Living with a Sense of a Right to Hope

This is an essay about the idea of a right to hope. It asks: what might it mean, to construct hope as a right in this way, to live with hope in this way? I come to these questions through law, and in particular through the notion of the ‘right to hope’ articulated by the European Court of Human Rights in recent years. Discussions of this have tended to stay within the legal literature, but in this essay I suggest that an analysis of the construction of the right to hope in European human rights law opens up a distinction that takes us beyond law: a distinction between living with an idea of a right to hope and living with a sense of a right to hope. How might we think about this distinction? How might we think with this distinction? And what might it mean, to live with a sense of a right to hope? The essay examines these questions and reflects on the way of thinking and relating that the very notion of living with a sense of a right to hope implies.