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Hope and its polar opposite, despair, are the subject of this issue of Social Research. When this theme first occurred to me, I worried that it was driven too closely by the circumstances in my own life at the time. On reflection and after discussions with others, it became clear that hope and despair are not just aspects of our psychic life that affect only our individual behaviors and sense of well being. They also have determining effects on the histories of nations and on political and economic activities which, on the face of it, seem patently nonpsychological. For example, the rise and fall of the stock market is hardly a function of market factors alone. So, there seemed no doubt that this was an appropriate subject for Social Research, a journal that prides itself on being, in the best sense of that unpleasant word, “interdisciplinary.” Those who know even a little history know that there have been periods we think of as times without hope, as dark times, and others that seem, in retrospect perhaps foolishly, to have been filled with hope and optimism. Both hope and despair have been written about by philosophers and theologians and studied by psychologists. In Catholic doctrine, hope is one of the three theological virtues (along with faith and charity). Its absence, namely, the denial of hope, or despair, while not a mortal sin is a sin, nevertheless, conceived of as the denial of a virtue or as moral sloth—an uncomfortable idea when increasingly large numbers of Americans suffer from depression. When I was in graduate school training to become a cognitive psychologist, I learned of an experiment, the outcome of which was so compelling that I never forgot it, and which bears directly on the subject of this issue. In the experiment, two groups of rats were individually placed in containers filled with water. One group had previous experience of having been left in the water for a period of time during which they were able to swim about, and after which they were “rescued”— that is, they were removed from the water. The others had no such prior experience. Subsequently, the experimenters simply clocked the amount of time each animal swam before drowning when placed in a water-filled container. (This experiment clearly predates the raising of our consciousness about animal rights.) They found that those animals with the experience of rescue swam for a significantly longer time than those without the “hope-inducing” experience (see the paper in this issue by Shlomo Breznitz). So, even in rats hope is important and can prolong life. This issue, then, reflects on hope and despair from many different perspectives and, while there are a few notable absences, I hope you will agree that together these papers make for an interesting set of readings on a subject not generally found in journals like this one.
Ronald Aronson is Professor of Humanities at Wayne State University and author, most recently, of After Marxism (1995) and the forthcoming Sartre versus Camus: A Cold War Tragedy.
Moshe Barasch is Jack Cotton Professor of Architecture and Fine Arts at Hebrew University. He is the author of Giotto and the Language of Gestures. His book The Blind: The History of an Image is in progress.
Shlomo Breznitz is Lady Davis Professor at the University of Haifa and Professor of Psychology at the Graduate Faculty of the New School University. He is the author of Denial of Stress (1983), Handbook of Stress (1992) with Leo Goldberger, and Memory Fields (1993).
John Burt is Professor of English at Brandeis University. His publications include The Collected Poems of Robert Penn Warren (1998) and Work Without Hope (1996), a book of poems. His book Lincoln, Douglas, and the Political Culture of Freedom is in progress.
Patrick J. Deneen is Assistant Professor of Politics at Princeton University. He has published on ancient and American political thought, and is the author of The Odyssey of Political Theory (forthcoming).
Jean Bethke Elshtain is Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago. Her recent publications include Real Politics At the Center of Everyday Life (1998) and New Wine and Old Bottles: International Politics and Ethical Discourse (1999).
Angus Fletcher is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the Graduate School of the City University of New York. He is the author of Colors of the Mind: Conjectures on Thinking in Literature (1991) and has written books on allegory, on Spencer, and on Milton.
Richard Lazarus is Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of California at Berkeley. His publications include Stress and Emotion: A New Synthesis (1999) and Emotion and Adaptation (1991).
Randolph M. Nesse is Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of California at Berkeley. His publications include Stress and Emotion: A New Synthesis (1999) and Emotion and Adaptation (1991).
Barbara Packer is Professor of English at the University of California at Los Angeles. Her article,"The Transcendentalists," appeared in The Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol. II (1994) and "Emerson and the Terrible Tabulations of the French" is forthcoming in The Transient and Permanent in Transcendentalism (1999).
Robert Pippin is Raymond W. and Martha Hilpert Gruner Distinguished Service Professor of Social Thought and Philosophy at the University of Chicago. His publications include Modernism as a Philosophical Problem: On the Dissatisfactions of European High Culture (1991); Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations (1997).
Michael Schudson is Professor of Communication at the University of California at San Diego and the author of The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life (1998) and The Power of News (1995)
Lionel Tiger is Darwin Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University. His publications include The Decline of Males (1999) and Optimism: The Decline of Hope (1995).
