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Martin Flanagan on hope under the microscope.

Article Excerpt
Mary Zournazi, Hope: New Philosophies for Change Pluto Press, Sydney, 2002

This book represents a most interesting project. A young woman, highly educated in a certain tradition of Western thought, experiences three waves of serious misfortune--death, the end of a relationship and unemployment. Her response to her sense of hopelessness is to seek out, over a period of three years, thinkers in her tradition from around the world. The result is a series of interviews titled Hope and sub-titled New Philosophies for Change. In fact, this book is not so much about hope as thinking about hope. Some of those interviewed don't seem to feel much hope at all. Typically, they will remark that such and such might be 'a useful way of thinking about hope'. After several thousand words of this, I was reminded of a discussion on economic rationalism (in New Philosophies for Change, 'neo-liberal hegemony') I attended at the Melbourne office of Arena Magazine four or five years ago. Towards the end of it, a woman stood up and said, 'I've just returned from El Salvador where there are right-wing death squads and people have family members going missing in the night, but there is more hope there than I have felt in this room tonight'. For me, like it was for this woman, hope is visceral, of the heart as much as the mind, and to discuss one without the other is like discussing a book on the philosophy of humor without a single joke. Ultimately, something is missing.

The book does, however, have some brilliant riffs. Like Nikos Papastergiadis' description of worker alienation in the part-time, post-industrial economy--it's...

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