The Idea of Progress: From the Enlightenment to the Modern World

In December 1793, a fifty-year-old French mathematician named Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet, sat down in a hiding place — the exact location is still disputed — and began to write a history of the human race. He was hiding because he was a member of the Legislative Assembly and a moderate republican, and the Jacobin government that had taken power in June 1793 was in the business of arresting and executing moderates. He finished the manuscript in the spring of 1794. The Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain was published posthumously in 1795. Condorcet himself was arrested in March 1794 and died in prison two days later — by his own hand, almost certainly, although the official record said he was taken ill. The Esquisse is the most complete statement of the Enlightenment faith in progress; it was written by a man who had been rendered a fugitive by the political heirs of the Enlightenment.

The fact that the most famous text on progress was written in hiding, by a man about to be murdered by the political movement that had been most influenced by the philosophes, is one of the more arresting ironies of modern intellectual history. The Enlightenment produced both the idea of progress and the political revolutions that, in the name of progress, were willing to destroy the present for the sake of the future. The tension between the two is the tension that runs through the whole subsequent history of the idea.

What the idea of progress actually was

The idea of progress is the belief that human societies move through identifiable stages, from primitive to civilized, and that reason, science, and education can accelerate this movement. The belief has a long prehistory. The ancient Stoics had a cyclical view of history; the early Christians had a linear view, but it ran from Creation to Last Judgment, and the direction of the movement was downward. The medieval philosophers had various views of the direction of history, but they did not generally believe that the human condition could be improved by human effort. The Renaissance and the Reformation had been accompanied by powerful hopes of human improvement, but the hopes were specific to particular projects (the revival of classical learning, the reform of the church) rather than to a general theory of historical direction.

The eighteenth century saw the development of the idea of progress in its modern form. The new feature was the combination of three ideas: that the human condition is, in fact, improvable; that the improvement is the result of the use of reason; and that the improvement is cumulative — that each generation can build on the achievements of the previous ones, so that the long-term direction of history is upward. The three ideas together produce the modern idea of progress.

The background: Newton and the new science

The Scientific Revolution was an important background for the development of the idea of progress. The discoveries of the seventeenth century demonstrated that the natural world could be understood, that human reason could be used to investigate nature, and that the results of this investigation could be put to practical use. The success of the new science suggested that similar methods could be applied to the study of human society, and that the human condition could be improved through the application of reason and science.

The most important figure in this connection was Isaac Newton. Newton’s success in explaining the motions of the planets suggested that the methods of natural science could be applied to other domains, and the French philosophes treated Newton as a kind of secular prophet of the new age of reason and progress. The Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica of 1687 was, in the eighteenth century, the model of what a successful science looks like, and the assumption that the same methods could be applied to politics, morals, and society was the foundation of the Enlightenment program of reform.

The new philosophy of history

The eighteenth century saw the development of a new kind of philosophical history, in which the development of human societies was explained in terms of identifiable stages of development. The major figures in this development were:

Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), the Italian philosopher whose Scienza Nuova (New Science, 1725) developed a theory of the cyclical development of human societies. Vico is a complicated case, because his theory is cyclical rather than progressive: societies move through a sequence of stages, but the stages recur. The progressive reading of Vico is a later imposition, although the fact that later readers found a progressive reading in Vico is itself significant.

Montesquieu (1689–1755), whose Spirit of the Laws (1748) compared the political institutions of different societies and traced the development of government through various stages. Montesquieu is interesting because he was not, in fact, a straightforward believer in progress. He believed that different societies were suited to different climates and conditions, and he was suspicious of the assumption that the European model of civilization was the universal standard.

Voltaire (1694–1778), whose Essai sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations (1756) developed a comprehensive account of the history of civilization, from ancient times to the eighteenth century. The Essai is the first modern work of universal history in anything like the modern sense, and it was enormously influential. Voltaire was, in fact, more of a critic of progress than a believer in it. He thought that the human condition had not, in any clear sense, improved over the centuries, and that the achievements of the eighteenth century were offset by the persistence of superstition, cruelty, and intolerance.

Adam Ferguson (1723–1816), whose Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) developed a theory of the development of human societies that anticipated later evolutionary and historical sociology. Ferguson is interesting because his theory is ambivalent: he celebrates the achievements of modern commercial society, but he is also concerned that the division of labor and the refinement of manners may be producing a kind of social and moral degradation.

Adam Smith (1723–1790), whose Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and Wealth of Nations (1776) traced the development of moral and economic institutions through various stages. Smith is, with Condorcet, the most straightforwardly progressive of the major figures, but he was also, like Ferguson, ambivalent. The invisible hand is a mechanism that produces social benefits from individual self-interest, but Smith was not sanguine about the moral consequences of commercial society.

The three great theorists

Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot (1727–1781) was the French economist and statesman who developed one of the first comprehensive theories of progress. His Discours sur les progrès successifs de l’esprit humain (Discourse on the Successive Progress of the Human Mind, 1750) traced the development of human knowledge and civilization through various stages, and he argued that the proper goal of political action was to accelerate the natural progress of the human mind. Turgot served as a reforming minister under Louis XVI, and his attempts to rationalize the French tax system and to introduce free trade in grain were important episodes in the pre-revolutionary crisis. His dismissal in 1776 marked the failure of the reform movement of the French monarchy, and it helped to set the stage for the French Revolution. The fact that Turgot’s program of rational reform failed, and that the Revolution that followed was much more violent than anything he had contemplated, is one of the great cautionary tales of the Enlightenment.

Condorcet (1743–1794) wrote the most famous statement of the idea of progress. The Esquisse traces the history of humanity through ten stages of development, from the primitive condition of the earliest human societies to the enlightened condition of the late eighteenth century, and he predicts still greater advances in the future. The work is, in its optimism, almost embarrassing to read in the twenty-first century. The poor are not going to be poor forever; the inequality between the sexes is going to disappear; the human race is going to be united in a single cosmopolitan community; the sciences are going to perfect human life. The work is also, for that reason, an important historical document. It captures the Enlightenment faith in progress at its purest, and the fact that we can no longer share the faith does not mean that the faith was not, in its time, a serious and even noble position.

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) developed the most sophisticated philosophical treatment of the idea of progress. In his Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim (1784), Kant argued that the apparent purposelessness of human action conceals a deeper purpose: the gradual development of the perfect civil constitution, the development of the cosmopolitan order that will eventually bring peace among nations. Kant did not believe that progress was inevitable, or that the human race was necessarily moving toward a better condition. He believed, rather, that the natural conflict of human passions and interests could be made to serve the long-term development of human rationality, and that the proper task of the political life was to create the conditions under which this development could take place. The argument is, in some ways, the most defensible version of the Enlightenment faith in progress, because it does not depend on any empirical claim about the actual direction of history. The progress is a regulative idea, a hypothesis that the practical reason must adopt in order to have any rational basis for political action.

The critique of progress

The idea of progress was criticized from the very beginning of its articulation in the eighteenth century, and the critiques have continued to the present day.

The Rousseauian critique is, in some ways, the most interesting. Rousseau’s Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (1750) argued that the progress of the arts and sciences had not improved human morality, and that the development of civilization had been a process of corruption rather than improvement. Rousseau did not deny that the arts and sciences had produced genuine achievements. He argued, rather, that these achievements had come at a cost — the loss of the natural simplicity and virtue that had characterized the primitive condition of human beings. The proper response, for Rousseau, was not to return to the primitive condition, but to recover the values of simplicity and virtue in the conditions of modern life.

The Romantic critique came from Herder, the Schlegel brothers, and the broader German Romantic reaction. The most sophisticated of the Romantic critics was Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), whose Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1784–1791) developed a comprehensive critique of the Enlightenment idea of progress. Herder argued that each culture had its own distinctive character, its own “genius,” and that the attempt to judge all cultures by the standard of European civilization was a form of cultural imperialism. The argument is one of the founding texts of modern cultural relativism, and the anthropologists and historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have, in many ways, accepted the basic point. The argument is also a serious challenge to the Enlightenment faith in progress, because it suggests that the very categories in which progress is measured (development, civilization, modernity) are themselves products of a particular cultural tradition.

The religious critique came from Christian, Jewish, and Islamic apologists, and it argued that the Enlightenment idea of progress was based on a false optimism about the human condition. The religious critics held that human beings are fallen creatures, that the human condition is fundamentally flawed, and that the proper response to this condition is religious faith, not the secular optimism of the Enlightenment.

The twentieth-century critiques have been particularly damaging. The Marxist critique argued that the Enlightenment idea of progress was a bourgeois ideology that served to disguise the realities of class domination. The Frankfurt School critique, developed by Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialect of Enlightenment (1944), argued that the Enlightenment idea of progress contained within itself the seeds of modern totalitarianism and instrumental rationality. The postcolonial critique, developed by Edward Said in Orientalism (1978) and by Frantz Fanon and Gayatri Spivak in different ways, argued that the Enlightenment idea of progress was closely connected to the European colonial enterprise, and that the universalism of the Enlightenment served to disguise the particular interests of the European powers. The environmental critique, developed by Rachel Carson in Silent Spring (1962) and by the contemporary environmental movement, argued that the Enlightenment idea of progress was based on a false conception of the relationship between human beings and nature, and that the unbridled pursuit of progress had produced an environmental crisis that threatened the very basis of human civilization.

The defense of progress

The defenses of progress have been various. The liberal defense, developed by John Stuart Mill, the American pragmatists, and the contemporary defenders of liberal democracy, has emphasized the achievements of the modern world: the abolition of slavery, the extension of the rights of citizenship, the development of constitutional government, the reduction of extreme poverty, the development of modern science and medicine, the spread of education. The Marxist defense has argued that the Enlightenment idea of progress was a real and important achievement, but that it was limited by its failure to address the realities of class domination. The cosmopolitan defense, developed by Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum, and the contemporary defenders of human rights, has argued that the Enlightenment idea of progress is still a valid and important framework for thinking about the challenges of the contemporary world.

The contemporary debate

The idea of progress remains one of the central features of modern thought, and the contemporary debate about its validity is part of the broader debate about the legacy of the Enlightenment. The defenders point to the genuine achievements of the modern world; the critics point to the failures and the dark side of modernity. The contemporary engagement with the idea of progress is shaped by a number of new developments, including the climate crisis, the digital revolution, the rise of new powers, and the increasing inequality of wealth and opportunity. The question is no longer whether the human condition can be improved; the question is whether the kind of improvement that the Enlightenment imagined is the kind of improvement that the contemporary world is, in fact, capable of. The defenders and the critics agree on the importance of the question. They disagree, predictably, on the answer.