The Economy of Hope

By Hirokazu Miyazaki and Richard Swedberg

Hope is an integral part of social life. Yet, hope has not been studied systematically in the social sciences. Editors Hirokazu Miyazaki and Richard Swedberg have collected essays that investigate hope in a broad range of socioeconomic situations and phenomena across time and space and from a variety of disciplinary vantage points. Contributors survey the resilience of hope, and the methodological implications of studying hope, in such experiences as farm collectivization in mid-twentieth-century communist Romania, changing employment relations under Japan's neoliberal reform during the first decade of the twenty-first century, the dynamics of innovation and replication in a West African niche economy, and Barack Obama's 2008 political campaign of hope in the midst of the unfolding global financial crisis.

The Economy of Hope shifts the analytic of anthropological and sociological investigations from knowledge to hope, presents case studies on the loss of collective hope, and concludes by offering techniques for replicating hope. In the hands of Miyazaki and Swedberg and their distinguished contributors, hope becomes not only a method of knowledge but also an essential framework for the sociocultural analysis of economic phenomena.

Contributors: Yuji Genda, Jane Guyer, Hirokazu Miyazaki, Annelise Riles, Richard Swedberg, Katherine Verdery.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Nov 29, 2016
• ISBN: 9780812293500

Book preview

The Economy of Hope: An Introduction

Hirokazu Miyazaki

Five days after Japan’s earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster of March 11, 2011, Ryu Murakami, a popular Japanese novelist and an influential opinion leader, published an op-ed piece in the New York Times, Amid Shortages, a Surplus of Hope, in which he stated,

Ten years ago I wrote a novel in which a middle-school student, delivering a speech before Parliament, says: This country has everything. You can find whatever you want here. The only thing you can’t find is hope.

One might say the opposite today: evacuation centers are facing serious shortages of food, water and medicine; there are shortages of goods and power in the Tokyo area as well. Our way of life is threatened, and the government and utility companies have not responded adequately.

But for all we’ve lost, hope is in fact one thing we Japanese have regained. The great earthquake and tsunami have robbed us of many lives and resources. But we who were so intoxicated with our own prosperity have once again planted the seed of hope. So I choose to believe. (Murakami 2011; emphasis added)¹

Murakami’s op-ed piece does not simply replay a familiar and yet compelling story of hope paradoxically regained in the midst of a disaster, a crisis, or a human tragedy. It also poses many interrelated general questions about hope: How is hope lost and regained? What are the economic and material conditions for hope? What is the relationship between individual and collective hopes? What is the linkage between past and future hopes? How is hope anchored in belief? These questions about hope’s absence and presence, form and substance, scale, and temporality constitute what I call the economy of hope.

This volume investigates this economy of hope in a broad range of economic situations and phenomena across time and space. Examples include eighteenth-century Swedish mercantilist-utopian projects, farm collectivization in mid-twentieth-century communist Romania, changing employment relations under Japan’s neoliberal reform during the first decade of the twenty-first century, the pragmatic uses of legal fictions in economic law, the dynamics of innovation and replication in the West African niche economy, and Barack Obama’s 2008 political campaign of hope in the midst of the unfolding global financial crisis.

What is hope? This remains a lingering and open question throughout the volume. In this book, hope is variously categorized as an affective, aesthetic, discursive, ideological, motivational, or temporal orientation, and it may at times embody some or all of these elements at once. The Economy of Hope explores these aspects and features of hope and operational uses to which the category of hope may be put in social scientific research.

As a result, the definition of hope varies from chapter to chapter, and each chapter presents a different analytical commitment to the category of hope. Yet definitional struggles surrounding the category of hope are also part of the ethnographic and historical materials analyzed in each chapter. For example, at both empirical and theoretical levels, each chapter incorporates and addresses common efforts to differentiate hope from other categories, such as desire (Crapanzano 2003) and optimism (see, e.g., Deneen 1999; Lasch 1991), or to distinguish different kinds of hope from one another, such as collective versus individual hopes (see, e.g., Braithwaite 2004) and utopian versus minimalist or residual hopes² (Redfield 2013: 237–40). Each chapter also at least implicitly tackles ethical questions regarding how to differentiate good hopes from bad hopes (Crapanzano 2003; see also Robbins 2013), as well as the moral philosophical problem of the proper object of hope, that is, the Kantian question of What may I hope? (Kant [1781] 1929). The goal of this introductory chapter is to weave together these diverse formulations of hope, and different kinds of hopes, in a way that illuminates this volume’s distinctive approach to the subject of hope.

How, and in what terms, can hope be a subject of knowledge? What does it mean to study hope from a social scientific perspective? The economy of hope revolves around the tension between hope and knowledge, and this ultimately renders the volume’s inquiry into hope methodological. Each chapter deploys the category of hope to accomplish a specific methodological goal. In fact, what unites the volume is precisely this preoccupation with the methodological implications of hope for social scientific research (see Appadurai 2013; Miyazaki 2004; Pels 2015 for their respective arguments regarding the methodological implications of the subject of futurity). These methodological implications, including the questions of what hope is and what it means to know hope, are part of what I call the economy of hope. This reflexive dimension is a defining feature of this collective inquiry.

Hope is often regarded as paradoxical in its practical deployments as well as in its analytical deployments. Hope often contains within itself its opposites, such as fear (Spinoza [1670] 2000: 215), disappointment (Bloch 1998; see also Greenberg 2014), and even despair (or loss of hope). Hope contains within itself mutually contradictory and competing elements, such as action and passivity (Crapanzano 2003; Hage 2003), confidence and patience (Pieper [1986] 1997: 100), and past and future, and each chapter of this volume embraces this profound ambiguity and paradoxicality of hope. As anthropologist Cheryl Mattingly has noted in her study of hope in medical and clinical settings, Paradoxically, hope is on intimate terms with despair. It asks for more than life promises. It is poised for disappointment (2010: 3). This paradoxical nature of hope can perhaps also be expressed in terms of cruelty, as Lauren Berlant has noted for what she terms cruel optimism, "a relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility whose realization is discovered either to be impossible, sheer fantasy, or too possible, and toxic" (2011: 24; original emphasis).

Such paradoxicality affords hope its distinctive reflexivity and openness. As French philosopher Gabriel Marcel has indicated, hope is not a category that benefits from an operational definition from the outset ([1962] 2010: 23). The theme of hope is meant to continuously open one’s analytical horizon rather than close it. As Paul Ricoeur notes, Hope is not a theme that comes after other themes, an idea that closes the system, but an impulse that opens the system, that breaks the closure of the system; it is a way of reopening what was unduly closed. In that sense it belongs to the structure of the system as such ([1970] 1995: 211). Ernst Bloch’s formulation of hope in terms of the category of not yet powerfully introduces such openness to philosophy by reorienting philosophical inquiry from what has already become to what has not yet become ([1959] 1986). The ultimate goal of this introductory chapter is to keep such methodological openness intact while specifying the collective contribution of the volume as a whole. Indeed, it is this interplay of openness and closure in the category of hope that I seek to capture in this chapter.

Hope and Knowledge

The Japanese debate about hope in which Murakami has played a key role offers a guiding image for the scope of the concept of the economy of hope and its underlying interplay of openness and closure. The debate has specifically concerned the current state and the future of the Japanese economy. It has constituted a distinctive response to a chain of radical shifts in the Japanese economy since the early 1990s: a shift from a period of rapid economic growth to contraction and stagnation following the collapse of the 1990s real estate and stock market bubble; a shift from state-sponsored economic development schemes to market-driven neoliberal reform programs in the 1980s and the 1990s (see Genda, this volume; see also Allison 2014; Genda 2001; University of Tokyo Institute of Social Science, Genda, and Uno 2009a, 2009b; Yamada 2004); and finally, a shift to a period of profound uncertainty intensified by Japan’s triple disaster of March 2011. The pervasive sense of blockage (heisokukan) that arose from this series of shifts has led to the rise of conservative politics, accompanied by an experimental economic policy introduced by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in December 2012. Abenomics is a curious combination of currency devaluation, monetary policy, public spending, and neoliberal deregulation aimed at putting the Japanese economy back on a path toward economic growth.

Kibo no kuni no ekusodasu (Exodus in a country of hope), Murakami’s near-future novel ([2000] 2002), served as a starting point for this debate, and its plot is worth recounting here (see also Miyazaki 2010). Murakami’s message about the loss of hope resonated powerfully with a widely shared sense of a blocked future at that time. In the novel, Murakami pointed to the fact that Japan had achieved an unprecedented level of affluence by the late 1980s and yet had lost a sense of the future during the 1990s, the decade that Murakami has been widely credited for naming the lost decade (ushinawareta junen). The novel is set in Japan in what was then the near-future period of 2003 to 2008. It reflected Murakami’s acute sense of the growing impact of the global force of money and finance on Japanese society (see, e.g., Miyazaki 2013). In fact, Murakami’s story grew out of his collaboration with financial market professionals and is peppered with references to financial techniques and market phenomena. The favorable reception of the novel in the early 2000s also represented a widely shared ambivalence toward the Japanese government’s programs of neoliberal painful reform (itami wo tomonau kaikaku) aimed at heroically breaking open the collective sense of blockage. In the novel Murakami had his protagonist reject such collective hope.

The novel’s protagonist is a middle school student, Ponchan. Ponchan leads a large group of students to initiate a revolt. They make use of financial tools and techniques to destroy the Japanese economy by setting up an Internet-based market information distributor and manipulating market information in order to prompt global speculative capital to short-sell Japanese yen and cause a currency crisis. In the novel, Ponchan’s widely quoted remark, There is everything in this country. Indeed, there are so many different things here. But the only thing that is not here is hope (Murakami [2000] 2002: 314; all quotations from this source are my own translation), is made in the midst of a currency crisis in which the value of the yen plunges. Murakami’s middle school students ultimately initiate a mass exodus to a town in Hokkaido, Japan’s northern island, where they create an economic system based on its own alternative regional currency (360–362), a subject of intense interest at the time of the novel’s publication (see, e.g., Karatani 2000).

It is important to recall that hope emerged as a key analytical concept in social theory precisely in this global context of intensifying neoliberal reform following the fall of the Soviet Union and other communist regimes (see, e.g., Harvey 2000; Zournazi 2003; see also Miyazaki 2004: 1–2; Miyazaki 2006). For example, in his widely acclaimed 2003 book, Australian anthropologist and cultural theorist Ghassan Hage theorized the shrinking of society’s ability to distribute hope equally. In particular, Hage drew attention to the linkage between the loss of hope among a certain segment of Australian society and narrow visions of nationalism in Australia: Increasingly, their attachment to such a non-feeding nation generates a specific paranoid form of nationalism. . . . Paranoid nationalists are the no-hopers produced by transcendental capitalism and the politics of neo-liberal government (21). Likewise, in his influential book Kibo kakusa shakai (The stratified hope society), Japanese sociologist Masahiro Yamada suggested that hope had ceased to be evenly distributed in society. According to Yamada, the neoliberal emphasis on strong individuals was producing winners (kachigumi) and losers (makegumi), and the latter simply gave up the possibility of imagining and hoping for a better future (2004). In Yamada’s interpretation, freeters, who refuse permanent employment; hikikomori, who refuse social interaction; NEETs (not in education, employment, or training), who show no interest in working or studying; and other social phenomena associated with Japanese youth were all manifestations of this trend.

Unlike these proposals to use hope as an analytic for studying the changing relationship between economy and society under neoliberalism, Murakami maintained a deeply ambivalent posture toward what he saw as the loss of hope in Japanese society. Although he did not specify what he meant by hope, Murakami seems to have meant the kind of collective hope that had propelled postwar Japanese economic growth by linking individual hopes for upward mobility and prosperity to the broader collective national goal of economic development. Murakami’s ambivalence toward such collective hope is made clear in Ponchan’s remark, immediately following the passage quoted above, about the absence of hope in Japanese society: I just said that the only thing that is missing in this country is hope. However, we are not entirely sure whether hope is absolutely necessary for humans. As long as we are subject to this country’s system, that is not a question we are able to investigate. We have determined that it is not possible for us to ask whether hope is an indispensable thing for humans inside a country where the only sure thing is the lack of hope (Murakami [2000] 2002: 319). Here, Murakami refutes the idea of hope as a moral imperative, and the novel ends with the following comment by Sekiguchi, a journalist following Ponchan’s activities and the narrator in the novel: I have not been able to reach a final conclusion [about whether there is hope in Ponchan’s community and whether he should join Ponchan in that community] (424; see Miyazaki 2010 for a more detailed analysis of Murakami’s work). At the time of the publication of this novel, Murakami often rejected any easy effort to reclaim hope for Japan’s future. Instead, he sought to dwell on the condition of no hope, and in his view, the strength required to dwell on that space would lead to a different kind of hope (Miyazaki 2010).

Murakami’s ambivalence toward hope was in part a reaction to Japan’s new economic and political situation, in which ideas associated with the popular appeal of neoliberalism, such as risk and the strong individual, offered a short-circuited and dangerous cultural expectation that these new economic concepts will generate new values and in turn will break through the blockage we are currently experiencing (Murakami 1999: 8–9; my translation). In place of what in his view was paradoxical collective hope built on highly individualistic neoliberal ideas, Murakami called for knowledge. For him, knowledge offered a way forward after the collapse of social hope, particularly the kind of collective hope that, at least on the surface, had oriented the entire nation toward a single direction of economic growth to the point of unprecedented affluence. Instead of embracing neoliberalism as yet another source of collective hope for the nation, Murakami urged Japanese people to develop their own respective individual strengths anchored in knowledge. In his resolutely individualistic response to the collective enactment of neoliberal individualism in the late 1990s and the early 2000s, he emphasized knowledge over hope (see Miyazaki 2010: 242–45).

Murakami’s oscillation between hope and knowledge may be productively juxtaposed with the contrast between the debates about hope and the knowledge economy, in both of which Japan has figured prominently. Japanese society has long been known for its commitment to learning, and the rapid growth of the postwar Japanese economy was routinely attributed to such collective commitment to learning and knowledge (Vogel 1979; see also Nonaka and Takeuchi 1995). To the extent that Japan has sometimes served as a model of our collective human future, the shift from knowledge to hope in the debate about the Japanese economy, signaled by Murakami’s embrace of hope after the triple disaster of March 11, 2011, perhaps also signals an emergent global trend.³

It is important to recall, however, that the very idea of knowledge in the knowledge economy and other similar concepts emerged in response to an analogous sense of loss of direction, the limits of rationality, and the ultimate importance of embracing ambiguity and uncertainty.⁴ Peter Drucker famously declared in his 1968 book, The Age of Discontinuity, that from an economy of goods, which America was as recently as World War II, we have changed into a knowledge economy. . . . Knowledge has become the central ‘factor of production’ in an advanced, developed economy (263, 264). It is interesting to note that Drucker explicitly differentiates knowledge from science here: ‘Knowledge’ rather than ‘science’ has become the foundation of the modern economy (265). For him, knowledge is a particular form of energy: Knowledge, like electricity or money, is a form of energy that exists only when doing work. When the intellectual says knowledge he usually thinks of something new. But what matters in the ‘knowledge economy’ is whether knowledge, old or new, is applicable, e.g., Newtonian physics to the space program. What is relevant is the imagination and skill of whoever applies it, rather than the sophistication or newness of the information (269; see also Drucker 1988). For Drucker, then, the pragmatic and imaginative engagement of knowledge with concrete tasks and goals makes knowledge a form of energy that fuels and moves forward the world. In this context knowledge perhaps can be called hope.

Likewise, in his book Knowing Capitalism, human geographer Nigel Thrift has observed that capitalism has become knowledgeable (2005: 21). Thrift draws attention to the primacy of nonessentialist and nonfoundationalist forms of knowledge, including New Ageism, in what he terms soft capitalism (24). Here Thrift notes that academic knowledge and business are intermingled with one another, and academics and business have come to think more alike about thinking (21). More importantly, Thrift argues that this attention to knowledge is linked to a willingness to embrace uncertainty (24–29).

Between the pragmatic orientation to knowledge that Drucker identifies in his vision of the knowledge economy and the embrace of uncertainty that Thrift identifies in his diagnosis of soft capitalism, The Economy of Hope finds a distinctive space for the intersection of hope and knowledge in the economy. Hope suggests a willingness to embrace uncertainty and also serves as a concrete method for keeping knowledge moving in conditions of uncertainty.

The relationship between hope and knowledge has long been a profound philosophical preoccupation. In philosophical terms, hope often surfaces at the limits of knowledge. There have been many different articulations of the question of the basis of hope. How can one sustain one’s hope for a future that cannot possibly be known? Perhaps the most prominent modern response to this question can be found in Bloch’s attention to the category of not yet as the driving force of hope. Bloch sought to use the category of not yet to reorient philosophical knowledge to the future ([1959] 1986). Likewise, American pragmatist and postmodern philosopher Richard Rorty proposed to substitute hope for knowledge in his 1999 book, Philosophy and Social Hope. His thesis represents a reformulation of the long-standing antifoundationalist critique of metaphysics. He advocates a nonessentialist embrace of uncertainty as a declaration of human potentiality. Hope signals for him that humanity is an open-ended notion (1999: 52). More recently, Jonathan Lear has proposed the idea of radical hope, that is, a hope that is directed toward a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is (2006: 103). Courage at the limits of knowledge is implicit in his notion of radical hope as well.⁵

If these conceptualizations of hope contain within themselves a certain dose of heroism and radicalism in the face of uncertainty, indeterminacy, and the limits of human knowledge, in Hope in a Democratic Age, in contrast, Alan Mittleman approaches hope as a virtue and calls for moderation in hope (2009: 257). In his view,

Hope is best understood as a virtue, indeed as a civic virtue—a virtue that conduces to our life in common—and that virtue discloses knowledge. In searching for the warrant of hope, I would claim that the act of hope itself gives us an intuition or fundamental apprehension of its ground. . . . Hope knows and affirms the value that inheres in being as such. It anticipates the full amplitude of value against a temporal horizon, a near or far future. Hope is felt as knowledge, that is, as an affirmation of something other than will, than mere desire or wishfulness. That knowledge, in which hope senses it participates, is the knowledge of value. . . . The ontology of hope is one where being and value are joined. (ibid.: 6; original emphasis)

For Mittleman, hope as a virtue knows its own rationality. In this formulation, hope becomes knowledge of its own. A moderate conception of hope for Mittleman resolves the tension between hope and knowledge (ibid.: 258–70).

In my 2004 book, The Method of Hope, I suggested that hope be approached as a method of knowledge rather than as another subject of ethnographic investigation. In that book, I drew on Bloch’s, Rorty’s, and others’ efforts to reorient philosophy to the future through the lens of hope to theorize reorientation itself as a key operation of hope. I drew particular attention to these philosophers’ shared attention to the retrospective orientation of metaphysics. An awareness of the temporal directionality of knowledge, I argued, allows its redirection (see Miyazaki 2004: 12–16). Reflexivity facilitates reorientation.

The economy of hope likewise revolves around an economy of knowledge, that is, the movement from knowledge to its limits and back to knowledge. Here hope inheres in knowledge’s incessant movement and all the work that ensures its own reorientation to the future unknown. Hope becomes knowledge in a specific sense. Hope is a paradoxical step in the process of knowing through an embrace of the limits of knowledge. The economy of hope calls for such continuous performative and interactive work of active commitment to knowing while recognizing the ultimate human incapacity to know. Hope appears at the limits of knowledge in this double sense. Hope is knowledge of itself, but hope becomes knowledge through the oscillation and movement between the two. Indeed, it is the relationship between hope and knowledge (including the question of what it means to know hope) that animates the economy of hope.

In this context, the oscillation between hope and knowledge in Murakami’s thought is precisely an instantiation of the economy of hope. The idea of reorientation is inherent in the question of how hope may be regained. When Murakami turned against hope as he offered a diagnosis of Japan’s loss of hope, in my view, he implicitly reoriented the urge to restore hope. In the midst of the loss of faith in knowledge (particularly the loss of confidence in expert knowledge) following the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster, Murakami turns to hope. Hope is in these moments of reorientation.

The Economy of Hope collectively seeks to perform a reorientation of this particular kind. It does not simply argue for a shift from knowledge to hope as a framework for the study of economy and society. Instead, it brings into view such reorientation itself and the empirical, methodological, and theoretical implications of such reorientation. Each chapter either explicitly or implicitly captures specific economic actors’ senses of personal reorientation that the reorientation from knowledge to hope brings into view.

In the volume, this reorientation sequentially manifests itself as a movement away from utopian (ideologically championed but mostly unrealistic and unrealized) hope (see the chapters by