Imagine a customs officer. He posts a notice at the gate: "This zone has no list of contraband. We presuppose no value judgment; anything may pass." Then, in the warehouse behind him, crate by crate, he sneaks in "emancipation," "adequate," "reflexivity," "complexity" — unlabeled, un-invoiced, as if they were not goods but air.
This is what Rahel Jaeggi — the fourth-generation heir of the Frankfurt School — does in her new book Progress and Regress. Not out of dishonesty, but out of a sincere philosophical predicament: she wants to salvage the concept of "progress," yet without taking on its dirty history. So she claims that her framework presupposes no substantive standard of value. In her review in NLR 159, Katie Ebner-Landy uses a precise term for what happens: norm smuggling.
The Dirty History of Progress
First, why "progress" needs salvaging.
Enlightenment philosophy used it to justify colonialism — the mission of "civilization" against "barbarism." Liberalism used it to justify imperialism — the uplift of "development" over "backwardness." Twentieth-century state socialism used it to justify the Gulag — the sacrifice of a generation for the "historical necessity." Every time someone acts in the name of "progress," what they stand on is usually someone else's corpse.
The postcolonial theorists are right, and Foucault is right — the concept is too dirty; throw it out.
But Jaeggi says no. She points to an awkward asymmetry: those who have abandoned "progress" still find themselves, unawares, using "regress" ("democratic backsliding," "the rollback of rights"). You cannot repudiate progress while unconsciously depending on it. If your critique requires the judgment that "things are getting worse," you implicitly admit that "things can get better" — and that is the minimum definition of "progress."
So Jaeggi's program is: extract the conceptual core, strip away the teleology, Eurocentrism, and dogmatism encrusted upon it. A precise philosophical operation.
"Societies Do Not Have Goals; They Solve Problems"
This is Jaeggi's core idea, and the way she reconstructs progress.
The old version of progress looked like this: humanity, like an individual, develops from "childhood" to "adulthood," passing through necessary stages of development, advancing in a straight line toward a preset goal (freedom, reason, wealth and power). Scientific progress and moral progress are links in a single unbreakable chain. Progress is an irresistible, impersonal historical force.
Jaeggi dismantles all of this. Her replacement is borrowed from pragmatism: progress is not movement toward a fixed goal but a process of working one's way out of a particular problem. Cavemen did not dream of skyscrapers — the skyscraper was a solution to the problem of a shortage of space in Manhattan combined with solid bedrock.
This is a clever conversion. It preserves the space for critique — you can judge whether certain changes are "solving problems" or "denying problems" — while avoiding teleology (there is no preset "end of history").
Up to this point, the operation is a success.
The First Smuggled Good: "Adequate"
Then the trouble begins.
Jaeggi needs a criterion for distinguishing "good problem-solving" from "bad problem-solving" — otherwise any change could be called "progress" so long as it responded to some problem. She says: progress is an "adequate" response to crisis, regress is an "inadequate" one.
Adequate. The word sounds harmless, even banal. But Ebner-Landy follows up with a lethal question: what counts as "adequate"? Who defines it? By what authority?
If we say that nationalism is "regress" because it denies the fact that the nation-state paradigm is historically obsolete — then should utopian socialism also be accused of "denying the reality of capitalist hegemony"? Communists would argue that their program is precisely the "adequate response" to the crisis of capitalism. Jaeggi's framework cannot adjudicate this disagreement, because "adequate" is a formal word without content — a blank check that becomes whatever you fill in.
The first smuggled good passes through customs like this. "Adequate," and its opposite "inadequate," are used as functional terms, requiring no argument, no tracing. But they carry a whole set of implicit judgments about what is "good" — only those judgments have not been declared.
The Second Smuggled Goods: "Reflexivity" and "Complexity"
Jaeggi defines progress as the "growth of reflexivity induced by crisis" — a society encounters a crisis, is forced to reflect on its own premises, and corrects its self-deceptions. Progress is not only quantitative growth in knowledge; it includes the qualitative transformation of "learning how to learn."
It sounds good. But Ebner-Landy asks two cold questions:
Is reflexivity an unquestionable good? And complexity?
Reflexivity — a society's capacity to examine its own assumptions — sounds, of course, good. But an over-reflective society can also lapse into paralysis: questioning its own premises so relentlessly that it cannot act. Shakespeare's Hamlet is the embodiment of reflexivity, and his reflexivity killed nearly everyone around him.
Complexity — the degree of differentiation in social structures — is the same. Complexity can mean a finer division of labor, a richer field of possibilities. But it can also mean more fragile systems, more incomprehensible institutions, deeper alienation. A "more complex" society is not necessarily a "better" society — unless you have already presupposed the judgment that "complex = good."
The second batch of smuggled goods also clears customs. "Reflexivity" and "complexity" are used as measures of progress, as if their value were self-evident. But they are not self-evident — they are normative judgments, and they need to be argued for.
The Third, and Deadliest, Smuggled Good: "Emancipation"
This is the most important item Ebner-Landy finds.
Jaeggi occasionally uses "emancipation" as a near-synonym for progress, and at one point calls it "the vanishing point for understanding progress and regress." Most of her examples of progressive change are drawn from struggles of emancipation — of the enslaved, of women, of colonies winning independence.
But she never systematically defines or argues for the criterion of "emancipation." It never occupies a formal place in her theoretical framework. It is only in the examples, in the marginal notes, in rhetoric like "the vanishing point," that it quietly, inconspicuously, becomes the criterion that distinguishes progress from regress.
It seems that "emancipation" has quietly become the criterion we need in order to distinguish progress from regress. But if we have such a criterion, are we not back where we started?
This is the complete portrait of "norm smuggling." Jaeggi claims to need no substantive standard of value. But she uses "adequate" — an undefined normative word. She uses "reflexivity" and "complexity" — two unargued goods. She uses "emancipation" — a criterion never officially acknowledged but everywhere present. The front door is shut; the back door keeps moving goods.
A Practical Test
Ebner-Landy puts Jaeggi's framework through a brilliant stress test.
Suppose an environmental activist reads the book and is much inspired. She now faces a choice: support "degrowth" or the "Green New Deal"?
Both are responses to a real ecological crisis. Neither is a repetition of a "historically discredited program" — both are new. Within Jaeggi's framework, neither can be judged a "regress." So how should she choose?
Jaeggi's framework can only assess retrospectively — only after degrowth has been implemented can one judge whether it improved society's problem-solving capacity. If you implement degrowth and the resulting economic contraction weakens the state's capacity to provide social services — then you can call it "inadequate." But is that not too late? You need to judge in the present, not grade after the fact.
This test exposes a structural defect: Jaeggi's "process concept" is a retrospective tool, but political action requires prospective judgment. You cannot stand at a crossroads and tell the activist "tell me which road was right after you have walked it." You need a "true north of progress" to point the way in the present.
The Fascism Problem
The sharpest challenge.
Jaeggi says the revival of contemporary neo-fascist movements can be fairly judged as "regress" — they repeat historically failed responses. This sounds reasonable. But Ebner-Landy presses: how do you prove that fascism was already "regress" at the moment of its emergence in the 1920s?
At that time it was no "repetition of a discredited program" — it was new. To judge it as regress already then, you need to bring in other norms — about human dignity, about the legitimacy of violence, about political equality. And Jaeggi claims her framework does not require these things.
Jaeggi is herself aware of this tension and makes an interesting concession: she distinguishes between "morally right" and "progressive." The defeat of fascism was morally right — "defeating fascism would still be morally right even if it had been accomplished by little green men from outer space." But you would not call reaching the summit by helicopter "progress."
The distinction is clever, but it pushes the problem away. If you admit the existence of a standard of moral judgment independent of "progress," you have to say what that standard is. Jaeggi's framework cannot.
Why This Debate Is Not an Academic Exercise
"Progress" is not just an academic concept. It is a political tool.
How you define progress determines how you view social movements, how you evaluate policy, how you judge what is worth fighting for. Was the abolitionist movement "progress"? Women's suffrage? Same-sex marriage? If you say "yes" — on what standard is your "yes" based? Because they "solved a problem"? Whose problem? Was the solution adequate or not? Who adjudicates?
Every declaration of "progress" in history has presupposed an unspoken standard. The abolitionist movement presupposed that "human freedom matters more than property rights." Women's suffrage presupposed that "political equality should not be excluded by gender." These are not cases of "adequate problem-solving" — they are substantive judgments about what constitutes a good society. Jaeggi tries to circumvent these judgments, but she cannot. Because if you do circumvent them, you cannot explain why abolition was progress and fascism was not — the difference lies not in "process" but in substance.
Ebner-Landy's final verdict is a measured one:
Despite being an admirable display of philosophical reasoning, it is unclear whether Progress and Regress achieves its goal. If we wish to retain the concept of progress, we need to be able to appeal to a substantive standard — whether emancipation or something else. The task is to identify and argue for the features of that standard.
Jaeggi's scalpel is precise. But the patient does not need a more precise incision; he needs a more fundamental transplant. The word that has been smuggled through the back door all along — emancipation — needs to be brought in through the front door and given a legitimate seat. And then, on the basis of it, to argue: what is emancipation, what obstructs it, who has the authority to define its scope.
This is more dangerous than Jaeggi's program — because it requires you to defend your standard rather than hide behind "process" and "adequacy." But for that very reason, it is more honest.
[Editor's Note] The difficulty of this debate may run a layer deeper than either Jaeggi or Ebner-Landy realizes. The binary narrative of progress and regress is not merely a philosophical inheritance; it is the underlying architecture of human cognition — the brain saves energy by classifying, and "good" and "bad" are its most basic energy-saving tools. To use the concept of "progress," you inevitably make a binary judgment; and to make a binary judgment, you inevitably need an anchor — a "goal," toward which is progress and away from which is regress.
But what is this goal? Communism? A post-scarcity society of material abundance and highly advanced technology? A society without class distinction in which all are equal? As long as no consensus on this endpoint exists — and in all probability it never will — progress and regress will be difficult to define strictly. Jaeggi's attempt to remove the goal while retaining the judgment is like trying to remove the North Star while retaining a sense of direction. You can navigate without a compass, but you have to be oriented toward some reference point in order to tell whether you are advancing or retreating. The question is: what is that reference point, who has the right to set it, and by what claim is it more legitimate than any other? This inquiry will not end — but it cannot be pretended out of existence.