Idea or Concept?: Progress in Comparative Methodological Perspective

The history of the idea of progress and the history of the concept of progress are two different things, not least because they emanate from considerably different intellectual traditions. In anglophone history of ideas, progress has typically been viewed as a belief. Historians of ideas explore the past evaluating the extent to which a given society met certain conditions of belief. By contrast, in the history of concepts as developed by Reinhart Koselleck, progress has occupied the dual role of a ‘basic concept’ that grasps modern sociopolitical reality and a ‘collective singular’ that aggregates previous and adjacent meanings in the one linguistic unit. This article compares these two historical research programmes, highlights their merits and deficiencies, and concludes by offering a new approach to the history of concepts as suggested by R.G. Collingwood’s theory of a scale of forms. In each of the approaches to the history of ideas and concepts addressed, particular attention is given to the problem of what qualifies as progress, and thus to a longstanding problem concerning the attribution of progress to past societies routinely excluded from its history, including those left out by Koselleck’s conventional secular-modern thesis.