Progress and Regression
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- £29.99
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- £29.99
Publisher Description
Despite widespread technological innovation, scientific and medical breakthroughs, and strides toward gender and racial equity, few believe that humanity is on the road of progress. Indeed, many are increasingly skeptical of the very notion of progress, seeing it as the stuff of hollow political speeches.
Nevertheless, this impassioned book argues that we are lost without a shared idea of progress. In the tradition of critical theory, Rahel Jaeggi defends a vision of progress that avoids Eurocentric and teleological distortions. Progress here is not an inevitable developmental trend but a kind of compass directing society’s never-ending journey toward emancipation. A nimble practitioner of dialectical reasoning, Jaeggi revitalizes progress by confronting its opposite: regression. Her analysis—sober and thoughtful, but urgent—reckons with the myriad signs of regression today, including growing inequality, ecological destruction, and above all the assault on educational institutions, critical thinking, and reason itself.
The task of imagining a human solidarity capable of transcending difference and promoting universal welfare has seldom been more pressing—or more complex. Progress and Regression is an indispensable resource for those ready to take up the challenge.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Jaeggi (A Critique of Forms of Life), a philosophy professor at Humboldt University in Berlin, tackles the "notoriously problematic" definition of progress in this astute if sometimes opaque analysis. Rather than being confined to material accomplishments—the discovery of penicillin, the invention of the computer—progress, in the author's view, is a continual "process of enrichment" guided by an expanding and increasingly complex "understanding of the situation" being examined. Furthermore, this process relies on "meta-reflection on what came before and how it was handled," and necessitates overcoming "imperfections, deficits, imbalances, blockages to learning" that stifle change. Jaeggi is less interested in how local or intergroup conflicts are resolved than considering what it might mean to pursue a type of progress that could help to refine the "principles and institutions regulating human existence" and thus embody "the possibility of different worlds." Jaeggi's aspirations are unapologetically capacious and her argument thought-provoking, though her focus on the abstract can seem in tension with elements of the argument. For example, despite noting that "context-sensitive understanding and analysis are practically a prerequisite for incisive critique," concrete examples of real-life social progress, conditions that enabled it, and its effects are few. Still, it's a rigorous consideration of what it means to move forward.
