Texas Tech University

The Idea of Progress

Syllabus | Introduction | Secondary Literature | Unit I | Unit II | Unit III | Unit IV

UNIT I: ATHENS AND JERUSALEM

The idea of progress draws on two great sources of Western culture: the distinct traditions of monotheistic faith and rational inquiry. The political philosopher Leo Strauss characterized these origins as “Jerusalem and Athens,” respectively. From Jerusalem, the idea of progress derives the conviction that man's striving and suffering are not merely random, but move toward a determinate goal. From Athens, it derives the confidence that this goal can be discerned by, and perhaps determined, by human reason. In the Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Hegel writes that world history is “a progress that we must come to know in its necessity.”[6] He does so as a self-conscious heir of both the Jews and Greeks.

Yet Hegel's understanding of progress cannot be found in either of his sources by itself. The Jewish prophets and their Christian successors hoped for divine intervention, radically altering the conditions of their existence. Greek philosophers expected that human ingenuity would lead to improvements in the future, but doubted the possibility of fundamental change. Neither tradition offers the idea of history as a rationally articulated, if not quite linear, movement found in Hegel.

For this reason, many historians of ideas have denied that the idea of progress has any legitimate connection to classical or Biblical sources.[7] They contend that it is either a distinctly modern idea rooted in opposition to classical thought, or a secularization of theological concepts. In Meaning and History, Karl Löwith argues that the idea of progress is based on a secularization of Christian eschatology., He states that when severed from its original theological purpose the idea of progress distorts our conception of time and raises false hopes regarding man's potential to control his destiny.[8]

Löwith's interpretation of the sources of progress is not simply an historical argument; it is bound up in a critique of modernity. Like many other intellectuals who reached intellectual maturity in the Weimar Republic, Löwith believed that expectations of progress had encouraged the development of totalitarian movements that claimed to have the key to history. In his view, progress was a dangerous illusion to be rejected in favor of a return to the original sources of Western culture.[9]

Löwith's assessment indicates one of the major fault lines in the historiography of progress. Speaking broadly, critics of progress tend to consider that the concept of progress cannot be found in the religious and philosophical sources of Western civilization. Instead, they argue, it is a modern development and therefore it is responsible for at least some of the defects of modernity. In addition to Löwith, Strauss and Hannah Arendt offer versions of this argument. Not coincidentally, all were steeped in the declinist literature associated with Oswald Spengler, as well as Martin Heidegger's critiques of post-Platonic metaphysics and modern technology.

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer offer a partial exception to the generalization that critics of progress see it as distinctively modern. In their view, the idea of progress is deeply embedded in Western civilization. At the same time, they use this conclusion to justify a broader critique of that civilization as caught in a destructive “dialectic of enlightenment.”[10] For Adorno and Horkheimer and many of their ‘postmodern' epigones, scientific reason itself is an expression of the human desire to dominate and control. The struggle to perceive an objective, intelligible reality thus implies a concomitant effort to negate or subjugate anything that resists rational calculation. Adorno and Horkheimer's colleague Walter Benjamin formulated a related thought in terms of culture with the phrase, “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”[11]

More recently, criticisms of progress as an alibi for the deployment of power have played a role in the development of postcolonial studies. In Orientalism, Edward Said famously argued that the concept of progress has historically been used to construct the East as backward and lacking agency, and thus the legitimate object of Western exploitation.[12]

Defenders of the idea of progress tend to agree that it can be traced back to the wellsprings of Western civilization. But usually this is a point in favor of Western culture, rather than its characteristic defect. In addition to exponents of the Whig interpretation of history such as G.M. Trevelyan, this group includes some Marxists, who have aimed to show that Marx's vision of human liberation within history was deeply rooted in philosophical and cultural tradition. These writers include M.I. Finley (cited above) and, using a less conventional approach, Ernst Bloch.[13]

The divisions in the historiography of progress are disciplinary as well as political. In general, academic historians are skeptical of claims that concepts can be traced coherently over long periods of time, while writers in political science, philosophy, and to some extent literary studies are more open to this approach. Although it is pervasive in contemporary academia, hostility to the history of ideas was not always so widespread. Pioneering early studies of the idea of progress were written by historians, most notably A.O. Lovejoy.

As the syllabus indicates, this course assumes that the development and transformations that the idea of progress has undergone can be followed across time. But that is not the same as claiming that there is just one such idea—or that all of history led up to its discovery. Löwith and his allies are correct that the distinctive German idealist vision of progress cannot be found in premodern sources, but it does not mean that ideas of improvement or historical change are absent from those sources. It is to those ideas that this unit is dedicated.


The Myth of the Golden Age

The Pentateuch and the archaic poets both describe increases in man's technical mastery and intellectual accomplishment. Yet they also suggest that man's point of origin was a moment of moral and in certain respects material superiority. In the Hebrew Bible the superiority of the past is reflected both in material creation—all of which is good as it leaves God's hand—and by the state of innocence in which man dwells before he learned to distinguish between good and evil.[14] The archaic poets observe a decline from blessed beginnings in the myth of the “golden race” that populated the earth before its present inhabitants. As Hesiod writes in the Works and Days,

… they lived like gods without sorrow of heart, remote and free from toil and grief: miserable age rested not on them; but with legs and arms never failing they made merry with feasting beyond the reach of all evils. When they died, it was as though they were overcome with sleep, and they had all good things; for the fruitful earth unforced bare them fruit abundantly and without stint. They dwelt in ease and peace upon their lands with many good things, rich in flocks and loved by the blessed gods.[15]

What caused man to leave this blessed estate? In the Book of Genesis, man is expelled from heaven on account of his own sin. First Eve, then Adam, eats of the forbidden tree. As punishment they are driven out from the Garden of Eden, and compelled to earn their living by laboring in now recalcitrant soil. In the Bible, sin and man's responsibility for his fate go together. By acquiring knowledge that God had not provided, man takes upon himself the burden of supplying his own needs through labor.

The Greeks agree with Genesis that the golden age was characterized by innocence and abundance rather than knowledge. As Xenophanes puts it: “In the beginning the gods did not at all reveal all things clearly to mortals, but by searching men in the course of time find them out better.”[16] But knowing better does not necessarily mean being better. The growth of knowledge makes it possible for man to do evil he could not previously even conceive. Even the Epicurean Lucretius, who in most respects is an optimist about human development, accepts that suffering attends advancements of knowledge. Writing of the early ages of man, Lucretius observes that at that time “never were many thousands of men led beneath the standards and done to death in a single day, nor did the stormy waters of ocean dash ships and men upon the rocks.”[17] The same intellectual and cultural progress that allows man to forge metals and ventured upon the sea makes possible the horrors of war and shipwreck.

The Hebrew Bible highlights the link between the extension of skill acquisition, knowledge and moral corruption. Cain founds the first city after being driven from Eden in punishment for the murder of his brother. In the Bible, the progress of civilization—literally the establishment of cities—and the arts of farming and building necessary to it are consequences of a crime. They do not so much supplement God's creation as provide an alternative to the given favor that the pastoralist Abel enjoyed.

An essentially urban people, the Greeks might be expected to be more favorable to civilization. In the Republic, however, Socrates roots the growth of cities in excessive desire. A simple community, Socrates argues, might arise to satisfy man's needs for food, shelter, and clothing. But the satisfaction of natural needs encourages the development of artificial ones. Once their physical requirements were met, Socrates suggests, the citizens of this first city would seek more delicious foods and comfortable clothing than a simple division of labor could supply. The city grows in technological prowess and population to the same extent that it becomes a luxurious “city of pigs.”[18]

Yet it would be a mistake to dismiss Hebrew and Greek criticisms of urban civilization and the refinements of the arts and science as “primitivism,” to use Lovejoy's term.[19] The suggestion, rather, is that as man grows in power and mastery, he gains responsibility for his own fate. In the early phases of abundance, man is childlike and dependent on God or gods. As he continues to develop, man assumes control of his own environment—for good or for ill.

One of the striking features of Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, is that he attributes no role to gods. It may not be coincidental that Thucydides begins by tracing the development of Greek civilization from its mythical origins to the achievements of the Classical Age. On one level, Thucydides rejects Hesiod's suggestion that the men of the past were better than those of the present: he argues that Greek thought and manners have become more refined in recent generations. On the other hand, it is precisely the Greeks of his own time who cast themselves, after extensive and eloquent deliberation, into fratricidal war.

Aristotle illustrates the association between progress and maturity by comparing social development to organic growth. According to Aristotle, “what each thing is when fully developed, we call its nature, whether we are speaking of a man, a horse, or a family.”[20] Since the fully developed or natural man is the citizen who exercises his reason in public conversation about the just and unjust, expedient and inexpedient, it follows that the mature form of human society is a deliberative political community. In Book I of the Politics, Aristotle shows how this kind of community might develop out the primordial reproductive unit.


Greek ‘Conservatism' and the Cycle of Regimes

Aristotle sees the self-governing city-state, which had been known in Greece since the 7th Century BC, as the final destination of political development, not a point of departure. In Book II of the Politics, he therefore distinguishes between politics, in which innovations should be treated with suspicion, and the other arts and sciences, which are susceptible of infinite improvement. Although he acknowledges that beneficial changes in laws and social institutions have occurred, Aristotle concludes that the analogy between political science and a progressive art like medicine is false. He remarks: “a change in a law is a very different thing from a change in an art. For the law has no power to command obedience except that of habit, which can only be given by time …”[21]

The implicit conservatism of Greek political philosophy was expressed in a different way by Plato. Socrates suggests in the Republic that political society is subject to a natural cycle, in which the defects of every form of government lead to the establishment of a new and less satisfactory constitutional form. Change is typically for the worse. The compelling political task is to preserve from corruption the good laws long ago established by a wise founder.

In his history of Rome, Polybius modifies Socrates' argument by proposing that the earliest government was a virtuous monarchy rather than an aristocracy. Unfortunately, the temptations of power are too great for any king to maintain his virtue. Monarchy thus degenerates into tyranny, which arouses the opposition of the best citizens, who rise up and establish an aristocracy. Their greed, however, renders the rule of the best merely the rule of a wealthy few. At this point, the common people assert themselves against exploitation by the rich and powerful, establishing a democracy. But “in due course the license and lawlessness of this form of government produces mob-rule to complete the series.”[22] While Polybius acknowledges the possibility of improvement then, he does not see human development as linear. On the contrary, Polybius describes an oscillation between virtue and vice, with a generally downward trajectory.

This thought is sometimes described as a cyclical view of history, but that is not entirely accurate. Rather than incessant rotation among a fixed number of constitutional forms, Polybius suggests that the sequence of political revolutions is periodically interrupted by telluric cataclysms that wipe away civilization and force mankind to start the process all over again. For Polybius, the problem is not simply that political improvements are only temporary. Like Plato, he suggests that all human achievements are subject to inevitable destruction.


Providence and Redemption

The Hebrew Bible approaches the limits to human development in a different way. Rather than a natural process, it shows God sitting in judgment on the cities of men. First, he destroys humanity itself, with the exception of Noah and his family. Later, he punishes the cities of the plain despite Abraham's pleas for mercy. In both cases, God's justice puts an end to the unguided development of civilization, which tends toward corruption.

At the same time, God holds out to the Israelites hopes for a brilliant, if improbable future. In Genesis, God promises Abraham:

I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.[23]

The Lord goes on to promise Abraham that his offspring will be as numerous as stars, and that they will inhabit a bounteous land of their own—provided that they remain obedient to the Lord, their God.

Much of the rest of the Old Testament is concerned with Hebrews' failure to fulfill their end of the bargain. In a pattern repeated throughout the books, the Hebrews' periods of adherence to the law, in which they prosper, are followed by periods of deviation, in which their fortunes take a turn for the worse. This process of spiritual and political declines begins with the Hebrews' demand for a king so as to be “like all the nations.”[24] It reaches a nadir in the conquest of the kingdom of Judah by the Neo-Babylonian Empire.

In this sense, the Hebrew Bible hardly seems to be a likely source of ideas about progress. But the prophets introduce a distinctive element of it, in response to the deserved miseries of an unfaithful people: the possibility of redemption. After rehearsing the sins of Judah that brought upon defeat, Isaiah describes the destruction of Israel's oppressors and her restoration to God's favor:

Zion shall be redeemed with justice, and her penitents with righteousness. The destruction of transgressors and of sinners shall be together, And those who forsake the Lord shall be consumed … The strong shall be as tinder, And the work of it as a spark; Both will burn together, And no one shall quench them.[25]

This prophetic vision imposes on history a different shape than the cycle sketched by Polybius and Plato. The destructions and tribulations that man suffers are steps toward his ultimate judgment and the reward of the faithful. In Isaiah, history becomes a guided movement toward a divine purpose.

The Jews apparently expected this redemption to take the form of restored political sovereignty. Jesus challenged this expectation by proclaiming himself the promised redeemer, while insisting that his kingdom is not of the familiar kind. At the same time, Jesus renews the prophetic vision of punishment for the wicked and redemption for the righteous. He explains in the Gospel of Mark:

When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit up upon the throne of his glory: and before him shall be gathered all nations, and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats. And he shall set the sheep on his right hand … Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, “Come ye, blessed of my father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.”[26]

There are two points to be noted in this passage, which make it a source for future ideas of progress. First, it presents divine judgment as a matter for all nations, not just the Jews. While the Biblical prophets had spoken of the redemption of Israel, Jesus describes the redemption of the whole human race. Second, Jesus presents the kingdom of God as ordained from all time. It is not arbitrary interruption of human activities. It is the predetermined goal of human existence.

For those reasons, Jesus' promise of the kingdom of God challenges any vision of time as extending infinitely forward. For Jesus, time has a definite beginning and end. And his early followers expected that end to come soon. The Book of Revelation offers a vivid account of the establishment of the kingdom of God—including punishments of the wicked that recall the Old Testament prophets.

Jesus' failure to return imminently led to a reinterpretation of the kingdom of God. Increasingly, Christ's kingdom was interpreted as an escape from this world rather than a transformation of it. At the same time, the foreshortened arc of history was extended, with the promised redemption extended into the (possibly distant) future rather than expected at any moment. Augustine of Hippo was the great expositor of this change. In Book XX of The City of God, he articulates for the first time a truly universal history in which Jerusalem and Athens, Greeks and Jews contribute to the salvation of the whole human race at some point in the future.

The question of progress was revived in early modernity as Christian thinkers sought to reconcile Augustine's sacred history with increasingly obvious distinctions between the ancients and the moderns. While Augustine wrote when the Roman empire slowly disintegrated, Bossuet and Vico lived in a newly confident and productive Europe marshaling powers of invention and production that rivaled those of antiquity. For these modern Christian writers, the history of all the nations point toward new achievements and new horizons.

Whereas Bossuet and Vico focus on political development, Lessing reflects on intellectual concerns. In “The Education of the Human Race,” he borrows Aristotle's association of phylogeny and ontogeny, but omits the limit implied by Aristotle's teleological conception of nature. Unlike Aristotelian development toward an objective standard of completion, Lessing treats “education” as an endless process. The education of the human race is not growth to the point of maturity followed by natural decay, but rather an open-ended movement toward greater understanding.

Lessing links his vision to Christian “enthusiasts” of the 13th and 14th century such as Joachim of Fiore, who offered a startling interpretation of John's revelation, according to which a “third age” of history succeeding the ages governed by the New and Old Testaments would be defined by a relationship of love between man and God. Unlike Joachim, however, Lessing emphasizes the role of reason. For Lessing, it would be defined by enlightenment.


Supplemental Materials for Unit 1

Note on Translations

There are many reliable translations of the works discussed in Unit 1. For the Bible, students should be encouraged to read the King James Version (KJV). Although its scholarship has been improved upon and language modified by subsequent editions, the KJV includes the renderings that have become proverbial in English literature and are most likely to be encountered in other sources.

I have cited the Greek and Latin works by standard divisions to make it easier for instructors to consult their own editions. For assignment to students, the following editions are among the cheapest and most widely available:

  • Hesiod, Works and Days, trans. M.L. West (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
  • Xenophanes in The First Philosophers: The Presocratics and the Sophists, trans. Robin Waterfield (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
  • Aristotle, The Politics and the Constitution of Athens, ed. Stephen Everson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
  • Thucydides, The Landmark Thucydides, ed. Robert B. Strassler (New York: Touchstone, 1996).
  • Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, trans. Martin Ferguson Smith (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001).

There are several English editions of the early modern materials. The following are the most widely available:

  • Bossuet, Discourse on Universal History, trans. Elborg Forster (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976).
  • Vico, The New Science, trans. David Marsh (New York: Penguin, 1999).
  • Lessing, Philosophical and Theological Writings, trans. H.S. Nisbet (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

Suggested Questions for Discussion

  • What aspects of human life are subject to “improvement”? In what ways? Is this improvement the same as “progress”?
  • What are the differences between the presentations of time/history in the Bible and in the pagan sources? In which respects is each linear? In what respects is it cyclical?
  • In what respects do the Bible and the Greek writers see the past as superior? In what respects do they see the present or future as superior? Be specific and contrast examples.
  • What is “golden” about the “golden race” in Hesiod? How does this compare to Plato's presentation of that myth in the Republic?
  • What causes of decline or degeneration do Polybius and Plato, respectively identify? Do they suggest any way in which this process can be resisted?
  • What events or changes characterize redemption in the prophets? To what extent do they represent “improvements” over current conditions? Can man do anything to hasten redemption? Or does it depend entirely on God's will? Be specific and contrast examples.
  • What does Jesus offer to believers? Would satisfaction of this promise represent a break in the course of history?
  • In what ways do Augustine and Bossuet broaden the scope of the prophetic narrative? To whom do they believe the prophecies apply?
  • Contrast the writers' assessments of monarchy as a political form. Do they see monarchy as a goal toward which we should aspire?
  • What does Augustine mean by “providence”? By what means does providence determine events?
  • In what ways does Vico believe that modern Europe will repeat the history of the Roman Empire? In what ways will it break the mold?
  • How does Lessing modify Joachim of Fiore's idea of the “third age”? How does this relate to his interpretation of revelation?

Suggested Writing Assignments

  • Compare the presentations of time that you find in the Old Testament and the Greek sources. In what respects are they similar? In what respects are they different? How does this affect the hopes for the future that you find in each set of sources? Pay particular attention to the distinctions between progress and decline, linearity and cyclicality.
  • Do the Greek writers see any role for the divine—gods or God—in their accounts of human development? How does this compare to God's role in the Hebrew Bible?
  • In what ways do Bossuet, Vico, and Lessing each develop the idea of universal history? In what respects do they think that members of the human race are the same? In what respects are they different? How does this presentation compare to the sacred history developed by Augustine? Pay particular attention to the role of the Jews, the Roman Catholic Church, and the Roman Empire.

Further Reading

Students interested in the Greek sources of the idea of progress should consult Ludwig Edelstein, The Idea of Progress in Classical Antiquity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1967). Edelstein contends that the idea of progress was more central to Greek culture than previous scholars realized, a point reiterated by M.I. Finley in The World of Odysseus (New York: New York Review of Books, 1982). Leon Kass pursues the contrast between Greek and Biblical intuitions about the human condition in The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis (New York: Free Press, 2003). Augustine's attempt to synthesize Athens and Jerusalem is the subject of a vast literature. A good start is Rüdiger Bittner's essay on “Augustine's Philosophy of History” in The Augustinian Tradition, ed. Gareth B. Matthews (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), which includes helpful references to much of the current literature. Reeves remains the most classic source on medieval apocalypticism. Students and instructors may also wish to consult Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970). On Vico, see Mark Lilla, G.B. Vico: The Making of an Anti-Modern (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994). The best introductory source on Lessing, particularly with regard to his religious view, is Henry E. Allison, Lessing and the Enlightenment (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966).

Unit I: Illustrations

Syllabus | Introduction | Secondary Literature | Unit I | Unit II | Unit III | Unit IV


[6] G.W.F. Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), 22.

[7] On the issue of “legitimacy,” see Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert Wallace (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985).

[8] Karl Löwith, Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957).

[9] See Leo Strauss, “Progress or Return?” in Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997) and Hannah Arendt, “The Concept of History: Ancient and Modern” in Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin, 2006).

[10] Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2007).

[11] Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” trans. Harry Zohn Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 2007), 256.

[12] Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), 206.

[13] Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), three volumes.

[14] Genesis 1–3.

[15] Hesiod, Works and Days, II.110–120.

[16] Xenophanes, Frag. 16.

[17] Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, D.

[18] Plato, Republic 369b–372e.

[19] Arthur O. Lovejoy, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).

[20] Aristotle, Politics 1252b33–5.

[21] Aristotle, Politics 1269a19–21.

[22] Polybius, The Histories, VI.9.

[23] Genesis 12:1–3.

[24] 1 Samuel 8:5.

[25] Isaiah 1:27–31.

[26] Matthew 25:31–34.