“The idea of progress is contemporary with the age of enlightenment and with the bourgeois revolution. Of
course, certain sources of its inspiration can be found in the seventeenth century; the quarrel between the
Ancients and the Moderns already introduced into European ideology the perfectly absurd conception of
an artistic form of progress. In a more serious fashion, the idea of a science that steadily increases its
conquests can also be derived from Cartesian philosophy. But Turgot, in 1750, is the first person to give a
clear definition of the new faith. His treatise on the progress of the human mind basically recapitulates
Bossuet's universal history. The idea of progress alone is substituted for the divine will. "The total mass
of the human race, by alternating stages of calm and agitation, of good and evil, always marches, though
with dragging footsteps, toward greater and greater perfection." This optimistic statement will furnish the
basic ingredient of the rhetorical observations of Condorcet, the official theorist of progress, which he
linked with the progress of the State and of which he was also the official victim in that the enlightened
State forced him to poison himself. Sorel was perfectly correct in saying that the philosophy of progress
was exactly the philosophy to suit a society eager to enjoy the material prosperity derived from technical
progress. When we are assured that tomorrow, in the natural order of events, will be better than today, we
can enjoy ourselves in peace. Progress, paradoxically, can be used to justify conservatism. A draft drawn
on confidence in the future, it allows the master to have a clear conscience. The slave and those whose
present life is miserable and who can find no consolation in the heavens are assured that at least the future
belongs to them. The future is the only kind of property that the masters willingly concede to the slaves.”