This kind of thinking reduces premodern or "traditional" societies to flatness and immobility.

The impression of a premodern past almost entirely devoid of incident is strengthened by a sociological conception of history that seeks the typical, the average, and the normal as opposed to the idiosyncratic and exceptional. Macaulay, whose name is so closely associated with the Whig view of history as the story of never-ending improvement, once said that the life of a modern nation could be understood only by studying "ordinary men as they appear in their ordinary business and in their ordinary pleasures." Those who wished "to understand the condition of mankind in former ages," according to Macaulay, "must proceed on the same principle," instead of confining their attention to "public transactions, to wars, congresses, and debates." Since it is above all the condition of the masses that furnishes the best index of progress, according to this way of thinking, the long ages in which the masses lived in poverty, illiteracy, and the darkness of superstition, bound to an unchanging round of toil, take on the same timeless appearance, in progressive historiography, that we have already noted in nostalgic representations of the past. The historical record boils down to an uneventful succession of births, marriages, and deaths. The only question it seems to invite is whether the monotony of premodern times was experienced as a comfort or a curse. Did the "immemorially old, clod-like existence" of the premodern masses, as Edward Shils has referred to it, offer the compensatory security of clearly defined social status, reciprocal obligations, and the reassuring knowledge that the future would closely resemble the past?

A conviction that such debates are not only interminable but completely uninformative, and yet that they continue to dominate the historical imagination of our time as well as its politics, has prompted this investigation of the idea of progress and its echo, the homesickness of the "homeless mind." A further exploration of the cultural background of contemporary debate requires an analysis of the long-standing controversy about "modernization" and "community," which has flared up again in recent years. The communitarian critique of modern life recapitulates, in a more explicitly political key, many of the same themes that inform the controversy about progress, only to leave them, once again, unresolved.

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