The concept of ‘progress’ in the twentieth century: decline, resilience, and conceptual change

PhD project
Start of project: April 2022

The project examines the history of the semantics of ‘progress’ (‘Fortschritt’) in twentieth century german political language. If one follows Reinhart Koselleck, 'progress' is one of the two central basic concepts which embody modernity’s conceptions of time and history (together with 'history' as a collective singular). For his own present time of the 1970s, however, Koselleck suspected a decline in the belief in progress, and he was not alone to do so: not only during the crises of the 1970s, but also in the face of many earlier and later crises and wars, as well as the experiences of the Shoah, colonialism and the ambivalent consequences of technical and industrial modernisation, contemporaries announced the death of progress. But in spite of all this criticism, 'progress' or 'progressive' remains a central concept of social self-description and self-questioning to this day. The PhD project explores this ambivalence and examines the significance of semantics of progress in their everyday use in the twentieth century in Germany: Who used the concept at what time and with what intentions? How was it explicitly or implicitly (re-)defined? What functions did the use of the concept fulfil in political language? To whom were promises of progress addressed, who remained excluded from them, and which ideas of order, practices, and ideologies were legitimised with them? In which thematic contexts and discourses did the concept gain particular significance?

To answer these questions, classical hermeneutic methods of historical semantics are combined with quantitative approaches of distant reading. Essential components of the corpora used for this purpose are parliamentary debates and mass media (newspapers and magazines). Together with the term 'progress', the semantic field around it will also be examined, including competing concepts, adjacent concepts, and counter-concepts. The project concentrates on the use of the concept in German, but, guided by the debates and discourses in which 'progress' played a role, it will also look at transnational transfers and entanglements - for example, in debates on European integration or development policy.

The PhD project is part of an investigation of political-social concepts of time and process and is funded within the framework of the collaborative project "The 20th Century in Basic Concepts. A Dictionary of Historical Semantics in Germany", which is carried out jointly by the Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung in Berlin, the Leibniz-Institute für Deutsche Sprache in Mannheim and the ZZF. The head researcher of the ZZF project is Rüdiger Graf.

Simon Specht

Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam
Am Neuen Markt 1
14467 Potsdam

Office: Am Neuen Markt 9d, Room E.08
Phone: +49 (331) 74510 134

E-Mail: simon.specht [at] zzf-potsdam.de

Forschung

The concept of ‘progress’ in the twentieth century: decline, resilience, and conceptual change

PhD project
Start of project: April 2022

The project examines the history of the semantics of ‘progress’ (‘Fortschritt’) in twentieth century german political language. If one follows Reinhart Koselleck, 'progress' is one of the two central basic concepts which embody modernity’s conceptions of time and history (together with 'history' as a collective singular). For his own present time of the 1970s, however, Koselleck suspected a decline in the belief in progress, and he was not alone to do so: not only during the crises of the 1970s, but also in the face of many earlier and later crises and wars, as well as the experiences of the Shoah, colonialism and the ambivalent consequences of technical and industrial modernisation, contemporaries announced the death of progress. But in spite of all this criticism, 'progress' or 'progressive' remains a central concept of social self-description and self-questioning to this day. The PhD project explores this ambivalence and examines the significance of semantics of progress in their everyday use in the twentieth century in Germany: Who used the concept at what time and with what intentions? How was it explicitly or implicitly (re-)defined? What functions did the use of the concept fulfil in political language? To whom were promises of progress addressed, who remained excluded from them, and which ideas of order, practices, and ideologies were legitimised with them? In which thematic contexts and discourses did the concept gain particular significance?

To answer these questions, classical hermeneutic methods of historical semantics are combined with quantitative approaches of distant reading. Essential components of the corpora used for this purpose are parliamentary debates and mass media (newspapers and magazines). Together with the term 'progress', the semantic field around it will also be examined, including competing concepts, adjacent concepts, and counter-concepts. The project concentrates on the use of the concept in German, but, guided by the debates and discourses in which 'progress' played a role, it will also look at transnational transfers and entanglements - for example, in debates on European integration or development policy.

The PhD project is part of an investigation of political-social concepts of time and process and is funded within the framework of the collaborative project "The 20th Century in Basic Concepts. A Dictionary of Historical Semantics in Germany", which is carried out jointly by the Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung in Berlin, the Leibniz-Institute für Deutsche Sprache in Mannheim and the ZZF. The head researcher of the ZZF project is Rüdiger Graf.

Simon Specht

Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam
Am Neuen Markt 1
14467 Potsdam

Office: Am Neuen Markt 9d, Room E.08
Phone: +49 (331) 74510 134

E-Mail: simon.specht [at] zzf-potsdam.de

Forschung