ABSTRACT
Many of the great thinkers of the European Enlightenment advanced two closely related beliefs. The first was that the societies in which they lived possessed or were about to possess properties that made them different from all other societies in history and thus distinctively “modern.” The second was that these modern features gave rise in turn to a second equally distinctive aspect of their societies: their “progressive” nature. The current reflection on progress is not a continuation of the longstanding debate over whether or not modern societies are progressive. The early Enlightenment view of progress as reform and gradual improvement was developed in response to the crisis caused by the wars of religion that engulfed Europe from the 1560s to 1648. The concepts of knowledge and rational control of the early Enlightenment were criticised in the period from roughly 1780 to 1850.
