The Economy of Hope

Hirokazu Miyazaki, Richard Swedberg, Hirokazu Miyazaki, Richard Swedberg

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780812248692, 9780812248692
• eBook ISBN: 9780812293500
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

CHAPTER 1

A Sociological Approach to Hope in the Economy

Richard Swedberg

The main aim of this chapter is to confront two topics with one another that are usually kept apart: hope and the economy. Since I am a sociologist, I will try to do this from a sociological perspective, that is, with an eye toward society and the way that it influences things. I will first say something about the way that sociologists have looked at hope, and then suggest a way in which one can approach the role of hope in the economy from a sociological perspective.

Sociologists on Hope

Sociologists have paid very little attention to hope, and what they have said is fragmentary in nature. It would seem that the classics were more interested in hope than modern sociologists have been, even if it never was at the center of their attention. It is also clear that sociologists have mostly seen hope in an empirical rather than a normative way.

Take, for example, the analysis of hope that can be found in the work of Alexis de Tocqueville. There is, first of all, the theory of the so-called Tocqueville effect, which is derived from Tocqueville’s study in The Old Regime and the Revolution ([1856] 1998). The Tocqueville effect refers to the fact that toward the end of the eighteenth century some reforms were carried out in France, and it was precisely in the areas where these were the most successful that the revolution received the most support from the population. The reason for this, Tocqueville suggests, is that when things improve, people’s hope that things can get better is awakened (236).

Hope also plays an empirical role in Tocqueville’s class analysis. One effect of the increasing leveling of society, according to Democracy in America, is that people begin to hope for material things that they never even thought of in the old class society. The poor in the United States, Tocqueville noted on his trip to this country in 1831–32, had a “hope and longing” for the things that the rich were consuming (Tocqueville 2004: 618). Democracy breaks down the barriers between people, and this allows hope to be awakened and extend in new directions.

Another example of hope and class in Tocqueville’s work is the following. One of the major reasons that France had a violent revolution but England did not, Tocqueville argues, has to do with the way that their respective aristocracies acted. The English aristocracy held out the promise that a few successful individuals one day could join its ranks, while the French aristocracy did not—with resentment and hatred toward the French aristocracy emerging as a result. The point was not so much whether people actually did join the aristocracy, Tocqueville says, but that they felt that the chance was there—the hope (see, e.g., Tocqueville 1862: 221).

While Tocqueville was an observer that posterity has labeled a sociologist, Max Weber was a professional sociologist. And just as with Tocqueville, one can only find scattered references to hope in his work. These scattered references are typically empirical rather than normative. An entrepreneur, to mention one example, has the “hope” to make more money than he would if he just left the money in the bank (Weber 1946: 97).

The two areas in his work where Weber uses the idea of hope the most frequently are in his political sociology and in his sociology of religion. Weber especially refers to hope when he speaks of the early working-class movement, which was inspired by Karl Marx. The Communist Manifesto, he says, is suffused with hope, just as hope underpins Marx’s idea that socialism will one day come into being through the collapse of capitalism (Weber 1994: 288, 294).

Weber also refers to hope in his discussion of the attitude of the poor to religion; and here he says that hope constitutes a “robust motive” (Weber 1946: 79). What motivates those who are “negatively privileged” in their attitude to religion is “hope for salvation” and “hope for compensation” (see Weber 1946: 273; 1978: 172). Charismatic leaders may also channel the hope of people and tend to appear in situations of despair.

Emile Durkheim was much more interested in the general phenomenon of hope than either Weber or Tocqueville, and he also addressed it in an original and speculative manner. The place where he does this is primarily in The Division of Labor in Society ([1893] 1984), more precisely in his discussion of the role of happiness in the evolution of society (cf. Neves 2003). Durkheim firmly resists the utilitarians’ idea that happiness represents the goal of mankind and that one can find an increase of happiness in recent history. On the contrary, he says, many countries experienced an important increase in suicide during the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, there is plenty of hope around, and room for a reasoned optimism.

What especially makes Durkheim’s argument interesting for the perspective in this chapter is how he accounts for the origin of hope. Hope can in principle be seen as either a biological product or a social product. Durkheim leans toward the latter alternative, but he does so in a normative way. He suggests that the reason why people can feel hope and be hopeful is that they have good reasons for believing that things will turn out well in the end. The central passage in The Division of Labor in Society reads as follows:

[Hope] has not miraculously fallen from heaven into our hearts, but must have, like all the sentiments, been formed under the influence of the facts. Thus if men have learnt to hope, if under the blows of misfortune they have grown accustomed to turn their gaze towards the future and to expect from it compensation for their present suffering, it is because they have perceived that such compensation occurred frequently, that the human organism was both too flexible and too resisting to be easily brought down, that the moments when misfortune gained the day were exceptional and that generally the balance ended up by being re-established. (Durkheim [1893] 1984: 190)

Is it then hope that stops people from committing suicide? Durkheim hesitates to answer yes, even if he does not rule out the possibility that there is a link between the instinct of self-preservation and hope. He writes, “Consequently, whatever the role of hope in the genesis of the instinct of self-preservation, that instinct is a convincing testimony to the relative goodness of life. For the same reason, where that instinct loses its power or generality we may be sure that life itself loses its attractiveness, that misfortune increases, either because the causes of suffering multiply or because the capacity for resistance on the part of the individual diminishes” (ibid.).

Just like classical sociology, modern sociology is incomplete and fragmentary in its analysis of hope (see, e.g., Berger 1969; Desroche 1979; Caspar 1981). And just like classical sociology, modern sociology seems to prefer to discuss concepts that are in some way related to the concept of hope, rather than hope itself—such as trust, expectations, aspirations, drive, and the like. This is also true for the growing branch called the sociology of emotions, which sometimes touches on hope but prefers to focus on the major and more important emotions (see, e.g., Barbalet 1998: 150).

An interesting and rare attempt to turn hope into a useful empirical concept can be found in a lecture by Ralf Dahrendorf entitled “Inequality, Hope, and Progress” (1976). The author begins by making a sharp distinction between “utopian hope” and “realistic hope.” The former he describes by pointing to the early writings by Marx, Herbert Marcuse’s notion of a multidimensional man, and Jürgen Habermas’s project of human communication. “Realistic hope,” in contrast, refers to what is concrete and possible to achieve. Dahrendorf also calls it “effective hope.” His main thesis is that social inequality serves as an important incentive for people to better their condition by awakening a realistic or effective hope in them.

From the perspective of hope and the economy, Dahrendorf’s enumeration of situations in which hope plays an important role in energizing people into action is of interest. “Hope . . . based on experience,” he says, can be awakened by “the villa one has seen on a Sunday morning walk, the television film about skiing holidays, or even about the rich man’s trip to Monte Carlo, the advertisement of a new sports-car” (1976: 14). He continues, “Such hope motivates people to change their conditions, or their lives, in a variety of ways. It may be a stimulus for the individual to move, either geographically, or in the scales of social status. It may be a challenge for solitary action, in associations, trade unions, political groups, in order to gain shorter working hours for all members. It may be international action, the demand for more voting rights in the International Monetary Fund, or membership in OECD” (ibid.).

The reason why realistic hope is also effective hope is that it constitutes a very practical kind of hope, ready to be translated into reality: “In all cases such hope is coupled with demands for change which are capable of implementation, specific demands, promotion or a salary increase, the forty-eight-hour or forty-hour week, new uses for special drawing rights, and the like. Whether every change brought about under social conditions in which action is sparked off by realistic hope is progress, may be open to doubt; but if there is to be any progress at all, such hope is one of its ingredients” (ibid.).

While Dahrendorf in his discussion of realistic hope comes very close to supplying the reader with an operational definition of hope, no such definition is actually given. One of our colleagues, however, who heard about our interest in hope and the economy, has kindly made an attempt in this direction, and we offer it as part of this discussion of hope as a social science concept. Hans Zetterberg, a well-known expert on survey research, wrote to us apropos hope that he very much would like to have the following question asked on an annual basis in countries all over the world: “Do you think that the children who are growing up today will have it better or worse than you have it, when they are your age?” (Zetterberg 2005). Perhaps this can be labeled projected hope or, better, hope for others.

Zetterberg’s approach to hope—survey research in which you ask someone to compare the situation today to that of tomorrow—also points to a whole genre of existing research. To cite one example among many: the surveys on “optimism” and “pessimism” by Gallup International. This organization typically carries out research in fifty to sixty countries simultaneously, and tries to establish if their inhabitants are optimistic or pessimistic. This is measured with the help of questions on the theme of “Do you think next year will be better than this year?” There are also questions that attempt to look at the economic dimensions of this theme, such as the economic prospect in general, whether unemployment will increase, and the like (see, e.g., Gallup International 2005).

This type of research leads in a natural way to the question of whether there exists a relationship between the idea of hope in the economy and surveys of consumer confidence. These surveys are very common in contemporary society, where they are closely followed by politicians and business people. Surveys of consumer confidence trace their origin to the pioneering work of George Katona, in particular his Index of Consumer Sentiment from 1952. The two most cited surveys of consumer confidence in the United States today are the Consumer Confidence Index (produced by the Conference Board) and the Index of Consumer Sentiment (produced at the University of Michigan). The questions that are asked in this type of survey include the following: “Looking ahead, do you think a year from now you (and your family living there) will be better off financially, worse off or just about the same as now?” and “Turning to business conditions in the country as a whole, do you think that during the next 12 months we’ll have good times financially or bad times or what?” (Weiss 2003). Results from surveys of consumer confidence indicate that young people have more confidence in the future than old people, and well-off people more than poor people.

The notion of consumer confidence overlaps to some extent with that of hope, but there also exist significant differences between the two. The most important of these is that while surveys of consumer confidence are interested in establishing what will happen, hope is more about what one wants or wishes to happen. It is true that what will happen and what one wants to happen may coincide. But even when this is the case, there is a complexity to the notion of hope that goes well beyond the standard measure of consumer confidence.

What so far represents the most impressive and important attempt to approach the topic of hope through survey research has been made at the Institute of Social Science at the University of Tokyo, in connection with the project of Hope Studies (2005–). The background to this research is the sense that has arisen in the past few years among people in Japan that the country lacks hope; hence the interest among some of its social scientists in this topic.

The main survey by this institute, undertaken in 2006, found that the majority of the country’s population (roughly 80 percent) had hope and that the majority of these (some 60 percent) also believed that they would be able to realize this hope within a reasonable amount of time (Genda 2007). People, it turned out, hoped for different things; for males, hope was typically attached to work. Not only individuals but also households were researched, and wealthy households had more hope than poor households.

Yuji Genda—the main researcher behind this work—concludes that the data does not allow one to determine if hope has actually declined or increased in Japan. Since Japanese society, however, has increasing numbers of old people, more unemployment, and certain other features, and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• The Economy of Hope: An Introduction
• Chapter 1. A Sociological Approach to Hope in the Economy
• Chapter 2. Mercantilist-Utopian Projects in Eighteenth-Century Sweden
• Chapter 3. Hope Turned Upside Down: How the Prospects for a Communist Utopia Were Dashed in 1950s Romania
• Chapter 4. Hope and Society in Japan
• Chapter 5. Is the Law Hopeful?
• Chapter 6. When and How Does Hope Spring Eternal in Personal and Popular Economics? Thoughts from West Africa to America
• Chapter 7. Obama’s Hope: An Economy of Belief and Substance
• List of Contributors
• Index