ABSTRACT
Conceivable is a condition where the category of progress loses its meaning. Then progress would be transformed into resistance against the continuous danger of retrogression. The intellectual representatives of new conservatism relate conservatively to a type of progress that is frozen within the structures of developed capitalist societies: that is, to a progress that unfolds within the formally rational orientation of the social world. The new conservative political apologia and authoritarian defense of a notion of progress as technological modernization finds a new irrationalist complement in a fundamentally skeptical pessimism and nihilism. Political tendencies were located along the right-left spectrum according to their relationship to the idea of historical progress in bourgeois society. The irrationalist critique of bourgeois civilization is so far-reaching and ambitious that the notion of progress that it addresses is no more than a vehicle for repression. Traditional socialist politics conceives of itself as collectively organized progress.
