Progress

The modern faith that things get better — championed by Bacon, Condorcet, Comte and Marx, and put on trial by Rousseau, Benjamin, Adorno and John Gray.

The question

Does history move forward toward something better, and if so by what measure — knowledge, freedom, or mere power?

The idea that humanity as a whole is advancing toward a better future is surprisingly modern; the ancients more often imagined cycles or a lost golden age. Emerging with the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, the idea of progress fused the growth of knowledge with the hope of moral and political improvement, and in the nineteenth century hardened into laws of history and theories of evolution that seemed to guarantee the future. Then came the counter-attack: is progress a genuine trend or a secularised faith, a comforting myth that redescribes the accumulation of power as improvement and hides its victims? The catastrophes of the twentieth century made the question urgent. The thinkers below range from confident architects of the idea to those who see in it the most dangerous illusion of the modern West.

13 thinkers

Francis Bacon

1561–1626

Early modern empiricism

Bacon gave progress its founding image: knowledge accumulates and, applied through science, steadily improves the human condition. The moderns are not dwarfs beneath the ancients but heirs who see further because knowledge builds cumulatively over time. His utopia Bensalem, with its research institute, portrays a society organised around the endless advancement of learning for 'the relief of man's estate'.

Novum Organum (1620); The New Atlantis (1627).

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

1712–1778

Enlightenment critique

Against the Enlightenment consensus, Rousseau argued that the progress of the arts and sciences had corrupted rather than improved morals. Civilisation multiplies artificial needs, inequality and dependence, exchanging the healthy self-sufficiency of natural man for vanity and servitude. What looks like advancement is in many respects a fall, and material and intellectual gains can coincide with moral decline.

Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (1750); Discourse on Inequality (1755).

A. R. J. Turgot

1727–1781

French Enlightenment

Turgot offered one of the first systematic philosophies of universal history as continuous progress. Unlike nature, which merely repeats cycles, humanity accumulates knowledge across generations through language and writing, so the whole species advances toward ever greater enlightenment. Even wars, errors and passions serve, unintentionally, to drive the mind forward.

A Philosophical Review of the Successive Advances of the Human Mind (1750).

Marquis de Condorcet

1743–1794

French Enlightenment

Writing while in hiding from the Terror that would kill him, Condorcet nonetheless sketched history as ten stages of ascent culminating in an indefinite future perfectibility of the human race. Reason and science will abolish inequality between nations and within them, and even extend the human lifespan. His faith in the boundless improvability of humanity is the purest expression of Enlightenment optimism.

Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1795).

Immanuel Kant

1724–1804

German idealism / critical philosophy

Kant proposed that we may read history as if guided by a hidden plan of nature, working through the 'unsocial sociability' of human beings toward a rightful civil constitution and perpetual peace. Progress is not guaranteed as a fact but is a rational hope and a practical postulate: we ought to act as though humanity is capable of moral advance. Antagonism itself, through competition and conflict, unfolds our capacities across generations.

Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim (1784); Perpetual Peace (1795).

G. W. F. Hegel

1770–1831

German idealism

World history is the progress of the consciousness of freedom, the rational self-development of Spirit through the succession of civilisations. This advance is not smooth but works through conflict and the 'cunning of reason', which uses the passions of individuals to realise ends they never intended. History is a slaughter-bench, yet its overall movement is the necessary unfolding of freedom toward the rational modern state.

Lectures on the Philosophy of World History (1820s).

Auguste Comte

1798–1857

Positivism

Comte's 'law of three stages' holds that each branch of knowledge, and society as a whole, passes from the theological through the metaphysical to the positive (scientific) stage. Progress is the necessary evolution toward positive science, which will finally organise society rationally through sociology, the queen of the sciences. Order and progress together define the coming positivist age.

Course of Positive Philosophy (1830–1842).

Herbert Spencer

1820–1903

Evolutionism / classical liberalism

Spencer generalised progress into a cosmic law of evolution: everything, from stars to societies, develops from simple homogeneity to complex, differentiated heterogeneity. Human progress is thus natural and all but inevitable, and society advances best when left to competition — 'survival of the fittest', his own phrase. State interference only obstructs this beneficent evolutionary process.

Progress: Its Law and Cause (1857); First Principles (1862).

Karl Marx

1818–1883

Historical materialism

History advances through the development of the forces of production and the class struggles they generate, passing through definite modes of production toward communism. Progress is real but dialectical and contradictory: capitalism is enormously productive yet exploitative, and its very achievements create the proletariat that will overturn it. Emancipation, not mere accumulation, is the measure of genuine advance.

The Communist Manifesto (1848); A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859).

J. B. Bury

1861–1927

History of ideas

Bury wrote the classic history of the idea of progress, showing it to be a distinctively modern belief that arose only when the ancient reverence for the past and the Christian focus on the next world had weakened. He treated progress not as an established fact but as an idea with a datable birth and a specific intellectual genealogy. In so doing he made progress itself an object of critical, historical study rather than an axiom.

The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into Its Origin and Growth (1920).

Walter Benjamin

1892–1940

Western Marxism / critical theory

Benjamin attacked the notion of history as smooth, homogeneous progress along empty time. His 'angel of history' is blown backward into the future by the storm of progress, seeing only a single catastrophe piling wreckage at his feet. 'There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism'; genuine hope lies not in the inevitable future but in redeeming the suffering of the past.

'Theses on the Philosophy of History' (1940).

Adorno & Horkheimer

1903–1969 / 1895–1973

Frankfurt School / critical theory

In Dialectic of Enlightenment they argue that the very reason that promised progress and liberation turned into instrumental domination — of nature, of others, and of the self. Enlightenment reverts to myth: the growth of technical mastery coincides with new forms of barbarism, from the culture industry to Auschwitz. Progress in the control of nature has not been matched by progress in freedom or humanity.

Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947).

John Gray

b. 1948

Contemporary political philosophy

Gray argues that the belief in progress is a secular religion, a Christian myth of salvation smuggled into a godless world. Progress in science and technology is real and cumulative, but it does not carry with it any parallel progress in ethics or politics; gains in one generation are routinely lost in the next. Humanity is not marching upward but remains 'Homo rapiens', and the faith in universal improvement is a dangerous illusion.

Straw Dogs (2002); Black Mass (2007).