Putting progress in its place

Abstract

The idea of progress disconcerts. While it is enshrined as an object in our research audit culture, its very existence is queried in many groves of the modern academy. Here I contend that the idea of ‘progress in geography’ has meant different things, at different times, in different places, and that it has been put to different cultural and political uses. The realization that ‘progress in geography’has its own geography might lead us in the direction of destabilizing the notion to the point of undermining it altogether. I believe that to be mistaken. Instead I argue for the retrieval of a chastened form of the idea of progress as a regulative ideal both epistemologically and morally.