The concept of progress

The concept of progress

It is usually conceded that the idea of progress comes to dominate nineteenth-century historiography and social theory alike, but equally that, despite the plethora of inventions, discoveries and technological innovations in the last decades of the century, it was under considerable assault from several quarters by 1900, as increasing pessimism about the future united with nostalgia about past ways of life being rapidly destroyed. The modern idea of progress, a gradual, steady, lineal and indefinite improvement in the lives of the majority, was certainly widely accepted by mid-century, and few writers advert to any notion of cyclical progress and then decline, even though the examples of classical Greece and Rome were always prominent in European minds in particular.

Though notions of direct divine intervention had generally receded, the theory of progress is not secular as such, but is often wedded to Providentialist ideas of God’s will, for instance in US developments of the idea of ‘Manifest Destiny’, or in the popular blending of such themes in Britain in the liberal Anglican view of history. The specific contribution of natural science and technology plays a prominent role in most accounts of progress: the century was steam-powered, iron-clad, telegraph-linked, gas-lit, inoculated, photographed, irradiated and anaesthetized. Such achievements undermined efforts to romanticize any preceding period of the past; Macaulay notably lambasted the fashion of placing ‘the golden age of England in times when noblemen were destitute of comforts, the want of which would be intolerable to a modern footman’. They also separated the ‘civilized’ inhabitants of the ‘advanced’ nations much more rigidly than had been the case a century earlier, and increasingly provided a rationale for the conquest, exploitation and even extermination of ‘backward’ peoples and races in the name of ‘progress’. With the rise of anthropology, and especially after DARWIN, primitive peoples became increasingly seen as having failed in an evolutionary race towards successful modernization. To bring them commerce, civilization and Christianity became virtually an imperious necessity: without these tools, native peoples were destined to disappear.

The creation of a pan-European ideal of progress, in which European peoples were seen as linked by a common inheritance, or common racial characteristics, encouraged renewed efforts to trace European history back to a Greek, then a Roman, source, to a common ‘Teuton’ or ‘Saxon’ ancestry and institutions, and even further, perhaps, to an ‘Aryan’, or Indo-European, origin in Central Asia, a claim derived from philology in the first instance. The emergence of democracy from the Greek polis, and to a lesser degree the Roman republic, was particularly important politically. Christian moral propriety was everywhere seen to be superior to the mores of savages, and often the perceived scurrility and laxness of the ancients. By mid-century the notion of a ‘science of society’ based on progressive laws came increasingly to be augmented by metaphors, analogies and theories drawn from the natural sciences. Of enormous influence here was HERBERT SPENCER (1820–1903), whose ‘law of progress’ plotted the evolutionary development of societies from the simple, homogenous and indeterminate to the complex, heterogenous, differentiated and individualistic. This process of transformation for Spencer made the modern laissez-faire state the best guarantor of an optimal evolutionary outcome, since interference, notably to assist the poor, impeded the ‘survival of the fittest’ (which phrase Spencer coined). An enormous impetus was given by Darwin’s account of natural selection, together with related discoveries in geology, palaeontology

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and other sciences, to the extension of historical time and enormous elongation of human history, as well as to the notion that human society was based upon an inevitable struggle for scarce resources. This was widely used to justify militarism and imperial conquest, and to bolster the pre-existing account of the superiority of civilization over savagery.