As such, the criteria for social progress do not exist, since progress in one area of public life is continuously associated with regression in another area of social relations. However, there are certain established views regarding social progress, its potential, direction and speed.
Instruction manual
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Progress is a movement forward from the lower to the higher, from less perfect to more perfect. Regression is the opposite meaning. The essence of social progress and its criteria remain a debatable issue. Even in ancient times, disputes arose over the cyclical nature of history and the sequence of progress and regression of society. French thinkers considered history a continuous renewal and improvement. Religious movements, in contrast, believed that society would inevitably regress. The great philosophers of antiquity, such as Plato, Aristotle, Toynbee, believed that society moves forward along the steps of a vicious circle. Such a movement corresponds to a spiral movement of the cylinder, moving along which society goes through the same stages, but regressing or progressing at the same time.
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Modern sociologists are convinced that moving forward in some areas of public life is always associated with stagnation in another area. Scientists have come to the conclusion that society never regresses, but periods of stagnation happen inevitably, and sometimes stagnation is delayed for a long time. If you build a graph of society’s progress, it will look like a zigzag curved line, where the period of progress is replaced by a period of stagnation.
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There is even more debate about the criteria of social progress. The main, and only recognized, is the humanistic criterion. This concept includes a person’s life expectancy, health status, the development of certain areas of cultural life, the level of education, attitude to oneself and nature, respect for human rights and the degree of freedom and other aspects.
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Society is a complex mechanism in which various social groups interact and different processes operate in parallel. These processes do not always coincide in their development, which means the impossibility of determining a specific criterion for the progress of society.
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The very concept of progress is always based on a certain value or their combination. Going forward without a goal does not make sense. The goal is a kind of idealistic idea of what society should be like. However, the concept of Aristotle and the methods proposed by him to analyze the development of the state to this day have an impact on the research of sociologists and political scientists, who are increasingly inclined to the impossibility of progressing some processes in society without regressing others.
