Progress is back

Abstract

This paper presents the International Panel on Social Progress and expounds key ideas from its first report, Rethinking Society for the 21 st Century (Cambridge U. P., 2018). It emphasizes the importance of three dimensions of progress on which serious challenges need to be addressed: equity, freedom and sustainability. Addressing these challenges primarily requires reforming power and governance structures in the economy, society, and politics.The linear view of progress promised by the Enlightenment was deeply weakened by the horrors of the 20th Century. It has also, according to Wagner (2016), lost momentum after the abolition of most forms of formal domination (serfdom, slavery, female subordination). And the profound ecological, social and technological disruptions of our contemporary world would only come to reinforce, it seems, a widespread disillusion with the idea of progress. But Wagner identifies three ways in which progress can (and should) be revived and reoriented for the 21 st century: 1) building democratic agency; 2) overcoming new kinds of domination; 3) avoiding hubris (in our interaction with Nature).