The critique of the idea of progress

In the last decade of the century the virtually unqualified optimism of the preceding half- century began to give way in face of a series of nagging doubts about the true nature and eventual future of industrial civilization. The growing popularity of socialism forced a widespread reassessment of the central liberal virtues of liberty, and particularly the system of freedom of trade, as well as the value of democratic institutions whose advantages were increasingly seen as at least partially nullified by social inequality. Some forms of socialism, moreover, were either overtly or partially anti-industrial, such as the ideas of EDWARD CARPENTER and WILLIAM MORRIS in Britain. At the other end of the political spectrum, conservatives like Guizot, Treitschke and W.E.H.LECKY warned of the overt dangers posed by the increasingly imminent arrival of democracy. Already by the late 1870s Darwinism, too, had helped to provoke an unsettling secularism and agnosticism, and could also, as in FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE’s (1844–1900) thought, be utilized for overtly anti-democratic ends. The Pax Britannica seemed less secure following Prussia’s defeat of France in the 1870–1 war, suffered constant threats from a trans-European arms race and imperial scramble, notably over Africa in the 1880s, and was dented by what was widely seen to be an ignominious stalemate in the Boer War (1899–1902).

But there were many other sources of the perception that social, political and economic progress required revaluation by the end of the century. Certain forms of Darwinism in particular suggested the potential physical degeneration of the human species, and the requirement, as eugenists urged, to avoid replication of ‘unfavourable’ variants in the species. The philosophy of Nietzsche lent credence to the notion that only an elite of ‘supermen’ capable of imposing their will on the hapless mass could stem the tide of decay and decline. Certain styles in art and architecture helped to promote a medievalist ideal as morally and aesthetically superior to the industrial age. The literary and aesthetic movement associated with the concept of ‘decadence’, or the intense expression of artistic beauty, was popularized by the poetry of Charles Baudelaire (1821– 67), the flourishing of impressionism in art, and the drama of Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906), and the music of Richard Wagner (1813–83). The aesthetic and artistic rebellion against bourgeois conventionalism was matched by the sexual rebellion of a revived, and increasingly radical, feminism in the 1880s and 1890s, in which the ‘new woman’ claimed an increasing range of social, political and sexual rights. Everywhere the old certainties seemed to be dissolving; after 1914, the world would be made anew, and at enormous cost, only to break down again almost immediately. There was now scant scope for the apparently vapid optimism of the mid-nineteenth century.

Adding to the increasing rejection of reason as the supposed controlling factor in individual and collective destinies were the psychological theories of Sigmund Freud (1865–1939), whose account of the unconscious mind, of the primacy of sexuality in

Encyclopedia of nineteenth-century thought 274

Entries A-Z 275

infantile development and of the proneness of civilizations to large-scale aggression, built on earlier conceptions of the mentality of the crowd, and helped to promote an already increasing eroticism throughout Europe and elsewhere. Freud had been prefigured by writers like E.von Hartmann, whose Philosophy of the Unconscious (1869) pointed to a similar incompatibility between civilization and human happiness. Similarly anti- rationalist themes predominated in the social theory of the French syndicalist and socialist GEORGES SOREL (1847–1922), who contended that the great lesson of Greek antiquity was that a ‘myth’ underpinning a warrior mentality of struggle was necessary to avoid the degeneration of society into merely consumerist hedonism. This theme he applied to the working-class movement in Reflections on Violence (1908), which stressed the creative aspects of will-power and energy against rationalist approaches to social order. In The Illusions of Progress (1908), most notably, Sorel argued that the idea of progress had been used to justify the extension of state power in liberalism as well as socialism, and that this undermined the capacity of the working classes to organise themselves and to resist oppression from above. The work of the French philosopher HENRI BERGSON (1859–1941), notably Creative Evolution (1907), similarly lent weight to the idea that the existence of a supra-rational ‘life force’ could alone explain the secrets of human development. The popularity of mysticism and oriental religions assisted the sapping of faith in a tradition of European rationalism. The old fixed reference points providing a sense of certainty and continuity were thus rapidly disappearing. At the end of our period, Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1918–22), which described the decline of a 1,000-year-old ‘Faustian’ culture, essentially feudal, in the face of modern materialism, democracy and collectivism, and gave a fillip to anti-rationalist, apocalyptic and authoritarian theories after the First World War. ‘Progress’ would be re-established in the following century, but on a much more tenuous and conditional basis.

The critique of the idea of progress