Social Change And History Robert Nisbet Pdf

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RobertNisbet (1913-1993), former professor of sociology at Columbia University, is the author of Sociology as an Art Form; The Social Philosophers; Prejudices: A Philosophical Dictionary; The Sociological Tradition; History of the Idea of Progress; and Twilight of Authority, also published by Liberty Fund.

The essence of the Western idea of progress can be simply stated: mankind has advanced in the past, is now advancing, and may be expected to continue advancing in the future. But what, it will be asked, does "advance" mean? Here matters necessarily become more complex. Its meanings have ranged from the most sublimely spiritual advance to the absolutely physical or material. In its most common form the idea of progress has referred, ever since the Greeks, to the advance of knowledge, more particularly the kind of practical knowledge contained in the arts and sciences. But the idea has also been made to refer to the achievement of what the early Christians called earthly paradise: a state of such spiritual exaltation that man's liberation from all tormenting physical compulsions becomes complete. We find the perspective of progress used, especially in the modern world, to give substance to the hope for a future characterized by individual freedom, equality, or justice. But we also find the idea of progress made to serve belief in the desirability and necessity of political absolutism, racial superiority, and the totalitarian state. In sum, there is almost no end to goals and purposes which have been declared the fulfillment or outcome of mankind's progress.

There is a widespread misconception of this idea that I mustimmediately identify. It is commonly believed that the idea of progressis a peculiarly modern idea, largely unknown to the ancientGreeks and Romans, wholly unknown to the Christian thinking thatgoverned Europe from the fall of Rome until the late seventeenthcentury, and first manifest in the currents of rationalism and science.These modern currents, the argument continues, repulsed Christiantheology and made possible, for the first time, a philosophy of humanprogress on this earth. This is the view that governs the contents ofthe single most widely read book on the history of the idea, J.B. Bury,The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into its Origin and Growth,published in 1920. The view, or misconception, is not original withBury. It may be found in most of the philosophical and historicalwritings in the West from the late eighteenth century on. Of all theideas which Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thinkers cherished,none was more favored than the idea of progress, so often used tobuttress other favored ideas, and with it the fancy that only in themodern world was it possible for so noble an idea to have been born. Iventure the guess that in ninety-nine percent of the writing on theidea of progress, the view is commonplace that the idea is inseparablefrom modernity and that it became possible of formulation only afterWestern thought had finally been able to throw the shackles ofChristian and classical-pagan dogma. The ancients, it is said, wereunable to shake off ideas of fate, of degeneration from a golden age,of cycles, and an indemic pessimism. The Christians, although throughbelief in redemption by Christ possessed of optimism and hope, turnedtheir minds entirely to the supernatural, believing that the things ofthis world are of no importance, and foresaw an early end to this worldand the ascent by the blessed to an unchanging, eternal heaven.

So much for conventional wisdom. Let us turn to the results ofstill-emerging, specialized modern scholarship on the differentepisodes in the history of the idea and turn also to the actual texts,from Hesiod to Toynbee, in which faith in progress has been expressedfor some 2,500 years.

The thesis that pagan-classical antiquity was bereft of belief inman's material and moral progress has been utterly destroyed by suchauthoritative works as Ludwig Edelstein, The Idea of Progress in Antiquity (the most comprehensive and thorough); W.K.C. Guthrie, especially his In the Beginning; E.R. Dodds, The Ancient Concept of Progress; and F.J. Teggart, Theory of History and his anthology, The Idea of Progress.The late Professor Edelstein speaks for them all when he tells us thatthe ancients "formulated most of the thoughts and sentiments that latergenerations down to the nineteenth century were accustomed to associatewith the blessed or cursed word progress."

We begin with Hesiod (ca. 700 B.C.) and his Works and Days,second only to Homer in the impact that it had upon classical thinkersfor hundreds of years. We almost inevitably associate Hesiod withbelief in a primordial golden age, from which mankind has been steadilydegenerating, reaching, in Hesiod's time, an iron age that is deemedthe worst of all. Humanity confined its hopes to an early disappearanceof this iron age and mankind's return to the first, that golden agewhen there was no knowledge but, at the same time, no contaminants tomoral virtue and universal happiness. Actually, Hesiod doesn't write ofages at all, but of races: gold, silver, bronze, heroes, and iron.Second, far from there being steady degeneration, the fourth, the ageof "hero-men" comes very close to the original "golden race" inquality. The careful reader will in fact find many lines in Hesiod'swork which testify to his awareness of a great deal of good in theworld around him and, more important, to his conviction that genuinereform is possible if only good men will rally to its cause. Theeminent classicist at Berkeley, George M. Calhoun, in his Growth of Criminal Law in Greece,refers to Hesiod as the first European reformer, and to his book as thebeginning of Western "political literature." F.J. Teggart, in anarticle, "The Argument of Hesiod's Works and Days," Journal of the History of Ideas, January 1947, writes, after long, meticulous analysis of the text, that Hesiod "set before men the first idea of progress."

Plato is the next contributor to the idea of progress. It is aserious error to categorize Plato's rich and complex thought asdirected solely to the perfect, the unchanging, the eternal, or to see(as Karl Popper has in The Open Society, and Its Enemies) areactionary mind interested only in the return of Greece to a remotepast. Such a view, widespread though it be, is false. In Plato'sphilosophy, as F.M. Cornford emphasizes in Plato's Cosmology,two orders of reality exist: one directed toward the world of perfectideas, the other directed toward this life, with all its variety,changes, conflicts, and needs for practical reforms. In The Statesman Plato delineates a historical account of the progress of mankind from lowly origins to its present heights. In Book III of The LawsPlato presents an even more detailed picture of humanity's progressfrom a state of nature, step by step, stage by stage, to ever-higherlevels of culture, economy, and polity. And as Edelstein observes,"Nowhere does Plato contradict the assertion that the arts and sciences. . . should proceed in their search 'for all future time.'"

Although Aristotle refers to cycles in some of his writings onphysics and allied sciences, he had a linear conception of humanhistory, one that began with mankind in the stage of kinship alone,progressed to villages and confederations, and finally reached thepolitical state. Aristotle's Politics makes clear his beliefthat reason and wisdom will lead to continuous progress with acorresponding growth in knowledge. The theme of improvement throughindividual effort and action that we find in his Ethics isclearly set, as Edelstein emphasizes, in a conception of morality thatis not static but dynamic, one to be envisaged in a progress ofdevelopment.

Let us now examine the Christian contribution to the idea ofprogress in the West. It is very large indeed. As I have already noted,the same bent of mind that denies to the Greeks and Romans any realconception of progress is prone (with a few exceptions such as JohnBaillie, The Belief in Progress, which attributes toChristianity what it takes from the pagans) to deny Christianity anyvision of mankind's progress. But, as with the Greeks and Romans, asubstantial and growing body of scholarship demonstrates quite theopposite. Such impressive studies as Gerhard B. Ladner, The Idea of Reform: Its Impact on Christian Thought and Action in the Age of the Fathers; Charles N. Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture; Karl Lwith, Meaning in History; and Marjorie Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Agesmake it certain beyond question that a very real philosophy of humanprogress appears almost from the very beginning in Christian theology,a philosophy stretching from St. Augustine (indeed his predecessors,Eusebius and Tertullian) down through the seventeenth century.

St. Augustine's The City of God has been often called thefirst full-blown philosophy of world history, and it would be hard torefute that statement. Augustine, as even J.B. Bury acknowledges, isthe earliest to emphatically insist upon the unity of mankind, theecumenical idea. This introduces the conception of a history of mankindthat, although predetermined by God in the beginning, has undergone anunfolding, a realization of essence, a struggle toward perfectionthrough forces immanent in humanity. Augustine fused the Greek idea ofgrowth or development with the Jewish idea of a sacred history. As aresult Augustine sets forth the history of mankind in terms of both thestages of growth understood by the Greeks and the historical epochsinto which the Jews divided their own Old Testament history.

Thus, in a celebrated and influential passage, Augustine writes:"The education of the human race, represented by the people of God, hasadvanced, like that of an individual, through certain epochs, or, as itwere, ages, so that it might gradually rise from earthly to heavenlythings, and from the visible to the invisible." The phrase "educationof the human race" and the analogy of the development of mankind togrowth in the individual would persist in Western thought, and we findit both in philosophers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries whowould no doubt have been astounded had the actual origin of the phraseand the analogy been revealed to their secular minds. St. Augustine isnot completely consistent in his divisions of historical time. In onesection, it is twofold: before Christ and after. In another we get whatis perhaps the first usage of a three-stage human history,unquestionably the most popular version in the history of progress,with the nineteenth-century Comte setting it forth in his "Law of ThreeStages." In still another section, at the end of The City of God,Augustine refers to seven stages of earthly history, with the seventhstage (one of happiness and peace on earth) yet to come. Augustinegives it no precise length; it may be short or long. But he is clearthat prior to Judgment Day and the final destruction of the earth,mankind, or at least the blessed, will know an earthly paradise, theconsequence of inexorable historical development from the primitivismof the Garden.

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