Most of human history was governed by the opposite assumption: that the best age had already happened, and everything since was decline.
“Progress” reads today as a near-universal value, self-evidently good, barely worth defining. That reading is itself historically recent. Classical historian J.B. Bury traced its emergence in The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into Its Origin and Growth (1920), showing that the ancient world largely worked from the reverse premise. Greek and Roman writers described a Golden Age receding into the past: ages of men decaying from gold, to silver, to bronze, to iron. History moved in cycles and catastrophes, not on a rising line. The idea that history moves cumulatively upward had no settled home in that worldview.
Bury located the shift in the writers who built modern science and modern political philosophy: Bacon and Descartes first, then Voltaire, Turgot, and Condorcet. Together they reimagined history as an open-ended process of accumulating knowledge, not a fall from a prior perfection. Condorcet’s Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (written 1794, published 1795) is the idea’s clearest statement: nine completed epochs of advancing reason and rights, with a tenth still to come. Humanity’s improvement was treated as effectively without limit.
Historian Christopher Lasch revisited the question from a critical angle in The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (1991), asking why belief in progress survives evidence that might seem to refute it. His answer traced progress to a specific and, in his view, unexamined premise: that human wants are inherently insatiable and that satisfying them requires ever-larger production. Lasch set this against a quieter counter-tradition: one that treats a boundless appetite for more as the problem to be diagnosed, not the engine to be trusted.
Treating progress as a contested historical idea rather than a timeless truth changes what follows from it. If “progress” names a specific 17th- and 18th-century wager about reason, production, and the future, rather than a fact about how history simply works, then the wager can be examined on its results, not assumed on its reputation.