope can evoke anxiety, and therefore focusing on hope can be used to manage fear. I argue that balancing hope with fear can make hope more in tune with real circumstances.
In a practical sense, the article seeks to contribute to changing the common perception of hope as a given, good or bad, often routinely associated with religion or utopias, by expanding hope as a social construct that can take many different forms, which in turn have different consequences affecting future outcomes. In other words, what we hope for and what source of hope we identify, via action in the present, have an impact on how we collectively create the future. As argued by Mische (2014: 441) ‘periods of heightened subjunctive engagement with imagined future possibilities (…) can have critical outcomes for both personal and historical trajectories.’ Therefore, an additional reason for understanding hope in collectively critical situations is its significance for future societies.
In the following, the first section outlines what I call the emotive-cognitive chain of evaluation, proposing a model of how emotion relates to action and temporality. The second section uses the model to theorise hope as an emotion of future possibility distinct from other future-oriented emotions, and the role of fear for hope. The third section discusses passive/active hope as an action continuum. The fourth section elaborates on hope as a collective emotion. In the last section, I illustrate how the emotion-sociological perspective on hope developed in this article can help in understanding transitioners’ and collapsologists’ approaches to hope. In conclusion, I discuss the relevance and possible applications of the theoretical framework.
Emotive-cognitive chain of evaluation
Action, which is necessarily an apprehension of the future with the resources of the past, has its animus and telos in emotion. Emotion is the basis of action; it both directs action to the future, and constructs the resources which action draws upon through the emotional apprehension of the past.
Through emotions we experience the world, make sense of it, and learn to differentiate between what we care about and what we do not care about (Dewey, 2008). Background emotions (Barbalet, 2011) guide routinised action in a flow of activities in the present that extends naturally to the short-term future (Wettergren and Bergman Blix, 2022). Background emotions denote the subjective experience of low-intensity, action-internal emotions. Because they contribute to ongoing action they do not require conscious emotion management. This state is therefore conventionally perceived as purely cognitive or non-emotional (Barbalet, 2011; Wettergren, 2019). In contrast, problem solving and imagining the future in terms of ‘projects’ (Schütz, 1951) or ‘ends-in-view’ (Dewey, 2008 [1939]) are urged by foreground emotions. Foreground emotions are experienced as sufficiently intensive to necessitate the subject’s attention and conscious management, They are conventionally perceived as a disturbing emotional state because they may deflect focus from the ongoing action to the emotion itself (Barbalet, 2011). Any particular emotion that requires conscious management, either because it disrupts the intended action or because it needs to be summoned to infuse a desired course of action, I call a foreground emotion (Wettergren, 2019). Foreground emotions can signal changes in the environment that urge the subject to evaluate what they feel and why, and consequently change their course of action (Hochschild, 1983). This is when people assess their present situation, drawing on both emotional and cognitive evaluations of past and present, in imagining and planning for the future (Burkitt, 2012).
Temporality and how emotion orients and informs action is discussed in detail by (Helm, 2009: 254) who considers emotions ‘evaluative feelings of import’. Especially useful is his concept of background import, where import is dependent on care: ‘for something to have import to you – for you to care about it – is (roughly) for it to be worthy of attention and action’ (Helm, 2009: 250). Caring for something generates active engagement: ‘to be reliably vigilant for circumstances affecting [the cared for] favourably or adversely and to be prepared to act on its behalf’ (Helm, 2009: 250, emphasis in original). Attending and acting on behalf of what one cares for is rational, while not doing so would be ‘a rational failure’ (Helm, 2009: 251).
The concept of background import highlights, I argue, past subjective experience but also ‘objective’ accumulated knowledge or what Schütz (1951: 165) calls ‘stocks of knowledge’, such as ‘the world as taken for granted’, biographical circumstances, the actor’s past and the actor’s involvement in ‘systems of interest’. Included in cares, stocks of knowledge and systems of interest are the actor’s social bonds and group belonging: that is, social status and power (access to resources). Background import orients the actor’s attention towards the target of emotion (Helm, 2009) in the present (for instance, one’s good friends can be the target of pleasure) in relation to the future object of action (for instance, arranging a dinner with those friends).
The concepts of background import, target and commitment to future emotions of relevance to the choice of object can be combined with what Barbalet (1998) terms the source and outcome of emotion. From a structural perspective on emotions, represented by Barbalet, the source of emotion is ‘objective’ and situated outside the individual actor, in structural relations as well as in structured micro-interactions between the actor and their surroundings (Kemper, 2006). The concept of outcome spans the objective and subjective realms, denoting how the imagined object of action would affect both the actor and the surrounding world. Thinking about future outcomes of present action choices brings future emotion to the present as anticipated feelings (Helm, 2009; Lantz, 2021). These anticipated emotions are, as argued by Helm (2009) and Holmes (2010), integral to discriminating between better or worse courses of action (see also Dewey, 2008); for example, inviting best friends to a dinner involves anticipated emotions of joy and pleasure but may also spark anticipated emotions of guilt regarding friends who are not invited. Indeed, Helm argues, action is guided by a commitment to anticipated emotions: ‘[T]o feel one emotion [related to what one cares for] is to be rationally committed to feeling a whole pattern of emotions’ (Helm, 2019: 251). In other words, when evaluating anticipated emotions of the future object of action, actors factor in action outcomes in terms of emotions both concerning the self and the position of the self in relation to the surrounding world.
I call background import, source, target and object (and imagined outcome) the analytical components of an emotive-cognitive chain of evaluation, useful for analysing how discrete emotions are oriented towards the past, present and future, and how emotion connects to action (Figure 1). The reason for calling it a ‘chain’ is to clarify that the emotive-cognitive evaluation is a dynamic process that moves in time. Hence, as time goes by, outcomes of past action decisions will become background import and influence the re-evaluation of source, target and object.
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The emotive-cognitive chain of evaluation of emotion
Citation: Emotions and Society 7, 1; 10.1332/26316897Y2024D000000021
Fear of climate change, for example, follows on background import with adequate knowledge and perhaps direct experience, and care for the future of nature and humanity. Climate change is the objective source of fear and the identified target may be CO2. Hence, the actor’s future object is to reduce carbon emissions. This involves the commitment to future emotions of relief if climate change is controlled and dread if it is not. The actor decides to stop flying and driving a car, becomes a vegan and reduces unnecessary consumption.
Time goes by but global carbon emissions keep rising. The actor is still committed to the object and anticipated emotions. The fear target remains, but the actor must now reflect on why more people do not act to reduce carbon emissions. Along with fear emerges anger and the actor identifies the source of anger as systemic inertia; structural change is needed. Politicians are the target of anger because they seem to ignore their responsibilities. The actor decides to join an environmental organisation, expecting collective action to influence politics. The example suggests that the original emotion, fear, was associated with anticipated relief. As the problem (target) remained and action-emotion was reassessed, anticipated dread grew stronger and anger arose as a companion (and counter-emotion; see Flam, 2005) to fear. Anger as a power emotion can attenuate fear which is an emotion of powerlessness (Kemper, 2001).
Next, we will consider hope along the dimensions of the emotive-cognitive chain of evaluation. Following the discussion above, this means a focus on foregrounded hope as a last resort in critical situations (individual or collective) where other future-oriented emotions become inadequate.
Hope as the emotion of future possibility
Based on the above, in this section, hope is proposed as an emotion of future possibility (object), characterised by limited agency and uncertain external circumstances in a bad present (target). The target and object of hope are shaped by background import, including lessons learned from past hopes (Horster and Bloch, 1977). The source of hope is an external resource that can partly compensate for limited agency, but given that external circumstances are uncertain, the source is also uncertain. Last, hope’s companion emotion is fear; fear that the bad present may prevail or worsen (fear object). I will begin by clarifying how hope differs from similar future-oriented emotions, notably self-confidence.
Hope and other future-oriented emotions
Hope’s primary temporal orientation is the future. Another emotion that projects the self into the future is self-confidence (Barbalet, 1998). Psychological research has suggested that hope relies on self-confidence or its more cognitivist term self-efficacy (for example, Snyder, 1995), but as argued by McGeer (2004) if hope was self-confidence there would be no need to hope. Self-confidence is the feeling of capable agency to reach desired goals (Barbalet, 1998), carrying positive expectations about the future (Miceli and Castelfranchi, 2010). Hope, in contrast, arises in ‘situations where we understand our own agency to be limited with respect to the things or conditions that we desire’ (McGeer, 2004: 103). According to Miceli and Castelfranchi (2010) in hope a wished-for future is possible, but never probable, as in positive expectations where the wished-for future is expected. Confounding hope with self-confident positive expectations, therefore ‘deprives hope of its specificity’ (Miceli and Castelfranchi, 2010: 253). Contrary to self-confidence hope is based on limited agency.
An additional contrast to self-confidence is that hope arises in conditions of uncertain external circumstances. For a self-confident projection of self into the future, external circumstances influencing one’s agency need to be reasonably manageable. This entails that self-confidence engages the future accompanied by trust, a commitment to expect a specific outcome, based on the confident assessment of both one’s own capable agency and of the surrounding world as stable and predictable (Barbalet, 2009; Miceli and Castelfanchi, 2010).
The emotional commitment to anticipated emotions of action infused by self-confidence is also different from hope (Miceli and Castelfranchi, 2010). Hope, which concerns possibility, is committed to future happiness/joy precisely because the end was not expected, while self-confident expectations, which concern probability, are more likely to generate satisfaction and relief because achievement of the object was expected (Miceli and Castelfranchi, 2010; Kemper, 2001). While hope is often conflated with trust and faith, Miceli and Castelfranchi (2010: 263) argue that hope is weaker than both trust and faith because trust entails ‘a commitment to expect’ and faith ‘a commitment to certainty’.2 Commitment refers to an external source, compensating for limited agency, that is expected (the trustee; see Barbalet, 2009) or certain (God) to deliver. The source of hope is uncertain and therefore there can be no certainty for it to deliver.
Target of hope: the bad present
In hope, the present, as can be deduced from the uncertainty concerning agency and external circumstances, is unsatisfactory and evaluated as such in relation to the actor’s background import.
‘A fundamental condition of hope is that our current life circumstance is unsatisfactory – that is, it involves deprivation or is damaging or threatening. We are concerned about what is going to happen and hope that there will be a change for the better’ (Lazarus, 1999: 654). Lazarus equates ‘unsatisfactory’ with feelings of grief (‘deprivation’), pain (‘damaging’) and fear (‘threatening’). In other words, hope for a future improved situation (the object of hope) derives from an unpleasant present situation (the target of hope), one that might even be miserable. Indeed, hope seems to be present ‘under even the bleakest of circumstances’ according to Lazarus (1999). In a talk that Ernst Bloch gave in East Germany in the 1950s depicting the present as depressive and disappointing in consequence of the defeat of what he called ‘the warm stream of Marxism’ (Horster and Bloch, 1977: 122), it further appears that the bad present of hope is preceded by emotive-cognitive evaluations of possibilities or probabilities that did not materialise, that is to say, failed hopes or expectations regarding the same particular target present.
The object of hope: future improvement
If the bad present is the target of hope, the object of hope is the possibility of future improvement of the target present. Where confidence perceives agency as capable and external circumstances manageable and trusts that they will so remain in the future, hope perceives agency as circumscribed, and external circumstances too uncertain to dare to make predictions.
Depending on the context (what the target present concerns) the object of hope can vary in reach and clarity (see Mische, 2009). Its reach can, for instance, be short- to long term. The clarity may vary between what Cook and Cuervo (2019: 1106) call ‘non-representational modes of hope not oriented towards a specific view of the future’ and ‘representational modes of hope which are comported towards a specific, hoped-for future’. Cook and Cuervo (2019: 1113, emphasis in original) relate perception of agency and what I call external circumstances, to the clarity of the object: when there is a sense of agency supported by external circumstances, the object is representational. This version of hope is almost conflated with self-confidence in the discussion earlier. At the other end, Cook and Cuervo suggest a slim sense of agency is all but destroyed by external circumstances and the object is non-representational. This mode, reminiscent of hopelessness, will be discussed later in connection with active/passive hope.
Given that in hope agency is always limited and the source may be as uncertain as the external circumstances, I suggest that the clarity of the object is connected to reach, and that hope (regarding the target present) can have different simultaneous temporal reaches. Under extremely uncertain circumstances, for instance, the short-term object may be non-representational because even tomorrow cannot be trusted. The long-term object, in contrast, may take on the clarity of daydreaming (Bloch, 1986). If hope instead concerns the possibility of avoiding a distant future where the target present is expected to get much worse, hope may focus on a clear object in the short term and avoid considering a long-term object until external circumstances stabilise. As an emotion of future possibility, hope may also be a mere aspiration, through everyday action ‘[leaning] into the future’ (McGeer, 2004: 109). This includes what is sometimes called ‘radical hope’ – an experience of living with devastating loss, waiting for new possibilities (Lear, 2006).
Source of hope
Given the bad present, limited agency and uncertain external circumstances, the source of hope cannot be the actor’s capable agency. Nor can external circumstances be supportive in themselves, if the premise of hope is that they are uncertain and unpredictable. Hope, I argue, needs to find a compensating source in – despite – the uncertain external circumstances. If the source is religious hope shades over to faith (a commitment to certainty). If the source could fully compensate for limited agency, thereby replacing limited agency with someone else’s confident agency, hope fades into trust (a commitment to expect). The source of hope is itself characterised by uncertainty and can therefore merely support limited agency, not give it a divine boost, nor replace it. The identification of the source of hope depends, of course, on concrete real-life contexts. If one must leave a sinking ship amid a stormy ocean, the source of hope may be the life jacket; if one is diagnosed with late-stage cancer, the source of hope may be the oncologist. As elaborated below, in a bad present that transcends the individual, the source of hope can be the ‘we’ of collective action (see Kleres and Wettergren, 2017). When the emotive-cognitive evaluation of hope regarding the same target present changes over time, a previous source of hope may be abandoned and a new one identified.
Background import
Background import (stocks of knowledge, interests and cares) shapes the contents of hope by informing the evaluation of the target present as bad, and what source(s) and object(s) are discernible and desirable. It follows that part of background import are the outcomes of past failed hopes for improving past target presents, informing the present evaluation of sources and objects. New experience and knowledge add to background import which entails adjustment of what is valued in the present and hoped for in the future (see Dewey, 2008; Schütz, 1951). For instance, Halperin (2023: 230) shows that as Israeli peace activists’ past hopes for peace between Palestinians and Israel have recurrently failed ‘the emotion of hope, alongside peace, becomes an objective in and of itself’. Similarly, Stuart (2020) concludes that realising the failure of past hopes in mitigating climate change, Extinction Rebellion activists nurture ‘new [radical] hope’ that embraces loss and grief. Both argue that the cultivation of ‘hope as an objective’ is a collective endeavour and means to deal with despair, suggesting that collective action constitutes a source of hope (see also Kleres and Wettergren, 2017) that may itself become an object of hope.
In line with my theorisation, access to individual and collective resources belongs to the realm of agency and thus power that, as an external source of hope, enhances the limited agency of the actor. Hence, the status and power of the actor belong to background import, orienting identification of source and object. The fact that defending privileges and interests is associated with status and that power gives access to a broader array of potential hope sources, affects the hope object and its outcomes (see Hage, 2003; Hertz et al, 2022). However, in times of profound social change marked by pervasive uncertainty, the social structures and cultural meaning-making that bolster the value of accumulated resources and marks of status may wither. As argued below, under such conditions, hopes to preserve socioculturally contingent status and power may turn out to be unrealistic, while community building or collective mobilisation remain a source of hope. In connection to this, if the object is somewhat representational, the emotive-cognitive chain of evaluation of hope entails reflecting on imagined object outcomes involving alternative sources. This reflexivity is also part of background import (see Holmes, 2010); in other words, imagining how the socially constructive dimension of action in the present is involved in making the future feeds into background import as an ethical stance on the world worth living in.
Fear and hope
The bad present as the target of hope suggests a companion emotion of hope: fear. Fear arises in situations of relative powerlessness (Kemper, 2001) which is the feeling of limited agency in relation to a threat. Fear informs the actor of the threat (source of fear) and causes the actor to identify possibilities of averting, combating or escaping its realisation (object of fear) (see Barbalet, 1998). Miceli and Castelfranchi (2010) argue that in hope there is belief in the possibility of a wished-for end, while in fear there is belief in the possibility of a not-wished-for end (see also Ortony et al, 2022). Thus, under given circumstances fear and hope concern the same target (the bad present) but opposed objects (worsening of the bad present vs improvement of the bad present). This makes fear a companion and potentially a motivator of hope. Provided that fear, like hope, contains a sense of limited agency (powerlessness), identifying a source of hope helps to manage the fear. Kleres and Wettergren (2017) showed in a study on climate change that activists who feared that the present target was likely to worsen were motivated to collective action, which in turn opened new possibilities and thus hope (see also Halperin 2023, Stuart 2020).
The above leads to the conclusion that fear may precede emotive-cognitive re-evaluation of hope in precarious circumstances. Particularly when previous hopes regarding the same target present have failed, the fear object will appear increasingly probable. Hence the feeling of fear grows from background concern or worry to foreground fear3 that needs to be consciously assessed and managed. This brings the actor to assess the source of fear (threat) and thereby the possibilities (target) to avoid the fear object (threat as realised). Identification of possibility gives rise to new hope. Hope will keep fear in check, but if hope fails (again), fear will resurface, necessitating the emotive-cognitive reassessment of hope, and so forth. The continuous oscillation between fear and hope can lead to anxiety, according to Miceli and Castelfranchi (2010: 64, emphasis in original) who also argue that anxiety contains ‘the epistemic goal to know whether the danger will come true, so as to put an end to anxiety’. Resignation and acceptance of the inevitability of the fear object is one way to deal with anxiety, another is to magnify the hope object and cling to it.
The emotive-cognitive evaluation of hope implies that hope’s source and object are continuously adjusted in relation to background import and past hopes, the shifting qualities of the bad present, the shifting degree of limited agency and uncertain external circumstances. It does not necessarily entail, however, that hope is correctly evaluated or realistic (for example, McGeer, 2004; Swedberg, 2017). While the notion of realistic hope seems to bring hope closer to expectations and confidence, we recall that hope is premised on uncertainty and merely about possibility, not probability. Even so, it would be foolish to hope for the impossible.
Swedberg (2017: 46–7) discusses ‘realistic’ or ‘effective’ hope as a ‘practical kind of hope, ready to be translated into reality’ meaning that the hope object must be based on the assessment of ‘facts’ (that is, external circumstances), the knowledge of which derives from ‘experience’ (that is, background import). McGeer (2004) discusses ‘wishful’ or ‘wilful’ hopes as opposed to ‘good, responsive’ hope. Responsive hope, she argues, denotes accepting own (limited) agency, while being responsive to the surrounding world. Responsive hope engages with others in the mutually supportive reflexive evaluation of hope over time, arguably achieving a continuous intersubjective evaluation of background import, target, source and object. Wishful hope, McGeer (2004) argues, relies excessively on the external source, denying the role of one’s own agency. Wilful hope relies excessively on one’s own agency, denying dependency on the external source, while tending to treat shifting external sources as instruments. Both wishful and wilful hopes further tend to be fixated on the hope object.
If hope can be somehow in tune with real circumstances, how do we know what is real? Here, I suggest, we need fear to identify hope. The fact that fear accompanies hope and resurfaces when hope fails, suggests that fear’s object (a worse present) represents a probable – expected – future, as opposed to the hope object (see Ortony et al, 2002). Put differently, the uncertain external circumstances regarding the hope object, seem (relatively) certain with regard to the fear object. Denying fear is likely to lead to either wishful or wilful hope, both clinging to the hope object while suppressing the fear object. Both these types of hopes may temporarily resolve the fear-hope oscillation, but still end up in anxiety (see McGeer, 2004). Responsive hope need however not be realistic since the people we interact with do not necessarily have a realistic grasp of (the facts of) the world. Instead, I suggest that realistic hope stays in touch with reality by being, in tandem with fear, evaluated and adapted over time. By helping to clarify the shifting probabilities and possibilities, fear becomes a reference for reasonable hopes and a motivator for accepting one’s own albeit limited agency.
The action continuum of hope
In this section I propose that hope is always active, although action can be limited to non-observable daydreaming, and, in line with my definition of hope as the emotion of future possibility, that action is bound to generate hope. Hope is sometimes criticised as passive and even a way to maintain social inequality or the status quo (see for example, Terpe, 2015; Cook and Cuervo, 2019). Hertz et al (2022) argue for instance that ‘glimmers of hope’ distributed top-down is a tool of governance, preventing social change. It works because the hoping actor identifies compliance with power and oppressive conditions as a source of hope (see also Terpe, 2015).
Cook and Cuervo (2019) refute the notion of ‘passive’ hope arguing that all hope, representational as well as non-representational, involves some sense of agency. In other words, passivity refers to the actor’s choice to not take observable action in relation to the hope object, which does not exclude the possibility that actors actively fantasise (Schütz, 1951). The clarity of the hope object, I argue, influences actors’ choices in the present. If the object is somewhat representational – arguably a fantasy, a utopia, even ‘survival’ – it can be comforting to passively cling to the object, particularly if one’s own agency is extremely limited – under conditions of severe repression, for example (Terpe, 2015). This is a form of wishful hope, implying an active resistance to re-evaluating hope and clinging to a virtually impossible object. Wilful hope, in contrast, is seemingly very active by exaggerating one’s own agency. Like wishful hope, it resists the re-evaluation of the hope object. In addition, I argue that the source of hope can vary between vagueness and clarity depending on the external circumstances. If the source of hope is abstract and vague it is harder to actively engage it. If the source of hope appears as a concrete opportunity, it enables, or even requires, active engagement. However, in both cases, wishful and wilful hope, the object of hope remains clear (otherwise it cannot be fixated). Wishful (passive) and wilful (active) hope, I suggest, thus vary in degree of observable activity not just because of their relation to one’s own agency but also depending on whether it is possible to identify a concrete external source in uncertain circumstances.
The remaining combinations of object and source are, first, ‘vague object and concrete source’, akin to what Cook and Cuervo (2019) label cultivating agency with a non-representational object. However, identifying a concrete source of hope to cultivate one’s own agency is bound to eventually lead to a clarification of the object, as it is hard to imagine dedicated action without an identified object. Second, the ‘vague source and vague object’ combination, while close to hopelessness, as argued earlier may be propelled by hope’s companion emotion – fear – to motivate action (Kleres and Wettergren, 2017). Even if action is sustained in a mood of resignation (Cassegård, 2023; see also Ortony et al, 2002), acting as if there is a day tomorrow implies leaning on the emotion of future possibility that is hope. Concrete new possibilities and thereby new hopes may also emerge through actions driven by despair (Terpe, 2015). The ‘vague source-vague object’ combination thus resembles the ‘clear source-vague object’ combination in the sense that hope is generated by action.
Collective hope
Like all emotions, hope can be experienced individually or by groups, as a collectively shared emotion inspiring collective action. By ‘collective emotion’ we often understand the concept as an emotion that is qualitatively different from individual emotion, akin to what von Scheve and Ismer (2013: 412) call ‘collective emotion in the we-mode’: an emotion deriving from identification with a group where an actor need not personally experience the event that gives rise to a particular emotion but feels the emotion on behalf of the group (Barbalet, 1998). To experience a collective emotion in the we-mode, background import is likely to be largely shared, and thus the emotive-cognitive evaluation of the emotion, its source, target, object and implications for action are also shared.
Social movement research suggests that collective emotions in the we-mode are generated through interaction rituals in which individuals, by articulating their shared emotions and jointly evaluating their source, target, object and action implications, discover being part of a collective (for example, Summers-Effler, 2002). von Scheve and Ismer (2013) propose that collective emotions can also appear in the ‘I-mode’, a lower level of social integration where individuals affected share ‘appraisal structures’ that bring them socially closer to a joint interpretation of an experienced event, and therefore likely to experience a similar emotional response. The I-mode, I argue, presumes some shared elements of background import, for instance, shared worries about climate change. Individual actors’ different direct experiences, and different locally shared background import (notably their belonging to different groups with different statuses, different stocks of knowledge and different power/access to resources) will generate different interpretations and action responses. Given what they already share, however, individuals experiencing collective emotions in the I-mode may be drawn to interaction rituals (for instance, that of a social movement) that generate the we-mode level of integration.
Turning to hope, McGeer (2004) suggests that responsive hope, discussed earlier, pulls people into a collective/community. The shared emotive-cognitive evaluation of hope she calls ‘peer scaffolding’, and she writes: ‘[I]n effective peer scaffolding, individuals are naturally drawn into a kind of community of mutually responsive hope in which each person’s hopes become partly invested in the hopeful agency of others and vice versa’ (McGeer, 2004: 118). Responsive hope thus involves dependency on and caring for others, a context of mutually supportive relationships through which intersubjective emotive-cognitive chains of evaluation of hope aid in the construction of a well-poised balance between agency, external circumstances and the hope object. McGeer argues that the intersubjective orientation makes responsive hope resilient and tenacious, and although hopes may still be disappointed ‘[e]xisting within such a community … will make [hopes] less likely to slide from disappointment into […] despair’ (McGeer, 2004: 118). In other words, responsive hope, beginning in the I-mode, through repeated interaction rituals of peer scaffolding, may develop into collective hope in the we-mode.
In times of large-scale crises and a globally threatening future, the urge for joint assessments of fear objects and the possibilities to avoid them draw people into responsive collective hope in the I- or we-mode. An obvious example is climate change and ecomodernist hope. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) provides scientifically balanced emotive-cognitive evaluations of both fear and hope objects and thereby a universal framing – shared elements of background import – to understand the global threat of climate change. Politicians and policy makers are identified (addressed) as the primary source of hope by the IPCC. Governments, however, fixated on the hope object in terms of a ruptureless transition to capitalist green growth (see for example, Tavory and Wagner-Pacifici, 2022), identify the source of hope in science and technological innovation. Under the auspices of the UNFCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) this ecomodernist hope has been historically peer-scaffolded, debated and adjusted at global, national and local levels (Cassegård et al, 2017) and dispersed through mass media and educational institutions. Ecomodernist hope can thus be understood as an institutionally embedded globally responsive hope in the I-mode. Nevertheless, given the outcomes, it appears unrealistic.4
The disadvantage of responsive hope as a collective emotion is that the collective itself may develop resistance against responsiveness to facts (see Swedberg, 2017). Ecomodernist responsive hope appears as wilful hope from the point of view of governments and power; we recall that wilful hope is fixated on the object (for example, undisturbed growth), addressing shifting external sources of hope (for example, science and technological innovation), while exaggerating own agency (arguably a trait of power). For majority populations, ecomodernist hope takes the form of wishful ‘passive’ hope (underestimating own agency). Brulle and Norgaard (2019: 900) argue that passive ecomodernist hope is based on active resistance to the ‘cultural trauma of climate change’, either by ignoring the information on climate change or by engaging in ‘ritualism and implicatory denial’ whereby people acknowledge the problem of climate change but paradoxically maintain their visions of a future unaffected. Ecomodernist hope is thus produced and reproduced through an active denial of the ‘radical eventfulness’ of climate change (Tavory and Wagner-Pacifici, 2022).
Transitioners and collapsologists
In this section, drawing on a small selection of the project data, I illustrate how the emotion-sociological perspective on hope can contribute to understanding the hope constructs of two post-apocalyptic climate groups. The Transition Network, founded in 2007 in the UK to realise the concrete transition to an ecologically sustainable society (Hopkins, 2008), was established in Sweden in 2008. It organises courses and workshops and the primary objective is the construction of resilient eco-villages (Hopkins, 2008). Collapsology emerged first as a research field studying the collapse of civilizations and gained momentum with the book How Everything Can Collapse (Servigne and Stephens, 2020). Swedish collapsologists are loosely organised individuals who mainly interact in two online collapsology groups.
Collapsologists and transitioners share vital elements of background import, specifically IPCC science, but also scientific prognoses regarding the depletion of planetary resources, notably peak oil, leading to the conclusion that civilizational breakdown is already happening (Hopkins, 2008; Servigne and Stevens, 2020). Some have a background in science or engineering, others a background as climate activists. Given the background import they reject ecomodernist hope, which they call ‘hopium’ or ‘passive hope’. Realising the impossibility of this majority-responsive hope was associated with periods of anxiety and depression, exemplified by Runar (transitioner): ‘I had just been living my life in … some bubble […] I went into a really deep state of climate anxiety […] I completely drowned in grief about the situation and the state of the future.’ Anxiety and despair reflect the worsening of the target present, warranting an emotive-cognitive re-evaluation of both fear and hope (Macey and Johnstone, 2012; Servigne and Stevens, 2020).
Transitioners advance ‘Active hope’ (Macy and Johnstone, 2012). It involves accepting and mourning the target present, imagining the possibilities opened by the lost ecomodernist hope object, and actively engaging the present to enable a new hope object. This is described by Macy and Johnstone (2012: 44) as ‘the Great Turning […] the essential adventure of our time […] [The] transition from a doomed economy of industrial growth to a life-sustaining society committed to the recovery of our world’. A more concrete object for transitioners is the construction of prosperous and resilient eco-villages (Hopkins, 2008). Active hope is responsive, scaffolded by the transition collective, with the community as the source of hope. Already existing villages, festivals and workshops shape and strengthen collective hope in the we-mode. In the short term, this makes the source and object of transitioners’ hope one and the same: the eco-village community. In the words of transitioner Ron, ‘[Hope] it’s … when we come together. When the movement comes together and sees itself and celebrates what we have done, or the mere fact that we are there, that we share the same vision […] yes, when we are together, then it feels like hope.’
The long-term hope object – The Great Turning – is a vague but representational extension of the short-term object, the transition villages, which is concrete and, by also being the source of hope, tangibly clear. Transitioners’ hope is an example of an alternative responsive hope (as opposed to ecomodernist Active hope) with a clear source and a representational (short-term and long-term) object.
In contrast, collapsologists consider all hope, even Active hope, ‘hopium’. Calling themselves individualists and nerds of facts and numbers, they rely on the evaluation of fear objects as too overwhelming, and of external circumstances as too uncertain, to identify any source or object of hope (Servigne and Stevens, 2020). Instead, they advance a ‘no-hope stance’ (Malmqvist, 2024). Collapsologist Erik, for instance, says, ‘Well, I try not to [hope]. […] If you feel anxious then do something instead. […] In any case, it is more meaningful than just to sit around and hope.’
In line with my theorisation of hope, a no-hope stance combined with action generates hope, but collapsologists, as demonstrated by Malmqvist (2024), counteract hope through ‘impossibility work’ by cultivating their online groups as safe spaces of emotive-cognitive support to this end. The forums identify and discuss false hope sources, like renewable energy sources, and the likelihood of fear objects such as wars, pandemics and famines. Collapsologists can thus be said to cultivate ‘responsive fear’ to maintain the no-hope stance. Meanwhile, collapsologists do similar things as transitioners do; they move to the countryside, grow their own food and engage in local communities. Collapsologists’ no hope is an example of rejecting dominant hope without a proper emotive-cognitive evaluation replacing the old hope.
The examples of transitioners and collapsologists illustrate ways to deal with anxiety. I argued earlier that the fear object in the context of hope belongs to the realm of expectations, against which hope sources and objects can be identified (Barbalet, 1998; see also Ortony et al, 2002). Ideally, hope should be balanced with fear to stay attuned to a realistic assessment of possibilities but the coexistence of fear and hope can also evoke anxiety. If transitioners resolve anxiety by focusing on new hope, collapsologists seem to resolve it by ‘knowing’ the fear objects. Through responsive fear, I suggest, collapsologists attempt to identify fear targets and stay in control of the unfolding collapse, transforming the uncertain external circumstances of hope to the relatively certain circumstances of fear, thereby also assuming a sense of confident agency. Transitioners may risk leaning towards wilful hope because the short-term object collapses object and source, exaggerating the agency of the community. Their utopian long-term object leaves a door open for wishful hope. Collapsologists’ impossibility work, however, runs the risk of throwing them into despair, hopelessness or cynicism.
To me, hope is […] this thing to care about each other to … help each other to be in this hardship and dare to be weak […] facing these enormous forces that run amok in the world, the capital flows, the climate and the devastated ecosystems … what they… like when we run out of water, no more clean water, groundwater. It’s so many dimensions … and the only hope … this is where I feel that we must talk more … like, how can we still stick together, how do we keep ourselves together? And how do we get this small world and this small achievement to survive, with the sense of community that make us strong enough to go on …
Rakel’s reflection indicates a collapsological embrace of the emotion of hope, avoiding despair through shared emotive-cognitive evaluation of both fear and hope in a caring community that recognises the limits of collective agency. Pending uncertain circumstances, the source and object of hope begin as vague and short-term, acting together towards a possible tomorrow (see Lear, 2006).
Concluding discussion
I have outlined an emotion-sociological perspective on hope as the emotion of future possibility. Hope is distinct from self-confidence, an emotion concerned with future probability. Hope as a foreground emotion, requiring emotive-cognitive evaluation, arises in a bad target present, an outcome of past failed hopes, and is characterised by uncertain circumstances. Hope is premised on limited agency and thus the need to identify a source of hope, which strengthens agency, but is also uncertain. This makes hope different from faith and trust, where both rely on sources believed or expected to deliver what the actor’s agency cannot achieve on its own. Hope’s object is the future improvement of the target present.
I chose to theorise hope in a period of rampant climate crisis to foreground the specific quality of the emotion of hope. In mundane situations hope can be backgrounded, entangled with other projective emotions. Moreover, the emotive-cognitive re-evaluation of hope regarding the same target present is only relevant if the hoped-for object is not achieved. The implications of the hope object for present collective action also become more significant in times of large-scale crisis. By understanding – and distinguishing between – different types of collective constructions of hope in such times, we glimpse different possibilities for social change. I have furthermore argued that if balanced against well-founded sources and objects of fear, collective hope may identify more realistic objects than if it denies fear. Finally, I argued that in its minimal expression (vague source and vague object) hope as the emotion of future possibility emerges through action.
Based on the notion of responsive hope (McGeer, 2004) I demonstrated that collective hope, unlike individual hope, is always responsive in the sense that it involves collective emotive-cognitive evaluation. This means that, regardless of collective hope’s resonance with reality, individual actors mutually support its maintenance. Consequently, contrasting McGeer’s proposition that responsive hope is ‘good hope’, collective responsive hope may become wilful or wishful hope. Fear, I propose, identifies targets leading to the expected worsening of the present, hence it directs hope towards possibilities of averting or mitigating the feared future.
It remains to be empirically investigated how the theorisation of hope presented in this article contributes to understanding collective constructions of hope that resist what those collectives consider to be dominant delusional hope. In times of radical social change, this is interesting in terms of background import and object because collective hope, via background import, carries assumptions about human nature that, through collective action in the present, shape future societies.
I have advanced the emotive-cognitive chain of evaluation as a model to analyse different kinds of hope, further developing contemporary sociological insights that hope can take many expressions depending on the empirical situation and its identification of source and object. The model can be applied to any other emotion of interest for future emotion-sociological research seeking to analyse a specific emotion, its action orientations, its relation to similar emotions and its companion emotion(s).
Notes
Participant observations were also made at two online courses held by a collapsologist, one online conference held by Transition Network Sweden, one offline workshop on inner transition, and two offline classes at a transition course by a Swedish adult education college (folkhögskola). Material from books, websites and the observations of two online collapsologist groups were also collected. It should be noted that the researchers’ position on the issue is that climate change endangers all life on Earth as we know it.
See Terpe’s (2015) discussion on concentration camp prisoners’ passivity tied to religious conviction about God’s revenge, making hope superfluous, because the prisoners ‘felt certain and confident’ about this. Miceli and Castelfranchi (2010) argue that religious faith implies knowing that God will intervene and is therefore not hope. The distinction between religious faith and hope is as important as the distinction between confidence/positive expectations and hope, highlighting the specific quality of hope as premised on the co-presence of limited agency and uncertain circumstances.
Like Ortony et al (2002: 129) I use the term ‘fear’ for a family of emotion words concerning ‘an envisaged undesirable event’. These range from ‘unease’ or ‘concern’ to ‘panic’ or ‘dread’, signifying an increase in intensity. With growing intensity, fear also gradually shifts from a background to a foreground emotion.
Since the Kyoto Protocol in Japan in 1997, the emotive-cognitive chain of evaluation of ecomodernist hope has been responsively evaluated multiple times (Cassegård et al, 2017). The failure of the much hoped-for COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009 left environmental movements in despair yet attempting to adjust hope tied to the (COP21) Paris agreement in 2015 and the 1.5°C goal. At subsequent COPs, this object has been declared unattainable. Governments now maintain that below 2°C is achievable.
Funding
This work is supported by FORMAS (2019-00638).
Acknowledgements
For invaluable feedback, I thank Karl Malmqvist, Carl Cassegård, Erik Andersson, Merete Monrad and participants at seminars and talks at the University of Gothenburg, Umeå University, Humboldt University of Berlin and Freie Universität Berlin. I also thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.
Conflict of interest
The author declares that there is no conflict of interest.
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