By AL Dunn
Abstract
‘Progress’. A comforting and familiar term. ‘Progress’, it seems, speaks to us all. Yet those who have endeavoured to offer a more precise definition have tended to find their quest frustrating. Does ‘progress’ represent a provisional outcome of human agency or the relentless work of structure? Is it essentially a matter of faith or fundamentally a matter of fact? Demonstrably rooted in classical antiquity or irredeemably modern? By adopting a discursive framework informed by post-structural understandings of power/knowledge, this dissertation will not even attempt to supply such answers; it will, however, somewhat alter the questions. Rather than enquiring into what ‘progress’, understood ideationally, actually is, it will undertake instead to ask what ‘progress’, understood as discursive practice, actually does. The specific site in which such discursive workings will be examined is furnished by colonial and contemporary texts on international trusteeship. In colonial and recent work which advocates (the revival) of trusteeship, it will be argued that deployment of such a discourse does not produce a consensus on the meaning of ‘progress’ but does instead produce the regular effect of a discursive space constitutive of subjectivities defined as anachronistic. The consequences of such a production are, it will be argued, profoundly depoliticising. Pluralist international society texts seeking to counter contemporary proposals for trusteeship affirm the enduring value of sovereignty and pluralist, anti-paternalist norms. Although such texts offer a counter-narrative which significantly differs from that proposed by trusteeship advocates, they nevertheless deploy a similar discourse on ‘progress’ which, whilst resulting in alternative policy recommendations, does not escape the depoliticising effects identified previously. By emphasising a view of ‘progress’ as discursive practice, this dissertation will conclude by arguing for a sensitivity to the (sometimes undesirable, always political) effects such a discourse produces.
Acknowledgements
To link particular names to a comparatively short piece of work on which the verdict is yet to be delivered may appear somewhat presumptuous; in this case, however, it seems to me more presumptuous still to omit to thank certain people whose encouragement has not made this dissertation what it is (that, I am afraid, is all my doing), but has, more importantly, given me the spirit to complete it in the first place.
I would therefore particularly like to thank: Richard Wyn Jones, for a much-appreciated second chance; Jenny Edkins, for kindness, time and intellectual inspiration; and Caroline Morris, a lady without whose open house, kind words and warm heart, the last six months would have been twice as hard and ten times as long.
Introduction
‘Progress’. The term is a comforting and familiar one. It connotes the seductive allure of a better life; it conveys hope in humanity’s telluric destiny. ‘Progress’, it seems, speaks to us all. Yet when we seek to define it more precisely, it becomes elusive. The field of operations of those who accept the definitional challenge is itself defined by conflict and contradiction, perhaps best exemplified by two seminal accounts of the ‘idea’ written at a sixty-year interval: J. B. Bury’s The Idea of Progress (1920) and Robert Nisbet’s History of the Idea of Progress (1980). Whilst Bury inaugurates his narrative with the bold claim that “the notion of progress, which now seems so easy to apprehend, is of comparatively recent origin” (Bury, 1920: 6; my italics), the opening lines of the Nisbetian text declare, conversely, that “no single idea has been as important in Western civilisation for nearly 3000 years” (Nisbet, 1980: 4; my italics). Further inspection of the literature on ‘progress’ only compounds our confusion: does ‘progress’ intimate the continuity of linear time or the rupture of revolutionary upheavals? Is ‘progress’ a materiality which looks one in the face or an idea one harbours in the mind? Do we work for ‘progress’, or does ‘Progress’ work for us? Such questions elicit no consistent responses in this literature; it appears we must either sign up to our preferred definition, or renounce our enquiries. (more…)
