Politicians of the left often refer to themselves as progressives. But the term is not necessarily well understood: the ideal of progress is of course not exclusive to the left and the word progressive is sometimes misused simply to describe opposition to cultural tradition and conservative politics in general. But political progressivism is far more complex than that. The term describes the belief that society must undergo change through reform and that this reform underpins the goal of improving the human condition. It stands in stark contrast to a free market, libertarian world view, according to which societal change and progress is achieved organically by the actions of individuals, but the real antithesis to progressivism is conservatism, which holds that the preservation of traditional culture and institutions is the condition for social stability.
Progressivism finds its roots in the Age of Enlightenment in Europe in the late 18th and early 19th century, from which much of the philosophical thought which eventually undermined the European monarchies and the church originates. There are several Enlightenment thinkers who can be thought of as proponents of progressive thought, most prominently Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), who shaped the thinking of both the leaders of the French Revolution and Karl Marx, but progressivism is most often associated with Immanuel Kant and G.W.F. Hegel, neither of whom are strictly of the Enlightenment school.
Kant (1724-1804), who was heavily influenced by Rousseau and broadly shared his belief that the fullest expression of human freedom was to be found in the institutions of state, identified the progress of ideas as a passage from barbarism to enlightenment through a largely inadvertent process driven not by reason but rather by the conflicts of human psychology and the natural environment (Kant’s apparent rejection of reason is why Ayn Rand famously called him “the most evil man in history”). This philosophical method, known as the dialectic, has come to form a core element of progressive thought, and is often referred to as thesis-antithesis-synthesis, reflecting how a intellectual proposition meets its negation and the contradictions between the two are settled by a new thesis, upon which the process repeats.
It is not Kant, however, but Hegel, who we can think of as the real father of progressive philosophical thought. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) came of age in a Germany where politics and military was the realm of the aristocracy, but where the universities, which came to be recognised as the finest in the world, were where the middle classes could shine. And Hegel shone brighter than any other German academic of the late enlightenment years.
Hegel took Kant’s dialectic and proposed it not as a theory of philosophy but of history; that is, it is in tension and contradiction between ideas that we should seek to understand societal development. One of his famous dialectics, which he borrowed from Rousseau, explores the conflict between a master and a slave and how the perspective of those who labour is pitched against those who enjoy the product of that labour. It is friction between such divergent thoughts and ideas that underpins progress, which happens by lurching from one extreme to another and in great eruptions of (violent) conflict. The other key tenet of Hegel’s theory of historical development is the Kantian view that change isn’t directionless; rather it is guided by what he called the Weltgeist, the spirit of the world, which has an irresistible direction from darkness towards enlightenment. The culmination of the Hegelian journey towards perfect enlightenment is the Rational State. An individual’s “supreme duty is to be a member of the state” he wrote in Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820) and, just like Rousseau, he saw the ultimate expression of freedom in belonging to a state where individuals knew their roles and obligations and would, ultimately, sacrifice themselves for the state.
Hegel’s belief in change through conflict towards a utopian end state heavily influenced Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) when they wrote The Communist Manifesto (1848). They saw the defining conflict in history as between the material condition of social classes rather than their understanding of themselves (hence their theory is known as dialectical materialism) and this class struggle would, through violent conflict, overturn the capitalist economy as it prevailed in contemporary 19th century Europe. Society progresses though tribalism, feudalism, and capitalism, all necessary states, before eventually arriving at the dictatorship of the proletariat – their vision of Hegel’s Rational State – which would initially have to be enforced (they called this stage socialism) but would eventually become spontaneous (communism), upon which all conflict would cease and history would come to an end. They shared Rousseau and Hegel’s belief in the individual’s complete subordination to the state but disagreed with Hegel on religion: Hegel, a Lutheran, emphasised religious faith as the foundation of the state, whereas Marx was an atheist and famously stated that “religion… is the opiate of the masses,” reflecting his opinion that religion’s emphasis on the spiritual acted as a barrier for the working class’ ability to recognise their material suffering and rise up in rebellion.
The events of the 20th century ended up costing millions of lives in two global wars and the world witnessed the horrors of the Holocaust, leading to criticism of Hegel’s claim that we would be able to reconcile even the tragedies of history as contributing to overall progress. Then Marx’s theories were put into praxis in the Soviet Union and its acolytes, also with catastrophic effects. But the collapse of communism in the late 1980ies inspired Francis Fukuyama’s famous proclamation of the “end of history”: a Hegelian rational state had manifested itself in western liberal democracies as the culmination of a process that had started two centuries earlier with the French revolution. Progressivism was back in fashion.
Fukuyama’s end of history was challenged by John Rawls (1921-2002) who was definitely not content with the state of the modern western democracies. Rawls is perhaps most famous for his theory of the veil of ignorance: imagine you were designing the world and it was up to you to make some people relatively advantaged and others disadvantaged, and that when you were allowed to enter the world you had created you were placed in it randomly. Rawls contented that we would all design an egalitarian world for fear of ending up at the bottom, and that this provides a compelling argument for real-world egalitarian policies. Rawls’ progressivism lays the foundation for radical modern egalitarianism to address the perceivably arbitrary unfairness of opportunity (and outcome) presented to different people.
Late 20th century politicians like Tony Blair and Bill Clinton were self-professed progressives (Clinton called Rawls “the greatest political philosopher of the twentieth century”) but they were not typical politicians of the left as the world had come to know them from the post-WW2 period. For one thing, modern progressivism has a strong streak of postmodernism about it. Led by the Frenchman Michel Foucault (1926-1984), the postmodernist movement was born as a reaction against the modernist emphasis on science and reason and took parts of Hegel’s thinking – that rights are relative to history and can be negated by future generations – and stretched it far further to claim that even truth is meaningless (apparently rejecting much of the Enlightenment in the process). Claims to truth are seen as impositions of power, and the entire postmodernist vision is centred on the identification of oppressed groups and the dismantlement of the perceived power structures that hold them down. There is a strong Marxist heritage in postmodernist thinking, which is placed well to the left of most modern progressives but has a strong influence on, especially, the increasingly important social justice agenda.
But mainstream modern progressives do differ from traditional Marxists in important ways. Peter Mandelson, a key Labour figure in the Blair years, said that his party was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich,” and as Labour disbanded the class struggle and kept intact much of the economic policy of their Tory predecessors, they focussed instead on building a large centralised state capable of directing society on the “right path” towards a better future. The central tenet of progressivism, the path of history towards a better future and change through intermittent upheaval, is intact in modern progressivism. What has changed is the focus on laws and regulation to drive through changes in preference to violent conflict, and it is not clear that Kant, arguing as he did against reason and therefore against planned action as a driver of change, would find much common ground with 21st century progressives.
Further to the left, politicians are still heavily influenced by Marx’s theory of class struggle, but progressivism has also found fertile new ground as a social movement, heavily influenced by postmodern thinking. The modern left sees all facets of society – class, race, religion, gender – in the context of privileged oppressors against the disenfranchised oppressed, and the struggles between those as driving progress (effected through regulation of behaviour and expression). In fact, this fundamental element of Marxism can be found across the leftist world view. The material dialectic is always present, through a relentless focus on the circumstantial differences between groups. In Marxism, the capitalist owns capital (or bourgeois property) which they enforce through the system of capitalism (a Marxist term), and the proletariat, made up of those from the working class who have been awakened to this material injustice, must revolt and abolish bourgeois property. The exact same formula repeats again and again in leftist progressive politics, as evident for example in the social justice movement: take “whiteness” (bourgeois property), which is enforced through white supremacy (capitalism) and the awakened – or “woke” – oppressed races (the proletariat) must rise up and “abolish whiteness.”
It is not all of the left, however, that is in harmony with progressive thought. The moral and cultural relativism that is pervasive in parts of the social justice movement stands in stark contrast to for example Rawls: according to this line of thinking moral statements should be judged relative to its cultural, societal or historical surrounding, but a truly progressive and egalitarian society cannot exculpate regressive and oppressive ideologies like fundamentalist Islam on the basis of relativism in moral judgements. Parts of the environmental movement is equally at odds with progressivism: while some environmentalists see increasing climate consciousness as part of inevitable progress, others argue that with the world heading towards disaster, progress is not the ideal it is held up to be by mainstream progressives; rather is it to be halted to prevent global annihilation.
For the free market right, progressivism is straightforward to criticise. “A rising tide lifts all boats” is a caricature defence of capitalism, but it contains a fundamental idea that stands in direct opposition to a dialectic view of progress: that it is through cooperation, rather than as a result of conflict, that we move forward. The right believe in division of labour and free trade. The free market is the sum of individual human action and that invokes progress as a slow and continuous process rather than the sporadic but large movements prescribed by progressives. Further, there is a determinism inherent in the vision of inevitable progress towards a Rational State which is hard to reconcile with a world in constant development. On a more ideological level, individualism is thoroughly incompatible with the Hegelian-Marxist view of supremacy of the state. At the time of the enlightenment, thinkers were just starting to play with the thought of individuals as having rights of their own, and it is therefore perhaps understandable that Kant and Hegel saw freedom in the context of belonging to a state (although some of their contemporaries, such as John Locke, went much further in their reckoning with individual rights). But today, with philosophical and political thought much more advanced and the knowledge of the 20th century crimes perpetrated against humanity in the name of collectivist ideology, is it still reasonable to subscribe to progressivism as a moral route to a better society? The answer, surely, must be in the negative.