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The concept of progress: a brief review
According to recent studies today’s “western” concept of progress can be traced back to the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, especially during the European “Enlightenment”. However, much older cultures developed notions of progress (including the Roman and Greek civilizations).
Plato (427 BC – 347 BC) developed a notion of progress as a continuous process, which improves the human condition from a state of nature to higher and higher levels of culture, economic organisation and political structure (towards an ideal state). Progress is linked to the rising complexity of society and the necessity to enlarge knowledge, through the development of sciences and arts. This process implies change and conflict and so needs to be governed properly.
Bacon (1561 –1626) can be considered is a precursor of the modern idea of progress. He felt that knowledge must be sub-servient to human happiness. So, progress in knowledge should lead to progress in well-being, and inventions should be useful for mankind’s fulfilment.
Thinkers in the late 18th Century searched for “laws of progress” that could describe the evolution of human societies through time. For example, Comte (1798 – 1857), the creator of positivism and altruism (the placing of others above self, of their interests above one’s own) literally created a church of followers and his influence carried as far as Latin America, where the famous Positivist movement maxim “Love as a principle and order as the basis; Progress as the goal” was the base for the dawn of the Brazilian Republic).
Voltaire (1694 – 1778) saw progress as not referring to human actions, but to the human mind (arts and sciences). Bentham (1748 – 1832) stressed the significance of government promotion of social well-being, mainly through laws protecting personal economic possessions. Stuart Mill (1806 – 1873) saw utility in a qualitative and dynamic sense associated with mankind’s progress. Spencer (1820 – 1903) attempted to explain what progress consists, proposing a “law of organic progress”, based on the concept that progress consists of the transformation of the homogeneous into the heterogeneous.
References to the idea of progress can also be found in most major religions. For example, the 1967 Papal Encyclical Populorum Progressio is viewed as one of the most influential Encyclical in the history of the Catholic Church. And Islamic scholars have said that “…sincere accomplished work towards progress and development is, therefore, an act of religious worship and is rewarded as such. The end result will be a serious scrupulous and perfect work, true scientific progress and hence actual achievement of balanced and comprehensive development” (Hamid El-Ghazli, 1994).
See the chart on the Chronological Evolution of Related Measures of Progress (PDF)
Translations of the word “Progress”
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