Social progress is defined as a progress of society, which makes this society better. The concept of social progress was introduced in the early, 19th century social theories, especially those of social Darwinists like August Comte and Herbert Spencer.

When it was invented, the concept of social progress was extremely radical. The reason is that previous to that time, the social order was viewed as unchangeable and immutable, often divinely ordained. In other words, ultimately God had created the social system, and that system as well as the place people had in that system was eternal, constant and permanent. Nothing really changed, and the more it changed, the more it stayed the same; the emphasis was on seeing the constant, eternal aspects in human life. This interpretation of society was very conservative, because even if change occurred, this was merely a superficial aspect of an underlying social order which was eternal. In turn, this way of seeing things was based on a way of life in which very little changed, and in which people stuck to their station in life, not having the option or chance of moving out of it into a different lifestyle.

Enlightenment

The big breakthrough to a new idea in Europe came with the Enlightenment, when social commentators and philosophers began to realize that people themselves could change society and change their way of life. Instead of being made completely by God, there was increasing room for the idea that people themselves made their own society - and not only that, as Giambattista Vico argued, because people practically made their own society, they could also fully comprehend it. This gave rise to new sciences, or proto-sciences, which claimed to provide new scientific knowledge about what society was really like, and how it could be changed for the better.

In turn, this gave rise to progressive opinion, in contrast with conservative opinion. The conservatives were skeptical, critical and cynical about panaceas for social progress - believing that any scheme of social amelioration was doomed, given that people just are as they are, and nothing changes very much except the rhetoric of change; try what you like, it was impossible to change human circumstances, and the more things appeared to change, the more they stayed the same anyhow. The only progress there could be, is if people could only understand the eternal conditions of human life, and stopped fighting against that reality.

By contrast, the progressives focused on real changes actually occurring, and introduced the concept of choice. Life did not have to happen in a pre-ordained way; people could make choices, and on the basis of those choices, there would be different outcomes. Ethically, this implied a human responsibility for what happened to people, rather than seeing it just as God's will.

The notion of freedom

This new idea implied a new concept of human freedom, i.e. people independently making their own lives using their own good judgment. Initially, this concept appeared rather paradoxical; thus Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote: "People are born free, but are everywhere in chains". A big breakthrough was the French Revolution of 1789, which inspired a lot of new philosophical thought. In the philosophy of the German thinker Hegel, history is radically recast as the continual development of humanity towards ever greater freedom, continually extending the limits of freedom. This philosophy is still religious and mystical however, insofar as Hegel sees history as culminating in the unity of God with the world, but at the same time, Hegel also affirmed and imputed a Logos or teleology to human history, and fully recognized that both evolutionary and revolutionary transformations took place in history. This was a hopeful philosophy, which in a rational way sees real progress occurring in history.

It was possible to detect human advances, as well as human regressions to an earlier state. In Hegel’s' view, if something existed, it was rational; if it passed out of existence, that was because it had become irrational. This contained a very important idea, however poorly expressed, namely that history was not a fluke of fate (a kismet) but that it could at least in principle be rationally understood.

Marx's radicalism

This trend of thinking is powerfully developed in the thought of Karl Marx (a student of Hegel's thought) and his secular historical materialism. With splendid rhetoric, Marx describes the mid-19th century condition in the Communist Manifesto as follows:

"The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind."

The capitalist era in history is understood here very radically as a process of continual change, in which the growth of markets dissolves all fixities in human life. This is an almost absolute rejection of the conservative ethos, according to which nothing really changes in human life.

Modernism

This kind of idea is also the radical harbinger of modernism, a trend of thought which affirms the power of human beings to make, improve and reshape their society, with the aid of scientific knowledge, technology and practical experimentation. It reaches its extreme limits with the Russian revolution and the third Chinese revolution, carried out with Marxist ideology. Here, people claimed such confidence in the ability to change their world for the better, that they thought that, in a relatively short time, largely illiterate peasants could begin to build a just, egalitarian and socialist order in a conscious way, armed with science and technology.

Postmodernism and social progress

In the postmodernist thought steadily gaining ground from the 1980s, the grandiose claims of the modernizers are steadily eroded, and the very concept of social progress is again questioned, relativised and scrutinised. In the new vision, revolutionaries like Stalin and Mao appear as mad, murderous totalitarian maniacs, whose vision of social progress appears totally deformed.

What progress is made, if new industries are stamped out of the ground by state directives to supply consumer goods, but peasants are pressed into forced labor, and any dissent from the state's decree results in imprisonment or death, while even the most ordinary human requirements like tampons are in short supply? What is progress if people are afraid to speak their mind, for fear of persecution? How do these so-called "revolutions" honor the striving for human freedom and human dignity? It is one thing to argue that the existence of human freedom requires a certain level of material productivity as its basic prerequisite; it is quite another to silence or kill masses of people in its pursuit.

Thus, the contemporary culture of postmodernism leads to a more or less critical re-evaluation of social progress and human progress. This re-evaluation takes many different forms. In its most extreme form, the very notion of social progress is rejected. How are people better off, if they have all modern consumer goods, but they are hopelessly unhappy and alienated? How can we validly say, that people are better off now than they were hundreds of years ago, if they cannot even make sense of their own lives? What can we truly change, beyond changing our individual lives? Even if things change, how can we say that they really change for the better?

Four recent trends of thought about social progress

In the present time, this trend of thought about social progress leads to four main kinds of responses:

· Neo-conservatism, which returns to the old idea that nothing ever truly changes in the human condition, and the eternal values of religion. The ability of people to change anything other than themselves is vastly overrated. Here, the emphasis is on honoring a traditional way of life which allegedly proved itself as superior in the past, and to which we should return.

· Neo-liberalism, which affirms the power and potential of change, but only on a personal, individual level. The idea that the state could be an instrument of social betterment in society as whole is totally rejected; only free choices made in markets can hold any promise of social progress.

· Socialism, which argues that although terrible mistakes were made, state direction of social progress booked very important positive results; at the simplest level, it was able to overcome problems of hunger and disease, and raise the material and cultural standard of living for the great masses where markets could not. This leads to the defense of public services and assets, and the case for regulation of market activity.

· Various strands of new radicalism, which begin to question again the objective criteria by which we could measure human social progress. For example, labor productivity might be a criterion of social progress, but how about infant mortality? This kind of thinking rejects the political traditions of the past, and argues that a variety of criteria must be applied to assess social progress. In some cases, this leads to new charters for the moral criteria to which a society should aspire; in other cases, authentic lived experience in society with all its complexities is emphasized.