Abstract

The author aims to write intellectual history in a traditional cast of a particular idea, the idea of progress, among a particular elite, the educated class of Britain roughly between 1730 and 1789. He describes the idea of progress as "belief in the movement over time of some aspect or aspects of human existence, within a social setting, toward a better condition". This admittedly broad definition is adopted in order to encompass belief in various sorts of progress. One might wonder why every variety of belief in progress ought to be studied as expressions of a single idea of progress, for what sort of unity would one's subject matter have? In fact Spadafora effectively resolves this problem in an Aristotelian manner by implicitly adopting something like a focal-meaning approach to the subject: he identifies two central conceptions of progress and relates other notions of progress to these. The central conceptions are: the Christian understanding of history as eschatological, and Baconian confidence in the advancement of learning. Although these two conceptions are frequently unified in English Puritanism between the accession of Charles I and the Restoration, Spadafora describes how they were largely independent and even at odds in the eighteenth century.