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This is a book about our need for redemptive narratives to ward off despair and the dangers these same narratives create by raising expectations that are seldom fulfilled. The story of the rise of secular redemptive hope narratives from the age of Enlightenment to the early part of the twenty-first century has been a story of the struggle between heightened expectations and post-utopian despair. The quasi-messianic expectations produced by the election of President Obama in 2008—followed by the diminution of these expectations—point to the stark reality that redemptive hope is seldom satisfactorily fulfilled. The redemptive narratives surrounding Obama’s elections are a reminder that we are still wrestling with what the neo-pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty considered to be one of the central intellectual challenges of our post-modern age, namely: Can solidarity with other people serve as a sufficient foundation for our social hopes, or do we need a transcendental force—like God—in order to maintain a grander vision of redemptive hope? This book engages this dilemma by bringing together Rorty’s neo-pragmatic version of social hope with the work of modern Jewish intellectuals, particularly that of Martin Buber and Ernst Bloch.

Chapter 4 is devoted to the fourth and final stage represented by Rorty’s neo-pragmatic proposal to ground social hopes in human solidarity. Rorty forged a new path toward fulfilling the emancipatory legacy of the Enlightenment by proposing provocative redescriptions for interpreting the traditional meanings of both hope and redemption. Rorty’s writings on social hope, however, reveal a tension between a more pragmatic approach that allows for a recovery of religious narratives as a source of hope and his secular utopian ideological position that advocated jettisoning all appeals to transcendental discourses. Rorty’s utopian proposal for overcoming metaphysics by replacing religion and philosophy with literature and dialogue constituted a new secular redemptive narrative that encourages a new thinking of how religious and secular narratives of redemptive hope might interact within the twenty-first century. Rorty's initial desire to rid the public sphere of all remnants of religious transcendence and metaphysics ended up, however, violating his own pragmatic principle. This chapter concludes by engaging Rorty's critics, showing the limits of Rorty’s position and where Rorty felt compelled to adjust his views toward the end of his career.