Tradition and transformation

No faith in moral progress or political reform: human nature does not change, only the muzzle can be better or worse fitted, and history merely varies the same. Frightened by the 1848 revolution, he lent his opera glass to the soldiers taking aim at the rioters and left part of his fortune to the fund for wounded soldiers, a gesture in which his pessimism turns frankly counter-revolutionary.

Parerga and Paralipomena; correspondence and biography

Having no truth in whose name to reform the established order, the skeptic regulates himself by default on the laws, customs and received institutions of his country, which he observes without dogmatic belief. This conformism is conservative by abstention rather than conviction: not love of tradition, but the absence of any criterion that would justify overturning it. The position thus leans conservative, but without the value-grounding a Burke would give it.

Outlines of Pyrrhonism, I, 17 and 23-24 (following law and custom)

Holding the established order to be a product of custom and tested utility, Hume distrusts reforms driven by abstract principles and enthusiasms (religious or factious enthusiasm). Without being a reactionary, he prizes the stability of institutions and prudence: a rather conservative sensibility, wary of abrupt change.

Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary (esp. "Of the Original Contract" and "Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences")

Laozi does not believe history climbs toward the better: the proper movement of the Dao is return, and civilization has made the human fall from his original simplicity. But his aim is not the conservation of institutions, rites and hierarchies, which he criticizes just as much: it is a primitivism that would go back behind tradition itself, which places him on the side of refusing progress without making him a conservator of established forms.

Dao De Jing, ch. 18, 19 and 38 · Dao De Jing, ch. 16 and 25

Rousseau is neither a progressive who expects salvation from civilization, nor a conservative who venerates established tradition. He rejects the century's central idea that the progress of enlightenment carries that of morals, and takes natural man as a critical yardstick for the present; yet he calls for a radical political refounding, not the maintenance of the old order. Hence a position drawn back from Enlightenment progressivism, without tipping into conservatism.

Rousseau, Discourse on the Sciences and Arts · Rousseau, The Social Contract

From the accumulation of knowledge and the spread of enlightenment the current draws a new thesis: humanity advances, and that march can be conscious and willed. Institutions and laws are not sacred merely for being old; they must prove their present usefulness, failing which reform is legitimate. Condorcet pushes the idea to a law of history, the human mind progressing by stages toward truth, liberty and happiness. Against this creed Burke will set the accumulated wisdom of tradition: this is the birth certificate of the divide between progressivism and conservatism.

Condorcet, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind · Turgot, On the Successive Advances of the Human Mind

Against the prejudice that reveres Antiquity as the age of wisdom, Bacon reverses the argument: the Ancients were the youth of the world, and it is we, coming after so many accumulated centuries, who are the true elders. The authority of the received masters has therefore no value in itself; knowledge is not an inheritance to preserve but an open building site, indefinitely perfectible. This trust in the reforming power of reason holds first for the sciences; in politics, the great servant of the Crown remained cautious, which holds the score back from the extreme.

Novum Organum, I, §84 · The Advancement of Learning, I

Meliorism holds the world to be neither fatally good nor fatally bad, but improvable through intelligent effort: this drives Dewey's reformism, which invests education and democracy as levers of gradual, experimental progress. Society is not an order to be preserved but a project to be revised without end, through trial, error and correction.

Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (1927) · James, Pragmatism (1907), lecture VIII

Enlightenment is the human being's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Kant makes the free public use of reason the engine of a gradual progress of humanity, placing him clearly on the progressist side.

An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?

Utilitarianism was born as a reformist program: Bentham subjected law, prisons and institutions to the test of utility, rejecting respect for tradition as such. Mill extended this drive toward emancipation, notably of women. Institutions are worth only the well-being they produce, which licenses reforming them as soon as they fall short.

Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation · Mill, The Subjection of Women

By justifying the right of resistance and the revocability of government, Locke gives the Glorious Revolution its theory and breaks with the order of divine right. His confidence in the growth of knowledge through experience and in the reform of education places him on the reforming side, without revolutionary radicalism, hence a moderately progressive value.

Two Treatises of Government, II, ch. 19 (the dissolution of government)