He examines the work of German philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Oswald Spengler, Russian novelists Leo Tolstoy and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and American historians Henry Adams and Christopher Lasch―rare skeptics of the idea of progress who have much to engage political theory, a field dominated by historical optimists. Slaboch argues that political theorists should entertain the possibility that long-term, continued progress may be more fiction than reality. However, events of the preceding century, including but not limited to two world wars, conflicts in Korea and Vietnam, the spread of communism across Eastern Europe and parts of Asia, violent nationalism in the Balkans, and genocides in Cambodia and Rwanda, have called into question this faith in the continued advancement of humankind. The belief that humans are capable of making lasting improvements―intellectual, scientific, material, moral, and cultural―continues to be a commonplace of our age. Since the Enlightenment, the idea of progress has spanned right- and left-wing politics, secular and spiritual philosophy, and most every school of art or culture.
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