The history of the idea of progress and the history of the concept of progress are two different things, not least because they emanate from considerably different intellectual traditions. In anglophone history of ideas, progress has typically been viewed as a belief. Historians of ideas explore the past evaluating the extent to which a given society met certain conditions of belief. By contrast, in the history of concepts as developed by Reinhart Koselleck, progress has occupied the dual role of a ‘basic concept’ that grasps modern sociopolitical reality and a ‘collective singular’ that aggregates previous and adjacent meanings in the one linguistic unit. This article compares these two historical research programmes, highlights their merits and deficiencies, and concludes by offering a new approach to the history of concepts as suggested by R.G. Collingwood’s theory of a scale of forms. In each of the approaches to the history of ideas and concepts addressed, particular attention is given to the problem of what qualifies as progress, and thus to a longstanding problem concerning the attribution of progress to past societies routinely excluded from its history, including those left out by Koselleck’s conventional secular-modern thesis.

中文翻译：

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想法还是概念？比较方法论的进展

进步思想的历史和进步概念的历史是两件不同的事情，尤其是因为它们源于截然不同的知识传统。在英语国家的思想史上，进步通常被视为一种信念。思想史学家探索过去，评估特定社会满足某些信仰条件的程度。相比之下，在莱因哈特·科塞莱克（Reinhart Koselleck）所发展的概念史上，进步占据了双重角色：掌握现代社会政治现实的“基本概念”和将先前和相邻含义聚合在一个语言单元中的“集体单一概念”。本文比较了这两个历史研究项目，强调了它们的优点和不足，并根据 RG 科林伍德的形式尺度理论提出了一种研究概念史的新方法。在所讨论的思想和概念史的每一种方法中，都特别关注什么是进步的问题，从而关注一个长期存在的问题，即将进步归因于通常被排除在其历史之外的过去社会，包括那些留下来的社会。科塞莱克的传统世俗现代论题得出了这一结论。