Progress: History of the Concept

Progress: History of the Concept

Progress: History of the Concept Dorothy Ross, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Abstract Extens...

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Progress: History of the Concept Dorothy Ross, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Abstract Extension of the progress of science into the realm of government and morals was central to Enlightenment belief in historical progress. During the nineteenth century, progress provided the framework and central problem of social science theory, and belief in the progress of the social sciences became the ideology of the social science disciplines. Discontents with progress had been present from the start and the conviction that progress was inevitable collapsed in the twentieth century, although in mitigated forms, it waxed and waned with historical expectations. At the end of the century, postmodern sensibilities challenged the progress both of history and the social sciences.

The idea of progress – that “civilization has moved, is moving, and will move in a desirable direction” (Bury, 1932) – was integral to the project of creating social sciences in eighteenth century Europe, and the relationship has continued since. During the nineteenth century, the idea of progress formed the historical framework and central problematic of social science theory and practice. One component, the idea of the progress of the social sciences figured prominently as the ideology of the social science disciplines. From its origin, however, the idea of progress was accompanied by recognition that progress created new problems and by doubts that the modern world coming into existence would be superior to the past or present. The belief that progress was inevitable collapsed in the disasters of the twentieth century, although belief in the possibility of progress continued in mitigated forms, waxing and waning with the portent of historical events, the expectations of different national cultures, and the character of the social sciences. This article embraces a theoretical tension that runs through recent studies of the human and social sciences. The project of creating social sciences was both a shared idea, aspiration, or program aimed at social improvement by means of science; and a framework, a mode of understanding the world within which certain kinds of ideas and practices rather than others came into being. In this latter sense, the program of science aimed at social improvement was a set of possibilities and constraints within which the social sciences formed. In the spirit of this duality, studies of the social sciences have emphasized the importance of language as both speech act and the medium in which meanings are produced, especially those integrated bodies of language called discourses that form from extended conversations around a shared problem. A discourse provides a bounded language for varied semantic use. Variant discourses of progress were the medium within which social scientists formed their purposes and within which they represented those purposes as true and legitimate (Porter and Ross, 2003).

Eighteenth-Century Origins The discourse of progress and the social science project emerged in early modern Europe as part of a new understanding of history as a realm of human construction, propelled ever

International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 19

forward in time and taking new qualitative forms. Modern society was decisively different from its feudal and ancient forerunners, engaged upon a novel historical course. Replacing earlier cyclical and supernatural views of historical time, historicism instantiated in human history the teleological movement and universal scope that governed the Christian drama of redemption. During the eighteenth century, enlightened thinkers argued that the advance of reason was moving history in a progressive direction, even to a utopian end. The emergence of the social sciences was itself a linchpin of progress. Science was understood as the most advanced form of reason, and the extension of the progress of science into the realm of government and morals – barely begun – was central to the expectation of civilizational advance. The array of human differences across the globe also sharpened for European thinkers the progressive character of their own society and the stages by which they had reached modernity (Meek, 1976). The task of the social sciences was to understand the forces that governed the modern European world and to guide it into a better future. The eighteenth-century discourse of progress drew upon, and was often coincident with, the early formulations of social science. Associationist psychology explained the ability of human mental capacities to improve over time, while the studies of historians and economists and the observations of travelers set the trajectory of progress toward greater complexity and refinement with increasing social differentiation and intercourse came improving manners, morals, knowledge, and rationality. The guiding role of providence in this process was still visible, but it was understood to work through nature. Particularly in Britain and France, natural principles assured the existence and continuation of progress. Several major theories of progress emerged within this discourse. Scottish ‘philosophical historians’ like Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson developed four- or five-stage theories of history in which the economic mode of production at each stage shaped political organization, customs, and moral temper. Economic growth, fueled by the expansion of population, the division of labor, and technological advance, emerged within a complex social process, for history was often the result of unintended consequences. In contrast, the philosophers of the French Enlightenment like Condorcet focused on reason as the overriding factor in historical progress.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.03138-X

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The rational acts of enlightened individuals, and particularly of utilitarian science, moved humanity forward, ignorance and war held it back. In Germany, Herder and Kant made historical progress the work of philosophical and moral reason. History was the progressive fulfillment of humanity’s moral and spiritual destiny, realized through the unique development of each historical people. Emerging in contested political arenas, the early theories of progress staked out ideological positions of long-standing influence in politics and the social sciences. Designedly, Smith’s social historical view lent itself to a liberal presumption against state action; Condorcet’s, to a justification of the authority of social scientists in the guidance of society; Kant’s, to a statecraft subordinated to idealist ends. Moreover, if the reliance on progressive reason initially assigned all evil to reactionary enemies, Scottish republicans and German idealists recognized from the start that progress necessarily involved losses. By the end of the eighteenth century, Rousseau’s contention that progress in reason involved instinctual loss; Ferguson’s analysis of the political, social, and psychological costs incurred by economic and social progress; Schiller’s summation of these complaints into a ‘classic diagnosis of the ills of modern society in terms of division, fragmentation, isolation, conflict, and distortion’– all drove a wedge between material and moral progress and set the foundation for a long line of variants on the discourse of historical advance that made progress itself responsible for the problems of modern society (Abrams, 1971: p. 211).

The Nineteenth-Century Triumph of Progress Despite these misgivings, the American and French revolutions aroused millennial hopes throughout Europe and when the American Revolution succeeded and the French Revolution was destroyed from within and without, those hopes were projected into the secular future. The rapid advance of science and its technological adjuncts began to remake the Atlantic world, heralding an ever-improving future. Progress became the dominant view of history among the educated classes of Europe and North America, while contesting versions of progress proliferated. Responding to rapid capitalist development and the continuing possibility of political and social revolution, theorists of political economy, sociology, and anthropology recast the eighteenth-century theories of progress into social scientific discourses that specified the factors that controlled the course of history. Classical political economy, drawing on the Scottish theorists, focused on the natural laws of economic growth and, of equal importance, on how the expanded product would be distributed. The question of whether the average workman would be better off, despite growing inequality, became urgent as egalitarian, utopian versions of progress appeared. The Reverend Thomas Malthus argued that food supply would keep wages at subsistence level. His political economy, informed by an Anglican reading of history, supported a cautious view of progress, incorporating cyclical movement and the necessity of suffering. The theories of David Ricardo were often pressed into this mold, though most practicing economists, including Ricardo, maintained a more hopeful account of economic

growth based on capital accumulation. By midcentury, recognition of the role of technology in increasing productivity shifted the weight of economic opinion toward more optimistic predictions of future well-being (Berg, 1990). American exceptionalists and socialist radicals transformed this liberal political economy in opposite directions. Henry C. Carey argued that the uncultivated American continent would abrogate altogether the action of Malthusian law, vindicating America’s utopian historical course (Ross, 1991). Socialists, charging the capitalist economy with the degradation of workmen and the destruction of community, made capitalism an intermediate stage, to be superceded by socialism. In Karl Marx’s formulation, history progressed by a process of historical contradiction between the forces and social relations of production: capitalism produced within itself the revolutionary proletariat that would destroy it and the technological basis of abundance that would support socialism and ultimately, communism (Cohen, 1978). Auguste Comte, inheriting Condorcet’s identification of historical progress with progress of the human mind, made social science its central agent. Civilization moved by necessary law from the theological to the metaphysical to the ultimate stage, the scientific, still struggling to be born. Although this trajectory was inevitable, action in accord with historical law could ease the transition. A new science of society, sociology, would objectively examine the world as it is and, based thereon, set out a plan for the rational ordering of society, opinion, and feeling (Lenzer, 1975). Herbert Spencer’s version of sociology, influenced by liberal political economy and Scottish philosophical history, removed the central planning role from sociology, but gave it the same power to discern the laws of historical progress to which successful social action must conform. More complacent about his own era, Spencer believed that the industrial age would encourage moral, intellectual, and social improvement. Drawing on biological notions of adaptation to the environment, the inheritance of acquired characteristics, and an embryological model of differentiation, Spencer turned historical progress into an aspect of social and cosmic evolution (Peel, 1971). Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859) reinforced both the idea of progress and the use of biological analogy. Despite the radically nonprogressivist implications of natural selection, Darwin’s theory, with its suggestion of the continuity of animal and human life, was often read in this era of faith in progress – even by Darwin himself – as proof of the progressive character of both evolution and history. The contemporaneous recognition of the long age of the earth created a space for ‘prehistory,’ solidifying the uniquely advanced position of European civilization (Bowler, 1989). Social scientists developed a ‘comparative method’ that sorted peoples and races on an evolutionary grid, assigning them to stages of a single evolutionary process by Euro-centered hierarchical standards. Nineteenth-century Romantic critics of the Enlightenment discourse of progress also worked within its progressive secular conception of historical time. Even as they argued that analytical reason and the conventional society being created by economic development were destroying humanity’s instinctual, aesthetic, and spiritual resources, they retained a vision of utopian possibility, available in the present to genius and in the future to all humanity through the creative imagination.

Progress: History of the Concept

The Problem of Progress, 1880–1914 By the turn of the twentieth century, however, historical events and cultural criticism placed increased burdens on the belief in progress. The modernist heirs of romanticism often presented a dire picture of modernity as a desiccated world of mechanism, instrumental reason, and alienation. Even for those who continued to believe that the benefits of science and economic growth far outweighed their drawbacks, the problems created by rapid industrialization, mass democracy, and imperialism were multiplying. The social sciences formed specialized, university-based disciplines in large part to define and grapple with the problems of modernity. In that context, Enlightenment hopes for modernity took chastened forms. At the same time, more stringent conceptions of science outlawed deterministic laws of history like those of Comte and Spencer as metaphysical constructions and made the moral valuation inherent in the concept suspect. By the early twentieth century, the rediscovery of Mendelian genetics attenuated the link between evolutionary biology and historical change, and critics, notably anthropologist Franz Boas, attacked the comparative method and its assumption of a single line of evolutionary advance. Progress no longer appeared to social scientists as an inevitable, universal process, guaranteed by natural or historical law, but the assumption that history moved in a progressive direction remained deeply woven into the discourses of the social science disciplines. In economics, marginalism shifted the focus of attention from economic growth to allocation. Those who joined the mixed neoclassical discourse grounded capitalism in laws analogous to the laws of physical nature and retained optimistic assumptions of economic growth and its central role in social advance, but those assumptions no longer framed their specialized and dehistoricized discourse. Other economists who sought a qualitative change in capitalism worked within a self-consciously historical or institutional framework, like the socialist Thorstein Veblen who asked in 1899 “Why Is Economics Not an Evolutionary Science?” (Ross, 1991). The classic sociological theorists of this period took as their problematic the integration of individual and society and reduced the trajectory of history to two or three stages of modal social organization. In Germany, where antimodernist attitudes flourished, sociologists were most pessimistic. For Ferdinand Tönnies, traditional face-to-face community (Gemeinschaft) and modern capitalist society (Gesellschaft) marked polar modes of social organization. The impersonality and loss of spirituality of modern society were inevitable consequences of its organizing principles. Max Weber saw the positive advantages of the instrumental rationality and secularism that characterized modernity, yet termed the framework it built for modern society an ‘iron cage’ (Liebersohn, 1988). Emile Durkheim, like American sociologists, retained the more hopeful nineteenth-century formulation that placed the present troubled society in transition to a more harmonious modernity. Durkheim argued that a new kind of functional and normative social integration was forming; the anomie of individuals thrown outside the regulative norms of society by the upheavals of social transformation would subside as modern society developed new forms of social solidarity. Edward A. Ross posited a transition from the natural social

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control of face-to-face community to the more fragile, ‘artificial’ controls of modern society, similar to the German model of Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft, but he too expected that a more harmonious adjustment would be reached (Ross, 1991). It was primarily in thinking about their own role in modern society that social scientists explicitly reaffirmed the central role of science in progress. In his presidential address to the American Psychological Association in 1899, John Dewey expressed both the anxieties of modernity and the solution favored by his colleagues. ‘With tremendous increase in control of nature,’ he noted, “we find the actual realization of ends, the enjoyment of values growing unassured and precarious.” But, he added, “the entire problem is one of the development of science and of its application to life.” When the social sciences are further developed, “we can anticipate no other outcome than increasing control in the ethical sphere” comparable to “the revolution that has taken place in the control of physical nature” (Dewey, 1976: pp. 149–150). That science itself progressed, that it produced increasing control over nature and social life, and that such control worked to the benefit of humanity remained unquestioned. This faith served as the ideological basis for the social science disciplines.

Progress Dethroned, 1914–50 The modern West’s confidence in progress could not survive the massive destruction of the two world wars, the onset of economic depression, and the rise of totalitarian politics. Science and technology, hitherto proof of the progress of reason, were deeply implicated in these disasters. At the same time, a sharp sense of historical discontinuity, breaking off the new world of mass production, mass consumption, and mass politics from the past, destroyed the sense of cumulative gain in civilization on which progress depended. Historians mark World War I as the end of progress as an unquestioned public faith and as an idea that social scientists could presuppose or hope to demonstrate. The toll on discourses of progress was greatest in Europe, which bore the brunt of the devastation and upheaval. Many threads of progressive theory were enfeebled or drawn into the orbit of totalitarian politics, as in Soviet Russia’s Marxist– Leninist ideology of the revolutionary state and the ‘new’ man and woman. Other liberal and socialist variants of the discourse of progress survived in the Scandinavian forging of welfare states and in Austria’s brief melding of empirical social science and socialist meliorism. Two notable efforts to sustain the possibility of progress despite dire views of the present were to have substantial influence during the second half of the century, particularly in the United States. In Austria and England, Friedrich Hayek – deploring the socialist direction of interwar economies – laid the foundation for neoliberalism in his Road to Serfdom (1944). And a group of mostly Jewish social theorists at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research combined Marx’s narrative of socialist progress and the modernist critique of capitalist society and culture. Exiled after 1933 to the United States, they found the basic source of modern evils in the radical separation of human beings from nature effected by modern science. The Enlightenment’s objectification of nature objectified humanity itself, turning the human world into

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a field for manipulation and political domination. Their vision of utopia no longer marked an historical future, but served only as a flickering standard by which to criticize the present (Jay, 1996). The possibility nonetheless remained open, particularly in the United States, of constructing limited lines of progress and maintaining the hope that limited gains worked toward the larger progress of history. Thus the American sociologist William F. Ogburn explained that social scientists had dropped the term progress and were instead studying social change as a ‘term free from dogmatic or moral implications.’ Social change is caused by inventions, Ogburn argued, but inventions occur unevenly, creating ‘lags’ until society ‘adjusts.’ In his analysis, however, adjustments can always be made and adjustments always resulted in improvements. Progress was not so much abandoned as forced underground (Ogburn, 1930). The point at which it remained still vibrantly alive, especially in the United States, was the faith in science. The neopositivist understanding of science itself suggested that science’s pragmatic relation to reality allowed it to reconstruct the world to human purposes (Porter, 1994). While Ogburn was moderate in his hopes for prediction and control, other American social scientists of the 1920s, like the behaviorist psychologist John B. Watson and the political scientist Charles Merriam, expressed utopian faith in science and technology (Ross, 1991). Although a more sober tone emerged throughout the West in the 1930s, the possibility of historical progress through science remained a central feature of American social science theory and ideology.

Progress as Americanization, 1950–70 In the decades after World War II, the possibility of a progressive modern society guided by social science gained energy and urgency from the defeat of fascism, the disintegration of colonial empires, and the threat of communism. As the strongest power to emerge from the war, the United States embraced that possibility with a mixture of self-confidence and anxiety. In what was experienced as the ‘American Moment’ of an ‘American Century,’ the country already appeared to stand at the summit of world history, ready to embody the values its exceptionalist history promised. At the same time, Cold War challenges and the uncertainties of international leadership created palpable anxiety. The discourse of progress continued to define the social science disciplines’ hopes for modernity and their own central role. Both were explicitly embodied in modernization theory, which set out the distance the underdeveloped world still needed to traverse to achieve the Western, or more specifically American, norms of economic growth, democracy, and individualism (Gilman, 2003). Defined as a ‘process of social change that seeks to govern itself by rational policy planning,’ modernization declared social scientists’ role in that process ‘indispensable’ (Lerner, 1968). During the same decades, University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman turned Hayek’s complex arguments against state control of the economy into a simplified neoliberal ideology that promised a virtually utopian outcome to the organization of economy and society on free market principles – a prescription that

would later become influential within and outside the United States (Burgin, 2012). Considerable complexity and uncertainty were nonetheless visible in postwar social science. Economists Alexander Gerschenkron and Albert O. Hirschman developed more sophisticated theories of economic development than the modernizationists’ linear model. The leading social science theories of the postwar decades modeled functionalist, cybernetic, and equilibrium systems that expressed the desire for stability as well as the sense of progress achieved. In the work of David Riesman and studies of the ‘authoritarian personality’ that drew on the personnel and ideas of the Frankfurt school, social scientists found a ‘soft’ totalitarianism of conformism in the United States parallel to the ‘hard’ totalitarianism of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, although these darker fears did not close off the possibility of progress. As part of its international leadership role, America worked to export its models of social science theory and research. In Europe, American influence peaked by 1970 as native traditions revived and new theorists analyzed the possibility of progress with greater circumspection than in the United States. The Annales historians disaggregated the flow of historical time and turned their attention to the structure of la longue durée. In German sociology, the dehumanizing character of modern society remained a powerful, and sometimes dominant, theme. One of the most hopeful German theorists, Jürgen Habermas blended Marxist traditions with American theories of pragmatism and democracy to project not a utopian future, but a utopian ideal against which modern society might measure its defects (Skinner, 1985). The idea of progress and its drawbacks also played a conspicuous role in the development of the social sciences in the non-Western world. As an arm of secular, Western-style development since the nineteenth century, the social sciences had been a major site of debate over whether or how far to follow Western models of economic growth or revive traditional cultures. After World War II, the developing world also served as a major source of critical revision of Western conceptions of progress as modernization: Latin American economists recast modernization as economic dependency; Japanese social theorists linked the country’s rapid economic growth to its blending of capitalist forms and traditional feudal culture. Proliferating formulations of modernity redefined tradition and modernity as mutually transformative rather than diametrically opposed processes (Gaonkar, 2001).

Progress and Postmodernity, 1970–2010 Since the 1970s, long-standing discontents with modernity and the global reach of developmental processes have opened the way for a variety of conflicting discourses on progress. The critique of the positivist conception of scientific progress by Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962, launched the most consequential challenge for the social sciences. Although Kuhn argued that his work did not undermine the rationality of science nor destroy the idea of scientific progress, it did radically remove science from positivism’s universalistic narrative of the cumulative, progressive discovery

Progress: History of the Concept

of truth and resituate it in a social historical world of shifting contexts and revolutionary change (Skinner, 1985). Kuhn’s work presented the social sciences with a double challenge. He was skeptical that most parts of the social sciences possessed a paradigm – a shared model of scientific practice – and hence qualified as mature sciences. And by historicizing science, he suggested that the positivist premises of mainstream social science were misguided; the often-marginalized interpretive models of social knowledge based on historicist premises could legitimately claim a central place in the social sciences. Although Kuhn’s critique of the positivist conception of scientific progress had roots in a scientific philosophy allied with positivism, it was soon joined to the mounting philosophical criticism of positivism and to the broader attack on the discourse of progress by postmodern theorists (Isaac, 2012; Bernstein, 1985). The most radical postmodern challenge came from the home of the rationalist Enlightenment. Francois Lyotard linked the idea of progress, with its universalist and rationalist premises, to the most oppressive, totalitarian impulses of modern Western society. Michel Foucault held the social sciences and professions responsible for the knowledge/ power that disciplined the unruly masses of modern society in the name of enlightened rationality. Animated by pluralistic and libertarian values, this critique gained power from the proliferation of postcolonial nations and by opposition to the increasing reach of Western capitalism into every area of the world. In the postmodern reading, globalization was producing not a single narrative of universal progress, but a pluralistic, hybrid, decentered world of many historical narratives. If, as the term postmodern suggests, this vision does not entirely escape modernity and can itself be read as a liberationist narrative of progress drawn from Romantic rather than Enlightenment sources, it nonetheless called into question the universalist and rationalist premises upon which discussions of progress had been conducted in the social sciences since the eighteenth century (McGowan, 1991). In those segments of social science identified most closely with mathematics and natural science, like economics, Kuhn and postmodernism have had little influence. The framework of historical progress held strong in economics, where it remained implicit in the economists’ assumption of the beneficent operation of the ideal market and explicit in the neoliberal gloss on free market economics. The economists’ own ideology of scientific progress also held firm in continued positivist understandings of science and claims to possession of a consensual paradigm (Backhouse, 1997). Postmodern currents have more powerfully undermined the discourse and ideology of progress in social science disciplines other than economics, where the political conflicts and social movements of the 1960s and 1970s were more keenly felt. As a result, divisions between positivist and historicist/ hermeneutic fields within these disciplines multiplied and deepened (Backhouse and Fontaine, 2010). Anthropology was most deeply shaken by the postmodern assertion that an objective Western science of peoples classified as ‘others’ was impossible and immoral. In sociology, the historical trajectory of progress from traditional to modern society which had guided social theory through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries appeared less relevant to the issues raised by globalization. As sociological theories built on that scaffolding

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collapsed, sociologists’ visions of historical advance shifted to the multiracial, multicultural, multigendered world valued by postmodernists (Calhoun, 2007). The power of the economics discipline, together with the fall of communism, continued globalization, and the rise of neoliberalism, revived the discourse of progress in the public sphere. In the United States, the narrative of American exceptionalism and the view of globalization as the Americanization of the world returned. Social scientists formulated and debated more complex narratives of universal progress toward the present form of capitalist society, such as Frances Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ in the Euro-American model of liberal democracy, David Landes’ attribution of Western economic growth to its cultural virtues, and Jared Diamond’s geographical explanation for the dominance of the modern societies of the Eurasian landmass. Despite the postmodern critique of science and the many fears of science’s destructive capacities, the scientific and technological conquest of nature often remained the chief motor and guarantee of progress in these narratives and in the self-conception of the social sciences themselves. Still, the context of fragmentation and critique forced some social scientists to abandon, and others to reconsider, the ability of their disciplines to meet the criteria of scientific progress (Rule, 1997; Smelser, 2005). If the eighteenth-century formulation of historicism launched the discourse of progress and gave the social sciences their charter, the critical historicism of the late twentieth century had called both progress and that charter into question.

See also: Enlightenment: Impact on the Social Sciences; Frankfurt School: Institute for Social Research; Historicism; Kuhn, Thomas S. (1922–96); Linguistic Turn and Discourse Analysis in History; Modernization and Modernity in History; Positivism, History of; Social Science, The Idea of.

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