ABSTRACT

The present crisis of belief in “progress” is not the first in the history of ideas, or even in the history of sociology. People often talk about progress as if there has existed a tradition of unquestioned assumptions about automatic or easily manageable advance since the Enlightenment. To talk like that means to forget that even some contemporaries of the Enlighten-ment—and not only its conservative opponents—considered the far-reaching changes of their time as being less than progressive in their effect.