A Time for Hope in Dark Times

Abstract

Copyright © 2020 by the authors. Soon after the victory of Donald Trump in the U.S. presidential election a striking image appeared on a social media network. This was a photograph of a pavement advertisement board outside a bookshop. The board read: “Dystopian fiction now found in the political history section”. The end of history has not led to the clash of civilisations as much as the very conditions that may force one to ask with Nicholas Lash whether “a global conversation” is now even possible when non-agonistically disciplined relations become scarce and the ‘common’ of common interests or the common good is reduced to semantic nostalgia. A number of academic political analysists have developed Hannah Arendt’s notion of “dark times” in order to capture a sense of political conditions depictable in terms of concerns over the erasure of liberal democracy and the rise of an apocalyptic imagination.

In this special edition on Hope in Dark Times, papers are invited that help wrestle with these crucial questions for the times