1 Hope As a Theopolitical Virtue: Eschatology and End of Time Politics Vassilios Paipais University of St Andrews vp31@st-andrews.a.cuk Abstract This chapter explores the meaning of hope as a theopolitical virtue in a nihilist era. Within the nihilist horizon, hope as simultaneously a theological and a political virtue is envisioned as equidistant both from arguments that favour a sanitised separation of eschatology from politics and from those that tend to recruit it in the service of earthly, political or technoscientific, utopias. In this context, eschatological hope becomes a type of counter-politics that transforms the very idea of what politics stands for: neither the politics of sovereign or revolutionary violence nor the technoscientific effacement of politics, but rather the counter-politics of happiness, resistance, messianic profanation, and theocratic an-archy. In this perspective, hope as a theopolitical virtue is affirmed within a terrain where politics and theology are no longer separate or juxtaposed discourses and where a certain nihilist take on the theological is always already political, transforming the latter from within. Keywords: hope, eschatology, apocalypse, messianism, theocracy, nihilism Introduction In the grip of an apocalyptic mood in the aftermath of the Second World War, Martin Wight famously quipped that ‘hope is not a political virtue; it is a theological virtue’ (Wight, 1948a, 3). Such an aphorism may have made sense in the wake of the atomic age and in the context of the apocalyptic violence unleashed by 20 th century totalitarianisms that Wight (1955), with Eric Voegelin, saw as the ‘political religions’ of our time. Wight (1948b) was prudent enough to issue a warning against both the dangers of the apocalyptic imaginary in world politics (the violent and premature introduction of salvation in history), and its negative mirror image, the dangerous sacralisation of power (performing the sacred duty of the katechon, the ‘withholder’