Solnit wrote this in the months after February 2003, when millions of people marched against the invasion of Iraq and the invasion happened anyway. The mood on the left was defeat, and this short book is an argument against that reading — written quickly, in something like an emergency, and reissued since with new forewords that apply the same case to later disappointments. It is less a history than a sustained attempt to change how activists interpret their own results.
The core argument
Solnit’s central move is to redefine hope so that it is not the same thing as optimism. Optimism says things will turn out well; despair says they will turn out badly; both are claims to know the future, and both licence sitting still. Hope, in her account, is the acknowledgement that the future is genuinely unknown — that outcomes are not determined, that the situation is uncertain enough for action to matter. It is a stance about uncertainty rather than a prediction, and it obliges you to act precisely because you cannot be sure it is pointless.
From there she attacks how political effects are usually measured. Activists tend to judge a campaign by whether it achieved its stated objective on schedule, which she argues is the wrong test: effects are frequently indirect, delayed by years or decades, and visible only in changes to what people take for granted. A protest that fails to stop a war may still have altered the terms of debate, trained a generation, or built networks that matter later. She is also sharply critical of a habit she sees on the left — a perfectionism that treats partial victories as failures and finds a kind of comfort in defeat, since despair asks nothing of you. Her examples are drawn from movements that appeared to lose and did not: the anti-nuclear campaigns at the Nevada Test Site, the Zapatistas, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Seattle WTO protests, and the global demonstrations of 2003 themselves, which she reads as the emergence of something like a world public opinion.
Key ideas
- Hope as uncertainty. Not confidence in a good outcome but the recognition that the outcome is undetermined, which is what makes acting reasonable.
- Indirect and delayed effects. Campaigns often work sideways and late; measuring them against their immediate goal understates what they did.
- The amnesia of victory. Won changes get absorbed as normal so fast that the movements that produced them disappear from the story, leaving the impression nothing ever works.
- Perfectionism as self-defeat. Refusing anything short of total transformation converts every real gain into a failure and makes despair the permanent conclusion.
- Despair is comfortable. Certainty that nothing can change removes the obligation to try — which is why she treats it as a position to be argued with rather than respected.
Who it’s for
Aimed squarely at people who are already engaged in some kind of political or campaigning work and are tired — this is a morale book, and it is honest about being one. It is short, quotable and unusually well written, and its central distinction between hope and optimism is genuinely useful well outside politics.
It is also, by design, an argument rather than an assessment, and the obvious criticism is selection: Solnit gathers examples of movements that turned out to matter and spends much less time on those that simply failed, which makes the case suggestive rather than demonstrated. A reader inclined to disagree could note that the same reasoning — effects are indirect, results may appear decades later — can absolve almost any campaign of ever having been ineffective, since it is hard to see what would count as evidence against it. Her frame of reference is the American left of the early 2000s, and the anti-globalisation and anti-war specifics have aged. Sceptics have also argued that hope framed this loosely risks becoming a substitute for strategy. Read it for the reframing, not for a method.