Enemies of Hope identifies the themes common to anti-humanist twentieth-century thought and challenges the cult of pessimism that pervades our age. Tallis teases out the many strands of the comfortable, self-congratulatory cynicism of modernist and postmodernist cultural critics, exposing their self-contradictions and their willful blindness to the distinctive mystery of human nature. The 'pathologizers of culture' and 'the marginalizers of consciousness' are shown to be the enemies of hope - the hope of progress based upon the rational, conscious endeavours of humankind.