Shortly just before he died, Lots Coups, the final great Chief of the Crow Nation, told his story-up to a particular point. ‘When the buffalo went aside the hearts of my people dropped to the ground,’ he said, ‘and they cannot lift them up again. After this nothing happened.’

It really is precisely this point-that of a people faced with the finish of their way of life-that prompts the philosophical and ethical inquiry pursued in Radical Hope. In Jonathan Lear’s watch, Plenty Coups’s tale raises a profound about Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation honest query that transcends his period and challenges people: how should one encounter the chance that one’s culture might collapse?

That is a vulnerability that affects us all-insofar as we are all inhabitants of a civilization, and civilizations are themselves vulnerable to historical forces. How should we live with this vulnerability? Can we make any feeling of facing up to such challenging courageously? Using the obtainable anthropology and background of the Indian tribes during their confinement to reservations, and sketching on beliefs and psychoanalytic theory, Lear explores the storyplot of the Crow Country at an impasse as it bears upon these questions-and these questions as they carry upon our own put in place the world.