The Progress Trap: The Modern Left and the False A uthority of History Cloth

Cobley, Ben

ISBN 10: 1509567623 / ISBN 13: 9781509567621

Published by Polity Pr, 2025

About this Item

224 pages. 6.34x1.18x9.29 inches. In Stock.

Seller Inventory # x-1509567623

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Progress Trap: The Modern Left and the False A uthority of History Cloth
• Publisher: Polity Pr
• Publication Date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1509567623
• ISBN 13: 9781509567621
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: Brand New
• Weight: 0.49 kilograms

About this title

Synopsis

The idea of progress, one of the animating ideas of Western civilization, has now gone global. From Marxism and neoliberalism to today’s mutant identity politics, it offers a framework of knowledge and confidence: an assurance that things will get better and that history is on our side. However, in doing this it creates a form of authority that is simultaneously imaginary and dishonest, resting on confidence in a future that is really contingent and unknowable.

In The Progress Trap, Ben Cobley looks at this progressive mindset as a form of power, conferring a right to act and control others. ‘Change’, ‘transformation’ and the ‘new’ are the superior values, meaning destruction of the old: people, cultures and nature. It is a trap into which nearly all of us fall at times, so attractive are its stories and familiar its techniques.

Hard-hitting but thoughtful, the book is a meditation on the sinister consequences of the progressive way of being: for ourselves, for our democracy, for our art and for the pursuit of real knowledge.

About the Author

Ben Cobley is a journalist and former Labour Party activist. He is the author of The Tribe: The Liberal-Left and the System of Diversity.