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“It's an odd thing that one half of mankind is looking for salvation in the future and the other half in the past,” ingeniously noted the anti-hero Ulrich, in Musil's classic novel of fin-de siècle Vienna The Men Without Qualities (1953, p. 323). Indeed, as Nisbet (1994) argued in his extensive survey of ideas of progress across history, “No single idea has been more important than, perhaps as important as, the idea of progress in Western civilization for nearly three thousand years” (p. 5). From Plato's early thesis elaborated in The Laws (346 B.C.) that human society evolved through time to more complex forms, to Pinker's controversial Better Angels of our Nature , which sought to demonstrate that institutionalized government brought about a long ‘pacification process’ of reduction of violence, authors have repeatedly speculated on whether we are approaching or departing from a utopian “Golden Age.”
Such wide speculations about the past and future of humankind take particular shapes that are informed by their social contexts. From the end of the eighteenth, and increasingly from the mid-nineteenth century, ideas about progress became intertwined with the many doctrines on evolution available at the time. This is the case of social evolutionism's most prominent author, Herbert Spencer, but also of Sigmund Freud. By arguing that Freud was a social evolutionist in a similar vein as Spencer, this paper attempts to bridge a gap in both the Freudian and sociological scholarship that seems to have disregarded this aspect of his work. Though substantial attention has been