ABSTRACT
When I mentioned to one of my colleagues, that I was preparing a paper for a conference on theoretical aspects of social progress, he gave me a long look and then said “You can't be serious, of course!.” This colleague of mine was expressing a widespread skepticism in the social sciences with the notion of “progress,” both with the empirical validity of ideas which have been associated with it in the course of the history of the social sciences, and with its usefulness in social analysis. I share the first of these doubts, nevertheless I think, that the notion of “progress” and some of its derivatives like “regress,” as well as some other concepts of the same logical category, can be quite useful, provided that both their meaning and the domain of their useful applicability be properly specified. This essay will try to specify both of these.
