tury America," as Clarke Chambers noted in 1958, it is because liberals and socialists have divorced it from the "heavenly city of the eighteenth‐ century philosophers," tied it to the cause of democracy and abundance, and brought it down to earth. No one claims any more that progress is inevitable or that it will culminate in some state of final perfection. No one denies that moral improvement often fails to keep pace with material improvement. But the general rise in living standards is obviously desirable in itself. The "average length of life has been steadily extended," Charles Frankel wrote some time ago, illiteracy "progressively eliminated," work made less back-breaking, leisure time increased, and the "basic conditions of human life," in short, "changed for the better" and "changed more radically in the last hundred and fifty years than in all history before that time."* The fact of technological progress simply cannot be denied, according to Barrington Moore, and it is "accompanied by changes in social structure" that provide the "prerequisites of freedom." Material comfort does not assure a good life, but a good life is impossible without it. Material improvements, moreover, can be taken as evidence of a refusal to tolerate conditions formerly taken for granted—poverty, hunger, epidemic disease, inequality, racial bigotry. "Despite the difficulty of balancing gains and losses," Morris Ginsberg argued in 1953, humanitarian sentiment "is gaining in strength.... In no previous age has so much been done to relieve suffering, and to abolish poverty, disease and ignorance in all parts of the world." A. J. Ayer likewise sees the "average man" as "more humane, more pacific and more concerned with social justice than he was a century ago."

Progress is the "working faith of our civilization," wrote Christopher Dawson in 1929. Later writers agree. "No single idea has been more important in Western civilization," Robert Nisbet argues. "... This idea has done more good over a twenty-five-hundred-year period ... and given more strength to human hope ... than any other single idea in Western

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*"The vision behind liberalism," Frankel noted, "is the vision of a world progressively redeemed by human power from its classic ailments of poverty, disease, and ignorance.... To hold the liberal view of history [has always] meant to believe in 'progress.'"

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