Home / Social Sciences / Sociology / Progress: A Reconstruction

Progress: A Reconstruction

AUTHOR
Price
€23.04
€25.60 -10%
Upon request
Dispatched within 15 - 25 days.

Add to wishlist

The idea of progress guided human expectations and actions for over two centuries. From the Enlightenment onwards, it was widely believed that the condition of humankind could be radically improved. History had embarked on an unstoppable forward trajectory, realizing the promise of freedom and reason. The scientific revolution, the industrial revolution, and the French Revolution, in some views also the socialist revolution, were milestones on this march of progress.But since the late twentieth century the idea of progress has largely disappeared from public debate. Sometimes it has been explicitly declared dead. The wide horizon of future possibilities has closed. The best we can hope for, some say, is to avoid regress.What happened to progress? Why did we stop believing in it, if indeed we did? This book offers answers to these questions. It reviews both the conceptual history of progress and the social and political experiences with progress over the past two centuries, and it comes to a surprising conclusion: The idea of progress was misconceived from its beginnings, and the failure of progress in practice was a result of this flawed conception. The experiences of the past half century, in turn, has allowed us to rethink progress in a more adequate way. Rather than the end of progress, they may herald the beginning of a new, reconstructed idea of progress.

Author: Wagner Peter
Publisher: POLITY PRESS
Pages: 171
ISBN: 9780745691008
Cover: Paperback
Edition Number: 1
Release Year: 2015

Gerard Rosich is Doctoral Researcher within the ERC Advanced Grant Research Project Trajectories of Modernity at The University of Barcelona. His work includes 'The limits of recognition: history, otherness and autonomy' in African, American and European Trajectories of Modernity: Past Oppression, Future Justice? edited by Peter Wagner (2015) in the Annual of European and Global Studies series published by Edinburgh University Press.

Peter Wagner is CREA Research Professor at the University of Barcelona. His publications include The Trouble with Democracy (Edinburgh University Press, 2016), African, American and European Trajectories of Modernity (Edinburgh University Press, 2015), Modernity as Experience and Interpretation (Polity Press, 2008), A History and Theory of the Social Sciences (Sage, 2001), Theorising Modernity (Sage, 2001) and A Sociology of Modernity (Routledge, 1994).

You may also like

Newsletter

Subscribe to the newsletter to be the first to receive our new releases and offers
Your account Your wishlist