Hope is being privatized. Throughout the world, but especially in the United States and the United Kingdom, a seismic shift is underway, displacing aspirations and responsibilities from the larger society to our own individual universes. The detaching of personal expectations from the wider world transforms both.

The phenomenon is usually described as “individualization” resulting from broad trends of social evolution, leading as Thomas Edsall described it in the New York Times, to “an inexorable pressure on individuals to, in effect, fly solo.” This suggests that the individualized society is a normal phase of historical development. However, the privatization of hope is a more compelling framework by which to understand this moment. It refers to political, economic, and ideological projects of the past two generations, including the deliberate construction of the consumer economy and then the turn toward neoliberalism. We have not lost all hope over the past generation; there is a maddening profusion of personal hopes. Under attack has been the kind of hope that is social, the motivation behind movements to make the world freer, more equal, more democratic, and more livable.

.....

The privatization of hope is rooted in deep and wide processes of change since World War II. These changes are visible in landscapes and technologies, in work and leisure, and in people themselves. There has been a transformation of how and what people think, do, and feel.

One might object that in fact the changes I ascribe to the postwar era just continue an age-old trend. Indeed, as much of the history of Christianity demonstrates, rulers and their functionaries seek to divert people from the political and social conditions of their daily lives by encouraging them to assume personal responsibility for these. A focus on personal responsibility, as Adam Smith and Karl Marx both knew, has been built into capitalism since its earliest moments.

But today this focus takes hypertrophied forms. As our culture grows more heavily influenced by psychology and therapy, personal demands and technologies explode, and individuals are increasingly fated to take control of their lives. Bounded by few traditional roles and customs, one is required to make endless decisions about one’s education, job, place of residence, lifestyle, and family. “In the individualized society,” sociologist Ulrich Beck writes, “the individual must . . . learn, on pain of permanent disadvantage, to conceive of himself or herself as the center of action, as the planning office with respect to his/her own biography, abilities, orientations, relationships and so on.”

.....