Freedom & Progress
Autumn 2026 · currentProgress is back, at least as a word. Abundance, Progress Studies, Accelerationism — the anglophone debate has found new names for the original liberal question of progress.
After years of degrowth debate and supposed limits to growth, the West is now to commit even more strongly to a course of progress.
What is new about the new buzzwords and what have we known for a long time? Is a strong concept of progress a matter of realpolitik or rather a promising metapolitics?
- Back to progress
Germany, like Kingsnorth, Göpel, and Ehrlich, fears the future. We are afraid, see only risks, want to prevent as much harm as we can. Progress seems philosophically discredited and not even utopian anymore. In fact, the opposite is true: today's posture of prevention is morally indefensible; progress is possible, valuable, and worth striving for.
- The Prevention State
Parts of Silicon Valley want to live on Mars; real-time data streams and AI are the pulse of Shenzhen, China's smart city. In Germany, by contrast, the story of progress mostly ends in front of a device that, like no other, has become the coffin nail of our stagnation: the printer.
- Progress Beyond the State
Modern humans have existed for roughly 200,000 years. Yet only for the last 250 years or so, during a vanishingly small slice of our history — about 0.125 percent (!) — have we experienced something one can call, without exaggeration, historically extraordinary: sustained progress.
- The Subjectivity of Progress
For a long time, progress counted as unreservedly good: as something we should all perceive as an imperative. Today, however, books become bestsellers that call for "green shrinkage" (Ulrike Herrmann, Das Ende des Kapitalismus) or "liberation from abundance" (Niko Paech, Befreiung vom Überfluss). These stand paradigmatically for the degrowth paradigm that has emerged over the past decades, according to which what was previously called progress is not good but bad.
- Accelerationism After the Acceleration
When things accelerate on their own, accelerationism is perhaps no more than a commentary on the slipping-away. A flight forward overtaken by the present.
- Obamabundance
The slogan that carried Rob Jetten to victory in the 2025 elections holds an unmistakable echo — and almost a literal translation — within it: the optimism of Barack Obama's "yes we can" from his first presidential campaign. And it was not the only thing Jetten borrowed from Obama. He set himself against division, reached out to voters who disagreed with him, and wanted to bring positive energy back into the country and its governance.
- Wanting, Enduring, Making Progress
In the living room of one of the authors hangs a print of the motif "Paris-Bruxelles" by the Belgian comic artist François Schuiten. The drawing shows a retrofuturist vision of Paris, in which the Eiffel Tower and the Bâtiments Haussmanniens disappear among viaducts carrying express trains, gliders whir through the air, and modern Art Deco towers rise into the sky. The idea of a future that triggers nostalgia: futuristic, aesthetic, sustainable, European, progressive.
- A New Love of Growth in the Chinese Century?
One could easily speak of a Gramsci Midcult these days. Metapolitics is the buzzword with which all sorts of political factions ride into battle, promising to win cultural ground – of whatever kind. The vulgar Gramscian responds to the cultural blind spots of the establishment with a political blind spot of his own: he loves cultural abstraction in order to blank out political concreteness.
- Human Progress?!
"What are you drinking?", I ask my girlfriend. She is shaking powder and water in a shaker. As the powder slowly dissolves, the liquid turns a toxic pink. "That's the new longevity mix by Bryan Johnson." Ah, the new longevity mix by Bryan Johnson, I think.