Abstract

This paper aims to inspect the political potential of Kant’s grounding of hope and its content breaks down in three parts. First, I give an account of Kant’s approach to right and hope as a rule for our judgments and actions, shedding light over the shift that Kant’s notion of the Highest Good undergoes from a theological framework to a political one, which makes of individuals the main feature of action. Second, I focus on the intergenerational exercise of imagination inasmuch as it foreshadows the material and symbolic needs of the forthcoming generations, highlighting the key role it plays for addressing the political agency of hope. Moreover, I focus on the capacity of this kind of imagination to resist against the devices and (mis-)informative tendencies that lead human imagination to collapse as the headquarters of critical mental activity. Third, I address the epistemic framework that seems more adequate to continue drawing to hope as a promising tool to build up subjects conscious of the shortcomings of the world and the society they are embedded in. Finally, I display some concluding remarks about the interaction between material structures and culture of emotions as a key issue stemming from this enquiry of Kant’s conceptual legacy about hope.