The Elements of Progress

Abstract

The 21st century has witnessed jarring set-backs in the spread of the liberal democracy around the globe, as well as domestic challenges to the liberal form of government where it has been long established. By interrogating the root principles of the liberal theory of progress, this study aims to account for both the overwhelming success of the liberal progress in the latter half of the twentieth century, as well as its mounting failures in the early twenty-first century. It is argued that the liberal theory of progress rests on an unstable synthesis of two competing modern political philosophies, which are identified as ideology and the philosophy of history. The latter offers a theory of mankind’s historical development toward reason, while the former provides a blueprint for the construction of the rational state. Before these modern philosophies were synthesized in the liberal theory of progress, they emerged in opposition to one another, in the works of Thomas Hobbes and Giambattista Vico. The first chapter introduces the political philosophy of Hobbes’ Leviathan, and examines Hobbes’s teaching about nature and art, power and public opinion, culture and civil religion. On this basis, the Leviathan is shown to inaugurate the ideological form of politics, of which liberalism is one example. Chapter two defines ideology and traces its history, demonstrating the common source of all modern ideologies in a foundational egalitarianism that replaces the natural politics of rule. Chapter three addresses the modern philosophy of history, inaugurated by Vico’s New Science. An account of the genesis of this philosophy is presented and contrasted with Leo Strauss’ account. The fourth chapter considers Vico’s political teaching and his opposition to the modern theories of natural law, including especially that of Hobbes. Rejecting the view that Vico should be characterized as an enemy of the Enlightenment, this chapter examines his teaching about the historicity of human nature as reflected in religion, justice, poetry, philosophy and the political cycle of human history, and concludes with a discussion of the “barbarism of reflection,” in which all progress is said to comes to an end. These studies of Hobbes and Vico indicate the points of greatest tension within the liberal theory of progress, and prepare the way for a future critical study of liberal theory of progress in Kant and his successors.