'Progress' Revisited: A Historical Materialist Reappraisal

Abstract

This paper attempts to restore the relevance of the notion of as a valid analytic concept from a critical historical-materialist perspective and situates it in the aporias of the liberal market society. It maintains that the idea of progress has its genealogy in the discursive attempts to navigate the tensions between the liberal self-image of capitalism and the coercive practices of expropriation (primitive accumulation) that typifies its historical reality. The paper illustrates this contradiction through a critical analysis of an influential neoclassical paradigm of political economy, new institutionalism.