The idea of progress is closely related to the modern time regime that, according to Reinhart Koselleck, emerged around 1800. Historians commonly associate the 19th century with the widespread hope for a better future to be brought about by the advances of science and technology. By contrast, in the 20th century, observers located the death of progress in the industrialized mass killings of the world wars or the alleged transformations from modernity to postmodernity in the 1970s. These obituaries, however, should not be transferred into historiography as they overlook the continuing appeal of the idea of progress among scientific and technical as well as political elites throughout the century and into our present.

Rüdiger Graf (PD, PhD) is currently the head of the research unit on the History of Economic Thought and Practice at the Center for Contemporary History, Potsdam. He studied history and philosophy at Berlin and Berkeley. In 2006, he received his PhD with a study on “The Future of Weimar Germany. Crises and Appropriations of the Future 1918-1933” at Humboldt University and, in 2013, his habilitation with a book on oil “Oil und Sovereignty. Petroknowlegde and Energy Policy in the United States and Western Europe in the 1970s”at Ruhr-University Bochum. He was a visiting scholar at New York University, a Kennedy-Fellow at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University and a Fellow at the Historisches Kolleg in Munich. Apart from the history of Weimar Germany and the history of oil and energy, he also published on historical theory and methodology.
Free and open to the public.

This lecture is part of the Thursday Series of the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies. It is made possible by a generous contribution from Kenneth and Frances Aftel Eisenberg.