1 The idea of modernity is closely associated with the expectation of progress. In Europe, the combination of Enlightenment thought, French Revolution and Industrial Revolution is often seen to spell the onset of modernity, a profound “rupture in societal consciousness” (Koselleck and Reichardt 1988; more generally Koselleck 1979). The new society that was emerging would leave all limitations of the past behind and open up towards the wide horizon of a future of steady improvement in the human condition.

2 At the core of these expectations was the idea of freedom. The Enlightenment announced “the exit from self-incurred immaturity”, as Immanuel Kant famously put it. Progress was to be expected through the interaction of free human beings. And the enthusiasm about the future was generated by the possibilities that would emerge with freedom: freedom as self-realization in personal terms and freedom as political self-determination in collective terms. Increase in the possibilities for personal self-realization will here be understood as social progress; and increase in the possibilities for collective self-determination as political progress. In this light, the purpose of this article is to review the connection between modernity and progress through freedom, a connection that is much more complicated than often assumed and keeps posing a problem for diagnosing our own present time and our expectations for the future. [1]

What freedom?

3 Soon after the end of the revolutionary period, new qualifications were introduced into the debate about freedom. Most significantly, it was suggested that the emerging society could not simply be seen in terms of the realization of freedom, but that it was based on a specific and novel, precisely a “modern” concept of freedom and a rejection of other interpretations of freedom, as argued most explicitly by Benjamin Constant in his 1819 lecture about the difference between ancient and modern freedom. One and a half centuries later, Isaiah Berlin summarized the conceptual debate by making a distinction between “freedom for” or “positive fredom”, freedom towards personal self-realization and collective self-determination, and “freedom from” or “negative freedom”, freedom from constraints and arbitrary interference (for a critical discussion of these distinctions see Karagiannis and Wagner 2013). Today, we are accustomed to see the latter concept as the basis of individualist liberalism, arguably the pivotal political ideology of our time. This article is not meant to contribute directly to this debate, which is marred by the fact that its contributions tend to be either too historical or too abstractly conceptual. Rather, its purpose is to suggest a way of reading the history of the past two centuries by diachronically contextualizing interpretations of freedom and, by implication, analyzing the ways in which realizations of freedom are seen as constituting social and political progress. [2] In other words, we look at transformations of modernity from the angle of possible progress achieved through the increase of freedom, of some kind or other.

4 In this light, the first question to ask is why the supposedly “modern” concept of freedom, as freedom from constraints, emerged and became central for political debate. The answer to this question seems to be rather straightforward: This emphasis on freedom from constraints was regarded as crucial, on the one hand, because the Old Regime had imposed constraints by denying freedom of expression, freedom of religion or freedom of commerce. The revolutionary movements aimed at abolishing these constraints. On the other hand, subsequently the commitment to freedom from constraints remained significant because post-revolutionary regimes granted freedoms in highly unequal ways. The agenda of progressive socio-political transformation in terms of emancipation and “freedom from” had been fully formulated by the end of the eighteenth century. But even though attempts at, for instance, establishing free and equal suffrage for women and men and emancipation of the slaves, such as in the Haitian Revolution, were made, this agenda was far from realized. The consolidation of regimes after the Vienna Congress of 1815 in Europe and after the accomplishment of state independence in America, South and North, witnessed both the denial of some freedoms and the unequal granting of others. This post-revolutionary experience explains why the idea of freedom from constraints retained particular appeal, much beyond being merely the “bourgeois” idea of freedom. We witness here the emergence of the claim for equal freedom as a core component of the agenda of progress.

5 In other words, starting with the call of the French Revolution for freedom and equality, equal freedom can be seen as the founding commitment of the new societies that were emerging from Enlightenment and revolutions. But since equal freedom was not realized anywhere in the aftermath of the revolutions, future social and political progress came to be identified with the realization of equal freedom, to occur in processes of emancipation. It came to be seen as the telos of the new society, and the notion that modernity is a project that can be completed arose in such conceptual context. Equal freedom, therefore, was at the core of the imaginary of social and political progress, but not at all at the core of socio-political practices during the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries. This tension between the imaginary and the prevailing practices generated the main trajectory of progress for at least one and a half centuries.

6 Let me introduce here a distinction that will be further elaborated upon below. Achieving freedom and equality was understood as liberation from formal domination, as emancipation, “freedom from”. As a consequence, freedom as personal self-realization and collective self-determination, “freedom for”, turn out to be conceptually “postponed”. They cannot happen under conditions of domination. Thus, emancipation has to occur first, and self-realization and self-determination can subsequently be accomplished on the basis of equal freedom. Often, significantly, the expectation was that self-realization and self-determination would be unproblematic once domination had been overcome. Karl Marx, for example, saw neither need nor possibility of pronouncing himself on the organisation of society after the next revolution; the free association of free human beings was all that was required.

7 An important feature of equal freedom in the sense of “freedom from”, of liberation from domination, is that it supposedly can be “measured”. The standard “measure” of both freedom and equality is a legal one, in the form of rights. Individual freedom is then a function of the rights an individual holds. Equality exists when all individuals in a given society and polity hold the same rights. In this form, equal freedom is today enshrined in many state constitutions, and progress can be measured by comparing those constitutions with earlier legal arrangements as well as by confronting the constitutional commitments with actual social and political practices. Thus, equal freedom understood in terms of rights becomes a relatively straightforward indicator of progress. Wherever legal discrimination between categories of persons exists, such as it did in South Africa under apartheid, such arrangements are – under conditions of modernity – under strong pressure from critique and in high need of justification that most often is difficult or impossible to provide.

8 While fundamental and necessary, however, such a formal, politico-juridical understanding of social and political progress is also insufficient. Philosophical and sociological debate has long been devoted to detecting unfreedom and inequality beyond formal rules, early examples being Etienne de la Boétie’s Discourse on voluntary servitude for the former, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on the origins of inequality for the latter. After the revolutionary period around 1800, “conformism” and “anomie” are terms, as elaborated by Alexis de Tocqueville and Emile Durkheim respectively, that refer to unfreedom under conditions of formal freedom. If we relate them to Max Weber’s concern about “life-conduct”, the possibilities for which he saw as limited by the “iron cage” of modern capitalism, we see how self-realization is undermined. The very term “social inequality”, to which measuring devices such as the Gini index are today attached, aims to identify inequality also under conditions of formal equality. To return to the South African example: high social inequality under apartheid was largely due to the regime of formal domination expressed in apartheid, but it persists two decades after the introduction of legal equality.

9 Thus, the distinction between “freedom from” and “freedom for” can be put to new use. Arguably, the realization of “freedom for” has some pre-condition in “freedom from” in the form of individual rights and equality. Self-realization and political self-determination are hampered by the absence of rights to freedom and by holding less rights to freedom than others. However, equal freedom not only is not necessarily sufficient for self-realization, as Axel Honneth convincingly argues, it may also contribute to creating a social situation that undermines the possibilities for self-realization and, I will add here, collective self-determination. In the light of the preceding reflections, social and political progress under conditions of modernity will be analyzed in the following three steps.

10 First, historical configurations of freedom and equality will be analyzed to see whether they can be compared with regard to what is here called social progress, namely the creation of conditions amenable to personal self-realization. Towards that end, sociological indicators for effective freedom and equality within and beyond the formal understanding of domination have to be developed and applied. Secondly, political progress will be discussed in terms of the capacity for self-determination in setting the rules for the life in common. Here freedom is one measure, namely as the capacity of the political self to determine those rules, but another one is mastery, namely as the capacity of the self to effectively determine those rules. As a result, thirdly, an ambivalence is identified that underlay the historical struggle over interpreting and realizing social and political progress and gains new and increased significance today.

Social progress: inclusion and individualization

11 The increase of freedom and equality is often seen as the most appropriate measure for social progress. The history of Western, supposedly modern societies, in turn, more precisely the history of North America and Western Europe (oddly forgetting Latin American republics, see Mota 2015), is considered to mark the progressive realization of the objective of equal freedom for all, with modern societies having institutionalized freedom. This view is not entirely wrong: increase of freedom and equality should be an indicator of social progress and it did historically happen in the West. But it is not entirely valid either, mostly because it equated freedom and equality with rights, thus privileging a formal juridical understanding, and additionally because it “measured” freedom and equality within formally constituted societies, ultimately defined by state institutions, disregarding inter-societal relations (see Rosich 2015).

12 This standard view of social progress and its projection on the history of Western societies has often – and often convincingly – been criticized, but it has not been replaced by a more adequate understanding of such progress, one with the help of which historical-comparative analysis could arrive at a more nuanced view of social progress in history. The most promising atttempt in this direction, as elaborated by Axel Honneth among others, is arguably the one that considers individualization and inclusion as the phenomena through which freedom and equality present themselves experientially, thus making the question amenable to socio-historical analysis. [3] With due caution with regard to these terms, this approach will be used to guide the following reflections on social progress. As we shall see, the history of Western societies looks less progressive when regarded in this way, also less than Honneth thinks, but the struggle for progress within it remains recognizable.

13 In which way can the concepts of inclusion and individualization help us in assessing historical social progress? In a first step, they just appear as different terms for equality and freedom. Inclusion would then mean that human beings – individuals or groups – become members of a society with equal rights in relation to all other members. Individualization would mean that human beings can develop their life-projects on their own, without being conditioned or determined by others. Individual rights are an important condition for individualization, endowing the singular being with some degree of independence from others. In both regards, thus, some emphasis on rights is maintained. However, the new terms go beyond an exclusive focus on rights, and this is their main merit. They allow to identify situations of lack of inclusion even when all members of a society have equal rights. And they permit the exploration of lack of actual individualization even when individual rights abound. Conformism and anomie, as mentioned above, but also alienation, were historical terms for capturing social situations in which self-realization was hampered despite the existence of significant individual rights. In this sense, inclusion and individualization keep equality and freedom as the central concern, but widen the perspective on their realization. Furthermore, in contrast to equality and freedom, inclusion and individualization are processual terms. They invite to look at the events and processes through which inclusion and individualization increase – or decrease. Thus, they are apt for a historical analysis of social change and of the progress – or regress – that occurs in the course of social change.

14 With these reflections, we are prepared for a look at social progress through the historical increase of inclusion and individualization. This shall be done in a sequence of steps, starting with the more familiar legal aspects. As increase in formal equality, inclusion has been a key feature of social transformations over the past two centuries. As mentioned above, one has to keep in mind that inclusion was denied to the majority of residents in those parts of the globe where the combined effect of the scientific, industrial and political revolutions was most pronounced, Europe and the Americas. The discrepancy between a socio-political imaginary of equality and freedom and the reality of formal inequality and restricted liberties lent itself, historically, to struggles for inclusion and individualization and, conceptually, for reading social progress in these regions in this light. In more detail: By 1800, only male property-owning heads of households were full citizens of modernity. Workers found recognition as rights-holders and as contributors to the collective good through struggles from the 1830s to the 1970s. Women found recognition as citizens between 1919 and the end of the Second World War; they gained equal civil rights to men often only as late as the 1960s and 1970; and during the same period they gained rights to their body through the legalisation of divorce and abortion that ended their being trapped by legal force in unwanted personal relations. After 1917, processes of inclusion in some respects were considerably accelerated in societies where a socialist revolution had occurred. In turn, residents of Asian and African societies under European colonial domination were excluded from most of the rights available to residents of the imperial mainlands and to settlers. Even though the pre-colonial societies had their own forms of hierarchy and stratification, which makes comparison difficult, inclusion arguably decreased with colonization. This situation only changed with the success of decolonization after the Second World War, often called national liberation, in most cases from 1960 onwards. In sum, there has been significant social progress through legal inclusion there where a formal approach to rights was adopted. But this progress only occurred over often long periods of struggle, and the imposition of European law on dominated societies led to new forms of legal exclusion.

15 Going beyond inclusion in terms of legal equality, the picture gets considerably more complex and normatively even more ambivalent. Arguably, first, the question of inclusion was first explicitly posed when European seafarers unexpectedly encountered the indigenous populations of America. It arose as the question about the inclusion, or not, of these unknown beings into humanity. If answered affirmatively, it entailed the granting of some status and rights, and thus limits to the exploitation of the new territories. And even when answered affirmatively, it entailed recognition as being of the same kind, concretely, as potential members of Christian humanity, not recognition as equal but different (Pagden 2000; Fuster and Rosich 2015). Thus, inclusion could be the beginning of processes of assimilation, from being equal to being same. Related phenomena emerged with most, maybe all, later processes of recognition and emancipation, of workers and women, of slaves, of immigrants becoming “Americanized” in the US, of decolonized societies embarking on “modernization and development”. Inclusion thus becomes conditional; being recognized is conditioned on being recognizable. By implication, it is no longer certain whether inclusion unambiguously means progress.

16 Taking a closer look at the processes of inclusion across the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, those that provided the basis for the view of inclusion as social progress, secondly, another ambiguity emerges. The increasing recognition of all adult residents as equal members of a society in Europe and the Americas, as expressed in universal suffrage, for instance, was accompanied by drawing stronger or new boundaries towards an outside. This outside was either other national societies, mostly in Europe, making the move from one to another society more difficult (Noiriel 1991). Or, in the Americas and in other so-called settler societies, this outside was the socially non-enfranchised groups within a society, such as the indigenous population and the descendents of slaves. Arguably, the processes of inclusion and exclusion are connected: the granting of political and social citizenship made societies depend on the loyalty and well-being of its members. Thus, it became more important to determine who the legitimate members of a society were. In other words, a more explicit definition and delimitation of the citizenry was required. As a consequence, internal recognition went along with denial of recognition to those defined as “outside”, raising the issue of justification of boundaries and of global justice and injustice. Progress, if it happened, happened inside societies, or segregated parts of societies, and often because boundaries to the outside had been set and enforced.

17 One may refer to equality within bounded societies as political inclusion (I will return to the issue below when discussing political progress). Where this political inclusion coincided with social inclusion, a phenomenon that up to the 1960s is mostly confined to European and socialist societies, thirdly, a new form of exclusion emerged from the 1980s onwards. Sociologists have referred to this phenomenon as social exclusion, emphasizing the co-existence of politico-legal equality with de facto denial of access to societal achievements for some groups. The term social exclusion is much less adequate for societies in which social inclusion had earlier not been achieved. In some of those societies, such as South Africa and Brazil, the advent of equal political inclusion in the 1980s and 1990s was indeed made to coincide with steps to greater social inclusion taken by “progressive” political majorities.

18 Lastly, it needs to be noted that inclusion was often claimed by and for social groups, collectivities, to whom equality had been denied: slaves, women, workers, but that it was mostly achieved in the form of individual rights. Thus, the collectivity that struggled for social progress as inclusion was dissolved, or at least significantly weakened, due to the achievement of inclusion. [4] The fact that the reaching of formal equality entailed the disappearance of strong collectivities should have an enormous impact on views of possible progress today.

19 This observation leads directly to the consideration of individualization as the second indicator of social progress. The increase of individual autonomy has been a key commitment of European modernity from at least the sixteenth century onwards, even though it spread only gradually through society (Taylor 1989). From the early nineteenth century onwards, juridical change such as the formalization of individual rights following the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and the granting of commercial freedom gave a push to the orientation towards individual autonomy. Very soon, though, negative consequences in terms of disembedding of human beings from their social contexts came to be perceived. This is the historical context in which Tocqueville would diagnose the rise of conformism as a consequence of equal freedom in US democracy; in which Marx would identify a particular form of alienation as the result of commodification, namely human relations turning into relations between things when human beings encounter each other on markets; and somewhat later the context in which Weber expresses his concern about the limited range of forms of conducting one’s life when exposed to the rationalizing demands of modern capitalism. According to these analyses, equal individual freedom had not increased, but rather decreased possibilities for personal self-realization under the socio-political conditions of the nineteenth century. One may have doubts about the adequacy of these diagnoses: Possibly these observers mistakenly applied an aristocratic-bourgeois view of self-realization to the peasant and worker majority population to whom gaining equal freedom meant something different, at least as a first historical experience. Nevertheless these analyses rightly question the immediacy of the connection between individual rights and individualization.

20 Subsequently, throughout the first two thirds of the twentieth century, one can indeed observe a process of collectivization with the building of mass organizations such as parties and trade unions, often emerging from social movements of protest, and the standardizing of life-expectations and forms of behaviour, enhanced through schools, mass media and mass consumption. These collective conventions and institutions of “organized modernity” (Wagner 1994) include their members as individuals, true, but they do so by means of standardizing roles and homogenizing outlooks on the world. Thus, the term individualization is hardly useful to characterize the period between the 1890s and the 1950s in many societies. In turn, the social transformation that started during the 1960s is often seen as having led to highly increased individualization and new forms of individualism. Whether this new individualization can be regarded as social progress, however, remains debated (e.g. Honneth 2005).

Political progress: individual rights and collective self-determination

21 Today, political progress is often considered to be indicated by individual rights and by democracy, as demonstrated by the widespread use of the slogan “human rights and democracy”, either to describe “advanced” societies or as a claim on societies that still need to make political progress. This conception of political progress, furthermore, is seen to have been inaugurated at the end of the eighteenth century, with the above-mentioned Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789 as a key event. A recent version of mapping such progress as evolutionary, even though not steady, can be found in the political-science theorem about successive waves of democratization.

22 But is this current understanding of political progress adequate? Political progress under conditions of modernity should mean that better answers are given to the question of how to live together, that there is increase in the possibility of collective self-determination. A good answer to this question – one that is normatively acceptable and the reaching of which marks progress – has to fulfill not one but two basic requirements: First, the rules for living together have to be determined freely, by oneself, as the expression of the collective will of those living together. And second, the application of those rules should result in a way of living together that was actually desired and intended. The first requirement points to autonomy, and in particular to the relation between individual and collective autonomy. The second is a question of mastery, of collectively mastering one’s fate. Rather than looking at historical political progress as the increase in individual rights and democracy, therefore, the ways in which these two requirements were supposed to be fulfilled need to be explored.

23 Individual rights – first – were discussed above under the heading of social progress as expressions of equal freedom. In the current context, they are of concern only in as far as they relate to addressing the question of political self-determination. As such, they have been seen as ambiguous. On the one hand, rights as the freedom of expression are essential for the communications that form public opinion and underlie collective decision-making. Being free, furthermore, enhances the civic commitment needed to sustain the polity that provides these freedoms, a reasoning first voiced by Pericles in ancient democratic Athens. On the other hand, individual liberty can endanger the polity. If everyone only follows their own will, political deliberation may remain inconclusive and no rules for living together can be agreed upon. According to the latter reasoning, increase in liberty alone cannot unequivocally be seen as an indicator of political progress because it left the question of setting the rules for the life in common without an answer.

24 Collective autonomy – second – requires, in turn, first of all the constitution of the collectivity that exercises collective self-determination. Historically, the textbook case of this process is the transformation of the absolute sovereignty of the monarch into the sovereignty of the people, and the key example is the French Revolution. In many situations, however, it was suggested that the boundaries of monarchical sovereignty did not coincide with the boundaries of reasonable collective self-determination. The considerations that were historically made in Europe in this regard drew on the concerns about individual autonomy: If it can be difficult to reach agreement between free and unbound individuals, then a democratic polity should possibly be constituted by human beings who already have something in common, and this commonality was found in language and culture. The constitution of such cultural-linguistic communities as political subjects, therefore, was widely considered as a key component of political progress.

25 The subject of collective self-determination could be referred to as the people or the nation, the former term emphasizing the seizing of popular sovereignty as the form of reaching collective autonomy, the latter hinting at the existence of collectivities that lived under domination – then, the emancipatory struggle was for national liberation from imperial or colonial domination. The nation-states that formed as the outcome of such struggles were seen to mark political progress due to the achievement of collective autonomy. And they were also seen as entities of equal standing towards each other, thus realizing equal freedom among collectivities in the “international” system of states in analogy to the equal freedom of individuals within states. That their boundaries also limited the reach of equal freedom, as discussed above, was of no concern, because those boundaries derived their justification from a political reasoning that had primacy over social progress, even provided the means for reaching limited social progress, indeed a bounded one.

26 The actual historical practice of collective self-determination – third – was radically limited by concerns for mastery. Even though the late-eighteenth-century political imaginary centrally included popular sovereignty based on free and equal universal suffrage, the idea of democracy was defeated in practice. Europe saw a restoration of the Old Regime after 1815, the newly independent republics of South America – and the “Boer” republics in what is now South Africa – were governed by the settler elites, and the USA and Brazil furthermore maintained slavery until long into the nineteenth century, thus excluding a sizable part of the population from political participation. Given this situation, the struggle for political progress understandably focused on reaching full and equal participation, achieved in many countries by the end of the First World War, often lost again, and regained after the end of the Second World War. Numerous countries faced persistent authoritarian or oligarchic rule to the 1980s or witnessed coup d’états that introduced military dictatorships during the 1960s and 1970s, most of them replaced by electoral democracies by the 1980s and 1990s.

27 Rather than turning this sequence of events into a narrative of an unstoppable, even though intermittent, process of democratization, it is more fruitful to ask why democracy was not introduced when its political imaginary forcefully emerged at the end of the eighteenth century. One answer to this question is the effective resistance of elites who feared to lose not only decision-making power but also many of the privileges they held before the revolutionary period. These elites were able to muster sufficient power to contain the drive towards democracy, so the argument goes. In other words, these elites attempted, temporarily successfully, to block the path of progress, which otherwise was well marked out. While being partly valid, this reasoning overlooks that justifications in terms of addressing the political problématique were also provided that conceived political progress in other terms than the increase of democracy.

28 Thus, we move to discuss the history of dealing with the second requirement of political progress, namely to elaborate and implement collective rules that lead to a way of living together that is desired and intended. To state this requirement means opening the path for the possibility that egalitarian-inclusive democracy was not the best means to elaborate and implement such rules. Reasoning in some such terms preceded the advent of democracy and has accompanied it all the way to the present.

29 Already during the eighteenth century the rationalization of state administration was seen as one major accomplishment of Enlightenment reason (for an example, see Guimarães 2015). When the “advance” of Europe was considered from the outside during this period, from the angle of the Ottoman or Russian elites, for example, it was the systematic improvement of state capacity in countries such as Prussia or France that formed the centre of attention. When these reform processes merged with the claims for popular sovereignty at the end of the eighteenth century, many otherwise fairly radical Enlightenment thinkers did not advocate egalitarian-inclusive democracy. Denying any inconsistence in their reasoning, they held that the majority of the population was not sufficiently educated to make proper use of their capacity for reason. Full political participation had to wait until everyone had exited from immaturity. In many cases, one should not consider this stand as a part of elite resistance, but as a conscious justification for domination that was seen as reasonable in the given context. This justification continued to be hegemonic for colonial rule and even for relations between former colonies and former colonizers until the 1980s (Karagiannis 2004).

30 By mid-nineteenth century, the discrepancy between the political imaginary and the existing institutions had become so pronounced that the calls for democracy became more forceful. But even among the advocates, the doubts had not entirely disappeared. One can suggest that Marx was talking about a form of democracy when he invoked the dictatorship of the proletariat, but the compelling argument was not that the proletariat formed the majority of the population, but that it was the class embodying the universal interest. Such mode of reasoning haunted the socialist tradition for a long time. Between the two world-wars of the twentieth century, defenders of actual practices of collective-self-determination were rare. Many intellectuals assumed that the collectivity first needed to be identified and delimited, as the working class or the nation, and the collective rules to be derived from the pre-defined interests of these collectivities.

31 It is only after the Second World War that the practices of collective self-determination were more widely accepted, not least because of the disastrous consequences of the collective essentialisms of nation and class. But even for this period qualifications need to be added. On the one hand, the justification for limitations of democracy did not disappear entirely. It is suggested, for instance, that “successful societies” that made considerable economic progress, such as South Korea and Brazil, laid the foundations for such progress during periods of authoritarian rule, and that political progress in terms of democracy can only be sustained once a certain degree of economic well-being has been achieved. On the other hand, the practice of collective self-determination itself had changed from the first half of the twentieth century to the second. The early century had witnessed periods of high mobilization, and now it was argued that totalitarianism was one of the outcomes of such mobilization. During the second half of the century, therefore, democracy was re-interpreted as low-level participation – “conventional participation”, as political scientists should call it – limited to elections, and political change as confined to the turnover of political personnel through those elections. All other participation was discouraged, and political apathy hailed as a precondition for democracy to be viable.

32 This situation was to change during the 1960s: with the success of the struggles for decolonization in Africa; with the Cuban Revolution and the radicalization of political debate in Latin America during the 1960s and 1970s; with the civil rights movement in the US, the Prague Spring in socialist Europe, and with the student and workers’ revolts in many parts of the globe at the end of the 1960s – all signs that “unconventional participation” had emerged and that the question of egalitarian-inclusive democracy with high intensity of participation was forcefully placed on the global political agenda. These occurrences, in turn, generated worries among the elites about the “governability” of democracies. It became clear that political progress had been conceptualized in highly contradictory ways: as the widening and intensification of participation, on the one hand, and as the enhancement of mastery by a centralized collective agency, the state, on the other. Even though both objectives were abstractly shared by many practitioners and observers, they appeared ever more irreconcilable as they were pursued in parallel.

The historical logics of modernity and the question of social and political progress today

33 The preceding conceptual reflections have shown that social and political progress have their core concern in freedom. Social and political progress, most broadly understood, is the increase in the human capacity to live lives as they want them to live, personally and collectively. The preceding historical observations, in turn, have shown that some such progress has occurred over the past two centuries. They have also shown, however, that this historical record is much more ambivalent than standard views are willing to recognize and that it poses questions both for the historical understanding and for the future pursuit of social and political progress. In the final step of this article, an attempt will be made to identify those questions by reviewing the above findings. For reasons of brevity, this will be done in the form of theses. [5]

34 First of all, while social and political progress has freedom as its core concern, it has historically not been brought about by the action and interaction of free human beings, unlike Enlightenment authors thought. As nineteenth and early twentieth-century societies remained marked by formal domination, resistance to domination turned out to be the main “engine” or “mechanism” for social and political progress.

35 Secondly, such resistance came to focus on rights, as achieving equal freedom from constraints and from domination, both individually and collectively. This emphasis needs to be understood against the background of prevailing formal domination; and the struggle for rights turned out to be highly successful in overcoming formal domination, even though only in the long run.

36 Thirdly, though, this focus on rights meant a reinterpretation of freedom, disassociating the form of right from what for want of a better term we may call the “substantive” goals of social and political progress, self-realization and self-determination. This move created some of the ambivalences in the history of social and political progress diagnosed above. Furthermore, this reinterpretation is the background for the distinction between negative and positive freedom in the tradition of liberalism. It is better understood as the individualization of the notion of self-realization, locating it in the preferences of the human being seen as the atom of social life, and in the delegitimation of the notion of collective self-determination, always suspect of infringing on the freedom of the individual.

37 Today, fourthly, we live in a particular historical situation: the actions of socio-political movements between the 1960s and the 1990s brought about a global constellation that comes close to the end of formal domination. Even though such domination is by far not absent from the contemporary world, it is today extremely difficult to justify the hierarchy of one category of persons over others. Equal legal freedom exists within many societies, and the global discourse on human rights and the introduction of the “responsibility to protect” principle in international politics has put pressure on polities in which it does not exist.

38 For this reason, fifthly, the mechanism that drove social and political progress for more than one and a half centuries, resistance to formal domination, has become defunct, leading to a variety of diagnoses about the end of progress during the closing decades of the twentieth century, from Jean-François Lyotard to Richard Rorty to Francis Fukuyama.

39 Rather than truly spelling the end of progress, sixthly, however, the current constellation demands a rethinking of progress, critically retrieving the notions of freedom and of critique of domination. The largely successful struggle for equal legal freedom has not done away with domination as such. It has led to a displacement of conflicts from formal to other kinds of domination, often based in the contemporary significance of past injustice. And the success of the struggle should not be equated with the realization of freedom either. Rather, we need to ask today what the requirements for personal self-realization and collective self-determination are in a situation of equal legal freedom, a question that was neglected as long as the overcoming of formal domination seemed to be the crucial objective. As we have reasons to believe that these requirements are far from being met today, the answer to this question is not self-evident at all.