Download or read book History of the Idea of Progress written by Robert Nisbet and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-12 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The idea of progress from the Enlightenment to postmodernism is still very much with us. In intellectual discourse, journals, popular magazines, and radio and talk shows, the debate between those who are "progressivists" and those who are "declinists" is as spirited as it was in the late seventeenth century. In History of the Idea of Progress, Robert Nisbet traces the idea of progress from its origins in Greek, Roman, and medieval civilizations to modern times. It is a masterful frame of reference for understanding the present world. Nisbet asserts there are two fundamental building blocks necessary to Western doctrines of human advancement: the idea of growth, and the idea of necessity. He sees Christianity as a key element in both secular and spiritual evolution, for it conveys all the ingredients of the modern idea of progress: the advancement of the human race in time, a single time frame for all the peoples and epochs of the past and present, the conception of time as linear, and the envisagement of the future as having a Utopian end. In his new introduction, Nisbet shows why the idea of progress remains of critical importance to studies of social evolution and natural history. He provides a contemporary basis for many disciplines, including sociology, economics, philosophy, religion, politics, and science. History of the Idea of Progress continues to be a major resource for scholars in all these areas.
Download or read book History of the Idea of Progress written by Robert A. Nisbet and published by Transaction Publishers. This book was released on with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Idea of Progress written by Sidney Pollard and published by Penguin Group. This book was released on 1971 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book History and the Idea of Progress written by Arthur M. Melzer and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-15 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The publication of Francis Fukuyama's article, "The End of History?" prompted a wave of public debates about democracy, progress, and the idea of history. In this book, twelve distinguished cultural commentators offer a brilliant array of responses to those debates. Fukuyama's controversial essay had considered whether Western-style democracy might be the endpoint of an inevitable historical development. For the present volume, the chapters—none of which has appeared elsewhere—include both a keynote chapter by Fukuyama and a series of spirited alternatives to his position. Additional essays examine the historical and philosophical origins of the idea of history that lies behind today's perspectives on progress and politics.
Download or read book The Idea of Progress written by John Bagnell Bury and published by . This book was released on 1921 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth century Britain written by David Spadafora and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1990-01-01 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The idea of progress stood at the very center of the intellectual world of eighteenth-century Britain, closely linked to every major facet of the British Enlightenment as well as to the economic revolutions of the period. Drawing on hundreds of eighteenth-century books and pamphlets, David Spadafora here provides the most extensive discussion ever written of this prevailing sense of historical optimism.
Download or read book A Short History of Progress written by Ronald Wright and published by House of Anansi. This book was released on 2004 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Each time history repeats itself, so it's said, the price goes up. The twentieth century was a time of runaway growth in human population, consumption, and technology, placing a colossal load on all natural systems, especially earth, air, and water — the very elements of life. The most urgent questions of the twenty-first century are: where will this growth lead? can it be consolidated or sustained? and what kind of world is our present bequeathing to our future?In his #1 bestseller A Short History of Progress Ronald Wright argues that our modern predicament is as old as civilization, a 10,000-year experiment we have participated in but seldom controlled. Only by understanding the patterns of triumph and disaster that humanity has repeated around the world since the Stone Age can we recognize the experiment's inherent dangers, and, with luck and wisdom, shape its outcome.
Download or read book The End of Progress written by Amy Allen and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-12 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While post- and decolonial theorists have thoroughly debunked the idea of historical progress as a Eurocentric, imperialist, and neocolonialist fallacy, many of the most prominent contemporary thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School—Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, and Rainer Forst—have defended ideas of progress, development, and modernity and have even made such ideas central to their normative claims. Can the Frankfurt School's goal of radical social change survive this critique? And what would a decolonized critical theory look like? Amy Allen fractures critical theory from within by dispensing with its progressive reading of history while retaining its notion of progress as a political imperative, so eloquently defended by Adorno. Critical theory, according to Allen, is the best resource we have for achieving emancipatory social goals. In reimagining a decolonized critical theory after the end of progress, she rescues it from oblivion and gives it a future.
Download or read book The Idea of Progress in Classical Antiquity written by Ludwig Edelstein and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2019-12-01 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1967. Ludwig Edelstein characterizes the idea of "progress" in Greek and Roman times. He analyzes the ancients' belief in "a tendency inherent in nature or in man to pass through a regular sequence of stages of development in past, present, and future, the latter stages being—with perhaps occasional retardations or minor regressions—superior to the earlier." Edelstein's contemporaries asserted that the Greeks and Romans were entirely ignorant of a belief in progress in this sense of the term. In arguing against this dominant thesis, Edelstein draws from the conclusions of scholars of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and discusses ideas of Auguste Comte and Wilhelm Dilthey.
Download or read book A Road to Nowhere written by Matthew W. Slaboch and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2017-12-11 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Matthew W. Slaboch examines the work of German philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Oswald Spengler, Russian novelists Leo Tolstoy and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and American historians Henry Adams and Christopher Lasch—rare skeptics of the idea of progress who have much to offer political theory, a field dominated by historical optimists.
Download or read book Progress and Religion written by Christopher Dawson and published by CUA Press. This book was released on 2012-08-09 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Progress and Religion was perhaps the most influential of all Christopher Dawson's books, establishing him as an interpreter of history and a historian of ideas.
Download or read book The Idea of Progress written by Charles Van Doren and published by New York : F. A. Praeger. This book was released on 1967 with total page 524 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Progress Unchained written by Peter J. Bowler and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-04 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bowler traces ideas about progress using evolutionary biology to throw light on parallel changes in the understanding of social development.
Download or read book Civilization and Progress written by Radoslav A. Tsanoff and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-10-21 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historical and systematic in its treatment, this work reviews the idea of progress in Western thought as it relates to civilization, in a more comprehensive survey than is to be found in previous writings on the subject. In the author's view, the history of civilization reveals an increasing range of human capacity, both for good and for evil, depending upon men's choice between contending values. From this standpoint, the work proceeds to the exploration of such fields of social activity as the evolution of the family, the emancipation of women, economic conditions and technology, intellectual and aesthetic values, moral and religious experience. Civilization and Progress is marked by balanced and judicious treatment, very broad learning, and a lucid and forceful style. The author asks us to consider the alternatives we face and to reflect on the choices which men have made in the past, which confront us in the present world crisis, and on which our destiny hangs in the future. Seminal in scholarship and creativity, this work will interest those concerned with the Western intellectual tradition and with the condition of mankind.
Download or read book Outlines of an Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind written by Antoine-Nicholas Condorcet and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2009-04-01 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Perhaps the last great work of the Enlightenment, this landmark in intellectual history is the Marquis de Condorcet's homage to the human future emancipated from its chains and led by the progress of reason and the establishment of liberty. Writing in 1794, while in hiding, under sentence of death from the Jacobins in revolutionary France, Condorcet surveys human history and speculates upon its future. With William Godwin, he is the chief foil of Malthus's Essay on Population. Portrayed by Malthus as an elate and giddy optimist, Condorcet foresees a future of indefinite progress. Freed from ignorance and superstition, he argues that the human race stands on the threshold of epochal progress and limitless improvement. Condorcet defies modernist stereotypes of the right and the left. He is at once precursor of the free market and social democracy. This new edition of the original 1795 English translation, is the only English translation of a work of Condorcet currently in print.
Download or read book The Crisis of Progress written by John C. Caiazza and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about the concept of progress, its separate varieties, its current rejection, and how it may be reconsidered from a philosophical and scientific basis. John C. Caiazza's main emphasis is on how science is understood as it has a direct impact on social values as expressed by prominent philosophers. He argues that progress is at a standstill, which presents a crisis for Western civilization.Caiazza presents historical examples, both of scientific inquiry and social and cultural themes, to examine the subject of progress. Beginning with the Whig model and progressive political values exemplified by Bacon and Dewey, he also examines other variations, the Enlightenment, cosmopolitanism, and totalitarianism. Technology, argues Caiazza, also has a stultifying effect on Western culture and to understand the idea of progress, we must take a philosophic rather than a scientific point of view. Modern cosmology has inevitable humanistic and theological implications, and major contemporary philosophers reject social science in favour of ancient concepts of virtue and ethics.In the end, Caiazza writes that time is an agent, not a neutral plain on which scientific and historical events occur. We can expect technology to keep us in stasis or become aware of the possibility of transcendence. This book will be of interest for students of scientific history and philosophy.
Download or read book The Idea of Progress written by William Ralph Inge and published by . This book was released on 1920 with total page 38 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
