History of the Idea of Progress

History of the Idea of Progress
Author: Robert Nisbet
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 594
Release: 2017-07-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 1351515462

The idea of progress from the Enlightenment to postmodernism is still very much with us. In intellectual discourse, journals, popular magazines, and radio and talk shows, the debate between those who are "progressivists" and those who are "declinists" is as spirited as it was in the late seventeenth century. In History of the Idea of Progress, Robert Nisbet traces the idea of progress from its origins in Greek, Roman, and medieval civilizations to modern times. It is a masterful frame of reference for understanding the present world. Nisbet asserts there are two fundamental building blocks necessary to Western doctrines of human advancement: the idea of growth, and the idea of necessity. He sees Christianity as a key element in both secular and spiritual evolution, for it conveys all the ingredients of the modern idea of progress: the advancement of the human race in time, a single time frame for all the peoples and epochs of the past and present, the conception of time as linear, and the envisagement of the future as having a Utopian end. In his new introduction, Nisbet shows why the idea of progress remains of critical importance to studies of social evolution and natural history. He provides a contemporary basis for many disciplines, including sociology, economics, philosophy, religion, politics, and science. History of the Idea of Progress continues to be a major resource for scholars in all these areas.

History and the Idea of Progress

History and the Idea of Progress
Author: Arthur M. Melzer
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2019-05-15
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1501744674

The publication of Francis Fukuyama's article, "The End of History?" prompted a wave of public debates about democracy, progress, and the idea of history. In this book, twelve distinguished cultural commentators offer a brilliant array of responses to those debates. Fukuyama's controversial essay had considered whether Western-style democracy might be the endpoint of an inevitable historical development. For the present volume, the chapters—none of which has appeared elsewhere—include both a keynote chapter by Fukuyama and a series of spirited alternatives to his position. Additional essays examine the historical and philosophical origins of the idea of history that lies behind today's perspectives on progress and politics.

The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-century Britain

The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-century Britain
Author: David Spadafora
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 488
Release: 1990-01-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780300046717

The idea of progress stood at the very center of the intellectual world of eighteenth-century Britain, closely linked to every major facet of the British Enlightenment as well as to the economic revolutions of the period. Drawing on hundreds of eighteenth-century books and pamphlets, David Spadafora here provides the most extensive discussion ever written of this prevailing sense of historical optimism.

A Short History of Progress

A Short History of Progress
Author: Ronald Wright
Publisher: House of Anansi
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2004
Genre: Civilization
ISBN: 0887847064

Each time history repeats itself, so it's said, the price goes up. The twentieth century was a time of runaway growth in human population, consumption, and technology, placing a colossal load on all natural systems, especially earth, air, and water — the very elements of life. The most urgent questions of the twenty-first century are: where will this growth lead? can it be consolidated or sustained? and what kind of world is our present bequeathing to our future?In his #1 bestseller A Short History of Progress Ronald Wright argues that our modern predicament is as old as civilization, a 10,000-year experiment we have participated in but seldom controlled. Only by understanding the patterns of triumph and disaster that humanity has repeated around the world since the Stone Age can we recognize the experiment's inherent dangers, and, with luck and wisdom, shape its outcome.

The Idea of Progress in Classical Antiquity

The Idea of Progress in Classical Antiquity
Author: Ludwig Edelstein
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2019-12-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1421435586

Originally published in 1967. Ludwig Edelstein characterizes the idea of "progress" in Greek and Roman times. He analyzes the ancients' belief in "a tendency inherent in nature or in man to pass through a regular sequence of stages of development in past, present, and future, the latter stages being—with perhaps occasional retardations or minor regressions—superior to the earlier." Edelstein's contemporaries asserted that the Greeks and Romans were entirely ignorant of a belief in progress in this sense of the term. In arguing against this dominant thesis, Edelstein draws from the conclusions of scholars of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and discusses ideas of Auguste Comte and Wilhelm Dilthey.

Progress and Religion

Progress and Religion
Author: Christopher Dawson
Publisher: CUA Press
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2012-08-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 0813218195

Progress and Religion was perhaps the most influential of all Christopher Dawson's books, establishing him as an interpreter of history and a historian of ideas.

A Road to Nowhere

A Road to Nowhere
Author: Matthew W. Slaboch
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2018
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0812249801

Matthew W. Slaboch examines the work of German philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Oswald Spengler, Russian novelists Leo Tolstoy and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and American historians Henry Adams and Christopher Lasch—rare skeptics of the idea of progress who have much to offer political theory, a field dominated by historical optimists.

Between Reason and History

Between Reason and History
Author: David S. Owen
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2012-02-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0791488470

Between Reason and History examines the role of the idea of progress both in Ju¬rgen Habermas's critical social theory and in critical social theory in general. The reception to Habermas's magnum opus, The Theory of Communicative Action, has tended to downplay the theory of social evolution it contains, but there are no in-depth examinations of this aspect of Habermas's critical theory. This book fills this gap by providing a comprehensive and detailed examination of Habermas's theory of social evolution, its significance within the wider scope of his critical social theory, and the importance of a theoretical understanding of history for any adequate critical social theory.