Ebook: The Idea of Progress: History and Society

Whether progress is an illusion or a reality, this recent concept of mankind's is certainly the most universal religion of the modern world.

The Idea of Progress has been the title of books by J.Bb Bury, Dean Inge, Morris Ginsberg and Charles van Doren and the subject of countless works. In this newer study (which succeeds in being both concise and comprehensive) Professor Pollard has related ideas not merely to their historical predecessors but also to the living experiences of the men who developed them and the concrete conditions of their times. In particular he has woven into one narrative the developing attitudes of thinkers as disparate as Saint-Simon, Macaulay, Spengler, Marx and Marshall.

The destruction and horrors of two world wars put a gigantic question-mark against the belief in progress which had been gaining adherents ever since the Renaissance, and which Darwin and industrial expansion had appeared to endorse. But the idea has survived: indeed, as Professor Pollard suggests in his final chapter, we must believe in it, because the only alternative is despair.