McGEER, Victoria <br/><br/>
The art of good hope 

 - Thousand Oaks :  SAGE,  March 2004 
<br/><br/> What is hope? Though variously charaterized as a cognitive attitude, an emotion, a disposition, and even a process or activity, hope, more deeply, a unifying and grounding force of human agency. We cannot live a human life without hope, therefore questions about the rationality of hope are properly recast as questions about the what it means to hope well. This thesis is defended and elaborated as follows. First, it is argued that hope is an essential and distinctive feature of human agency, both conceptually and developmentally. The author then explores a number of dimensions of agency that are critically implicated in the art of hoping well, drawing on several examples from George Eliot's Middlemarch. The hoping well in an individual context may be extended to hope at the collective level