On geography and progress: Turgot's plan d'un ouvrage sur la géographie politique (1751) and the origins of modern progressive thought

Abstract

Abstract The fragmentary early writings of the French philosophe , Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot (1727–1781) contain one of the first, clearly developed statements of a stadial theory of human progress conceived as the inevitable onward and upward march of civilization through a series of discrete levels. This idea of progress, and the possibility of human perfectibility which it suggested, was expanded and developed by a number of other 18th-century writers and is now widely seen as one of the most important intellectual formulations of the Enlightenment, the essential point of origin for the progressive developmentalism which has dominated western thought throughout the modern era. Turgot's first reference to a stadial theory of progress appears in a short essay which he composed in 1751 while a student at the Sorbonne. The essay took the form of a plan for a proposed book on la geographie politique . The present article examines Turgot's conception of political geography and its influence on his broader idea of human progress.