Progress

Progress is the idea that human life and society move towards a state regarded as better, fairer or fuller, so that the past can be read as a stage overcome by the present and the future.

The notion has a long history. Classical antiquity tended to see history as cycles of rise and decline, whereas the Judeo-Christian tradition introduced a history with meaning and direction, though in the Middle Ages that direction was understood as a providential destiny rather than human improvement. The turning point came with the Renaissance, humanism and the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns, which displaced authority and revelation as the main sources of knowledge. During the Enlightenment the idea became a general interpretation of history, and in the nineteenth century it took on a particularly optimistic tone, linked to science, technology, industrialisation and European colonial expansion.

Thinkers who defended it understood progress in different ways. Condorcet tied historical advance to the growth of knowledge, which he believed could improve both morals and material conditions. Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer presented it as an orderly social evolution governed by laws. Others viewed it with suspicion: Giacomo Leopardi regarded the optimism of progress as a deceptive comfort that hid the human condition, while Pierre-Simon Ballanche conceived it as a process of fall, atonement and regeneration, close to the Christian scheme of fall and redemption.

Current debate centres on how progress should be measured and whether it is a linear movement at all. Indicators such as GDP are widely used but criticised for ignoring environmental damage and sustainability. Alternative indices try to capture life expectancy, education, equality or happiness. In the philosophy of science, the view that knowledge accumulates has been challenged by accounts of paradigm change, and in the social sciences there is ongoing discussion over whether history advances, regresses or simply changes.