Abstract

A study in important aspects of the history of an idea from the 17th century to the present. The author believes that the Enlightenment founded progress on a natural law open to the rational powers of man. Following the work of Hobbes, Rousseau and Hume, progress could be justified only by reducing it to the status of an historical or sociological law, as in Hegel, Marx and Toynbee. The author's "sociology of historians" in the 17th century is especially well done.--R. P.