Robert Nisbet, "The Idea of Progress"
Table of Contents
Introduction
Confusion Over the Meanings of Progress
Progress as an Ancient Idea
Classical Antiquity and the Idea of Progress
Greek Poets, Sophists, and Historians on Progress
Roman Philosophers on Progress
Christianity and the Idea of Progress
The Augustinian Legacy: Stages of Historical Development
Joachim of Fiore and the Millennialist Legacy of Progress
The Seventeenth Century Battle of the Books: The Ancients vs. The Moderns
The Case For and Against the Moderns and Progress
Turgot and the Christian Legacy of Progress
The Eighteenth-Century Views of Progress
Germany
England and Scotland
France: Rousseau and Condorcet
America
The Nineteenth Century's View of Progress
France: Auguste Comte
Germany: Hegel and Marx
England: J.S. Mill and Spencer
America
Nineteenth Century Skeptics of Progress
The Dark Side of Progress: Power, Nationalism, and Racism
The Fate of Progress in the Twentieth Century
The Early Twentieth Century's Faith in Progress
Current Skepticism on the Idea of Progress
The Prospects for Progress
Bibliography
Introduction
Confusion Over the Meanings of Progress
The essence of the Western idea of progress can be simply stated: mankind has advanced in the past, is now advancing, and may be expected to continue advancing in the future. But what, it will be asked, does "advance" mean? Here matters necessarily become more complex. Its meanings have ranged from the most sublimely spiritual advance to the absolutely physical or material. In its most common form the idea of progress has referred, ever since the Greeks, to the advance of knowledge, more particularly the kind of practical knowledge contained in the arts and sciences. But the idea has also been made to refer to the achievement of what the early Christians called earthly paradise: a state of such spiritual exaltation that man's liberation from all tormenting physical compulsions becomes complete. We find the perspective of progress used, especially in the modern world, to give substance to the hope for a future characterized by individual freedom, equality, or justice. But we also find the idea of progress made to serve belief in the desirability and necessity of political absolutism, racial superiority, and the totalitarian state. In sum, there is almost no end to goals and purposes which have been declared the fulfillment or outcome of mankind's progress.
Progress as an Ancient Idea
In the form I have just described, the idea is peculiarly Western. Other, older civilizations have certainly known the ideals of moral, spiritual, and material improvement; have known the quest for virtue, spirituality, and salvation in one degree or other. But only in Western Civilization, apparently, does the idea exist that all history may be seen as one of humanity improving itself, step by step, stage by stage, through immanent forces, until at some remote time in the future a condition of near-perfection for all will exist—such perfection definable, as I have noted, in a great variety of ways.
There is a widespread misconception of this idea that I must immediately identify. It is commonly believed that the idea of progress is a peculiarly modern idea, largely unknown to the ancient Greeks and Romans, wholly unknown to the Christian thinking that governed Europe from the fall of Rome until the late seventeenth century, and first manifest in the currents of rationalism and science. These modern currents, the argument continues, repulsed Christian theology and made possible, for the first time, a philosophy of human progress on this earth. This is the view that governs the contents of the single most widely read book on the history of the idea, J.B. Bury, The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into its Origin and Growth, published in 1920. The view, or misconception, is not original with Bury. It may be found in most of the philosophical and historical writings in the West from the late eighteenth century on. Of all the ideas which Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thinkers cherished, none was more favored than the idea of progress, so often used to buttress other favored ideas, and with it the fancy that only in the modern world was it possible for so noble an idea to have been born. I venture the guess that in ninety-nine percent of the writing on the idea of progress, the view is commonplace that the idea is inseparable from modernity and that it became possible of formulation only after Western thought had finally been able to throw the shackles of Christian and classical-pagan dogma. The ancients, it is said, were unable to shake off ideas of fate, of degeneration from a golden age, of cycles, and an indemic pessimism. The Christians, although through belief in redemption by Christ possessed of optimism and hope, turned their minds entirely to the supernatural, believing that the things of this world are of no importance, and foresaw an early end to this world and the ascent by the blessed to an unchanging, eternal heaven....
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