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6 - End of an Era?

from Part I - The Ladder of Progress and the End of History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2021

Peter J. Bowler
Affiliation:
Queen's University Belfast
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Summary

Although the twentieth century saw a transition to a less goal-directed model of progress, efforts were still made to defend the older vision in which humanity was the predetermined end of evolution and a particular social order the goal of social progress. Christian thinkers still tended to think of evolution as a process driven by cooperation rather than struggle, with humanity and a spiritually mature society as the goals. Even within a Darwinian framework, it has been argued that evolution is subject to constraints that leave something like humanity as the only possible end-point. From the opposite ideological position, Soviet Marxism preserved the image of a sequence of developmental stages leading to the future utopia. With the collapse of the Soviet Union there were suggestions that free-enterprise capitalism is the final end-point of social evolution.

Type
Chapter
Information
Progress Unchained
Ideas of Evolution, Human History and the Future
, pp. 149 - 170
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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  • End of an Era?
  • Peter J. Bowler, Queen's University Belfast
  • Book: Progress Unchained
  • Online publication: 11 February 2021
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108909877.008
Available formats
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  • End of an Era?
  • Peter J. Bowler, Queen's University Belfast
  • Book: Progress Unchained
  • Online publication: 11 February 2021
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108909877.008
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • End of an Era?
  • Peter J. Bowler, Queen's University Belfast
  • Book: Progress Unchained
  • Online publication: 11 February 2021
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108909877.008
Available formats
×