ABSTRACT
There has been some controversy among historians concerning the idea of progress in Western thought, some contending that it can be dated back only a few centuries while others claim that the idea was evident even in medieval and ancient times. This controversy does not concern us, since the historical scope of this book is restricted to the modern era, and the historians who have debated the issue are agreed that, whether the idea was new or not, it gripped hold to an extraordinary extent during the Age of Enlightenment. Having said this, it is necessary to add immediately that it was not universally embraced by Western thinkers. No ideas ever are; but in the case of the idea of progress, differences of view led to a notable literary and philosophical controversy, most strikingly in England and France, which continued vigorously for many
years. In France, following the lead of Bernard de Fontenelle and Charles Perrault, the controversy became known as the ‘quarrel of the ancients and moderns’ in the late seventeenth century. In the eighteenth century the quarrel continued, with especially notable contributions by Turgot and Condorcet. In England the controversy was referred to, apparently with some irony, by the title employed by Jonathan Swift, as ‘the battle of the books’. David Hume contributed an important essay to the controversy, linking the issues of population growth and progress, which, as we shall see in Chapter 9, was a connection that constituted a central feature of the economic model that became known as classical political economy. The third quarter of the eighteenth century witnessed an outpouring of books in Great Britain in which the dominant theme was progress, so the era discussed in the preceding chapter as the birth-time of the modern social sciences was one in which the idea of progress (and debate over its possibility) was especially prominent in intellectual discourse-just as the work of the great inventors and entrepreneurs who produced the industrial revolution was making it a dominant issue (and a controversial one) in the real world of economic activity and social and political organization.
