Ben Cobley, Rupert Read, Fraser Myers
Progressive Agendas

The idea of progress, one of the animating concepts of Western civilisation, permeates our understanding of history and shapes the way we imagine the future. From Marxism and neoliberalism to today’s identity politics, progress offers a framework of knowledge and confidence: an assurance that things can get better and a justification for our desires.

Progress is thus a form of authority resting on confidence in a future under which ‘change’, ‘transformation’, and the ‘new’ are superior. It underwrites the destruction of existing cultures, nature, and people. But it also underpins step changes in civil rights and, until recently, living standards.

What determines whether the ideas of progress give rise to, well, progress, or merely the substitution of the old? Join writer Ben Cobley, environmental philosopher and former Extinction Rebellion spokesman Rupert Read, and Spiked magazine deputy editor Fraser Myers in a discussion about the prospects and limits of progressive thought, governance, and economies.

The event will launch Ben Cobley’s latest book The Progress Trap which examines the progressive mindset as a form of power.