Idea of Progress - The First Prophet Of Progress, Inevitable Progress, The Idea Of Progress In The Anglo-american World
human society time classical
The idea of progress—the idea that human society can be made ever better by conscious effort, or that society is becoming ever better by spontaneous laws of history—is relatively new. The idea was virtually unknown in classical antiquity. In each of the three greatest books of that period, what we think of as progress is explicitly denied. In Plato's Republic, even the best possible political regime, based on the rule of the philosopher-king, is subject to inevitable decay and descent into tyranny. In the Politics, Aristotle argues that while frequent change is good in the arts and sciences it is not good in matters of politics and law. And Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War begins with the famous "archaeology" meant to remind the reader of the oblivion into which even the mightiest human empires must inevitably fall. In the classical mind, the prevailing view was that the courses of time and the motions of the universe consist of endless cycles of rise and fall—creation is always followed by dissolution. It took the coming of the Bible for the courses of time to be understood as a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. But with the Christian doctrine of sin and redemption in the heavens and not on this earth, it was many centuries before the biblical understanding of history was reinterpreted in the direction of human redemption on this earth and by secular means.
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Not even the coming of the Renaissance in Europe paved the way for the idea of progress. One could argue, in fact, that Renaissance humanism, with its focus on and reverence for classical antiquity, made it harder to conceive of progress, since the rebirth of learning in the Renaissance required looking backward from a condition of contemporary decay. This was certainly the view espoused by the fi…
This new dimension introduced by Fontenelle was to become very important later on, but was often based more on faith than on clear evidence of the superiority of contemporary life. This dependence on faith sprang from a reason revealed by Fontenelle himself: the progress of knowledge and science, even if necessary and unending, did not in Fontenelle's mind lead necessarily to the ameliorati…
While the idea of progress was first announced by Francis Bacon in England, and while English philosophers (including Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, and especially John Locke) played an important role in the French and German Enlightenments, the idea of progress developed in more moderate and practical forms in England and America. There were English utopian thinkers in the nineteenth century, such as Will…
The twentieth century was not kind to believers in the idea of inevitable progress. One could say without exaggeration that between World War I and the collapse of the Soviet Union and communism, the West, bosom of the Enlightenment and the idea of progress, was convulsed by sanguinary madness unparalleled in the whole of human experience. Baconian progress produced the rifled barrel and the machi…
Alembert, Jean Le Rond d'. Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot. Translated by Richard N. Schwab. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963. Bacon, Francis. New Atlantis; and, The Great Instauration. Edited by Jerry Weinberger. Rev. ed. Arlington Heights, Ill.: H. Davidson, 1989. Bury, J. B. The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into Its Origin and Growth. New York: Dover, 1955. Comte, A…
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