Volume 47, Issue 2 - Focus: Rahel Jaeggi, Progress and Regression

This paper challenges both simplistic optimism and categorical rejection of the concept of progress. It argues that while historical and technological advancements – such as antibiotics or digital communication – are undeniable, they do not automatically equate to moral or social progress. Progress is not a linear or teleological unfolding of pre-defined goals but a normatively charged, processual concept rooted in problem-solving and experiential learning. The paper thus proposes a materialist and pragmatic understanding of social change, where forms of life evolve through crisis-driven responses to second-order problems – failures not just in addressing immediate needs, but in the systems meant to solve them. Progress, then, is a qualitative transformation that reflects not just adaptation, but learning how to learn – an accumulative, reflexive process that may or may not occur. Regression, by contrast, marks blocked or reversed learning, a breakdown in such problem-solving capacity. Ultimately, the paper offers a pluralist and non-essentialist theory of progress, preserving its critical and normative potential while rejecting deterministic or ethnocentric narratives. The approach repositions progress as a dynamic, reflective category necessary for critical social theory.

Rahel Jaeggi says of her book: “The Hegelian idea of a dialectically self-enriching experiential learning process thus emerges as central to the entire project.” I examine and compare Jaeggi’s own uptake of Hegelian themes and consider them in light of her acceptance of Philip Kitcher’s distinction between ‘progress from’ and ‘progress towards’ conceptions of progress. Although there are some obvious differences between Jaeggi’s and Hegel’s conception of progress, I conclude by arguing that her way of taking things gets at the deeper roots of Hegel’s views as a non-teleological conception of history that brings into relief what is immanent to human agency.

I argue that Rahel Jaeggi’s processual account of progress cannot support substantive judgments of progress without privileging liberal values and outcomes over their alternatives. To privilege those values is perhaps not to become a hegemon in the strongest sense, but it does nudge us uncomfortably in that direction. In this respect, I suggest, a comparison with a near cousin of Jaeggi’s approach – that of John Dewey – is informative. Dewey’s view also centers on a pluralistic model of ‘problems’ that yield diverse, context-sensitive improvements, and Jaeggi herself openly aligns herself with Dewey. But Dewey’s view depends on an open embrace of core liberal principles that seem to entail invidious cross-cultural judgments. Jaeggi thinks that she can avoid this prospect, but the comparison with Dewey presents a number of reasons to doubt this. On a speculative note, I conclude that the notion of progress itself, as a normative ideal, may be inextricably linked to certain core liberal commitments. In that respect the idea of progress may involve liberal hegemony by nature, in at least a weak sense of the idea.

This paper examines the shifting semantics of ‘progress’ and ‘crisis’ as key frameworks for modern society’s self-description. Drawing on Rahel Jaeggi’s functionalist conception of progress and placing it in dialogue with Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory, it reconstructs how progress historically emerged as a synchronizing device under conditions of functional differentiation – particularly in science – before being gradually supplanted by crisis as a more inclusive semantic. By tracing the conceptual histories of both terms, the analysis reveals their roles in managing temporal complexity and societal coordination. While progress organizes change through asymmetrical inclusion, crisis flattens distinctions by encompassing all as affected, aligning more closely with the structural needs of a polycrisis-prone world society. The paper argues that any contemporary rehabilitation of progress must address its semantic selectivity, historical asymmetries, and the communicative functions it shares with the crisis narrative.

This article explores Rahel Jaeggi’s conception of the relation between progress and regression, highlighting her account of social transformation as a practical and reflexive learning process. In the first section, the article reconstructs Jaeggi’s argument that progress is never linear or necessary but contingent, multidimensional, and embedded in ‘forms of life.’ This perspective emphasizes that emancipatory change arises through crises and problem-solving practices, where gains and losses are simultaneously articulated. The second section places Jaeggi’s framework in dialogue with Brazilian critical theory, particularly the paradigm of formação [formation], which long framed the nation’s development as a progressive overcoming of colonial and slaveholding legacies. By foregrounding race as a decisive category, I argue that Jaeggi’s approach helps reinterpret Brazil’s history of incomplete modernization and persistent inequality. Anti-racist struggles, in this view, exemplify processes of experiential learning that create possibilities for emancipation while confronting enduring contradictions.

The text applies a functional ideology analysis to Rahel Jaeggi’s theory of progress in order to demonstrate its capacity to orient practices and values in modern societies. It examines the problem-solving competencies of her concept of progress within a context of highly differentiated social structures and shows that the ideologeme of functional learning proposed by Jaeggi could offer a comprehensive yet complex orientation toward progress due to its formal abstraction. However, this potential is still constrained by requirements of specification and the occurrence of learning conflicts, both of which are also rooted in society’s differentiation. Addressing these issues calls for further development of Jaeggi’s theory, particularly by elaborating a perspective on conflicts of learning processes.

The following reflections are provoked by, and focus on, one of the key statements of synthesis in Rahel Jaeggi’s treatise on Progress and Regression , namely ‘Societies do not have goals, they solve problems.’ The phrase serves to criticize philosophies of history that work with a strong conception of progress in its first part and announces the step to elaborate a more adequate concept in the second. While agreeing with the underlying diagnosis and quest, none of the two steps nor the connection between the two is found entirely compelling. An alternative approach, hinted at in conclusion, would need to connect socio-philosophical conceptions of progress not with philosophies of history in the conventional understanding of the term, but with global history and historical sociology.

How should be think about moral progress? In her book Progress and Regression , Rahel Jaeggi answers this question from the perspective of critical social theory. She claims that, if we want to avoid falling into the familiar traps of colonial and/or imperialist thinking, theorizing about moral progress requires that we proceed proceduralistically and negativistically: instead of identifying positive instances of substantive moral improvement, we should understand moral progress as a process of self-enriching experiential learning through which certain forms of regression are blocked. In this paper, I argue that these methodological commitments remain unjustified, and that there is nothing inherently objectionable about identifying cases of morally progressive social change.

The present paper calls into question one of the most prominent International Relations theories: John J. Mearsheimer’s offensive realism. By bringing to bear the conceptual apparatus of Austrian- and public-choice-style political economy, the article demonstrates Mearsheimer’s conception to be either substantively unsound or logically fallacious. More specifically, three of the notorious five ‘bedrock assumptions’ of offensive realism – uncertainty regarding other actors’ intentions, the primacy of survival, and the rationality of statesmen – are, depending on interpretation, either untenable or insufficient to support the conclusions Mearsheimer purports to have established. Thus, the article contends that offensive realism is a faulty approach to international politics. This is largely due to the neglect of economic science, which results in the latent assumption of the absoluteness of national survival as a goal of states. It is this assumption that underlies the entire edifice of offensive realism and simultaneously renders it surprisingly utopian and idealistic.

The biblical command ‘Blot out the memory of Amalek’ surfaced heavily in Israel after October 7, 2023. UN institutions, international and Israeli human rights NGOs and scholars of genocide studies classified the wide use of the Amalek rhetoric across Israeli politics and the military as a clear incitement to genocide. It is acknowledged that such scientific and legal subordination of the present Israeli Amalek rhetoric to the concept of genocide is indispensably important for the Palestinian just cause. However, this paper further singles out this rhetoric to examine it through the analytical lens of political theology. Thus, it first highlights the political-theological carriage of the biblical narrations of Amalek. Second, it situates Amalek as an archetype of Carl Schmitt’s concept of the enemy. Third, the paper traces a genealogy of the Zionist construction of the Palestinian as an Amalekite enemy. Finally, it concludes by showing how this political-theological genealogy culminates in the erasure of the Palestinian from the memory of Western ‘civilization.’

Kuch’s proposal for a regime of Plural Cooperativism relies on a universalization of the (worker) cooperative, while abolishing today’s dominant business corporations. It integrates several other components (public banks and stock markets) into such a regime. In this response, I first make some general comments about the normative framework of Kuch’s paper, which presents Plural Cooperativism as a way to instantiate the idea of ‘social ownership’. Second, I question the exclusive focus on cooperatives: why pluralize cooperativism , and not a pluralism of a wider set of corporate forms, amongst which foundation-owned companies and state-owned companies? Third, I question whether we should pluralize cooperativism with private and public shareholding. Why not restrict oneself to cooperativism simpliciter? All in all, we can think of ‘varieties of social ownership’ just as there are varieties of capitalism. My critiques are meant to stimulate systematic comparative thinking about the merits of Plural Cooperativism versus other regimes of social ownership.