Progress and Power

by Carl Lotus Becker

116 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1965

About the author

Carl Lotus Becker was an American historian. He is best known for The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (1932), four lectures on The Enlightenment delivered at Yale University. His assertion that philosophies, in the "Age of Reason," relied far more upon Christian assumptions than they cared to admit, has been influential, but has also been much attacked,

Cornell has recognized his work as an educator by naming one of its five new residential colleges the Carl Becker House.

Reviews

[Paul Bond · Rating 4 out of 5]

A series of lectures given at Stanford University in 1935. Becker provides a "view from Mount Olympus" of human history to date, an account not so high level as to be completely alien, but clinical as to the fate of any one nation or civilization. His prognosis: that our power to unleash the bounty of nature has increased exponentially, but we are, by comparison, flops at reforming social institutions. Unlike matter, mankind resist (and resents) the external imposition of plans for systematic improvement. Becker gives such skepticism its due, but urges us not to abandon the concept of progress wholesale. Interesting blend of flinty-eyed realism and what Al Franken described as the politics of the mushball middle.