A prominent political historian has recently identified unwarranted optimism and unwarranted pessimism as democracy's “dual dangers.” While this historical analysis highlights the difficulties that accompany democratic hope, our prevailing conceptual vocabulary obscures the resources needed to address them. This essay attempts to recover these resources by excavating insights from Thomas Aquinas, who supplies one of the most systematic accounts of hope in the history of religious and political thought. By appropriating the conceptual structure of Thomas's theological virtue of hope, this essay reconstructs a democratic virtue that perfects acts of hoping in fellow citizens to achieve democratic goods and thereby enables citizens to respond properly to difficulties that tempt presumption and despair.

中文翻译：

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阿奎那与希望的美德：神学与民主

一位著名的政治历史学家最近将毫无根据的乐观主义和毫无根据的悲观主义确定为民主的“双重危险”。虽然这种历史分析强调了伴随民主希望而来的困难，但我们流行的概念词汇掩盖了解决这些问题所需的资源。本文试图通过挖掘托马斯·阿奎那的见解来恢复这些资源，托马斯·阿奎那提供了宗教和政治思想史上最系统的希望描述之一。本文通过借鉴托马斯关于希望的神学美德的概念结构，重构了一种民主美德，该美德完善了同胞的希望行为，以实现民主善，从而使公民能够正确应对引诱推定和绝望的困难。