Not all hope is equal. For the Christian religion, hope is a theological virtue, and refers to the expectation of future life, beyond death. With the transformation of European society in a secular sense and the rise of individualism between the 17th and 18th centuries, hope becomes a program of political and social transformation, aimed at this world. In my contribution I trace the emergence of the concept of hope in social thought and, then, in sociology. My analysis begins with the Philosophie sociale (Paris, 1793) by Moses Dobruska (1753–1794), a pioneering and largely overlooked text that founds a new vision of social science. After Dobruska, I then devote my attention to the great thinkers of the early nineteenth century, Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825) and Auguste Comte (1798–1857), and then I move on to the work of Émile Durkheim (1858–1917). It is a historical perspective that has been neglected until now, and that allows us to appreciate the construction of an idea of hope that frees itself from religious determinants and is oriented toward society and the individuals who live in it, and that anticipates the utopias and failures of the social ideologies of the 20th century.
