Idea of Progress
An Idea of Progress is an Intellectual History that ...
- See: Ancient Greece, World War I, Intellectual History, Technology, Science, Social Organization, Human Condition, Quality of Life, Social Progress, Modernization, Scientific Progress, Age of Enlightenment.
References
2018
- (Wikipedia, 2018) ⇒ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/idea_of_progress Retrieved:2018-2-18.
- In intellectual history, the Idea of Progress is the idea that advances in technology, science, and social organization can produce an improvement in the human condition. That is, people can become better in terms of quality of life (social progress) through economic development (modernization), and the application of science and technology (scientific progress). The assumption is that the process will happen once people apply their reason and skills, for it is not divinely foreordained. The role of the expert is to identify hindrances that slow or neutralize progress.
The Idea of Progress emerged primarily in the Enlightenment in the 18th century. [1] [2] Significant movements in this period were Diderot's Encyclopedia, which carried on the campaign against authority and superstition, and the French Revolution. Some scholars consider the idea of progress that was affirmed with the Enlightenment, as a secularization of ideas from early Christianity, and a reworking of ideas from ancient Greece. [3] [4] [5] In the nineteenth century, the idea of progress was united by Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer to their theories of evolution. The Spencerian version of it, called Social Darwinism, was very widely influential among intellectuals in many fields in the late nineteenth century. [6] By the 1920s, however, Social Darwinism had generally lost favor with intellectuals, especially because World War I had shown that modern technology could cause horrible negative impacts on human affairs.
- In intellectual history, the Idea of Progress is the idea that advances in technology, science, and social organization can produce an improvement in the human condition. That is, people can become better in terms of quality of life (social progress) through economic development (modernization), and the application of science and technology (scientific progress). The assumption is that the process will happen once people apply their reason and skills, for it is not divinely foreordained. The role of the expert is to identify hindrances that slow or neutralize progress.
- ↑ Becker, Carl L. (1932). The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers. New Haven: Yale University Press.
- ↑ Hazard, Paul (1963). European Thought in the Eighteenth Century. New York: Meridian Books.
- ↑ The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Political Thought By David Miller, Janet Coleman, p.402.
- ↑ Nisbet, Robert (1980). History of the Idea of Progress. New York: Basic Books.
- ↑ Ludwig Edelstein takes a minority view in seeing evidence for The Idea of Progress in Classical Antiquity, Johns Hopkins Press (1967).
- ↑ Robert Bannister, Social Darwinism: Science and myth in Anglo-American social thought (2010)