Aristotle

Hope is seen as “an unqualified good” today, Adam Potkay writes in his excellent history of the idea. We hope that things will get better in the world — that peace will come to Ukraine, that religious violence will stop in Burkina Faso, that fat-cat sexual predators in Hollywood will be brought to justice. For members of the world’s three monotheistic religions, it is a virtue to hope in life after death. This hasn’t always been the case. For ancient Greeks and Romans, Potkay observes, hope was mostly a vice.

In a plea for vocational education, Sen. Marco Rubio famously remarked that we could use ‘more welders and less philosophers’. Doesn’t everyone know that ‘skills pay the bills’? If things weren’t bad enough, the rise of deconstruction and critical theory has created a generation of humanities scholars who themselves see little value in the works they study, insisting that famous art and literature emerged from racist and sexist power structures. What sensible young person would borrow $100,000 to be educated in these pointless disciplines? Eric Adler, a classicist at the University of Maryland, has the answer: anyone who wants to understand his own humanity. Adler’s invaluable survey not only defends the humanities: it even lays out how their allies have fallen short.