Many of the notions on which philosophy has traditionally depended came under attack in the late twentieth century. French post-structuralists assailed the notion of human nature, Rawlsian liberals refused to engage with substantive conceptions of the good life and postcolonial theorists questioned the Western-imperial presumptions of the idea of progress. The delicate task that the critical theorist Rahel Jaeggi has set herself is to see how such ideas might be salvaged—reimagined in less dogmatic, suppler form. Her latest work addresses the concept of progress, which she acknowledges to be highly problematic; not only does it have an ignominious history as the optimistic justification for liberal imperialism, but a glance at the world makes it hard to think that any type of progress is taking place. Nonetheless its conceptual counterpart, regression, is if anything gaining momentum, Jaeggi notes: autocratic leaders are often accused of democratic ‘backsliding’, reverting to earlier political stages or reversing hard-won gains. Disavowing the idea of progress while ‘unreflectively clinging’ to its opposite, Jaeggi argues, risks a kind of bad faith. Her short book Progress and Regression, ably translated from the German by Robert Savage, is a defence of both as ‘crucial conceptual tools’—indispensable for broaching ‘what was once a fundamental concern of Critical Theory: investigating the causes, driving forces, character and underlying laws of the social transformation process, including social revolutions’.
Jaeggi, born in 1966, can be counted as a fourth-generation thinker in the Frankfurt critical-theory tradition. She grew up for the most part in the scholarly-bohemian Cold War enclave of West Berlin, where her parents taught at the Freie Universität. Her father, a Swiss-born sociologist, sculptor and painter, was the author of a damning study of the post-war German political elite, Macht und Herrschaft in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (1969) and supervised Rudi Dutschke’s thesis; her mother, an Austrian-born psychoanalyst, wrote many popular books on psychology. Jaeggi herself also studied at the Freie Universität, writing her Master’s dissertation on Hannah Arendt, before spending five years working with Axel Honneth in Frankfurt. Since 2009, she has been a professor of philosophy at Humboldt University. Progress and Regression deploys a theoretical approach that Jaeggi has honed across a number of books. Her first monograph, Alienation (2005), based on her doctoral thesis, was an attempt to ‘resurrect the concept’ and defend its ‘legitimacy’. Jaeggi took the post-structuralist critique of alienation seriously—above all, the charge that it relied on an unproblematized essentialism—and tried to re-ground the concept by offering a critical reconstruction of its foundations.
In her next book, Critique of Forms of Life (2013), Jaeggi turned to the philosophical problem of the ‘good life’. Not only Rawls but Habermas had argued for ‘ethical abstinence’ on this key Socratic question, on the grounds of the irreducible ethico-cultural pluralism of modern societies, towards which the liberal state should be neutral. For Jaeggi, this was to consign the unavoidably social question of more or less productive, or desirable, forms of life to a matter of private preference. Defining ‘forms of life’ as ensembles of social practices and ‘problem-solving processes’, she proposed a critical framework that would immanently assess such practices. A successful form of life, Jaeggi argued, will find ‘the appropriate solution’ to the problem it confronts, and will exhibit learning, self-understanding and an ‘ability to deal rationally with crises’. The point is not to develop an abstract, prescriptive conception of the right form of life, once and for all, but rather to find a way to distinguish forms which succeed from those which fall short. ‘Failing forms of life suffer from a collective practical reflexive deficit, from a blockage to learning’, Jaeggi concluded. She followed this with a book-length dialogue with Nancy Fraser, published as Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory in 2018, just as Critique of Forms of Life appeared in English.
The approach that Jaeggi has been developing straddles philosophical traditions, combining her Frankfurt School inheritance with Anglo-American influences. Progress and Regression could be seen as a synthesis of Western Marxism, pragmatism and psychoanalysis; its touchstones are Hegel, Marx and Adorno as well as Freud and Dewey. Typically, these approaches are not easily combined. A Marxist commitment to structural dynamics can be at odds with the pragmatist insistence on contingency. Whereas psychoanalysis insists on the presence of the past, pragmatism prioritizes future experimentation. Psychoanalysis’s concern with the individual psyche is not always compatible with the Marxist emphasis on social conditions and historical change. Progress and Regression represents a courageous attempt to resolve these tensions. In the process, Jaeggi provides her own reformulation of three classic Marxist contrasts, reconsidered through a pragmatist and psychoanalytic lens: reform/revolution, base/superstructure, socialism/barbarism.
In grasping something as progress, Jaeggi writes, we set historical and social events in a relation to each other that we purport to evaluate and understand. In her terms, progress is a ‘process concept’, both interpretive and reflective—one of those through which a society comes to communicate about and understand itself: why, and in what way, do we understand change to be for the better? Drawing on Reinhart Koselleck’s essay, ‘“Progress” and “Decline”: An Appendix to the History of Two Concepts’, Jaeggi begins by identifying four characteristic features of the ‘progress’ narrative—‘distillations of its problems and possibilities’—that will guide her attempt to reconstruct it. First is the Enlightenment notion that scientific, social, moral, intellectual and political advance are part of a single, all-encompassing dynamic—‘interlinked as if by an unbreakable chain’, as Steven Lukes put it. Second, the understanding of progress as an irresistible and impersonal historical force, the execution of what is ‘timely’, as Hegel would say. Third, the idea that it is evolutionary, proceeding through a series of necessary steps—as in Turgot’s formulation, so influential in the Enlightenment era and beyond, which imagines that the human race, like an individual, has its childhood and its developmental progress. And finally, the notion that progress proceeds in a linear and cumulative fashion, producing gains without much loss.
As Progress and Regression notes, these features have long been subject to legitimate criticism. Technoscientific advances do not necessarily go hand in hand with welcome social change (think only of the diminution of attention that has resulted from the smartphone). Given that progress requires that people act, it is always subject to some contingency. Evolutionary accounts of progress have historically set up a hierarchy between the West and the rest and so are compromised by what Jaeggi calls ‘ethnocentrism and false, ideological-parochial universalization’. And finally, it is plain that every advance entails unrealized alternatives and ambivalent knock-on consequences (though we may enjoy satellite navigation, we have lost geographic literacy).
Any rehabilitation of progress will need to address these criticisms. But why revive it at all? Why should we not, with Foucault, eschew this contested rubric? Jaeggi’s answer is twofold. Not only has the critique of progress often been even more politically dubious—consider, for example, the romantic nostalgia present in early fascism—but some such notion is indispensable for evaluating social developments and struggles. Jaeggi describes progress as an ‘ethically thick concept’, with a ‘normatively founding character’, like ‘alienation’ or ‘kitsch’. When we use such words, we are not simply describing, we are judging—and it is this dual character which gives them their ‘specific interpretative power’. To understand the logic of social change at all, Jaeggi suggests, some idea of progress is necessary. How then should it be reframed?