The Age of Regression
Born in the seventeenth century, our faith in progress is now at death’s door. Sociologist Göran Therborn traces the idea’s history — and argues that it must be revived.
Illustration by Ben Jones.
Göran Therborn is one of the world’s leading sociologists, author of works such as European Modernity and Beyond, The World: A Beginner’s Guide, and The Killing Fields of Inequality. In a 2016 essay for New Left Review, Therborn argued that there was a prevailing mood of pessimism about the very idea of historical progress on the Left, which he considered to be mistaken: “Against, or perhaps, more cautiously, alongside the sombre mood prevailing on the left, including the environmentalist left-of-centre, it can be stated that humankind today is at a historical peak of its possibilities, in the sense of its capability and resources to shape the world, and itself.” In a recent interview, we asked Therborn to revisit and expand on his ideas about the dynamics of human social evolution.
Daniel Finn
To what extent is the idea of progress a historical novelty in its own right?
Göran Therborn
Progress has been a left-wing commitment since the birth of the Left more than two centuries ago. It appeared before modernity and a general orientation to an open future. The predominant premodern interpretations of history either saw it in cyclical terms or in those of decline from a golden age of the past. To ordinary Christians, there had been the Garden of Eden; to scholars, artists, and intellectuals, classical Greece and Rome were more relevant. Aristotle was the great authority of science in general for more than 1,500 years, alongside other ancient masters in specific disciplines, such as the Greek-Roman anatomist Galen of the second century. The timescales of science were vastly different in premodern times.
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