Introduction: anti-entropy - the idea of progress

Abstract

Introduces the notion of ‘progress’ as it emerged in the West, stressing the shift from circular views of the human condition prevalent in medieval Europe and points to the thought of Machiavelli as a turning point after which the idea of progress began to take hold and quicken in the eighteenth century. The idea of progress as a normal trajectory in emerging western capitalism is carried forward by Mill, Marx and Keynes into the early twentieth century but has run up against new challenges in the first decades of the twenty-first in the face of global economic crises, climate change and pandemics. The book makes an argument for an ‘open’ view of the uncertain and unknowable future, introducing a central concept developed throughout the whole, namely, the one-way arrow of time. The structure and the substantive chapters of the book are then outlined, and brief acknowledgments made.