Canguilhem, Georges - The Decline of The Idea of Progress

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The decline of the idea

of progress
Georges Canguilhem
Published online: 28 Jul 2006.
To cite this article: Georges Canguilhem (1998) The decline of

the idea of progress, Economy and Society, 27:2-3, 313-329, DOI:
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The decline of the idea of
progress
Georges Canguilhem
Translated by David Macey

Abstract
The philosophers of the Enlightenment conceived Progress as evidence of mankind's

natural perfectibility. In the nineteenth century this image of the future was tarnished
by abrupt epistemological changes and technical surprises. An unforeseen conse-
quence of the invention and use of the steam engine was the breaking up of an idea
that had acted as a principle for preserving values, caused by the principle of the dis-
sipation of energy in physics and the revolutionary analyses of the relations of socio-
economic inequality in industrial societies. With Freud and Levi-Strauss, Carnot's
principle became the principle for judging history.
Keywords: progress; the Enlightenment; history of science.
If there is anything more poignant than a body dying for want of bread, it is
a soul that is dying of hunger for light. Progress in its entirety offers a solu-
tion. One day, we will be stupefied ... We would be wrong to doubt this
blessed solution .... What have we believers to fear? Rivers do not flow
upstream, and nor do ideas ... and we can expect everything from the mys-
terious power of progress which, one fine day, will bring East and West
together in the depths of a sepulchre, and will force the lmams and Bonaparte
into a dialogue inside the Great Pyramid.
(Hugo 1862, Ill: 27-8) 1
Writing in 1862, Victor Hugo presses a religious vocabulary into the service of a
secular idea. He reads a prophecy into what the philosophes of the eighteenth
century regarded as a law of human history. Could it be said that he is distort-
ing its meaning or import? While Turgot is given credit for being the first to
describe the progress of the human mind, which had already been celebrated by
Pascal, Bacon and Fontenelle, in the form of a tableau philosophique, it tends to
be forgotten or overlooked that he was in fact speaking in his capacity as an
Economy and Society Volume 27 Numbers 2o3 May 1998: 313-329

© Routledge 1998 0308-5147
3H Grorgrs Ctm.Ktllllmn
elected prirur nf the Snrhonnc I which made him n·sponsihlc ll1r the supervision
of rheology students; translator I. and that the projt.·ct he outlined in his Plan Je
drux d1scours sur l'hlstolrt' untt•tnt'llt• w01s intended to he a reworking of Bossuet's
[),scours sur 1'/ustoiTr unn·t·r.w:l/t': '\\'hen we consider its origins, the human race
looks to the philosopher like an immense whole which, like every individual, has
its childhood and its progress ... the tot;ll mass of the human race ... always
walks, albeit slowly, towards greater perfc~:tion' ( Bossuet 16X1 ). 'H> base progress
on the infinite perfectibility of the human race is in itself a way of prophesying
the future. Kanr himself is in agreement here. llaving asked in the third section
of Thr Contest of Fat'ultirs whether the human race is ~:ontinually progressing
(Kant 1798: 171l), he outlines in se~:tion 7 'i\ propheti~: history of mankind'. This
propheq· is, however, confirmed by a re~:ent experien~:e of a collective nature:
the upsurge of 'universal sympathy' li1r the ideals that inspired the French
Revolution (Kant 179H: IH4). This is something 'to whi~:h the human soul mani-
festly adnowlcdges (,ij/rntllch l't'mtth/ a duty', and 'tht.· human race ... will
henceforth progressively improve without any more total reversals [nicht mehr
ganzhch rii£'kgiing(~ I'. Z And, if is not too fimdful to t.·ompare Hugo and Kant, why
not extend the comparison hy noting th;\t I lugo likens the irreversibility of his-
torical progress to the irreversible flow of the ri,er that Kant evokes in the
Second Analogy of the Transcendental Anal~·tic in order tu explain what he
means by the 'objective' sequence of phenomena, or in other words the irre-
versible order of causality (Kant 171l1: 150-1 ).
It would, however, be a mistake to rejtard the JUojtress observable in the
course and direction of human history as an analogue li>r the causality required
to establish a natural sdence. Ac~:ordin~t to Kant, tht.• role of progress is not to
function as a category. It is an Idea that can introduce order into empirical diver-
sity; its function is that of a 'guiding prindple ll.t·l~/atlrn ]'. In the essay on the
'Idea for a Universalllistory with a Cosmopolitan Purpose', the 'idea' is a 'plan
of nature', and a 'germ of enli~thtenment' that sur,ives the turbulence of history
(Kant 171l4a: 52). The guiding prindple is an tt prior/ whose independence from
past and present events is even more de~uly emphasized in 'An answer to the
question: "What is Enlightt.•mnent?" ', whil:h was written in the same year as
the 'Idea', where the ~term that develops into human nature is described as
'Man's inclination and vocation to th•n'·Frdv ... to actf'rr(l•'(Kant I784b:
59).>
Is it for lack of ~:ritical reflection that a mere guidin~t principle can be mis-
taken for the motor of history? The eijthteenth-century French phi/osoplm who
established the theory of prugress retcarded it as a summation of all kinds of
actual progres.'i,~ and as a portent of all possible future progress. What is more,
in the final pages of his l:'squissr d'un tahlrau hl.lloriqur tits progrrs tk /'esprit
lruma/n, Condorcet mention~; one possible li1rm of progress which is of particu-
lar importance because it is the condition of possibility fin the infinite perpetu-
ation of other forms: the increased averat(c longevity of human beings and,
thercfi>rc, the hereditary guarantee that their physkal, intellectual and moral
capacities will improve. We have to a~:cept that this avera!(c longevity will go on
The decline of the idea ofprogress 315
increasing 'unless physical re,·olutions prevent it from doing so'. Condorcet's

Esquisse was published in Year Ill of the Remlution (1795). It is therefore not
improbable that Kant was able to read it before writing in The Contest of Facul-
ties that, because it is based upon the collective memory of the events that
revealed to mankind its capacity for progress, the irreversibility of progress is
subject to only one restrictive condition, namely the possibility that a natural
revolution might engulf the human race 'so that other creatures might take the
stage instead' (Kant 1798: 185).
The paradox is that, for both Kant and Condorcet, the infinite progress of
human progress in the plural [progres humains] is subordinate to a cosmological
law of constancy. Condorcet is quite explicit about this. At the beginning of the
Esquisse he links the progress of perfectibility to the continued existence of the

terrestrial globe on which nature has placed men. The march of progress there-
fore cannot be reversed 'so long as the earth, at least, retains the same place in the
system of the universe and so long as the general laws of that system do not bring
about either a general upheaval on that globe, or changes that no longer allow the
human race to preserve and go on using the same faculties.' Newton's Principia
and then Laplace's Exposition therefore guarantee the truth of the Esquisse.
Perhaps too little attention has been given to the fact that, in the eighteenth
century, astronomy served the cause of progress because of its recent content
rather than its history. It is because ~ewton's cosmology seemed to Condorcet to
be definitive that he entrusted it with the task of guaranteeing the infinite
perfectibility of man. And when Auguste Comte, who regarded Condorcet as his
brilliant predecessor, taught that progress is no more than the development of
order, he too made historical emlution subordinate to cosmic stability. 5
This desire to support the belief in progress with guarantees derived from the
laws of astronomy means that we can liken the eighteenth-century idea of
progress to a principle of conservation similar to that established by the scien-
tists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: the principle of the conser-
vation of natural human perfectibility.
If, to restrict the debate to Condorcet alone, we carefullv examine the elements
of the argument put forward for the infinite perfectibili;y of man at the end of
that century of intellectual ferment, we can seen their site and their date. No
matter whether we look at the formation of ideas and the rules of reason, the
childish stage of human understanding and pedagogy, the structure of the sci-
ences and their histor~·. the application of the sciences (and especially of math-
ematics), the practice of the arts (including medicine and politics), the
production of consumer goods, or the rights and frecdoms of citizens, the same
question arises. We find a historical form of culture contemplating itself, as
though in a mirror. In its historical tableaux, it contemplates its own enlighten-
ment, its own rank and place, and it believes that what it discovers in this redu-
plication is not a culmination but the continuation of a process that is as regular
as the movement of the stars. If that is the case, comparing the idea of progress
to a principle of conservation might enable us to explain its decline without
having to resort to arguments about an unexpected return to irrationality.
316 Georges Canguilhem
Even before the so-called Carnot-Clausius principle had identified change

within a closed system as a dissipation of energy, and before philosophers and
men of letters had appropriated the basic concepts of thermodynamics to make
their prophecies of doom, the new socio-technological and cultural configura-
tion both brought about and explained the cruel frustration of all the hopes that
had been placed in progress in the political and social domain. The new factor
was an invention whose impact could not be reduced to mere development. At
the beginning of the nineteenth century, Watt's steam engine was dethroned by
Woolf's steam engine. A machine had been invented and its efficiency had been
improved before and without the elaboration of the theory that made its work-
ings intelligible. This machine, which both permitted and necessitated large-
scale industry, meant that Progress now had a new face: the face of children
working fifteen hours a day in the mills and the mines (Marx [1867]1976: 354).
It could not be said that Victor Hugo's faith in the irreversibility of progress
is based on an insensitivity to economic slavery, but, although he was writing at
the time when historical materialism was being elaborated, he continues to
discuss social questions in the same terms as the philosophes of the eighteenth
century. Enlightenment is the motor of history. The enlightenment of darkness
is progress. Now, in the nineteenth century, the physical phenomenon that sym-
bolizes progress is no longer light, but heat. Unlike light, whose continuous
emission is regarded as being guaranteed by the stability of the solar system, heat
requires non-renewable deposits of earthly combustibles if it is to be used as an
industrial tool. Renan and Cournot simultaneously drew attention to the
inevitable exhaustion of a form of power that could increase the productive
forces. 6 No doubt Frederick En gels deserves to be famous for having written that
in his day the discovery that mechanical motion can be transformed into heat
(the reproduction of fire by friction) represented the threshold of human history,
and that the discovery that heat can be transformed into mechanical motion (the
steam-engine) represented 'the close of the development traversed so far'
(Engels 1878: 144--5). But, because he is still seduced by a rationalist explanation
of technical progress, En gels makes no distinction between a technical invention
that exists prior to the knowledge that will make it more efficient, and an inven-
tion that results from the application of knowledge. He writes as though the
steam-engine and the revolutionary new motor known as 'Gramme's ring' (1869)
were not inventions that were theoretically unpremeditated, unlike the next
revolutionary motor, namely the Diesel engine which became a possibility when
research into improving the efficiency of thermal machines began to be under-
taken at the University of Munich from 1878 onwards.
We therefore have to look at how history gave the lie to the optimistic claim
that its course was progressively rational, or in other words examine whether the
arguments put forward in the ideologies of the eighteenth and nineteenth cen-
turies as proofs of the past and hopes for the future were or were not ratified by
the passage of time, and look at them from the moment of their formulation.
In our examination of a qualitative change in the human condition that
occurred both in the space of the subsistence of human groups, and in the time
of the invention of their regimes, we must therefore look at origins, the law of
the succession of states, instruments and distribution processes, the trajectory
and direction of motion, and at certain obstacles and dangers.
Origins
In the theory of progress, as formulated by Turgot and Condorcet and as sys-

tematized by Comte when he formulates the three laws of the three states/ the
terms 'progress', 'perfectibility' and 'development' are interchangeable. The
basic meaning of development is, however, the dominant term: the successive
manifestations of the potentialities contained within the germ of an organism.

Origins therefore are not, and cannot be, an object of experience. But childhood
can and does provide a model for their conceptualization. Progress is a transition
from childhood to adulthood, from debility and ignorance to maturity and know-
ledge. Pascal asked 'How can someone who was so weak as a child become really
strong when grown up? ... Nothing that was once weak can ever be absolutely
strong' (Pascal 1670: 263). From the heights of his dogmatic certainty, Bossuet
wrote that 'childhood is an animal's life' (cited in Teysseire 1982: 25, 28). In the
En~yclopedie, on the other hand, children are credited with the ability to reach the
age of reason when they are about 8. According to this model, progress means the
rejection of the human race's childishness and prejudices, and a recognition of
its errors. Despite Rousseau and his Emile, the child is compared with the adult
only because education can rescue it from an original state of incorrectness.
Although incorrect, the child is not incorrigible. The child's relationship with
things and adults can straighten him out, and children are therefore capable,
thanks to the cumulative effects of those relationships, of infinite perfectibility.
This image of the perfectibility of the human race, which is drawn from cen-
turies-old theories about how the child accedes to rational responsibility, was
reinforced in the nineteenth century by the new interest in the issue of biological
evolution. It was possible to conceptualize the psychical development of the
child as a recapitulation of an earlier phylogenetic evolution, and therefore as the
reproduction of a process. Haeckel and others had no hesitations about doing so.
Conversely, it was possible to argue at this time that the prolongation of the
biological stage of childhood, which is characteristic of the human race, played
a positive role in its evolution. John Fiske claimed that childhood made the man
(Fiske 1871). 8 Psychoanalysis unexpectedly confirmed this view. The figure of
the adult ceased to be regarded as the image that inspired the development of
the child. On the contrary, for a child living in an initial state of dependency, the
image of the adult was the cause of the internalized conflicts that persisted in
the unconscious. Adults learned that their childhood could not be definitively
abolished, and the proliferation of non-directive and non-repressive pedagogic
theories made them receptive to the idea that the child's polymorphous possi-
bilities were a source of values. The meaning of progress was inverted. Wealth,
if not perfection, lay in the source, in the dawn.
It is therefore natural that a new representation of childhood should inspire a

new model of origins. Even if this was not the direct source of his inspiration,
we can now understand how Vladimir Jank6levitch could liken progress to deca-
dence. Compared with the primal state, progress is a form of decadence. The
proof of that is that, in the long term, it produces nostalgia for lost origins and
a desire for regeneration through naivety: 'Degeneration is one of progress's ill-
nesses' (Jank61evitch 1956: 40, cf. 39--49).
The law of the succession of states
It is generally accepted that, in the nineteenth century, from Turgot to Auguste

Comte, the theory of progress could draw support from a certain conception of
the history of the sciences. Condorcet held that the history of the sciences was
useful 'primarily because it provides a better understanding of the march of the
human spirit' (1773: 9). According to both Condorcet and Fontenelle, all other
forms of progress- technical, political and moral- depended upon the progress
of the mathematical and astronomical sciences: Montucla, Bailly, Bossuet and
Saverien shared the common belief that the acquisition of knowledge was a rec-
tilinear and continuous process. Even the realization that there were two types
of what we would now call normal science or two paradigms in mathematics
(Descartes- Newton, Leibniz), mechanics (Descartes- Leibniz) and cosmol-
ogy (Descartes - Newton), did not shake their conviction that reason is self-
identical.
At this time in Germany, the history of philosophy was being written as a
history of progress. In his important study of this period, Lucien Braun (1973)
stresses the importance German authors attached to breaking down the concept
of progress into the concepts of goal, link and subject. The historical irony is
that, as we can see from the discussion of the science in the preface to the second
edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant endorsed the 'cumulative-linear
progress' theory of the European Aufkliirung, whereas his so-called Copernican
Revolution in philosophy, or his critical philosophy, was to provoke a crisis within
the problematic of the history of philosophy (Braun 1973: 205-24). Reason's
progress through history must, henceforth and forever, make reason self-
transparent and self-identical.
More ironically still, the history of science was to destroy the linear image of
scientific progress by calling into question the assumption that the properties of
a straight line were such that a parallel had to be drawn from a point outside it.
Because contemporary mathematicians failed to notice Saccheri and Lambert's
attempts to simulate a revolution in Euclidean geometry the philosophers of the
nineteenth century knew nothing of the theoretical richness of 'Non', which is
now a commonplace. Non-Newtonian mechanics did even more than non-
Euclidean geometry to introduce the idea of dialectical rectification into the
history of the sciences. Continuous progress is a conservative epistemological
concept. Predictions of progress turn today into tomorrow. But it is only when
The decline of the idea of progress 319
tomorrow comes that we can speak of yesterday. Referring to the crises affecting
the basic notions of geometry and analysis in the early twentieth century and to
the use of complex numbers and infinite series, Jean Cavailles writes:
The results obtained with these new instruments brought about a transform-
ation of the entire mathematical system: non-Euclidean models are trans-
formed into a projective geometry constructed with the help of complex
numbers, theories of arbitrary functions represented by trigonometric series
... what had once been a real mathematics was now no more than a particu-
lar case within the new mathematics, and could be explained by it
(Cavailles 1938: 45-6).
Instruments and processes of distribution
The third of the epochs into which Condorcet divides the course of history is
the site of two events with a long-term historical import: the emergence of an
agricultural way of life which tied men to the land and the invention of alpha-
betic writing. Both are preconditions for cumulative progress. In the absence of
the former, there can be no stabilized or organized society, and therefore no per-
manent need for communication. In the absence of the latter, there can be no
means of communication. Without communications, it is impossible to capital-
ize on experience and to enrich knowledge.
Condorcet's seventh and eighth epochs are the site of two technological
developments with an immediate political effect: the invention of gunpowder
and of printing. Here, he is merely following Bacon's Novum Organum (Book I,
proposition 129), which also mentions the magnetic compass, and which
describes all these inventions as recent and as having obscure origins. 9
One can readily understand why the Enlightenment regarded the increased
availability of books and the appearance of newspapers as promoting the spread
of education, public information and the exercise of reason, despite the obstacles
of censorship. It was inconceivable, at this time, that the day would come when
the view that the invention of the alphabet and typography were forces of cul-
tural emancipation could be contested. And yet that is precisely what occurred
with the invention and spread of the modern mass media of radio and television.
Just as Rousseau denounces writing as an instrument that divides men and
destroys all forms of conviviality in his Essai sur l'origine des langues, Marshall
McLuhan (1962) deplores the fact that men nourished on printed matter are
becoming psychic cripples. Technological advances in the audio-visual means of
communication are a precondition for a reversal of the direction of progress and
for the restoration of affective structures bound up with a traditional social
structures. 10
The dissipation of the effects that new inventions were initially expected to
produce is even more obvious in the case of weaponry than in that of means of
communication. According to Condorcet, artillery brought about the destruction
of feudalism in the past, and will in the future help to lessen even more murder-
ous conflicts. Condorcet is one of a long line of authors to have commented on
the invention of artillery and its effects. They include Montesquieu (1721),
Mercier (1787, 1: 48), Balzac (a comment in Le Cabinet des Antiques), Michelet,
who sings the praises of the 'levelling canon ball' which set the people free in his
Introduction al'Histoire Universelle, Renan, who predicted that the application of
science to armaments would result in one people's world domination (Renan
1914: 105-9), and Rene Berthelot, according to whom, 'The modern world began
with the invention of artillery' (Berthelot 1930: 98-102).
We know that history has dismissed the commonplace progressive argument
that the generalized fear of scientifically revolutionary weapons would force
nations into rivalry in the field of economic power. Raymond Aron (1951) is more
successful than most in explaining why the First World War lasted so long and
inspired such passions because he invokes what he calls 'the technological sur-
prise', or the dimension of fire-power. The destructive effects of means which
are hyperbolic when compared with the initial ends influenced the drafting of a
peace treaty that caused a Second World War, and the technological surprise that
exploded at Hiroshima.
The cumulative experience of the unpredictability of the political and social
effects of technological inventions, transcending the effects of previous inven-
tions withip the same technological family, provides grounds for saying that
Aron's notion of a technological surprise is, in terms of political and social
history, an equivalent to Bachelard's notion of an epistemological break in the
history of the sciences.
The trajectory and direction of motion
The manner in which the technological, political and cultural effects of the
human development progressively humanize men must, ultimately, be related to
the vision that sees humanity as a species confined to the surface of the terres-
trial globe. In the foreword to his Esquisse, Condorcet attempts to show how,
given the continuous expansion of social groups, the subject of progress could,
in the long term, be seen as a single people. Determining the original centre (or
centres) and the direction (or directions) of processes of distribution in fact
means outlining a geographical history and drawing a map of progress, or a
survey of the intersections and itineraries that transmit what we would now call
information.
Like many others before him and after him, Condorcet accepted that the real
trajectory of progress should be modelled on the apparent East-West trajectory
of the sun. Alphabetic writing, which is in a sense the absolute invention on
which progress, defined both as a fact and as a normative idea of history, is based,
is described as originating in the encounter between Africa and Asia. The centres
of expansion and the places where relapses into barbarism were followed by a
renaissance are situated on a line that runs from East to West: 11 Athens, Italy,
The decline of the idea of progress 321
Paris, Muslim Spain, England and the United States of America. America is a
new accident, and it will in its turn discover its West. It is as though the course
of progress cannot be interrupted now that it has reached the Far West, and a
new figure of progress appears. It is now moving from West to East as peoples
draw up Constitutions that guarantee the freedom and equal rights of indi-
viduals. The Revolution is moving from West to East, from America to Europe,
beginning with France. Condorcet is outlining what might be termed the law of
the increasing radicalization of the Revolution as it moves from West to East. 12
It is as though the Revolution had to become more total as it moves east, because
it must, in the societies it turns upside down, overcome the effects of their
belated decision to take the path to progress. The older, which in fact means the
less accidental, the nature of power, the greater the violence.

The trace of this geographical trajectory of Enlightenment or this image of
the history of progress long outlived its inventors. 13 As we have seen, Hugo saw
progress as a mysterious power that brought East and West together in the pyra-
mids. Proudhon mocked that theory, but summarized it very well. 14 The heavi-
est blows were no doubt struck by Nietzsche, especially in The Will to Power:
'The nineteenth century does not represent progress over the sixteenth; and the
German spirit of 1888 represents a regress from the German spirit of 1788.
"Mankind" does not advance, it does not even exist .... Man represents no
progress over the animal: the civilized tenderfoot is an abortion compared to the
Arab and Corsican; the Chinese is a more successful type, namely more durable,
than the European' (Nietzsche 1901: 55). This is why Bernard Pautrat can rightly
describe the idea of the eternal return that obsesses Zarathustra as 'the return of
the East' (Pautrat 1971: 329f. ). When he entitled the book he published towards
the end of the First World War The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler no
doubt thought that he was finally discrediting the image of a progressive
enlightenment which the philosophers of the eighteenth century had embell-
ished by borrowing from the history of astronomy.
Obstacles and dangers
While Condorcet expected progress to continue in the future, he also voiced

some worrying questions. While progress in knowledge, the arts and industry
might be expected to result in increased well-being, would not the increase in
the number of human beings have the opposite effect of restricting or even
reversing the progress that had made it possible? Condorcet took the view that
the discrepancy between demographic growth and the growth rate of the means
of subsistence could be narrowed by the progress of reason in the domain of pro-
creation, or in others words birth control. 15 Conversely, the art of prolonging
human life was within medicine's grasp.
In short, the philosophy of the eighteenth century was not unaware of the
problem of the scarcity of resources relative to the number of subjects in need.
It imagined that the problem would be resolved by quantitative controls on
human life and by the art of converting the elements into substances we could
use. Condorcct was, like so many other economists of his day, aware that the
transformation of agricultural societies into industrial societies made their sur-
vival problematic. But in his day, no one could imagine the quantity of mineral
raw materials large-scale industry would consume. We have already alluded to
the fears of Renan and Cournot. The issue was soon vulgarized. Pecuchet, who
takes a gloomy view of the future of humanity, announces l the J'End of the world
because heat runs out'. Bouvard takes the rosy view, and replies: 'There will be
travel to the stars - and when the earth is used up humanity will move over to
the stars' (Flaubert 1881: 286, 287). Such was Flaubcrt's description, written in
about 187 5, of the mingled hopes and fears of the nineteenth century.
A few months before his death, Georgcs Dumezil admitted: 'I would have
liked to have been a man of the eighteenth century, but one with a greater sense
of the ephemeral and the inaccessible than those great minds. I would have liked
to have been a d'Alembert or a Montesquieu who had read Darwin and Bopp'
(Dumezil 1987: 194). Darwin: the man who inserted the living actor of human
history into the history of Life. Bopp: the man who made Language an object of
knowledge and not an instrument of knowledge, and who discovered that lan-
guage is a repository of tradition and a collective memory of ways of life. It is
obvious that previous theorists of Progress did not conceptualize historical evol-
ution as a form of identity, and did not use means that had nothing to do with
any historicity to reconstruct how origins were transcended and how possibilities
developed. The fragility of its models and the failure of most of its predictions
revealed the limits of the idea's validity.
Living in the twentieth century, we can understand why the nineteenth
century took a critical view of the eighteenth, even though it thought it was
following in its footsteps. We are now in a better position than the nineteenth
century to realize the importance of what the physical sciences of the day had to
admit: there is a principle of conservation, hut there is also a principle of inequal-
ity or dissipation which governs irreversible transformations. An isolated
material system with a singular structure is an unstable system, and its evolution
necessarily produces a more stable, or more probable, structure. Similarly, a
meaningful message carries a quantity of inf(Jrmation that can decrease in the
course of communication, hut cannot increase. In the eighteenth century, it was
impossible to arrive at the idea that the transmission of knowledge implies, by
the very fact of its transmission, a possibility that the metaphor of illumination
cannot explain: distortion. With light, there is no 'noise'.
The classic issue raised by nineteenth-century physics, namely that of the
quantitative but non-qualitative equivalence between mechanical work and heat,
was in a sense modelled on an issue in political economy and social justice: the
non-equivalence between a quantity of useful labour and its remuneration in
ewnomic value in capitalist society. A self-proclaimed scientific socialism set
itself the task of finding a solution. The difference between the real effects of the
industrial utilization of heat and the supposed effects of the pedagogic propa-
gation of light now became apparent. According to the philosophy of progress,
The decline of the idea o_{progress 323
the progress of reason dispelled prejudices just as the sun dispelled darkness.
But, for dialectical socialism, the wretched condition of the working class was
not, like obscurity, the result of the absence of something. It was the effect of a
despoilment. Improving it was not a matter of recowring something that was
missing, but of winning back something that had been taken away. Making
progress a reality for all implied a second revolution: a true revolution that could
replace idealist predictions with a materialist theory of history.
The 'motive power of fire' did not, however, undermine the progressive virtue
symbolized by light simply because it had indirect socio-economic effects. Its
contribution to the decline of the idea of progress was through the importation
into philosophy of concepts elaborated by the founders of thermodynamics.

Following Clausius, \\"illiam Thomson (Lord Kelvin) established the principle
of the dissipation or loss of energy in 1852: not all the energy inside a system
can be transformed into mechanical energy. The dissipation of energy soon came
to be seen as a portent of death. The German physicist Wilhelm Ostwald
( 1853-92) attempted in his Dte philnsophi,· der IJ erte (1913) to use the second
principle of thermodynamics as the basis for a theory of values. Given that it has
been demonstrated that the producti,·ity of a machine is the ratio between its
efficiency and the quantity of energy supplied, the value of different human
activities can be calculated in similar terms. Hence the exhortation not to waste
energy, or to use it as efficiently as possible.:\ parallel has inevitably been drawn
with the famous 'economy of thinking' principle celebrated by Richard Avenar-
ius and Ernst \lac h. who were spiritual advisers to the \"ienna Circle.
The history of the use of energy was later thrown into turmoil by the dis-
cm·ery of the atomic nucleus and the invention of nuclear energy. Yet, while we
can justifiably speak of scientific and technological progress, the relationship
between human acti,·ities and the exhaustion of human resources does not
change. The nuclear energy that is freed is used as thermal energy. As a result
of the increase in entropy, units of mass-energy and of electromagnetic radiation
have replaced units of heat and light. But because the first application of nuclear
physics was the :\-bomb, nuclear energy evokes the terrifying face of death, even
though it is a source of life on the surface of the earth.
Few of today's Pecuchets fear that the world will end when heat runs out, but
many of them imagine that they will be buried by the debris of progress. By using
a few concepts borrowed from the fashionable science of ecology, they have elab-
orated a pseudo-philosophical theory of a return to a natural, simple life. Nature
is good box-office. The concept of 'wildness' takes on a new positive value as we
react against evolutionary theories that have had their day in the human sciences.
Many enemies of progress, which has now been compromised by its apologists
in the so-called consumer society, believe that they have brought about a
Jansenist conversion by taking up a romantic theme that is dear to German
thought: nostalgia for a primal Resene of authenticity where beings can rest safe
from change and degeneration; a Resen·e where everything is presen·ed. As
history has demonstrated, this theme often conceals the vertigo of nihilism
behind the charms of archaism.
It is, however, possible to reject evolutionism and the linear conception of

progress without, hopefully, succumbing to the temptations of a retrograde
naivety. We can, that is, compare the history of different societies, or different
states of the same society, in various ways and in accordance with several cri-
teria. This position is defended by Claude Levi-Strauss in many of his works,
and is expounded with particular vigour in two short texts: 'Race and History'
(Levi-Strauss 1952) and 'Diogene couche' (Levi-Strauss 1955a). 16 So-called
primitive societies do not represent stages that have been transcended by the
progress made by so-called civilized societies; they represent different solutions
to analogous problems, and their value cannot be gauged by standards imported
from outside. Anyone who studies structured sets of cultural modes of behav-
iour learns to take a relativistic view and to note that progress in one direction
may be accompanied by stagnation or regression in another. The anthropolo-
gist's relativism gives rise to a cultural tolerance that the unilinear theory of
progress did nothing to encourage. 'Enthusiastic partisans of the idea of
progress are in danger of failing to recognize - because they set so little store
by them - the immense riches accumulated by the human race on either side
of the narrow furrow on which they keep their eyes fixed; by underrating the
achievements of the past, they devalue all those which still remain to be accom-
plished' (Levi-Strauss 1955b: 515). If we look at it as a whole, civilization is a
mechanism of prodigious complexity, and its function is to increase entropy. 17
In a sense, cold societies with a repetitive history dissipate less energy than hot
societies with a cumulative history whose activity presupposes a high degree of
inequality.
Claude Levi-Strauss has succeeded in explaining the paradox of 'civilized
man' who, like Levi-Strauss himself, challenges the progressive ideology of his
own society by pointing out that it began to take an interest in the study of
lesser societies at the very moment when it was bringing about their destruc-
tion in the name of progress. In similar vein, he reacts violently to certain of
the statements made by Sartre in his Critique de la raison dialectique. 18 Sartre
takes up and reworks some of the themes of the philosophy inspired by the
energetics of the nineteenth century: scarcity and inertia. 'A man is a practical
organism living with a multiplicity of fellow men in a field of scarcity' (Sartre
1960: 688; cf. Sartre 1960: 223). The scarcity of resources in the practico-inert
field of human activity, be it a scarcity of natural resources or of machines,
forces man to endure the effects of an expenditure of energy in the form of
labour. 19 The societies in which scarcity founds the possibility, but not the
reality, of history include some backward societies where 'stunted' men live on
neglected land in groups stabilized in repetition, and their legendary history is
the negation of history (Sartre 1960: 203). Levi-Strauss argues that it is it
unacceptable to discredit cold societies on the grounds that their means of
production are archaic, or in other words because their expenditure of energy
is sober. Acceptance of peace in equilibrium, inertia and ultimately death,
means a studied rejection of any culture that claims to be able to define the
criterion that allows it to judge its own progress and the backwardness of other
culture. 20
In his Critique, Sartre writes that Marxism is History becoming self-con-
scious (Sartre 1960: 203). We do not have to understand this proposition in
Sartre's own terms. Marxism boasts of having discovered the practical precon-
ditions for the realization of progress in a critique of the alienation that forced
bourgeois thought to believe that it had discovered the law of progress. The
revolutionary analysis of the social and economic implications of capitalist
mechanization made no attempt to reach the same conclusions that physicists
and philosophers reached when they analysed energy and entropy. The idea of
progress, which has now become dialectical, is preserved by militancy, but it
retains its cultural function of millenarian prophecy. Progress now consists,

according to Marxists, in converting to the revolutionary conception of
progress those societies which, if they have not been colonized or in other words
exploited in the name of civilization, have been abandoned to their primitivism.
The new 'practical' idea of progress is realized at the factual level, is a product
of history and, curiously enough, once more spreads on an East to West trajec-
tory. The progressive sun still rises in the East, and moves from Moscow to
Cuba. But some of its observers wonder if the vehicle for this Marxist version
of progress conforms to the authentic Marxist design for the vehicle. At this
point, we might recall that Jean Hyppolite used 'Hegel in the West' as the title
for a paper in which he stressed the importance of the writings of the young
Marx, his debts to Hegel and his existential meditation on alienation (Hyppo-
lite 1971: 262-7 4). Why should there not be a 'Marx in the West', who is not
quite identical to the Eastern Marx? Jiirgen Habermas raised a similar question
when he wondered how controls similar to those exercised over technology by
science could be applied to hitherto poorly regulated social institutions (Haber-
mas 1971). 21
While attempts have been made to fuse the teachings of Marx and Freud, it
seems that we cannot draw the same conclusions from The Communist Manifesto
and Civilization and its Discontents. According to the former, the death of a social
class that produces its own gravediggers has been announced. According to the
latter, humanity is its own gravedigger to the extent that the death drive is at
work in the aggressive behaviour that makes collective life impossible. Freud
incorporated concepts borrowed from nineteenth-century energetics into his
theory of the drives. Much of Jacques Lacan's seminar of 1959-60 was devoted
to the study of the death drive and stressed the similarity between the drive and
a material system that strives to return to a state of equilibrium (Lacan 1986). In
a later study, Jean Laplanche traces this idea's source back to the teachings of
Helmholtz (Laplanche 1970). This is not the place to discuss the place and role
of the death drive in psychoanalysis. Here, we can do no more than give an
updated account of the conditions under which an idea lost its prestige and its
role.
At the end of Civilization and its Discontents, Freud writes in 1929: 'The fateful
question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent
their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their
communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction' (Freud
1930: 339-40). Before leaving Vienna for London in 1938, he wrote in the first
Prefatory Note to Moses and Monotheism: 'We are living in a specially remark-
able period. We find to our astonishment that progress has allied itself with bar-
barism' (Freud 1939: 295). Readers of a certain age are now in a position to add
many other examples to those invoked by Freud.
Notes
Anyone who is surprised to see Victor Hugo being cited with reference to a philo-
sophical issue should consult Renouvier (1900) and chapter XIV of Renouvier (1893).
Jean Maurel has recently detected the same qualities in Hugo (Maurell985).
2 In a lecture given in 1983, Michel Foucault uses this passage from the Conflict of
Faculties to interpret Kant's 'An answer to the question: "What is Enlightenment?"' and
to demonstrate that Kant attaches less importance to the Revolution itself than to the
potential moral disposition revealed by the general enthusiasm for the Revolution
(Foucault 1984). Nietzsche, on the other hand, sees Kant's argument as a sure sign of his
imbecility: 'Kant werde Idiot'. (Nietzsche 1895: 122) In an earlier passage, he writes
(Nietzsche 1895: 116): '"Progress" is merely a modern idea, that is to say a false idea.'
3 It is impossible in this context not to mention Alexis Philomenko's fine article (1974)
on the idea of progress in Kant.
4 Progress in knowledge (determination of the shape of the earth), in craftsmanship
(the use of chronometers to measure longitude), in medicine (inoculations against
smallpox) and in jurisprudence (Beccaria's penal law reforms), etc.
5 'The scientific conception of social development, considered in the whole of its
duration, was essentially impossible so long as the basic stability of our astronomical
constitution had not been suitably demonstrated through the general application of the
law of gravity, as the continuity of this evolution is, within certain limits, a precondition
for that stability', Cours de philosophic positive 49th lesson.
6 Ernest Renan, Dialogues philosophiques 2nd dialogue, 'Probabilities', p. 67: 'The
earth's forces are finite. It is clear that if the mechanical theory of heat does not succeed
in finding ways to substitute for coal within five or six hundred years, mankind will
regress to a sort of mediocrity and will have little chance of escaping it'; A. Cournot,
Considerations sur la marche de idees et des evenements dans les temps modernes (1872):
'Having been, or having believed himself to be, the king of creation, man has been
reduced or elevated (as one pleases) to the role of having a franchise on a planet. By
sounding the depth and thickness of the fossil beds it took thousands of centuries to lay
down, and which had been convulsed by so many revolutions before man appeared on
earth and which his industrial activity is now devouring so rapidly, man has been able to
locate the first indices of these providential destinies in an infinitely distant past, and to
sense that the future is measured not only in terms of individuals but in terms of nations
and in previously unthought ways. Once he had an estate to tend; now he has a mine to
exploit' ([1872]1934: 203---4).
7 Comte (1912, Ill: 63-73): the sequence of the three states (theological, metaphysical
and positive) can be broken down into three laws of succession: fiction, abstraction and
demonstration (understanding); military conquest, feudal defence and industrial labour
(action); and civic, collective and universal (emotion).
8 Cf. Canguilhem et al. (1962)
9 A recent commentator (Needham 1986: section 30(h)) on the origins of these inven-
tions in Chinese society draws attention to the fact that, while they had a revolutionary
impact in Europe, they did nothing to alter the 'bureaucratic feudal' structure of Chinese
society.
10 In her study of Condorcet on education, Catherine Kintzler cites a Recteur
d'Academie de !'Education Nationale as saying: 'Schools are not meant to promote
culture .... Gutenburg's era is drawing to a close. The culture of the year 2000 will unde-
niably be based upon other cultural criteria, many of them audio-visual. ... We are
moving towards a culture of orality and going back to our sources, and I am convinced
that modernizing the education system is something we have to come to grips with'
(Kintzler 1984: 301).
11 Jerusalem and Palestine do not figure in this Tableau. Condorcet views the Christian
religion as a realm of darkness: 'One of the prime characteristics of Christianity was its
scorn for the human sciences.'

12 'In France ... the revolution must embrace the entire economy of society, change
all social relations, and penetrate every link in the political chain.'
13 Hegel adopts the idea that universal history moves from East to West in the final
chapters of his Reason in History (Hegel 1837).
14 'Progress or social virtuality has been represented as a fluid running through each
race in its turn, and moving from East to West like the sun, from the Indians to the
Bactrians, from the Bactrians to the Assyrians and from them to the Greeks, from the
Greeks to the Romans and then to the Celts and finally the Americans. At the end of his
life, Nodier exclaimed: ''America is already old. To China!" All this does not stand up to
a moment's discussion, it is merely idle chatter and the Germanic solemnity of the Hegels
and the rest of them does not make it any more profound or true' (Proudhon, letter of 27
September 1853 to Monsieur X in Proudhon 1929).
15 Renan's view (1886) of the future was more audacious than Condorcet's: 'Until now,
men have been born and educated almost at random, and no science has understood the
manner of their birth ... And what will happen when man understands the law that deter-
mines the sex of an embryo and when he can apply it at will? And this is one of the discov-
eries that can be expected to be made in the near future.'
16 Levi-Strauss (1955a) takes up the themes of his earlier paper (1952) in a lively
response to the criticisms of Roger Caillois (1955).
17 'But far from this part [in creation] according man an independent position, or his
endeavours - even if doomed to failure - being opposed to universal decline, he himself
appears as perhaps the most effective agent working towards the disintegration of the
original order of things and hurrying on powerfully organized matter towards ever greater
inertia, an inertia which one day will be final' (Levi-Strauss 1955b: 542).
18 Levi-Strauss's critique of Sartre can be found in the final chapter of The Savage
Mind (Levi-Strauss 1963).
19 'Everything is born of the line that both unites and divides the great physical forces
in the world of inertia and exteriority (insofar as the nature and orientation of the
energetic transformations that characterize them give a certain status of improbability to
life in general and to human life in particular) and practical organisms (insofar as their
praxis is designed to include them in their structure of inertia), that is in their role as
transformers of energy' (Sartre 1960: 369).
20 Raymond Aron discusses Levi-Strauss's critique of Sartre in his Histoire et dialec-
tique de la violence (Aron 1973).
21 Habermas argues that 'Marx did not reckon with the possible emergence at every
level of a discrepancy between scientific control of the material conditions of life and a
· democratic decision-making process. This is the philosophical reason why socialists never
anticipated the authoritarian welfare state, where social wealth is relatively guaranteed
while political freedom is excluded' (Habermas 1971: 58).
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Notes on contributors
Alain Badiou is a writer and philosopher. His numerous books include, most
recently, D 'un Disastre Obscur (droit, it at, politique) ( 1991) and Conditions ( 1992).
Pierre Bourdieu is Professor of Sociology at the College de France and is the

author of numerous works in anthropology, sociological theory, the sociology of
education and the sociology of culture.
Georges Canguilhem (1904-95) held the Chair in the History of Sciences at the
Sorbonne from 1955 to 1971, and was one of France's leading historians and
philosophers of science. A collection of his writings has been translated into

English under the title A Vital Rationalist: Selected Writings .from Georges
Canguilhem (Zone, 1994).
Franfois Delaporte is Professor of Philosophy at the University ofPicardy Oules

Verne). Specializing in the history of medicine, he has written a history of the
origins of botany, Nature's Second Kingdom: Explorations of Vegetality in the
Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1986), The History ofYellow
Fever: An Essay on the Birth of Tropical Medicine (Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press,
1991). He is currently writing a History of Myopathies.
Mike Cane studied at Leicester University and at the LSE. Since 1972 he has
taught in the Department of Social Sciences at Loughborough University. He
has written widely on social theory with particular reference to the French tra-
dition, and is the author of a study of gender theory published as Harmless
Lovers? Gender Theory and Personal Lives (Routledge, 1993).
Colin Cordon edited and eo-translated Power I Knowledge ( 1980), a collection of

Michel Foucault's interviews and writings, and co-edited The Foucault Effect
(1991). He was an editor of the journals Radical Philosophy and U5C, and trans-
lated Michele Le Doeuff's The Philosophical Imaginary. He works in the area of
medical informatics.
Monica Greco was born in Italy and studied at Sussex University (BA, MA),
European University Institute (Ph.D.). She is Lecturer in Sociology at Gold-
smiths College, London. She is the author of Illness as a WrJrk of Thought (forth-
coming 1998), and various articles.
fan Hacking was born in Canada and studied at University of British Colum-
bia (physics) and Cambridge University (moral sciences). He has taught
at UBC, Cambridge, Stanford and is now University Professor of Philosophy
at the University of Toronto. Author of Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personal-
ity and the Sciences of Memory (1995); Le Plus pur nominalisme. L'inigme de
Goodman: 'Vleu' et usages de 'Vleu' (1993); The Taming of Chance (1990);
Notes on contributors 331
Representing and Intervening (1983); and four earlier books. Forthcoming are
Mad Travellers: Reflections on the Reali~y ofMental Illnesses and The Social Con-
struction of What?
Dominique Lecourt is Professor at the Universite de Paris VII/Denis Diderot. He

is the author of numerous books, including, in English, Marxism and Epistemol-
ogy: Bachelard, Canguilhem, Foucault (New Left Books, 1975), Proletarian
Science? The Case ofLysenko (New Left Books, 1977) and L'Ordre et lesjeux: le
positivisme logique en question (Grasset, 1981), Le philosophic sansfeinte (Hallier-
Michel, 1982) and Promithee, Faust, Frankenstein: fondements imaginaires de
l'ithique (Synthe!abo, 1996).
David Macey studied at University College, London. He is the translator of

numerous works from the French; author of Lacan in Contexts (1988) and The
Lives of Michel Fouwult; biography of Frantz Fanon in preparation.
Annemarie Mol studied in Utrecht (medicine and philosophy) and Paris (anthro-
pology). She then worked at the universities of Groningen and Maastricht. She
is currently a Socrates Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of
Twente and a research fellow of the Program on Ethics and Policy of the Nether-
lands Organization for Scientific Research. She is the author of Ziek is het woord
niet (1989), with Peter van Lieshout, of The Body Multiple (in press), and of
various articles.
Thomas Osborne holds degrees from Oxford University, the London School of
Economics and from Brunei University in West London. He is currently Lec-
turer in the Department of Sociology, University of Bristol, UK; author of
Aspects of Enlightenment: Social Theory and the Ethics of Truth ( 1998).
Paul Rabinow is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California at

Berkeley. He is the author of Frenc·h Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social
Environment (MIT Press, 1989) and, with Hubert Dreyfuss, of Michel Foucault:
Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago, 1983) and editor of The
Foucault Reader (Penguin, 1984 ). His most recent books are Making PCR: A
Story of Biotechnology (Chicago, 1996) and Essays in the Anthropology ofReason
(Princeton, 1986). He is currently working on a book tentatively entitled French
DNA.
Nikolas Rose is Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of

London. He studied biology and psychology at Sussex University, and sociology
at the University of London Institute of Education. He is the author of a number
of studies of the social and conceptual history of the human sciences, most
recently Inventing Ourselves (Cambridge University Press, 1996). He is currently
working on the history of biological and genetic psychiatry in the twentieth
century.
332 Notes on contributors
Lorna Weir is Associate Professor of Sociology, York University, Canada. She is

a member of the National Network on Environments and Women's Health,
editor of Governing Medically Assisted Human Reproduction (1996) and various
articles on social movements. She is currently working on the governance of
pregnancy.
RO u T L E D G E
Citizenship and the Ethics of Care
Feminist Considerations on Justice, Morality and Politics
Selma Sevenhuijsen, University of Utrecht, The Netherlands
This book mark~ a new and significant contribution to the debates surrounding the whole nature of
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Canguilhem, Georges - The Decline of The Idea of Progress

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Canguilhem, Georges - The Decline of The Idea of Progress

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This article was downloaded by: [York University Libraries]

On: 15 November 2014, At: 14:30

Economy and Society

The decline of the idea

To cite this article: Georges Canguilhem (1998) The decline of

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03085149800000023

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Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of

Translated by David Macey

The philosophers of the Enlightenment conceived Progress as evidence of mankind's

Keywords: progress; the Enlightenment; history of science.

Economy and Society Volume 27 Numbers 2o3 May 1998: 313-329

increasing 'unless physical re,·olutions prevent it from doing so'. Condorcet's

Esquisse he links the progress of perfectibility to the continued existence of the

Even before the so-called Carnot-Clausius principle had identified change

In the theory of progress, as formulated by Turgot and Condorcet and as sys-

manifestations of the potentialities contained within the germ of an organism.

It is therefore natural that a new representation of childhood should inspire a

The law of the succession of states

It is generally accepted that, in the nineteenth century, from Turgot to Auguste

Instruments and processes of distribution

The trajectory and direction of motion

less accidental, the nature of power, the greater the violence.

Obstacles and dangers

While Condorcet expected progress to continue in the future, he also voiced

into philosophy of concepts elaborated by the founders of thermodynamics.

It is, however, possible to reject evolutionism and the linear conception of

retains its cultural function of millenarian prophecy. Progress now consists,

scorn for the human sciences.'

Aron, Raymond ( 19 51) Les Guerres en Enlightenment and revolution', trans.

rebours', La Nouvelle Revue fran[aise 24 239-386.

Livre VII: L'Ethique de la psychanalyse, Needham,Joseph (1986) Science and

and Dorothy Weightman, London: Krailsheimer, Harmondsworth: Penguin,

Pierre Bourdieu is Professor of Sociology at the College de France and is the

philosophers of science. A collection of his writings has been translated into

Franfois Delaporte is Professor of Philosophy at the University ofPicardy Oules

Colin Cordon edited and eo-translated Power I Knowledge ( 1980), a collection of

Dominique Lecourt is Professor at the Universite de Paris VII/Denis Diderot. He

David Macey studied at University College, London. He is the translator of

Paul Rabinow is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California at

Nikolas Rose is Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of

Lorna Weir is Associate Professor of Sociology, York University, Canada. She is

feminist ethics and gender thpories is proposed.

Feminist Visions of Development

Rout/edge books are available from all good bookshops.

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PLEASE USE BLOCK CAPITALS

1997 SUBSCRIPTION RATES 1998 SUBSCRIPTION RATES

LIBRARY RECOMMENDATION FORM

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