ideologies have dwindled down to a wistful hope against hope that things will somehow work out for the best, we need to recover a more vigorous form of hope, which trusts life without denying its tragic character or attempting to explain away tragedy as "cultural lag." We can fully appreciate this kind of hope only now that the other kind, better described as optimism, has fully revealed itself as a higher form of wishful thinking. Progressive optimism rests, at bottom, on a denial of the natural limits on human power and freedom, and it cannot survive for very long in a world in which an awareness of those limits has become inescapable. The disposition properly described as hope, trust, or wonder, on the other hand— three names for the same state of heart and mind—asserts the goodness of life in the face of its limits. It cannot be defeated by adversity. In the troubled times to come, we will need it even more than we needed it in the past.

Limits and hope: these words sum up the two lines of argument I have tried to weave together. One line of argument seeks to distinguish between hope and optimism and to explore the implications of that distinction. The other explores some of the political and ideological expressions of the sense of limits. It is their recognition of limits alone that justifies consideration of such a great variety of political movements and schools of thought as in any sense part of a single tradition or sensibility. This sensibility—call it populist or petty-bourgeois, for lack of a better term— was defined, in the first place, by deep reservations about the progressive scheme of history. The idea that history, like science, records a cumulative unfolding of human capacities and that modern civilization is heir to all the achievements of the past ran counter to common sense—that is, to the experience of loss and defeat that makes up so much of the texture of daily life. "Are there no calamities in history?" Orestes Brownson demanded. "Nothing tragic?" Brownson and other opponents of "improvement" found little evidence of cumulative enlightenment. Officially discredited concepts like nemesis, fate, fortune, or providence seemed to speak more directly to human experience, in their view, than the concept of progress.

Their political sensibility, in the second place, was formed by a more modest assessment of the economic aspirations appropriate to human beings than the progressive assessment. Those who believed in progress were impressed by the technological conquest of scarcity and the collec

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