Five Faces of Progress: The Road to Anti-Progress |Prof. Tyson Retz Pt.2 | Ep. 4

Описание: 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 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.

🎯 Key Topics Discussed:
Five Categories of Progress: Periodizations from Antiquity to the Present
Relative Progress - Progress as unevenly distributed and context-dependent. "progress for some meant decline for others" [3]
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”[4]
Anti-Progress (Contemporary) - Contemporary rejection or skepticism toward progress narratives, driven by environmental crisis, expanded geological timescales, technological determinism.[5]

Footnotes
Retz, Tyson. Progress and the Scale of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022, p. 13. ↩
Ibid., p. 16. ↩
Ibid., p. 6. ↩
Ibid., p. 45. ↩
Ibid., pp. 7-16. (from the Introduction) ↩

Major Themes:
✓ Decoupling Progress from History: Various movements (China's iconoclasm, India's revivalist traditionalism) attempted to separate progress from historical determinism and create futures disconnected from the past.
✓ In the late 19th Century, progress as a benchmark as well as a zero sum game.
✓ Re-examination of progress vis-a-vis colonialism and marginalized states: “progress for some is decline for others”
✓ Neo-liberalism and the rejection of “historicism”
✓ The paradox of regulation in the free market
✓ Progress and the State - Statistics as state narratives
✓ Optimism vs. pessimism in contemporary progress debates

Fascinating Historical Insights:

Japan as an inspiration for “marginalized states” seeking to “catch up”

The role of iconoclasm in shaping China’s conception of progress

The paradox of progressive politics rejecting the concept of progress

The historiographical turn in the 21st century: an expanded and re-imagined scale (big history, deep history, the Anthropocene)

🎓 About Our Guest: Prof. Tyson Retz is an intellectual historian with a PhD from the University of Melbourne. His first book Empathy and History (Berghahn 2018) explains the role that the concept of 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 appears in the Cambridge Elements series Historical Theory and Practice. The Element develops five categories of progress from antiquity to the present day. Retz 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 he sits on the board of the History Education Research Journal.

📚 Referenced Authors/Works in this Episode:
"The Idea of History" - Collingwood, Robin George
"Road to Serfdom", “Constitution of Liberty” - Hayak,Friedrich A.
"The Technosphere and Its Relation to the Anthropocene", Haaf, Peter
"The Poverty of Historicism" - Karl Popper
"Progress in the Scale of History" - Retz,Tyson

Chapters
00:00 Part 2
00:32 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


💬 Join the Conversation: Do you see current relevance to the ideas of “No Progress” or “Absolute Progress” discussed in part 1 ? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

🔔 Subscribe to Notions of Progress for deep dives into the intellectual history of progress, from ancient philosophy to contemporary AI debates.

Coming Soon:

The Sophistic Movement - The 5th Century Enlightenment

#NotionsOfProgress #HistoryPodcast #AncientGreece #TechnologyHistory #IntellectualHistory #ProgressStudies #GreekPhilosophy #PhilosophyPodcast #HistoryOfIdeas #TechnologicalProgress #AncientHistory #educationalcontent #AI #TechnoOptimism #Hayek #condorcet #parisexpostionuniverselle #Enlightenment #TysonRetz #ProgressTheory #AntiProgress #Technosphere #PhilosophyOfHistory #anthropocene