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Five Faces of Progress: The Road to Anti-Progress |Prof. Tyson Retz Pt.2 | Ep. 4
About This Episode
In this episode of Notions of Progress - Part Two, we continue exploring the fascinating evolution of progress thinking with Professor Tyson Retz, author of "Progress in the Scale of History" (Cambridge University Press, 2022). In this episode, Professor Retz discusses categories 3-5 of his framework: Relative Progress, Everybody’s Progress and Anti-Progress. He starts this opening by detailing the break from absolute progress to more current conceptions beginning in the 19th century with relative progress. It is during this period that a consciousness arises regarding the unequal costs and benefits that come with progress. This new consciousness extends to re-imagining the relationship between history and progress. These notions challenged previous frameworks that envisioned a progression of stages from “primitive” to more “evolved” civilizations along various paths. In yet another departure, Professor Retz takes us into the 20th century in detailing the rise of neo-liberal ideas around progress and the rejection of deterministic frameworks (e.g. historicism) that prescribe a fixed path for history to follow. It is here that he identifies critical totalitarian impulses that seek to control the course of history armed with the knowledge of these pre-determined forces. Lastly, Professor Retz arrives at the modern era whereby he outlines the turn in historical theories that view humankind within a much larger scale that encompasses a timeline leading back to the big bang and the inclusion of natural histories.
He ends this interview on an optimistic note by highlighting the spirit beyond the enlightenment conception of progress in seeking to inspire collective action to make the world a better place.
No Progress - Why the ancients couldn't conceive of progress as we understand it. "Societies far and wide in the ancient world believed that time destroyed things rather than improved them." (Retz, 2022, p. 13)
Absolute Progress - Universal history, stadial theory (civilizations move through stages), and the emergence of progress as a "collective singular" blending scientific, moral, and human advancement. (Retz, 2022, p. 16)
Relative Progress - Progress as unevenly distributed and context-dependent. "Progress for some mean[s] decline for others." (Retz, 2022, p. 6)
Everybody's Progress - The tension between collective state imposition of historical direction versus spontaneous market order (e.g. Neoliberalism, the rejection of historicism). "Economic growth became the dominant historical narrative in the twentieth century." (Retz, 2022, p. 45)
Anti-Progress (Contemporary) - Contemporary rejection or skepticism toward progress narratives, driven by environmental crisis, a focus on the impact of humans across geological times,deep and big history (an expansive historical view extending well beyond the emergence of human existence and encompassing a wide range of areas of exploration). (Retz, 2022, pp. 7-16, from the Introduction)
We discuss relative progress as recognizing that advancement for some often meant decline for others, Japan's pragmatic modernization inspiring marginalized communities worldwide, movements attempting to separate progress from fixed historical paths (China's iconoclasm destroying the past to create new futures, India blending indigenous traditions with Western ideas), everybody's progress as the postwar project to measure and export development globally through neoliberal frameworks, Hayek's rejection of "historicism" and his claim that "guided progress would not be progress," the paradox that free markets require regulation to stay deregulated, how states use statistics to construct narratives of progress, the expansion of historical thinking (big history, deep history, Anthropocene) that reduces focus on human action, anti-progress as recognition that we may have progressed toward undesirable outcomes or that technology now controls us rather than the reverse, and the tension between cultural pessimism and techno-optimism today.
Japan's influence on "marginalized states" in the late 19th-early 20th century - Japan's rapid modernization after defeating Russia in 1905 profoundly inspired marginalized communities worldwide, particularly African Americans. Booker T. Washington observed that Japan's rise "has nowhere been studied with greater interest or enthusiasm than by the Negroes of America," demonstrating that non-Western peoples could master Western technologies while maintaining distinct identities.
The paradox at the heart of "free market" ideology - Neoliberalism's central contradiction: "a deregulated market requires regulation in order to keep it deregulated." The supposed spontaneous market order actually demands extensive governmental frameworks to maintain competitive conditions—"no regulation is a form of regulation too."
China's iconoclasm vs. incremental progress - Chinese reformers introduced a radically different conception: "complete destruction of the past in order to create the future you want." Rather than building incrementally from historical foundations, iconoclasm proposed wiping the slate clean to construct entirely new futures unconstrained by historical inheritance.
The technosphere challenges human agency - Peter Haff's theory that "we don't control technology, it controls us"—technology possesses agency separate from human intentions. This represents a fundamental shift from viewing humans as purposeful actors to recognizing non-human forces increasingly shape societal outcomes beyond our control.
The role of expansive conceptions of history - Big history, deep history, and the Anthropocene minimize the role of individual human agency, questioning whether humans remain purposeful historical actors in vast temporal and spatial scales.
Professor Tyson Retz
Associate Professor of Intellectual History, University of Stavanger, Norway
Tyson Retz is an intellectual historian with a PhD from the University of Melbourne. His research examines how concepts like progress, empathy, and historical consciousness have been constructed and contested across different periods.
His first book, Empathy and History: Historical Understanding in Re-enactment, Hermeneutics, and Education (Berghahn Books, 2018), explains the role that empathy played in providing history with a philosophical foundation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Critical of the psychologism of that tradition, the book develops an alternative to 'empathetic understanding' based on Gadamer's hermeneutical reception of Collingwood's logic of question and answer.
His second book, Progress and the Scale of History (Cambridge University Press, 2022), appears in the Cambridge Elements series on Historical Theory and Practice. The Element develops five categories of progress from antiquity to the present day, examining how scale shapes our ability to perceive and claim progress.
He is also the author of numerous peer-reviewed articles that explore the history of history as a concept and practice. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, an editor of the Bloomsbury History: Theory and Method digital resource, and serves on the board of the History Education Research Journal.
00:00 Part 2
00:36 Relative Progress
07:09 Decoupling Progress from History
10:16 Everybody's Progress: A Reaction to Historicism
15:44 Statistics and the Narrative of Progress
18:21 Understanding Anti-Progress
24:59 Cultural Pessimism and Optimism in Progress
30:06 The Dialectical Nature of Progress
35:58 A New Conception of Progress
**Relative Progress:** The late 19th century recognition that progress requires evaluation of who benefits and at what cost. R.G. Collingwood defined it as "gain without corresponding loss," marking a shift from universal claims to distributional questions. Marginalized groups formed global networks pursuing progress "in their own terms," though paradoxically still relied on absolute progress as their measuring stick.
**Japan's Pragmatic Modernization:** Japan's unprecedented embrace of progress as an instrumental tool for national survival rather than moral improvement, inspiring marginalized communities worldwide. Booker T. Washington noted Japan's rise "has nowhere been studied with greater interest or enthusiasm than by the Negroes of America."
**Decoupling Progress from History:** Various movements attempted to separate progress from predetermined historical trajectories. China's iconoclasm proposed "complete destruction of the past to create the future you want," while India's revivalist traditionalism blended indigenous traditions with European liberalism.
**Neoliberalism and Anti-Historicism:** Hayek and the Mont Pelerin Society rejected "historicism" (claiming to know history's direction) as politically dangerous. They argued "guided progress would not be progress," advocating for spontaneous market order over conscious historical planning.
**The Regulation Paradox:** "A deregulated market requires regulation in order to keep it deregulated"—the neoliberal "free market" paradoxically demands extensive regulatory frameworks to maintain competitive conditions.
**Statistics as State Narratives:** The word "statistics" contains "state." Post-WWII governments used statistical data as "hard data that you need to know that your life is getting better," constructing narratives of progress through GDP growth, employment rates, and quality-of-life metrics.
**Anti-Progress and the Technosphere:** Unlike ancient "no progress," contemporary anti-progress recognizes that modern progress may be undesirable or that non-human agencies (technology, environmental systems) increasingly control outcomes. Peter Haff's "technosphere" suggests "we don't control technology, it controls us."
Guest's Work: • Retz, Tyson. Progress and the Scale of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Cambridge University Press • Retz, Tyson. Empathy and History: Historical Understanding in Re-enactment, Hermeneutics, and Education. New York: Berghahn Books, 2018.
Works Discussed in Conversation (full episode including pt 2: • Bury, J.B. The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into Its Origin and Growth. London: Macmillan, 1920. • Edelstein, Ludwig. The Idea of Progress in Classical Antiquity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967. • Dodds, E.R. The Ancient Concept of Progress and Other Essays on Greek Literature and Belief. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973. • Koselleck, Reinhart. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Translated by Keith Tribe. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. • Popper, Karl. The Poverty of Historicism. London: Routledge, 1957. • Collingwood, R.G. The Idea of History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946. • Hayek, Friedrich A. The Road to Serfdom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944. • Chakrabarty, Dipesh. "The Climate of History: Four Theses." Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 197-222.
Related Concepts & Further Exploration: • Stadial Theory and Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations • Georges Sorel's The Illusions of Progress and voluntarist Marxism • Vico's philosophy of history and purposeful human action • The Anthropocene and expanded temporal scales in historiography
Related Notions of Progress Episodes:
Five Faces of Progress: A Conceptual Framework for Historical Change |Prof. Tyson Retz | Ep. 3 Pt.1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7QEgiLV3G8
Coming Soon
The Sophists - A 5th Century Proto-Enlightenment Movement
Where to Listen
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
YouTube
Amazon Music
Website notionsofprogress.com
Email: [email protected]
Notions of Progress examines ideas of technological progress and human advancement from antiquity through contemporary AI debates. Each episode features in-depth conversations with scholars exploring the intellectual history of progress narratives and the debated meanings of advancement. The podcast traces how different historical periods and thinkers have understood—or rejected—the idea that humanity progresses through time.
Host: Marshall Madow is an independent researcher who holds an MA in History from Cambridge University (thesis on Georges Sorel's epistemology of myth) and an MSc from Oxford University, Said Business School (specialty in Complexity Science and Leadership). His current research interests include understanding progress narratives and technological progress from antiquity to the present.
Contact: [email protected]
Social: @NotionsProgress on X/Twitter
For full timestamps, transcript, and additional resources, visit: https://www.notionsofprogress.com/
View all episodes
By Marshall MadowAbout This Episode
In this episode of Notions of Progress - Part Two, we continue exploring the fascinating evolution of progress thinking with Professor Tyson Retz, author of "Progress in the Scale of History" (Cambridge University Press, 2022). In this episode, Professor Retz discusses categories 3-5 of his framework: Relative Progress, Everybody’s Progress and Anti-Progress. He starts this opening by detailing the break from absolute progress to more current conceptions beginning in the 19th century with relative progress. It is during this period that a consciousness arises regarding the unequal costs and benefits that come with progress. This new consciousness extends to re-imagining the relationship between history and progress. These notions challenged previous frameworks that envisioned a progression of stages from “primitive” to more “evolved” civilizations along various paths. In yet another departure, Professor Retz takes us into the 20th century in detailing the rise of neo-liberal ideas around progress and the rejection of deterministic frameworks (e.g. historicism) that prescribe a fixed path for history to follow. It is here that he identifies critical totalitarian impulses that seek to control the course of history armed with the knowledge of these pre-determined forces. Lastly, Professor Retz arrives at the modern era whereby he outlines the turn in historical theories that view humankind within a much larger scale that encompasses a timeline leading back to the big bang and the inclusion of natural histories.
He ends this interview on an optimistic note by highlighting the spirit beyond the enlightenment conception of progress in seeking to inspire collective action to make the world a better place.
No Progress - Why the ancients couldn't conceive of progress as we understand it. "Societies far and wide in the ancient world believed that time destroyed things rather than improved them." (Retz, 2022, p. 13)
Absolute Progress - Universal history, stadial theory (civilizations move through stages), and the emergence of progress as a "collective singular" blending scientific, moral, and human advancement. (Retz, 2022, p. 16)
Relative Progress - Progress as unevenly distributed and context-dependent. "Progress for some mean[s] decline for others." (Retz, 2022, p. 6)
Everybody's Progress - The tension between collective state imposition of historical direction versus spontaneous market order (e.g. Neoliberalism, the rejection of historicism). "Economic growth became the dominant historical narrative in the twentieth century." (Retz, 2022, p. 45)
Anti-Progress (Contemporary) - Contemporary rejection or skepticism toward progress narratives, driven by environmental crisis, a focus on the impact of humans across geological times,deep and big history (an expansive historical view extending well beyond the emergence of human existence and encompassing a wide range of areas of exploration). (Retz, 2022, pp. 7-16, from the Introduction)
We discuss relative progress as recognizing that advancement for some often meant decline for others, Japan's pragmatic modernization inspiring marginalized communities worldwide, movements attempting to separate progress from fixed historical paths (China's iconoclasm destroying the past to create new futures, India blending indigenous traditions with Western ideas), everybody's progress as the postwar project to measure and export development globally through neoliberal frameworks, Hayek's rejection of "historicism" and his claim that "guided progress would not be progress," the paradox that free markets require regulation to stay deregulated, how states use statistics to construct narratives of progress, the expansion of historical thinking (big history, deep history, Anthropocene) that reduces focus on human action, anti-progress as recognition that we may have progressed toward undesirable outcomes or that technology now controls us rather than the reverse, and the tension between cultural pessimism and techno-optimism today.
Japan's influence on "marginalized states" in the late 19th-early 20th century - Japan's rapid modernization after defeating Russia in 1905 profoundly inspired marginalized communities worldwide, particularly African Americans. Booker T. Washington observed that Japan's rise "has nowhere been studied with greater interest or enthusiasm than by the Negroes of America," demonstrating that non-Western peoples could master Western technologies while maintaining distinct identities.
The paradox at the heart of "free market" ideology - Neoliberalism's central contradiction: "a deregulated market requires regulation in order to keep it deregulated." The supposed spontaneous market order actually demands extensive governmental frameworks to maintain competitive conditions—"no regulation is a form of regulation too."
China's iconoclasm vs. incremental progress - Chinese reformers introduced a radically different conception: "complete destruction of the past in order to create the future you want." Rather than building incrementally from historical foundations, iconoclasm proposed wiping the slate clean to construct entirely new futures unconstrained by historical inheritance.
The technosphere challenges human agency - Peter Haff's theory that "we don't control technology, it controls us"—technology possesses agency separate from human intentions. This represents a fundamental shift from viewing humans as purposeful actors to recognizing non-human forces increasingly shape societal outcomes beyond our control.
The role of expansive conceptions of history - Big history, deep history, and the Anthropocene minimize the role of individual human agency, questioning whether humans remain purposeful historical actors in vast temporal and spatial scales.
Professor Tyson Retz
Associate Professor of Intellectual History, University of Stavanger, Norway
Tyson Retz is an intellectual historian with a PhD from the University of Melbourne. His research examines how concepts like progress, empathy, and historical consciousness have been constructed and contested across different periods.
His first book, Empathy and History: Historical Understanding in Re-enactment, Hermeneutics, and Education (Berghahn Books, 2018), explains the role that empathy played in providing history with a philosophical foundation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Critical of the psychologism of that tradition, the book develops an alternative to 'empathetic understanding' based on Gadamer's hermeneutical reception of Collingwood's logic of question and answer.
His second book, Progress and the Scale of History (Cambridge University Press, 2022), appears in the Cambridge Elements series on Historical Theory and Practice. The Element develops five categories of progress from antiquity to the present day, examining how scale shapes our ability to perceive and claim progress.
He is also the author of numerous peer-reviewed articles that explore the history of history as a concept and practice. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, an editor of the Bloomsbury History: Theory and Method digital resource, and serves on the board of the History Education Research Journal.
00:00 Part 2
00:36 Relative Progress
07:09 Decoupling Progress from History
10:16 Everybody's Progress: A Reaction to Historicism
15:44 Statistics and the Narrative of Progress
18:21 Understanding Anti-Progress
24:59 Cultural Pessimism and Optimism in Progress
30:06 The Dialectical Nature of Progress
35:58 A New Conception of Progress
**Relative Progress:** The late 19th century recognition that progress requires evaluation of who benefits and at what cost. R.G. Collingwood defined it as "gain without corresponding loss," marking a shift from universal claims to distributional questions. Marginalized groups formed global networks pursuing progress "in their own terms," though paradoxically still relied on absolute progress as their measuring stick.
**Japan's Pragmatic Modernization:** Japan's unprecedented embrace of progress as an instrumental tool for national survival rather than moral improvement, inspiring marginalized communities worldwide. Booker T. Washington noted Japan's rise "has nowhere been studied with greater interest or enthusiasm than by the Negroes of America."
**Decoupling Progress from History:** Various movements attempted to separate progress from predetermined historical trajectories. China's iconoclasm proposed "complete destruction of the past to create the future you want," while India's revivalist traditionalism blended indigenous traditions with European liberalism.
**Neoliberalism and Anti-Historicism:** Hayek and the Mont Pelerin Society rejected "historicism" (claiming to know history's direction) as politically dangerous. They argued "guided progress would not be progress," advocating for spontaneous market order over conscious historical planning.
**The Regulation Paradox:** "A deregulated market requires regulation in order to keep it deregulated"—the neoliberal "free market" paradoxically demands extensive regulatory frameworks to maintain competitive conditions.
**Statistics as State Narratives:** The word "statistics" contains "state." Post-WWII governments used statistical data as "hard data that you need to know that your life is getting better," constructing narratives of progress through GDP growth, employment rates, and quality-of-life metrics.
**Anti-Progress and the Technosphere:** Unlike ancient "no progress," contemporary anti-progress recognizes that modern progress may be undesirable or that non-human agencies (technology, environmental systems) increasingly control outcomes. Peter Haff's "technosphere" suggests "we don't control technology, it controls us."
Guest's Work: • Retz, Tyson. Progress and the Scale of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Cambridge University Press • Retz, Tyson. Empathy and History: Historical Understanding in Re-enactment, Hermeneutics, and Education. New York: Berghahn Books, 2018.
Works Discussed in Conversation (full episode including pt 2: • Bury, J.B. The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into Its Origin and Growth. London: Macmillan, 1920. • Edelstein, Ludwig. The Idea of Progress in Classical Antiquity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967. • Dodds, E.R. The Ancient Concept of Progress and Other Essays on Greek Literature and Belief. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973. • Koselleck, Reinhart. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Translated by Keith Tribe. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. • Popper, Karl. The Poverty of Historicism. London: Routledge, 1957. • Collingwood, R.G. The Idea of History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946. • Hayek, Friedrich A. The Road to Serfdom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944. • Chakrabarty, Dipesh. "The Climate of History: Four Theses." Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 197-222.
Related Concepts & Further Exploration: • Stadial Theory and Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations • Georges Sorel's The Illusions of Progress and voluntarist Marxism • Vico's philosophy of history and purposeful human action • The Anthropocene and expanded temporal scales in historiography
Related Notions of Progress Episodes:
Five Faces of Progress: A Conceptual Framework for Historical Change |Prof. Tyson Retz | Ep. 3 Pt.1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7QEgiLV3G8
Coming Soon
The Sophists - A 5th Century Proto-Enlightenment Movement
Where to Listen
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
YouTube
Amazon Music
Website notionsofprogress.com
Email: [email protected]
Notions of Progress examines ideas of technological progress and human advancement from antiquity through contemporary AI debates. Each episode features in-depth conversations with scholars exploring the intellectual history of progress narratives and the debated meanings of advancement. The podcast traces how different historical periods and thinkers have understood—or rejected—the idea that humanity progresses through time.
Host: Marshall Madow is an independent researcher who holds an MA in History from Cambridge University (thesis on Georges Sorel's epistemology of myth) and an MSc from Oxford University, Said Business School (specialty in Complexity Science and Leadership). His current research interests include understanding progress narratives and technological progress from antiquity to the present.
Contact: [email protected]
Social: @NotionsProgress on X/Twitter
For full timestamps, transcript, and additional resources, visit: https://www.notionsofprogress.com/