If so, then hope’s last stand may not last long! How could it? And where, in liquid times, can one really ‘stand’? I’m with you on the tectonic shifts that render modernity far less solid than it once appeared – even though Marx and others did warn us long ago that the apparent solidity ‘melts into air’ – with on the one hand the ambivalence evident all around, and on the other the merely ‘manufactured certainties’ of risk societies. No wonder hope hides its face and even its feeble fill-in, optimism, waits in the wings for some semblance of a cultural cue that will allow it a moment on the unwelcoming stage of liquid times.