Review of Progress and Regression

‘A path back’ to the future. Review of Progress and Regression, translated by Robert Savage. Harvard University Press, 2025. $35.00 (hardcover). 248pp. ISBN 9780674298019

Stevan Veljkovic, University of Oxford

[ 1 ]

Now in its fourth generation, the Frankfurt School, lineage of Theodor Adorno and the late Jürgen Habermas, counts amongst its current standard-bearers Swiss philosopher Rahel Jaeggi (RAH-hel YEH-ghi). As readers of Theory & Event will know, the Frankfurt body of thought is customarily referred to by the proper noun Critical Theory—capital letters, always slightly awkward in English, signalling the insider’s prerogative to protect and define. In Progress and Regression, a slim quarto volume with an ambitious agenda, Jaeggi casts her tradition against the legacy of dissolutive genealogy often associated with Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault. Revisiting Critical Theory’s originary impulses, Jaeggi argues for the legitimacy of progress as a normative concept, a high-wire act in which she must eschew any conventional philosophy of history. True to her heritage of dialectical thinking, Jaeggi approaches the topic of progress by thematising its obverse, regression. Jaeggi thereby implicitly challenges the genealogists to show the courage of their convictions: Would those who fashionably scoff at the idea of progress also deny the reality of contemporary backsliding?

[ 2 ]

In substance, Progress and Regression continues an ongoing debate between Jaeggi and the American theorist Amy Allen. In charging a normative progress—‘the backward-looking conception of progress as a historical “fact” ’ ¹ —with fatal Eurocentricity and colonialism, Allen levels a critique at Critical Theory overall. Implicitly acknowledging that Allen has the initiative, Jaeggi responds by proposing an act of retrieval. Presenting Allen’s intellectual purism as a luxury, Jaeggi asks ‘whether this [Foucauldian view] is a stance we can afford to take’ (10). The exchange shows Allen and Jaeggi as avatars of certain Anglophone and German strands in continental philosophy: German thinkers, in view of postwar Vergangenheitsbewältigung [contending with the past], have been more convinced of philosophy’s civic responsibilities and more discomfitted by postmodern flirtation with nihilism. Jaeggi puts Adorno’s negativist method to constructive purposes, answering Allen’s deleterious historicism with apophaticisms like ‘progress is neither a fact nor an ideal, nor is it a more or less justified empty norm’ (xiv).

[ 3 ]

A notable feature of Progress and Regression is the use that Jaeggi makes of North American pragmatism. Richard Rorty appears regularly and Jaeggi engages closely with the work of Philip Kitcher. Progress and Regression contains many provisional glosses on the word progress, and in a typical instance Jaeggi says progress is ‘a self-enriching experiential learning process for finding solutions to problems that are systematically blocked under conditions of regression’ (xii). Jaeggi intends by her pragmatism to shift progressivism away from the quasi-metaphysical lens of power relations and towards questions of societal and psychological health. Advocating for that shift puts Jaeggi in the incongruous role of conservative amongst proponents of emancipation. When Jaeggi says that she wishes to chart ‘a path back to the matter that has preoccupied Critical Theory (with a capital C and T) from the beginning . . . the question of the conditions for implementing progressive or regressive social change’ (14), she gestures towards a poverty of normative resources for which many would blame the abiding influence of Foucault and Jacques Derrida.

[ 4 ]

The background against which that lack shows up is, of course, the decadelong ascendancy of right-wing populism in Western democracies and emboldened authoritarianism around the globe. In examining progress through the aspect of regression, Jaeggi analogises the psychoanalytical and the social, a manoeuvre she self-consciously borrows from the ‘first generation of the Frankfurt School’ (205n1). For instance, Jaeggi observes that ‘the same pattern of regression as a defense against crisis . . . seems to be in play in the resistance shown by the populist-authoritarian right to changing gender norms and family structures’ (161). Jaeggi thus moves towards a communitarian or left-of-centre position, from which it is possible (perhaps just barely) to contemplate rapprochement with the forces of reaction and atavism.

[ 5 ]

Inasmuch as Jaeggi is chiefly addressing critical theorists in the domain of Marxist-Hegelian shibboleths, Progress and Regression is at its core about the present state of left-wing political philosophy. Jaeggi’s internecine concerns come into full view in the closing discussion, in which she recommends her regression model for its recognition of ‘a common situation, not just various competing and colliding interest groups’ (167). Jaeggi’s ‘common situation’ is close in meaning to Charles Taylor’s ‘social imaginary’—elsewhere Jaeggi refers to ‘the fundamental social epistemology and social ontology that make certain institutions and practices possible or impossible, conceivable or inconceivable, in the first place’ (54– 55). In invoking an underlying, proto-discusive level of social agreement, Jaeggi broaches the notion (unforgiveable to many of her interlocutors) that theory might transcend the political.

[ 6 ]

But despite Jaeggi’s adumbration of a wider discourse, Progress and Regression has little new to say about actual political issues. On far-right populism, Jaeggi hardly goes beyond the references to David Goodhart and Arlie Hochschild that have been standard for a decade (210). ² And Jaeggi undercuts her solidaristic approach by omitting even to ventriloquise those with whom she differs in political outlook. ‘Ostentatiously clinging to the traditional family unit and “natural” gender relations, they conjure up the specter of social and moral collapse in the face of a bewildering profusion of genders, personal pronouns, and choose-your-own identities and lifestyles’ (161–62). The word ‘clinging’ here (presumably the translator’s choice rather than Jaeggi’s ³ ) is unfortunate in view of its resonance with Barack Obama’s infamous ‘guns and religion’ remark—from 2008. ⁴ When Jaeggi takes up the issue of ‘paternalism’ late in the book (167), the ideological constrictions are apparent: The challenge she feels herself obliged to meet is not that the clinging critique is pat and stale but rather that it is too lenient towards supposed malefactors.

[ 7 ]

In places the prose of Progress and Regression can be awkward, reflecting differences of idiomatic structure between German and English. The translation renders Jaeggi’s style as a mix of Rortyan plainspeaking (‘societies do not have goals, they solve problems’ [18] ) and the stolid abstractness of Adorno: ‘The normative index of the transformation in question is not nourished by the concept of the good’ (30). Overall Jaeggi is a talented writer, and Progress and Regression is filled with lucid analysis and judicious distinctions. But where Jaeggi’s language in German has real verve, in English it can come across as merely precise and procedural.

[ 8 ]

In one respect the publication of Progress and Regression was not fortuitously timed. The German original appeared in late 2023, just months after the launch of ChatGPT and the general uptake of LLMs changed the context of progress discourse. Apart from one remark which now sounds both prescient and quaint—‘whatever one thinks of the likelihood of radical moral revolutions or radical innovations in our collective social existence, it would be foolish to rule out any such innovations in the future when it comes, say, to technological change’ (50)—Progress and Regression has little to say on questions of technology. One imagines that Jaeggi already has revisions in mind.

[ 9 ]

Readers interested in the current state of Critical Theory should regard Progress and Regression as essential reading; those interested in theory more generally may find the discussion parochial. Whilst Jaeggi hazards that ‘the question of success [in progress] can be detached from any substantive determination of what constitutes the good life’ (136), it seems in practice her vision of such success closely tracks a schema (her own political affinities). Meanwhile, the tradition of Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse has reached the natural stage at which epigones work out an orthodoxy, and Progress and Regression can be read as an artefact of that moment.

¹Amy Allen, The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory (Columbia University Press, 2016), 25, https://doi.org/10.7312/alle17324. ↩

²David Goodhart, The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics (Hurst & Company, 2017); Arlie Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (The New Press, 2016). ↩

³Cf. the original: ‘gegen die gegenwärtigen Transformationen von Geschlechterverhältnissen und familiärer Organisation demonstrativ an traditionellen Familienstrukturen festgehalten und eine Renaturalisierung der Geschlechterverhältnisse forciert wird.’ Rahel Jaeggi, Fortschritt und Regression (Suhrkamp, 2023), 232, ProQuest Ebook Central. ↩

⁴Obama was speaking at a fundraiser during the 2008 US presidential election: ‘They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.’ Carol Iannone, ‘Still Clinging to Truth,’ Academic Questions 27, no. 4 (2014): 363–367, https://www.proquest.com/docview/1634398558. ↩