Hope in the Dark

Rebecca Solnit wrote this book for radicals who had grown despairing. In her account, they were fixed on what they had lost and had stopped looking at the victories behind them, and at the large changes that were about to arrive.

Her argument is that hope is a commitment to act, held in a world whose future nobody can know. She draws on decades of activism and wide reading in environmental, cultural and political history to make the case.

Three claims carry the book. Radicals have a long record of transformative wins that people have neglected. The good effects of an action may not show up at once, may not be directly knowable, and may never be measurable. And pessimism rests on a confidence about what comes next that nobody has earned.

This edition adds a new introduction on how the book came about, and a new afterword on learning to hope and act in the unsettled world of 2016. It is a work of non-fiction essays and argument, aimed at activists and at anyone worn down by bad news.