History of the Idea Progress

by Robert A. Nisbet

Book Overview

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... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0465030254
• ISBN13: 9780465030255
• Release Date: May 1980
• Publisher: Basic Books
• Length: 370 Pages
• Weight: 1.48 lbs.

Customer Reviews

history of the idea of project

Altough Nisbet's research on the idea of progress offer little that is not in Bury,still remains a stimulating and finely documented study of the history of the idea from classical antiquity to modern era. Comprehensive in scope and well-written is adressed not only to intellectual elite but to general public as well. A true classic.

An Idea in exile

This Transaction reprint of Nisbet's book is well worth reading although it is not the most classic treatment of the idea of progress, for which see a work such as J.B. Bury's Idea of Progress. Nisbet's book has an ironic history, having been written with a sudden conservative slant just as the postmodern critiques of the idea were in the ascendant. It left the author wondering in the second edition preface why rotten tomatoes were sailing overhead. The obsessive rant by Darwinians against evolutionary progress is another factor in the twilight of view of history, more likely the twilight of the culture that can no longer handle such a foundational discourse whose lineage stretches back to the Battle of the Ancients and Moderns, or indeed, as the work by Edelstein cited by Nisbet suggests, the Ancient Greeks. Here the conservative rewrite of the idea of progress shows through Nisbet's treatment as he tries to bring in an Augustinian claim on the idea for the Middle Ages. That misses the point that the idea of progress gained strength as an affirmation of creative modernity, able finally to surpass the ancients. Despite a slight wiseacring thus Nisbet's book is always interesting and points to the immense literature on the subject, a la Bury, that has been unjustly sent into exile.