Progress is a very important modern concept from which a couple of other principles follow; one there is a history, two the future will be better, and three that degeneration is possible.

During the Medieval period it was assumed that the heavens were perfect and through the knowledge of God in the present via the bible (another perfect font of information) that paradise would be gained. This notion left the medieval mind without an ego, nor the concept of time and hence history.

It is a much different world today. Progress in the market arena is known as innovation. It has become so important to the economic process that Microsoft was willing to argue that treating them as a monopoly would negatively impact innovation. This is a less-nationalistic variation on the "what is good for General Motors is good for America" argument.

It was not until the Reformation, and the Renaissance that followed, where progress become an intrinsic part of the Western culture and psyche. China had it's own issues in this area, the Confucian concept of harmony helped dampen the philosophical nature of progress, but as can be seen more recently - despite a couple of upheavals - progress has become a part of the Chinese culture and a central government policy. Arguably the communist revolution established that principle in China despite the incompetency with which progress was attempted.

In 1920 J.B.Bury published a book, The Idea of Progress, Paul Watson writes of it:

it [the book] contained one very provocative - even subversive - thought. Bury found that the idea of progress had itself progressed.

Early views of progress believed that a perfect society was possible; however, after the publishing of Origin of the Species the idea of progress gained both optimistic and pessimistic possibilities. This is the concept of regression - as opposed to progression. Watson writes:

The last chapter of Bury's book outlined how 'progress' had, in effect, evolved into the idea of evolution. This was a pertinent philosophical change, because evolution was nonteleological - had no political, or social, or religious significance. It theorized there would be progress without specifying what direction it would take.

The result of this was that it gave all manner of studies a historical dimension. Watson continues:

all discoveries, whatever value they had in themselves, were henceforth analyzed for they way they filled in our understanding of evolution - progress.

The dominance of liberal democracy and market economies since World War II has broken that chain to a large extent. All the talk of racial, political and social degeneracy was dis-credited with large scale implementation of utopian style political-racial-social systems in Germany, Russia and China.

Part of Watson's thesis is that because of science's authority through the technology gadgets it litters our lives with, and that it is non-reflective and doesn't look back over its shoulder, is that all other aspects of culture and society are following in science's wake.

As Hitler sought to implement his views of racial, social and political progress in the Third Reich, scientists were under-cutting that whole 19thC metaphysical viewpoint of progress with Quantum Mechanics and return humanity to a fuzzy, or statistically based version of certainty - a philosophy without absolutes.