Progress

Abstract

Progress was the “faith of reason” in the Age of Enlightenment. The advances of sciences in the seventeenth century brought the question to the fore; it was debated in the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns. As the belief spread that scientific methodology and inquiry could be applied to social, political, and moral problems and that laws could be discovered in those domains, and as the Lockean psychology was extended to a theory of the malleability of behavior, the idea of progress became stronger and bolder, especially toward the end of the century. Yet many voices of caution and distrust were heard.¹ Progress, said the doubters, has limits, even in science. Men do not change, and the societies they make reflect their viciousness: the book of history is evidence for that. Some thought that progress and regress follow each other in cycles; others, that the sum of good and evil and the happiness of the species remains a constant. Despite these warnings, the majority of thinkers held not only that the material and intellectual condition of mankind could be considerably enhanced, but that society itself could be improved. In the conditions of a good society—or, some affirmed, in response to intensive pressures of government and education—behavior, at least, could be controlled.