THE PROGRESSIVE WORLDVIEW, VOLUME 1

Carlson ruminates on the role of progress in human history in this debut nonfiction book.

“I am a progressive,” the author declares in the opening lines of this book. While endorsing a plethora of 21st-century progressive causes—from raising the minimum wage and corporate tax rates to advocating for reproductive rights and gun control—Carlson is careful to clarify that progressivism extends beyond one’s views on public policy to an overarching “moral obligation to participate in our world’s progress.” Focusing his attention on human history, the author emphasizes what he calls “the reality of progress,” noting that progress is “the general trend, not just of human history, but of cosmic history.” Acknowledging that progress is rife with setbacks and is a slow process, Carlson breezes through thousands of years of human history in the book’s first chapter before taking readers to “The Birth of Progress” with the Scientific Revolution. Isaac Newton, Galileo, and other paradigm-shifting scientists challenged the cultural and religious status quo, providing the foundations upon which the subsequent Enlightenment would be built. Once the medieval scientific model was effectively overturned, the author asserts, it was only a matter of time before men such as John Locke and Thomas Jefferson sought to replace the feudal model of governance (which was based on the supposed natural order of a universe that Newtonian physics had upended). Progress, per Carlson’s narrative history, continued to advance into the 19th and early 20th centuries: The Civil War marked the end of slavery in the United States, suffragist movements united women across the globe, Christian scholars embraced more critical approaches to biblical analysis, and Darwinian evolution offered alternative explanations for the origins of life. By the 20th century, Martin Luther King Jr. was expanding the limited visions of Locke and Jefferson to their natural conclusions, arguing for a moral universalism that transcended race and ethnicity.

Book one in an anticipated three-volume work on progressivism, this installment’s concluding chapter on the 21st century—from the progressive hopes embodied in Barack Obama’s presidency to the backlash embodied in Donald Trump’s—sets the stage for the series’ next two books, which will focus more on the present and future than the past. With a doctorate in philosophy from Penn State, Carlson has a firm command of the major philosophical and ethical transformations that have defined Western history from the Scientific Revolution to the present, and he writes with a clear and accessible style. African, Indigenous, and Asian perspectives are largely excluded, however, while China, a nation rich in history and philosophy, is only mentioned once in the almost 500-page tome, and then only in reference to those killed under its communist regime. Problematically, this is not the history of a global “progressive worldview” but a history of the West that highlights the ways in which Western thinkers and revolutionaries (including Black Americans like King) have shaped global history. Though critical of Aristotle, the author ironically embraces a teleological view of history that sees a “fundamental trajectory” of history “moving forward and upward.” Contemporary historians, who have by and large rejected teleological narratives as reductive and exclusionary, may also chafe at the book’s lack of citations and engagement with historiographic literature.

A well-written, yet oversimplified, history of human progress over the past half-millennium.