Social Progress after the Age of Progressivism

This essay is about trade unions, an institution that arose to play an important part in relation to the social progress characterizing much of the present century and that served as an important reference point for several varieties of normative progressivism. The past two decades of social progress in the most prosperous established nations appear to be rendering the institution obsolete. The objective of the paper is to reject all progressivist interpretations of this trend, neither condemning the development as a regressive obstacle to progress nor welcoming it as a normal part of the developmental process. The aim is to inquire anew into the historical project of trade unions and the interplay between this project and the processes of social progress, past and prospective. The analytical thesis is that the institution has been multi-dimensional, serving in one of its dimensions as an important political response to social progress. The normative problem is whether the unions’ political contribution to a socially conscious political democratization can be revived or transferred, when the unions’ constitutive adaptations to past stages of social progress appear to be failing so badly in the present.