history." ^* J. H. Plumb joins Nisbet in upholding the idea of progress as a "great human truth." Warren Wagar condemns the "neo-Augustinian theologians, the obscurantists, and all the pious and aesthetic and mystical refugees" who question man's ability to prevail. A. J. P. Taylor, along with Wagar and Carr, dismisses cultural pessimism as the vice of disgruntled intellectuals. Talk about the decline of civilization, Taylor says, means "only that university professors used to have domestic servants and now do their own washing-up."

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Since the idea of progress, in our time, gains a certain plausibility the more it loses the character of a secular religion, the next step in its rehabilitation might be to deny its religious origins altogether. In The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, published in Germany in 1966 but only recently translated into English, Hans Blumenberg subjects the "secularization thesis," as he calls it—the notion that progressive ideology represents a secularized version of the Christian millennium—to an all-out assault. According to Blumenberg, the idea of progress originated not in Christian eschatology but in the seventeenth-century revolt against the prestige of classical art and learning and in the scientific revolution, which provided mankind with a new mastery over the conditions of its existence and suggested by its example that the production of knowledge is cumulative and irreversible. Blumenberg admits that nineteenth-century theorists of progress like Hegel, Comte, and Spencer spun out elaborate theories of

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Nisbet finds it alarming that the present age is "almost barren of faith in progress," obsessed with "limits to growth" and "limits of scientific inquiry." In fact, however, those who talk about limits on growth and scientific inquiry remain a small minority. Even Barry Commoner, probably the most prominent environmentalist in the United States, rejects the idea that environmentalism depends on "limiting economic development." The "'limits of growth' approach," Commoner maintains, rests on the "misconception" that the earth is a "closed system, isolated from all outside sources of support and necessarily sustained only by its own limited resources."

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