progress," Sidney Pollard flatly declared in 1986, because "the only possible alternative to the belief in progress would be total despair." Faith in progress could no longer rest on a vision of human perfection, but a more modest conception of progress was not only possible but essential to the "survival" of human society, as E. H. Carr put it in 1963. Since "some such conception" alone could "persuade the present generation to make sacrifices for future generations," Carr proposed a more thoroughly secularized doctrine of "unlimited progress." Without postulating an end to history, he argued, men and women could still look forward to improvements "subject to no limits that we can ... envisage, towards goals which can be defined only as we advance towards them." Only intellectuals questioned the reality of progress. The condition of the masses had undeniably improved. The "mere accumulation of resources," to be sure, was not enough to justify a belief in progress, unless it brought "increased technical and social knowledge, ... increased mastery of man's environment." But progress in this broader sense, Carr maintained, could still not be ruled out.

His observations exemplify the dominant view of the matter. If "the belief in progress has exhibited remarkable toughness in twentieth-cen

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illusion deprive men and women of the incentive to plan for the future? Having traced the idea of progress, in the usual fashion, to the millennarian tradition of Christianity, which encouraged its heirs to envision the "completion of the past in the future," Mannheim traced the growth of a "skeptical," "prosaic," and "matter-of-fact" mentality that undermined the idea of historical completion and thus brought about a "general subsidence of utopian intensity." Unlike those who welcomed this development, Mannheim wondered whether the modern world could get along without faith in a future utopia. "A removal of the chiliastic element from the midst of culture and politics ... would leave the world without meaning of life." It would lead to a "decay of the human will." Without "ideals," man would become a "mere creature of impulses." Utopia remained a cultural and psychological necessity even if it no longer appeared to have any solid basis in fact. More recent defenders of the idea of progress tend to reject Mannheim's assumption that millennial expectations are the only grounds on which to base a belief in progress. As I hope to show, the history of progressive ideology provides a good deal of support for their position. Whether a belief in progress provides the only possible source of "ideals" and hope is quite another matter. A central premise of my own argument is that it does not.

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