The Critique of Progress: Romantic and Modern Challenges

The idea of progress was one of the central commitments of the Enlightenment, but it has been criticized from the very beginning of its articulation. The German Romantics, the conservative counter-revolutionaries, the religious critics of the Enlightenment, and the contemporary environmental thinkers have all developed powerful critiques of the idea of progress. This article examines the major critiques in depth and their continuing influence on contemporary debates about modernity, technology, and the future of the human community.

The Rousseauian Breakthrough

The first major critic of the idea of progress was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (1750) — the very title of which is ironic, since it was composed for a prize essay contest on the question of whether the arts and sciences had improved the morals of mankind — won the prize by giving the unexpected answer that they had not. The essay is, the founding document of the modern critique of progress. Rousseau’s argument was that the development of civilization had been a process of corruption, in which the natural goodness of human beings had been replaced by the artificiality, vanity, and inequality of modern life.

Rousseau’s critique was radical, but it was not a call for a return to the primitive condition. Rousseau recognized that the development of the arts and sciences had produced genuine achievements. His argument was that these achievements had come at a cost — the loss of the natural simplicity and virtue that had characterized the primitive condition — and that the proper response was to recover the values of simplicity and virtue in the conditions of modern life. The argument was an important counterweight to the Enlightenment faith in progress, and it set the agenda for the modern romantic and communitarian critiques of the Enlightenment.

Herder and the Romantic Critique

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’s central concept was the Volksgeist — the distinctive spirit or genius of a people, formed by its language, its history, its geography, and its traditions. Herder argued that each culture had its own distinctive character, and that the attempt to judge all cultures by the standard of European civilization was a form of cultural imperialism. The proper study of human history, in Herder’s view, was the study of the plurality of human cultures, each understood on its own terms.

Herder’s critique had a profound influence on the development of modern cultural relativism, on the contemporary emphasis on cultural diversity, and on the contemporary suspicion of the universalist pretensions of the Enlightenment. His work was also an important source of the modern nationalist movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and of the contemporary debates about multiculturalism and the limits of Western universalism.

Burke and the Conservative Critique

Edmund Burke, in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), developed a conservative critique of progress that was to be enormously influential in the modern debate. Burke’s central argument was that the appeal to abstract progress was incompatible with the proper understanding of political life, which is rooted in tradition, prescription, and the accumulated wisdom of past generations. The proper political life, for Burke, is one in which the inherited institutions are respected and reformed gradually, not one in which they are destroyed and rebuilt from first principles.

Burke’s critique was not a rejection of all reform, but a defense of the principle that reform must be gradual and must respect the inherited institutions. The argument was an important source of the modern conservative political tradition, and it remains an important counterweight to the more radical versions of the Enlightenment commitment to progress.

The Religious Critique

The religious critique of progress is examined in detail in The Idea of Progress; the major variants of the critique — Catholic, Protestant evangelical, Jewish, and Islamic — have all been developed in the modern period as a response to what the religious critics see as the false optimism of the Enlightenment.

The religious critique had a number of important variants. The Catholic counter-revolutionary writers, including Joseph de Maistre and Louis de Bonald, developed a religious critique that combined the defense of tradition with the defense of the Catholic Church. The Protestant evangelical critics, including the various writers of the early nineteenth-century revival movements, developed a critique that emphasized the importance of the new birth and the transformation of the individual. The Islamic and Jewish apologists, including the various writers of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, developed critiques that emphasized the importance of the revealed law and the religious community.

The religious critique was an important feature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it has been an important source of the contemporary religious revival and the various religious critiques of secularism.

The Twentieth-Century Critiques

The twentieth century saw a series of new critiques of the idea of progress, and the most important of these — the Marxist critique, the Frankfurt School critique, the postcolonial critique, and the environmental critique — are examined in greater detail in the following sections.

The Frankfurt School critique, developed by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in their Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), argued that the Enlightenment idea of progress contained within itself the seeds of modern totalitarianism and instrumental rationality. The Enlightenment, in this view, was not a project of liberation but a project of domination, and the proper response is to reject the Enlightenment faith in progress and to develop a more critical and more reflective approach to the human condition.

The postcolonial critique, developed by Edward Said in Orientalism (1978) and by Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), 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 proper response to this critique is to acknowledge the contribution of the Enlightenment while also recognizing its limits and its complicity with the colonial enterprise.

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 proper response to this critique is to develop a more sustainable and more environmentally sensitive conception of human progress.

The Contemporary Debate

The contemporary debate about the idea of progress is shaped by a recognition of both the achievements and the limitations of the Enlightenment tradition. The defenders of progress point to the genuine achievements of the modern world — the abolition of slavery, the extension of rights, the reduction of extreme poverty, the development of modern medicine. The critics point to the failures and the dark side of modernity — the world wars, the totalitarian regimes, the environmental crisis, the persistence of inequality.