Abstract

The chapter reconstructs the roots and developments of the idea of progress from Christianity to the global age. Crucial was the shift from an understanding of time as recurrence to a linear conceptualization of a prospective future in the sense of a permanent revolution. In postmodernity, this alternative is reproduced in terms of globalization as a climax of all-leveling modernity, i.e., progress as retrogression on the one hand and globality as an advent of new transcendence consciousness and a rehabilitation of the idea of progress in the world society.