This paper explores the role of hope in the work of Iranian publishers and translators of Western philosophy and social science. As public intellectuals, publishers and translators occupy an increasingly precarious and significant social role as gatekeepers and importers of ideas in the intellectual field. Since 2009, there have been unprecedented incursions on publishers’ freedoms, including the revocation of existing print licenses, rejection of new manuscript applications, and the barring of their entry into book exhibitions. In addition, an economic downturn and international sanctions have severely reduced their profit margin, and books of social science have grown increasingly unpopular. Even so, publishers have continued to publish and disseminate books of social science, even in small print runs (numbering less than 1000 copies). This paper attempts to capture hope not as a sentiment, singular political moment, or mass movement, but as a future-oriented element of everyday action, as illustrated by the work of publishers and translators in Iran. I ask: How is that actors continue to engage in the day-to-day work of the publication and dissemination of Western discourses in the face of a shrinking book market, marginal profits, and antagonistic, ever-changing, and indeterminate policies and censorship practices on the part of the Iranian government? In doing so, I hope to contribute to literature that takes hope as both anthropological subject and method. In The Method of Hope: Anthropology, Philosophy, and Fijian Knowledge (Stanford, 2004), Hirokazu Miyazaki points out that the retrospective character of knowledge poses a methodological challenge to exploring hope, since knowledge is generally orientated to the endpoint (as he puts it, its “seen from the vantage point of its effects” (11). He suggests a reorientation of philosophy towards the future can help us understand and enact hope as method. As Miyazaki points out, ethnography faces a challenge in capturing both the temporality of events on the ground and our ensuing representations. I here take up the challenge of by asking how hope is produced and sustained under duress, inquiring about the relationship between hope and uncertainty, and reflecting on the ethnographic complexities of writing about hope.