Slaboch is a postdoctoral research fellow at the James Madison Program in the Department of Politics at Princeton University. Plunked down in a rural area, serving only to span the mighty Tulpehocken Creek, the famous Road-to-Nowhere of Berks County existed for years as a tiny bit of four-lane highway power connecting two rural roads. A Road to Nowhere concludes that these notable naysayers were not mere defeatists andpresents their varied prescriptions for individual and social action.Ībout author(s): Matthew W. 183 south toward where it dead ended around Van Reed Road in 1971. Turning to Spengler, Solzhenitsyn, and Lasch, Slaboch explores the contemporary relevance of the critique of progress and the arguments for and against political engagement in the face ofuncertain improvement, one-way inevitable decline, or unending cycles of advancement and decay. He compares Germany, Russia, and the UnitedStates to illustrate how these nineteenth-century critics of the idea of progress contributed to or helped forestall the emergence of forms of government that came to be associated with eachcountry: fascism, communism, and democratic capitalism, respectively. Looking at the figures of Schopenhauer, Tolstoy, andAdams, Slaboch considers the ways in which they defined progress and their reasons for doubting that their cultures, or the world, were progressing. He examines the work of German philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Oswald Spengler, Russian novelists Leo Tolstoy and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and American historians Henry Adams andChristopher Lasch-rare skeptics of the idea of progress who have much to engage political theory, a field dominated by historical optimists. Slaboch argues that political theorists should entertain the possibility that long-term, continued progress may be more fiction thanreality. ![]() However, events of the preceding century, including butnot limited to two world wars, conflicts in Korea and Vietnam, the spread of communism across Eastern Europe and parts of Asia, violent nationalism in the Balkans, and genocides in Cambodia andRwanda, have called into question this faith in the continued advancement of humankind. The belief that humans arecapable of making lasting improvements-intellectual, scientific, material, moral, and cultural-continues to be a commonplace of our age. ![]() Descriere: Since the Enlightenment, the idea of progress has spanned right- and left-wing politics, secular and spiritual philosophy, and most every school of art or culture.
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