On Progress and Historical Change

Abstract

I s progress inevitable? Is it natural? Is it fragile? Is it possible? Is it a problematic concept in the first place? Many people are reexamining these kinds of questions in the wake of the political events of 2016. There is a strange doubleness to experiencing a historic moment while being a historian oneself. I feel the same shock, fear, overload, and emotional exhaustion that so many feel right now, but at the same time another self is analyzing, dredging up historical examples, bigger crises, smaller crises, more surprising votes, votes that set the fuse to powder kegs, votes that changed nothing. I keep thinking about what it must have felt like during the Wars of the Roses, or the French Wars of Religion, during those little blips of peace, a decade long or so, that we—centuries later—call mere pauses, but which were long enough for a person to be born and grow to political maturity in what seemed like peace, which only hindsight labels “dormant war.” But even such protracted wars eventually ended, and then the peace was real. And yet, to those who lived through them, the two must have felt exactly the same: the “real” peace and those