The Idea of Progress is the theory that the world can become increasingly better in terms of science, technology, modernization, liberty, democracy, and quality of life, especially by the application of science. Proponents debate whether or not art and literature can show major progress. The idea emerged in the Enlightenment in the 18th century, although some scholars like Nisbet (1980) have traced it to Christian notions.[1] The idea was challenged by the 20th century realization that destruction, as in the two world wars, could grow out of technical progress..
While the Greeks and Romans maintained a cyclical view of history and the Jews and early Christians a linear view, only in the 18th century did the concept of progress develop. The scientific advances of the 16th and 17th centuries provided a basis for the optimistic outlook of Bacon's 'New Atlantis.' The epistemology of John Locke provided further support and was popularized by the Encyclopedists Diderot, Holbach, and Condorcet. Locke had a powerful influence on the American Founding Fathers[2]
In the Enlightenment, French historian and philosopher Voltaire (1694-1778) was a major proponent. At first Voltaire's thought was informed by the idea of progress coupled with rationalism. His subsequent notion of the historical idea of progress saw science and reason as the driving forces behind societal advancement. The first complete statement of progress is that of Turgot, in his "A Philosophical Review of the Successive Advances of the Human Mind" (1750). For Turgot progress covers not simply the arts and sciences but, on their base, the whole of culture—manner, mores, institutions, legal codes, economy, and society.[3]
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), the Great German philosopher, argued that progress is neither automatic nor continuous and does not measure knowledge or wealth, but is a painful and largely inadvertent passage from barbarism through civilization toward enlightened culture and the abolition of war. Kant called for education, with the education of humankind seen as a slow process whereby world history propels mankind toward peace through war, international commerce, and enlightened self-interest.[4]
Scottish theorist Adam Ferguson (1723-1816) defined human progress as the working out of a divine plan. The difficulties and dangers of life provided the necessary stimuli for human development, while the uniquely human ability to evaluate led to ambition and the conscious striving for excellence. But he never adequately analyzed the competitive and aggressive consequences stemming from his emphasis on ambition even though he envisioned man's lot as a perpetual striving with no earthly culmination. Man found his happiness only in effort.[5]
The American Revolution strongly encouraged the idea of inevitable American progress. What gave the American Revolution its widespread appeal and linked it to all subsequent political revolutions was its association with the idea of progress. The most original 'New World' contribution to historical thought was the idea that history is not exhausted but that man may begin again in a new world. Besides rejecting the lessons of the past, the Jeffersonians Americanized the idea of progress by democratizing and vulgarizing it to include the welfare of the common man as a form of republicanism. As Romantics deeply concerned with the past, collecting source materials and founding historical societies, the Founding Fathers were animated by clear principles. They saw man in control of his destiny, saw virtue as a distinguishing characteristic of a republic, and were concerned with happiness, progress, and prosperity. Thomas Paine, combining the spirit of rationalism and romanticism, pictured a time when America's innocence would sound like a romance, and concluded that the fall of America could mark the end of 'the noblest work of human wisdom.'[6]
That human liberty was put on the agenda of fundamental concerns of the modern world was recognized by the revolutionaries as well as by many British commentators. Yet, within two years after the adoption of the Constitution, the American Revolution had to share the spotlight with the French Revolution. The American Revolution was eclipsed, and, in the 20th century, lost its appeal even for subject peoples involved in similar movements for self-determination. Thus, its life as a model for political revolutions was relatively short. The reason for this development lies in the fact that its concerns and preoccupations were overwhelmingly political; economic demands and social unrest remained largely peripheral. After the middle of the 19th century, all political revolutions would ultimately have to involve themselves with social questions and become revolutions of modernization. But the American Colonies in the 1770s, in contrast to all other colonies, had been modern from the beginning. The American patriots were protecting the modernity and liberty they had already achieved, while later revolutions were fighting to obtain liberty for the first time. However, since so few modern revolutions have evinced much concern for the preservation and extension of human freedom, the American model may still come to provide a lesson for the future.[7]
The Idea of progress was promoted by classical liberals in the 19th century, who called for the rapid modernization of the economy and society to remove the traditional hindrances to free markets and free movements of people. John Stuart Mill's (1806-73) ethical and political thought assumed a great faith in the power of ideas and of intellectual education for improving human nature or behavior. For those who do not share this faith the very idea of progress becomes questionable.[8]
The influential English philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) in The Principles of Sociology (1876) and The Principles of Ethics (1879) proclaimed a universal law of socio-political development: societies moved from a military organization to a base in industrial production. As society evolved, he argued, there would be greater individualism, greater altruism, greater co-operation, and a more equal freedom for everyone. The laws of human society would produce the changes, and he said the only role for government was military police, and enforcement of civil contracts in courts. Many libertarians adopted his perspective.[9]
In Italy the idea that progress in science and technology would lead to solutions for human ills was connected to the nationalism that united the country in 1860. The new Kingdom of Italy, formed in 1861, worked to speed up the processes of modernization and industrialization that had begun in northern, but were slow to arrive in the Papal States in and central Italy, and were nowhere in sight in the "Mezzogiorno" (that is, Southern Italy, Sicily and Sardinia). The government sought to combat the backwardness of the poorer regions in the south and towards augmenting the size and quality of the newly created Italian army so that it could compete on an equal footing with the powerful nations of Europe. In the same period, the government was legislating in favour of public education to fight the great problem of illiteracy, upgrade the teaching classes, improve existing schools and procure the funds needed for social hygiene and care of the body as factors in the physical and moral regeneration of the race.[10]
In Russia the notion of progress was first imported from the West by Peter the Great (1672-1725). An absolute ruler, he used the concept to transform backward Russia and to legitimize his monarchy (quite unlike its usage in Western Europe, where it was primarily associated with political opposition). By the early 19th century the notion of progress was being taken up by intellectuals in Russia and was no longer accepted as legitimate by the tsars. Four schools of thought on progress emerged in 19th-century Russia: conservative (reactionary), religious, liberal, and socialist - the latter winning out in the form of Bolshevist materialism.[11]
Unlike Confucianism that searches for an ideal past, the Judeo-Christian tradition believes in the fulfillment of history, which was translated into the idea of progress in the modern age. Therefore Chinese proponents of modernization have looked to western models. In the 20th century the KMT or Nationalist party, which ruled from the 1920s to the 1940s, advocated progress. The Communists under Mao Zedong rejected western models and their ruinous projects caused mass famines. After the Mao's death, however, the new regime led by Deng Xiaoping (1904-97) and his successors aggressively promoted modernization of the economy using capitalist models and imported western technology.[12]
Juan Bautista Alberdi (1810 – 1884) was one of the most influential political theorists in Argentina. Economic liberalism which was the key to his Idea of Progress. He promoted faith in progress, while chiding fellow Latin Americans for blind copying of American and European models. He hoped for progress through promotion of immigration, education, and a moderate type of federalism and republicanism that might serve as transition in Argentina to true democracy.[13] In Mexico, Jose Mora (1795-1856) was a leader of classical liberalism in the first generation after independence, leading the battle against the conservative trinity, the army, the church, and the 'hacendados.' He envisioned progress as both a process of human development by the search for philosophical truth and as the introduction of an era of material prosperity by technological advancement. His plan for Mexican reform demanded a republican government bolstered by widespread popular education free of clerical control, confiscation and sale of ecclesiastical lands as a means of redistributing income and clearing government debts, and effective control of a reduced military force by the government. Mora also demanded the establishment of legal equality between native Mexicans and foreign residents. His program, untried in his lifetime, became the key element in the Constitution of 1857 and remains the basic aim of the Mexican government to this day.[14]
Alfred Marshall (1842-1924) was the most influential British economist of the early 20th century, and a proponent of classical liberalism. In his highly influential Principles of Economics (1890), he was deeply interested in human progress and in what is now called sustainable development. For Marshall, the importance of wealth lay in its ability to promote the physical, mental, and moral health of the general population.[15] After World War II, the modernization and development programs undertaken in the Third World were typically based on the Idea of Progress.[16]
How to improve the degraded status of women in traditional society was a major theme of the Idea of Progress. British theorists William Robertson (1721-93) and Edmund Burke (1729-97), along with many of their contemporaries, remained committed to Christian- and republican-based conceptions of virtue, while working within a new Enlightenment paradigm. The political agenda related beauty, taste, and morality to the imperatives and needs of modern societies of a high level of sophistication and differentiation. Two themes in the work of Robertson and Burke - the nature of women in 'savage' and 'civilized' societies and 'beauty in distress' - reveals how long-held convictions about the character of women, especially with regard to their capacity and right to appear in the public domain, were modified and adjusted to the idea of progress and became central to an enlightened affirmation of modern European civilization.[17]
Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) reacted against the concept of progress as set forth by William Godwin and Condorcet because he believed that inequality of conditions is 'the best calculated to develop the energies and faculties of man.' He said, 'Had population and food increased in the same ratio, it is probable that man might never have emerged from the savage state.' Man's capacity for improvement has been demonstrated by the growth of his intellect, a form of progress which offsets the distresses engendered by the law of population.[18]
A fierce opponent of the Idea of Progress was German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), who became the prophet of decadence, scorning the 'weakling's doctrines of optimism,' and in his diagnoses of the times undermining the pillars of modernism, including historicism, to allow the strong individual to stand with his radical value system above the plebeian masses. An important part of his radically critical thinking consists of the attempt to use the classical model of 'eternal recurrence of the same' to dislodge the Judeo-Christian idea of progress.[19]
A cyclical theory of history was adopted by Oswald Spengler (1880-1936), a German historian who wrote a very influential pessimistic study of the end of progress called The Decline of the West (1920). The horrors of World War I challenged the unblinking optimism of the modernizers. Clearly progress would not be automatic, and the rise of totalitarianism in the 20th century undercut the idea that technological improvement guaranteed democracy and moral advancement. Spengler was challenged by the optimism of British historian Arnold J. Toynbee (1889-1975), who felt that Christianity would help modern civilization overcome its challenges.[20]
The notion that America is a highly favorable place for people seeking progress in their own lives comprises the American Dream.[21]