Progressivism

If exploitation lies in the very structure of the relations of production, then reform can only manage it: only their overthrow abolishes it. Hence the revolutionary character of Marxist progressivism and its refusal of the alternatives: neither awaiting a moral evolution, nor the ideal cities of utopian socialism, nor mere philosophical critique will do, since to interpret the world leaves it intact. Thought itself has worth only as praxis, a moment of real transformation borne by the class that has "nothing to lose but its chains." Philosophy ceases to be contemplation and becomes a weapon, as the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach sums up.

Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, XI (1845) · Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848)

Transhumanism carries the Enlightenment's faith in progress to its limit: not only knowledge and institutions, but the human being itself can and must be improved. No tradition, no inherited order holds an authority that would withstand a demonstrable improvement; the past is merely a starting point that reason and technology are meant to surpass.

More, 'The Extropian Principles' · Condorcet, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (lineage)

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

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

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

Marx calls not for gradual reform but for a revolutionary overturning of the social order: the proletariat must overthrow the bourgeois state and abolish existing relations of production: a radical progressivism, hostile to any conservation of the established order.

Manifesto of the Communist Party, conclusion · Theses on Feuerbach, XI (changing the world)

Beauvoir is resolutely emancipatory: The Second Sex is a call to transform the structures that make woman the Other, and her engagement (feminism, anticolonialism, support for liberation struggles) aims at abolishing inherited oppressions. The traditions that fix roles are, for her, alienation, not an order to be conserved.

The Second Sex (1949), perspective of liberation · Force of Circumstance (1963), political engagements

Bentham judges institutions by their present utility alone, never by their antiquity: law must be methodically reformed, statutes codified, irrational survivals abolished. A radical reformer of the penal and carceral system (the Panopticon project), he denounces the nonsense of the common law and campaigns for a rational recasting of the codes. This is an avowed reformist progressivism.

A Fragment on Government (critique of Blackstone and the common law) · Panopticon, or the Inspection-House

A committed reformer, Mill sees in the progress of humanity the horizon of morals and politics. He campaigns for the extension of the suffrage, popular education, social reform and, in The Subjection of Women, for the emancipation of women, which he also carries into Parliament. Freedom of thought matters precisely because it is the engine of human improvement.

The Subjection of Women (1869), ch. 1 (sexual equality as a demand of progress) · On Liberty, ch. 2 (freedom of opinion as a condition of progress)

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?