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Focus: Progress and Regression
2025 (47) Issue 2

The concept of progress may seem outdated. After all, critics of ‘progress’ have been showing how this concept not only facilitated colonial domination but also allowed placing ‘non-Western’ regions in the waiting room of history. Understandably, thus, many scholars wish to leave ‘progress’ behind. What is curious, however, is that many of these scholars would also accept the claim that liberal democratic societies are presently subject to regression. Yet what is regression if not the loss of progress? Hence, analyzing regression must draw on an understanding of what is lost, and thus, of progress. Accordingly, as long as regression remains an interpretative frame for diagnosing society, there is a need for theorizing progress.

Rahel Jaeggi has taken up this task in her latest book Progress and Regression (Harvard 2025). Based on materialist and pragmatist perspectives, she rejects the idea that progress consists in the gradual realization of an ideal and articulates progress as a second-order problem-solving capacity. This capacity, Jaeggi argues, involves an experiential accumulation process that enables societies to effectively address problems. By contrast, societies suffer from regression when, due to an experiential blockage, they pursue inadequate solutions. Morally progressive social change, on Jaeggi’s view, is therefore not simply the result of approriately structured reasoning, but depends on material conditions that lead to learning experiences.

Analyse & Kritik welcomes submissions to Jaeggi’s book as well as to the wider field of research on progress and regression. The deadline for submitting papers of 8000 words is September 1, 2025. To submit your paper, please email it as word document to one of the editors via jculp@aup.edu, leist@philos.uzh.ch, or tranow@uni-duesseldorf.de. The issue will be published by December 2025.