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Critiques of Progress

The speculative tradition assumed that history goes somewhere. This page gathers the twentieth-century critiques of that assumption, made from theology, from the philosophy of science and from the history of knowledge.

Three twentieth-century critiques attacked the assumption from different sides. Walter Benjamin’s theses “On the Concept of History” (1940) set now-time against the homogeneous, empty time in which progress is measured, read the angel of history as blown backwards into the future by the storm called progress, and observed that history as written is the history of the victors. Karl Löwith’s Meaning in History (1949), running its chapters backwards from Burckhardt and Marx to Augustine and the Bible, argued that the modern philosophy of history is secularised eschatology: providence became progress, and the structure kept its shape while losing the faith that made it coherent. Karl Popper’s The Poverty of Historicism (lectures 1936, articles 1944–45, book 1957) attacked what he called historicism, the doctrine that the social sciences aim at historical prediction and can reach it by discovering the laws or trends of historical development. His central argument is that the course of history depends on the growth of knowledge, and the growth of knowledge cannot be predicted. Popper’s target is the speculative tradition of Hegel and Marx. It is not Meinecke’s Historismus, which is closer to what Popper himself called “historism”.

A fourth critique came from the history of knowledge itself. Michel Foucault’s archaeology, in The Order of Things (1966) and The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), described the rules governing what could be said and known in a period without deriving one period from the last, and his genealogy, taken from Nietzsche and practised in Discipline and Punish (1975), traced present institutions to contingent, unglamorous origins that no scheme of progress had planned. Both are counter-histories: they are written to show that what looks necessary in the present was arrived at, and could have been otherwise.

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See also: Philosophy of history (the subject landing) · The Speculative Tradition · The Critical Tradition · Historical Time · Deep Time and Evolution · Benjamin · Popper · Nietzsche