How we are all progressives, really

Hello everyone.

I thought you might be interested in a piece I’ve had published for Unherd, titled ‘The progressive mindset has won: We all think history is on our side’.

It considers an idea that I put forward in The Progress Trap but develops it further: of how progressivism is embedded in our existential bloodstream, in our reflexive ways of talking and seeing the world, to the extent that we might all be seen as progressive at least at certain moments, in certain things we say.

And this goes for people who publicly reject progressive ideology too. My spur for writing the piece was seeing a slide from the Heterodox Social Science conference organised by Professor Eric Kaufmann at the University of Buckingham in June. The slide proclaimed ‘a Post-Progressive Era’ as one of the foundation points for a new ‘Buckingham Manifesto’ for the social sciences.

Now I know Eric and get on well with him. He had even read my book manuscript and provided a few interesting comments for the jacket. But this whole idea of the ‘Post-Progressive Era’ got my progressive radar buzzing. For to see what you’re doing as a progress from one era to another is classically progressive in the wider sense, in how you relate to time and your place in it.

And I think it shows how we often reflexively fall into these ways of thinking and justifying what we do - by presenting them as somehow historically, sociologically ordained. It’s a habit - and it comes with an authoritarian tinge, the message that we must defer to this historical, sociological authority. Eric’s project is just about the least damaging example of this you could find given he’s going against what he calls ‘left-modernist’ domination of the social sciences. However, it has elements of the same style.

I argue in favour of recovering politics as politics, rather than treating it as a branch of the sciences, of giving our instinctive choices a bit more respect - a democratic point of view, you might say; “returning to human agency as a legitimate source of political action.”

I hope you find the article interesting anyway.