Progress

• A Reconstruction
• Peter Wagner

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The idea of progress guided human expectations and actions for over two centuries. From the Enlightenment onwards, it was widely believed that the condition of humankind could be radically improved. History had embarked on an unstoppable forward trajectory, realizing the promise of freedom and reason. The scientific revolution, the industrial revolution, and the French Revolution, in some views also the socialist revolution, were milestones on this march of progress.

But since the late twentieth century the idea of progress has largely disappeared from public debate. Sometimes it has been explicitly declared dead. The wide horizon of future possibilities has closed. The best we can hope for, some say, is to avoid regress.

What happened to progress? Why did we stop believing in it, if indeed we did? This book offers answers to these questions. It reviews both the conceptual history of progress and the social and political experiences with progress over the past two centuries, and it comes to a surprising conclusion: The idea of progress was misconceived from its beginnings, and the failure of progress in practice was a result of this flawed conception. The experiences of the past half century, in turn, has allowed us to rethink progress in a more adequate way. Rather than the end of progress, they may herald the beginning of a new, reconstructed idea of progress.

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Peter Wagner is a German sociologist and political theorist. He is currently a research professor at the Catalan Institute for Research and Advanced Studies, University of Barcelona. He has studied economics, political science and sociology in Hamburg, London and Berlin and is active in academia in many European countries, including Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Italy and Norway, as well as the United States and the Republic of South Africa. He was Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick and the University of Trento, Professor of Social and Political Theory at the European University Institute in Florence and Visiting Professor at the Université de Paris 8, the Catholic University of Louvain-la-Neuve, the University of Berkeley and other prestigious universities.

From his rich opus we single out the following titles: A Sociology of Modernity: Liberty and Discipline;  A History and Theory of the Social Sciences: Not All That is Solid Melts into Air;  Theorizing Modernity. Inescapability and Attainability in Social Theory;  and Modernity as Experience and Interpretation: A New Sociology of Modernity.
Progress: A Reconstruction is Wagner's first book published in Croatian.

• ISBN: 978-953-8075-82-7
• Dimensions: 128x200 mm
• Number of pages: 204
• Cover: paperback
• Year of the edition: 2020
• Original title: Progress. A Reconstruction
• Original language: English
• Translation: Nenad Zakošek