Ethical Growth in History: Good News and Bad

Abstract

One of the things Rosen's very interesting and wide-ranging book shows is why history and the goal of moral advance in history have become so important. We want to believe in moral advance (I am shunning the word “progress” with its resonance of steady uninterrupted forward movement), but we feel incapable of affirming this. What the Lisbon earthquake did to the eighteenth-century versions of Providence, Auschwitz has done for us. Rosen cites Adorno to good effect.