In December 1940, a 43-year-old policeman in London scratched his face on a rose bush. The small wound quickly turned septic, his face ballooned with abscesses and pus, one eye became infected and had to be removed, and the infection spread to his arm and lungs. He was in a huge amount of pain. An escalation like this seems like extreme bad luck to us today. But before antibiotics, life-threatening infection was so common that life expectancy was 47.

The policeman’s doctor decided to try a brand new drug, penicillin. He was the first person in the world to receive it.

Around ten years before, Alexander Fleming returned to his lab from holiday and found one of his petri dishes contaminated with mould. He noticed, though, that the mould inhibited the growth of the bacteria, so he took it and added it to other dishes, finding the same result.

After four days of treatment the policeman was making what his doctor described as a striking recovery. His temperature returned to normal and he was eating well. On the fifth day, though, the supply ran out. A month later, he died.

It’s been estimated that since, penicillin has saved the lives of maybe two hundred million people and saved countless others from excruciating pain. It is probably the most important life-saving discovery in human history.

But it also points to a paradox in thinking about ‘progress’ in history. Not only was it discovered by accident, the mould had floated up through a window accidently left open onto a petri dish left accidently out on a bench, rather than in an incubator, while the exceptionally cool weather for the time of year encouraged growth.

If such a lifesaving drug is the result of chance, how can we think about progress? What drives it? Is it guaranteed? Is it a myth?

Of course, it wasn’t just chance. Fleming was a practicing scientist embedded in the context of institutions, aims, methods, a particular culture, and so on.

And compare this story to what was going on at precisely the same time only a few hundred miles away, in Germany and Poland – millions were being systematically murdered while the innovations of science and technology were being put to good use by Europeans slaughtering each other on battlefields.

How do we make sense of this paradox – that the most important innovation in history, like other medical and scientific advances, was happening at the same time as the most devastating catastrophe?

The historian Will Durant said that, ‘Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting, and doing the things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry, and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks. Historians are pessimists because they ignore the banks for the river’.

Is Durant right? Do we ignore the good in history? Are we all pessimists? How do we even begin to understand the good in history – how it unfolds, what drives it, what could promote, what we could learn from? There are countless difficulties. The first is, what does good even mean? What’s the measure? The criteria?

Some say health, others happiness, others wealth. Stability? Community? Equality? A postmodern critique that it’s impossible to rank values, to compare and classify, or to place any hope in grand narratives? What is a long life if it’s lived under tyranny? What is a wealthy life if those around you live in poverty?

However, if we were to begin with a loose meta-criterion that I think most would agree with while nevertheless disagreeing on precisely what it means, we’d land on something like liberty.

Liberty, broadly speaking, is the freedom to think, to speak, to do, to act, to be oneself, to go where one chooses, to strive in the way one wants to strive. To have as many of the ‘primary goods’ of life as possible in order to do so – food, shelter, transport, even things like good relationships, friendships, opportunities, and so on. Most, I think, would agree that generally, more of these things is better than less.

Liberty in this sense is neutral between competing ideological beliefs or political systems. It begins from a simple premise, that more possibility is better than less; the society that has better access to penicillin is better than the one where you’re more likely to be sent to a gas chamber.

The historical question then is to understand which historical conditions – institutional, political, cultural, philosophical – lead to an increase in liberty and which diminish it. What ideas about liberty seem to work? Where did they come from? Who built on them? Improved them? What diminished or restricted them? The historical question is to search for the causes of liberty so they can be identified and built upon today.

Hegel argued that history was the unfolding of reason through time. Martin Luther King, who read Hegel, argued that the moral arc of history bends towards justice. Marx argued that economic contradictions resolve through history, leading to a more equal society. And more recently some have claimed liberal capitalism as the end of history.

All of these claims are in some sense Hegelian, and the philosopher Terry Pinkard has recently argued in a work on Hegel that the end at work in history is the securing of justice as freedom.

Freedom is the relationship between desire, reasoning, acting on your desires, and recognition and authority. In other words, our desires don’t exist in a vacuum – we are in constant negotiation with others and their desires, with figures and systems of authority that act upon and direct our desires, and so on. Freedom is intersubjective. Social consciousness, culture, and institutions arise out of the interplay of our desires.

With this in mind, Pinkard asks if history makes sense. Is there logic in the way the interplay of desires plays out? Is history comprehensible? Or is it contingent? Random? Messy?

Hegel was a figure of the Enlightenment. Like Kant before him, he believed in a scientific approach to the world – and that included history. He argued that science was bringing the phenomena of the world around us – in nature, in humans, in everything – under ‘the concept’.

What he meant by this was that we have ideas of things – we have ideas of ourselves, our desires, of others, of history. We categorise things – we look at the qualities of things, the causes of things. The historian looks at the causes of World War II, for example.

Importantly, it’s this ability to go about the messy work of building up ideas that makes us human and provides the possibility of even having a history in the first place.

A mouse has a past, but it has no real history. We have ideas of how we acted, why we acted, how we’ve changed since. A mouse may have a drive to eat which it acts on but a human has a concept of eating under which reasons for eating, what to eat, when to eat, what’s healthy, how to farm, where to shop are categorised under the idea or concept of eating.

What Hegel is showing is how we make sense of the world – that from our ideas and concepts we make judgements about how to act. Once we understand this we can understand that the idea of salad is a historical one. We’ve brought more understanding under the concept of salad – its chemical composition, its effects, the best ways of growing, distributing, eating it, and so on.

Humans develop conceptions over time – at times ideas fall apart and are discarded and at other times they develop and are adopted. The biblical idea that the sun went around the earth fell apart as it was observed that the opposite was true, so the idea that the bible was the guide to wisdom was slowly superseded by an emphasis on observation and empiricism.

Pinkard writes that, ‘the components of the “Idea” arise in history, but as humans reflect on those concepts, put them to use, and modify them in the course of their collective lives, they refashion them into overall schemes of intelligibility’.

Hegel was expanding on Spinoza’s point that modern scientific enquiry expands outwards towards the ‘perspective of infinity’, by looking at the causes and qualities of the things that help us expand upon our desires and interests.

Pinkard writes that, ‘Hegel concludes that freedom is the capacity to make what truly matters effective in one’s life, and, in modern times, that more or less comes down to acting on our own reasons rather than on vague feelings of guidance from nature, the gods, or those who claim to rule us by natural right’.

This is obviously not just an individual process. Our own ideas and desires come into conflict with others. There are disagreements that play out in culture, institutions, norms, practices, political decisions, etc.

Pinkard writes: ‘history is an arena in which people seek and have sought reconciliation — that is, a kind of justification of their lives — in their social worlds, and they have sought this both individually and collectively’.

When it comes to the meta-criterion of liberty, denouncing fascism is thought of as the same as trying to eat more salad. An individual, directed by education, cultural context, social information, makes a judgement that the former had the effect of reducing liberty in the past and the latter has the effect of increasing energy and lifespan.

Hegel says that we emerge from a ‘realm of shadows’ and move towards the light of the ‘space of reasons’.

If this is true, we should be able to establish some points of historical progress. Which ‘shapes of consciousness’, to use Hegel’s term, which ideas, practices, institutions in history promote liberty?

For Hegel, the process developed as history unfolded from one being free – a king or emperor, free to make their own decisions – to many being free – i.e. an aristocracy – to all, in principle at least, being free.

Hegel argued that pre-Greek societies were paternalistic and authoritarian, that they were ‘rule-followers’ that didn’t interrogate the reasons for following or abandoning certain rules. And that the Persians, Egyptians, Indians, and Chinese civilisations that preceded the Greeks didn’t approach the world and people as ideas to be studied but instead were absorbed in the world. They didn’t have reflective critical distance. Without these mechanisms for self-criticism there can be no movement in history.

It’s important to note his interpretation of ancient history has been criticised a lot since, but for our purposes, the important point is less where it started, but the idea of reflective distance on the world being important – the questioning of why some ideas or rules are adopted. The Greeks, he thinks, were ‘self’-conscious – they had a particularly acute idea of the self and asked questions about it.

It’s under these conditions that the question is more forcefully asked: who are ‘the people’? What does ‘freedom’ mean? Who rules?

Pinkard writes, ‘The Greek miracle, as it were, was its creation of the polis, a new form of social and political organization in history in which the ability to defend the community united with an ancient conception of justice into a new kind of unity that broke with the past and thereby combined the advantages of the emotional closeness and solidarity of traditional tribal life with the reflective and economic advantages of an urban life’.

What we have developing is an idea of freedom.

For the Greeks, what made someone free was self-sufficiency – that they weren’t under the sway of others, that they had the means to make decisions and live by their own means, own desires, and that, in Aristotle’s phrase, a person was a ‘law unto himself’. He continued that, ‘it is the mark of a free man not to live at another’s beck and call’. Freedom meant not being compelled, it meant to be self-directing, and crucially, it meant not being a slave.

But women and slaves were excluded. The community had ultimate authority over the individual. The Greek polis and its face-to-face direct democracy struggled to grow.

Benjamin Constant wrote, ‘if this was what the ancients called liberty, they admitted as compatible with this collective freedom the complete subjection of the individual to the authority of the community’.

In some ways, Rome expanded on Greece’s idea and managed to grow by granting citizenship to many of the areas it conquered, but ultimately ruling was left to the aristocracy, senate, and emperor.

However, Pinkard writes that, ‘Once the Greeks had put freedom on the map as a way of thinking about justice, there was a push toward justice as equality and as the mutual recognition of the freedom of all, an actualization of the ideal of each being “his or her own person”’.

If we acknowledge that political liberty – the right to contribute to and be part of the political process, to have rights – is an important part of liberty, then it must be true to say that the so-called ‘dark ages’ – between the collapse of the Roman Empire in the 5th century to the Renaissance in the 15th, are a regression.

Historians broadly no longer use the term ‘dark ages’, using the Middle Ages instead, with many pointing to achievements in architecture, agriculture, mining, and more.

Nevertheless, monarchism, absolutism, even the Catholicism of the period, don’t fit well under our broad idea of liberty.

In forms of organisation like monarchy and the medieval church, the right to act, move, worship freely, to contribute towards the decisions that affect your life, are quite clearly restricted in important ways. Social positions are carefully orchestrated from above. Different rights, powers, and privileges are distributed depending on one’s standing and social position. Economic activity, religious freedom, education, and so on, is, or least can always in principle be, commanded from above.

We should look briefly then at four interrelated moments: the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment.

When Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Empire in 1453, an influx of migrants into Europe led to the discovery of many ancient Greek texts on everything from music and art to politics and philosophy. The resulting Renaissance – impossible without the printing press, invented in 1436 – led to a flourishing of commentary on old ideas and new ideas across the continent.

The ‘discovery’ of America by Europeans in 1492 also revolutionised attitudes of many Europeans – that the world was bigger than assumed, there were more peoples, ideas, possibilities than had been long assumed. It also proved the usefulness of technology – the compass and ship building, in particular.

The Reformation would not have been the same without the Renaissance. The German priest Martin Luther’s rejection of the Pope’s supreme authority set off the reformation across Europe in 1517, encouraging Christians to read the Bible themselves, despite the church forbidding it. No single person or group should have a monopoly on interpreting god’s will.

Protestantism was important because it began to democratise the interpretation of morals and ethics and spirituality. Similarly, the Treaty of Westphalia, signed after the fighting between Catholics and Protestants during the Thirty Years’ War, contained the seeds of the modern idea of the sovereignty of nations, that each nation has the right to determine its own laws, its own course of action. That each, to go back to Aristotle’s phrase, was a ‘law unto himself’.

The Scientific Revolution was happening at around the same time, and by 1700 the world looked very different to how it did in 1400.

Copernicus’s discovery that the earth revolved around the sun rather than the other way around expanded the universe in people’s minds, made the earth just another celestial body, refuted biblical texts, and legitimised the further study of the physical universe. Galileo and Newton revolutionised and formalised the laws of motion and physics, and many began proving that these principles could be applied to innovation through projects like navigational instruments, canal building, architecture, and road improvement. Francis Bacon argued that an inductive method should be used – the careful observation of the world.

All of this led to an interest in and improvement of instruments like the barometer, the telescope, the microscope, the compass, cartography, medical instruments, and on to the steam engine, electricity, and modern engineering.

Paul Hazard places the Enlightenment’s focus on reason as central: ‘Its essence was to examine; and its first charge was to take on the mysterious, the unexplained, the obscure, in order to project its light out into the world. The world was full of errors, created by the deceitful powers of the soul, vouchsafed by authorities beyond control, spread by preference for credulity and laziness, accumulated and strengthened through the force of time’.

Pinkard says that, ‘the major turning point in world history has to do with the advantages gained by modern Europeans who have come to comprehend the “eternal justice” of their world as consisting in a kind of commitment to the equal freedom of all’.

 The Enlightenment, according to many, may have been contradictory, inadequate, misguided – the idea of equal freedom of all conveniently not being applied to colonies, slaves, women, the proletariat – but the question is, despite it taking a painfully slow amount of time, how the nascent animating principles of freedom, justice, equal freedom, that slowly unfolded, complexified, became more forceful, more convincing, more nuanced, from the ancient Greeks, through to the reformation, the scientific revolution, and the enlightenment, and on to things like Marxism, anarchism, decolonisation, human rights, and the debates about freedom and justice today? Is it ideas? Is it economics? Is it innovation? Or is it something else?

I think it’s worth pausing here to reflect on a problem, though. This a common Eurocentric story. And, as we discussed in the Dark Side of History, the expansion of liberties for some led to the domination of others.

I’m not suggesting a simple triumphalist narrative, and there is much to include that traditionally isn’t – the Islamic Golden Age, the prosperity of the Mughal Empire, science leading to pollution as much as new tools.

Furthermore, it is much easier to measure something as distinct as deathrates and violence than it is to measure liberty – what someone sees as liberty varies so much across the world. As we move into the modern era, everywhere, the different methods, technologies, political solutions, languages we have developed for choosing freely to do things has expanded exponentially. So let’s return to our initial question: what is liberty?

The philosopher Thomas Hobbes described some places as having ‘more’ or ‘less’ liberty. Friedrich Hayek said that the ‘poor in a competitive society’ are ‘much more free than a person commanding much greater material comfort in a different type of society’. John Somerville said during the Cold War that in the communist world there was more freedom from the power of private money and periodic unemployment.

A brief look at the history of the concept shows the difficulty in agreeing on what liberty means – whether it can be measured like height or weight.

In his book A Measure of Freedom, philosopher Ian Carter writes that, ‘freedom is the absence of preventing conditions on agents’ possible actions’.

Those ‘preventing conditions’ can be many –  we might be physically prevented, coerced or threatened, unable because of a lack of education or resources – but the broad point is that a measure of freedom is the availability of choices.

You might not be free to climb a mountain if you are incapable, but a better society, I’d argue, is the one that, if that is your choice out of many, you’ll have easier access to the resources, education, time, and energy to do so.

The same can be applied to jobs, health, innovation, cooking, art, religion, travel, politics – a good measure of freedom is one that should be applicable to anything. One that has broad access to scientific research is an improvement on one that doesn’t, one that has the widest availability of ingredients is an improvement on the one that doesn’t, the easiest access to healthcare, etc.

Moving into the 19th century, the new scientific, enlightenment, liberal, rights-based order was becoming dominant throughout Europe. But especially towards the end of the century contradictions began to appear. Was it really capitalism that was responsible for progress? Could capitalism be made more ethical? Could rational state organisation better direct the innovations of science and industry? Could empires be overthrown?

The problem, then and now, is the difficulty in agreeing on the causes of liberty. If we say science – or at least some if it, like medicine, tools, architecture – has been fundamental in improving the lives of most people, then the focus should be to discover, protect, and augment the conditions that led to its rise and proliferation.

Historians of the Scientific Revolution emphasise the activity of academies, collaboration, empiricism, on new ways of reporting experiments as if the reader could witness them – the start of ‘peer review’, the printing press, the availability of information – but the precise conditions are always difficult to agree on.

Another example of this problem comes from the study of the decline of violence. It’s mostly agreed now that there was a decline in homicide and violent crime from the end of the Middle Ages through, roughly speaking, to today. Some – like historian Pieter Spierenburg argue that the cause of this was the monopolisation of state power. As monarchs became more secure and consolidated their authority, the royal court became a politer and more ‘civilised’ place as lords had to jostle for favour, and the monarch was able to capitalise on their power by being more intolerant of volatility. Others have pointed to the rise of commerce and the need for more ‘civil’ interaction between people to make one’s way in life.

On the other hand, the historian Mark Mazower argues that this state monopolisation of power led to the death toll of the two world wars, the Holocaust, and nuclear bombs in the twentieth century, contradicting the story of civil progress.

The point, again, is that the causes of any type of progress are always difficult to identify: just because a monarch imposed order where elite violence would have previously gone unpunished, say, that doesn’t necessarily mean the premise, ‘absolute monarchy causes less violence’, is universally true and so we should support absolute monarchy. This is an error in attribution.

Steven Pinker, who relies heavily on these sorts of arguments in his The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, falls into this trap.

Historian Gregory Hanlon notes that while Pinker is correct to ‘underline the vertiginous drop in violence since the end of the middle ages’, he is also prone to ‘wild exaggeration, hyperbole, junk statistics and reference to fiction as if it were fact’, and that he has, ‘exaggerated, often outrageously, the contrast between then and now’.

And in a particularly damning critique in the introduction to a special issue of History & Theory looking at Pinker’s work, the authors write: ‘the overall verdict is that Pinker’s thesis, for all the stimulus it may have given to discussions around violence, is seriously, if not fatally, flawed. The problems that come up time and again are: the failure to genuinely engage with historical methodologies; the unquestioning use of dubious sources; the tendency to exaggerate the violence of the past in order to contrast it with the supposed peacefulness of the modern era; the creation of a number of straw men, which Pinker then goes on to debunk; and its extraordinarily Western-centric, not to say Whiggish, view of the world’.

Any attempt to make sense of history requires understanding multiple disciplines, has unavoidable ideological biases, and quickly gets very complicated.

That doesn’t mean we should give up – to discern a drop in violence and to roughly identify some causes, to know what encourages scientific discovery, to discern the conditions that have led to  increases in democracy, to know what protects against totalitarianism, to be able to understand, however imperfectly, many other questions like these, is pretty good progress enough, but history is obviously not a story of easy-to-understand simple progress. We try things, get things wrong, give power to the wrong people, go down wrong turnings, we’re prone to accidents and the misuse of ideas, we forget or lose things, new problems develop, freedoms for some lead to catastrophe for others.

This is why Hegel said that the owl Minerva flies at dusk – only in retrospect, as we try and make some sense out of what’s happened.

In 1854 the physician John Snow mapped the houses hit by a cholera outbreak in London. He discovered that the cases centred around one water pump. Snow’s discovery was a huge breakthrough in the prevention of communicable diseases, proving that cholera was not airborne as people thought, but was caught from contaminated water. It led to an unprecedented move towards a focus on sanitation, sewage works, clean water and toilets, and in doing saved countless lives.

Snow looked at the causes of something in the past to make conclusions about how to prevent it in the future. It was this tradition that Alexander Fleming was working in, and one that led to a vast range of advances in health.

History is a scientific discipline. It’s different to, say, physics, but it’s still the study of objects – diaries, letters, newspapers, memos, images – to create an accurate picture of the past – it can be as close as possible to object-ive. And it can still be an attempt to make generalisable patterns from a set of observations. It’s much more open to interpretation than many other disciplines – to find the causes of poverty, the causes of affluence, of happiness – and it’s much more difficult to apply, because we’re not germs or rocks – we respond. But historians have avoided making strong claims about the use of history for policy, politics, thinking about the future, and I think that’s a mistake. We should still use history to understand the likely outcome of scenarios and conditions, to be able to predict what works and what doesn’t.

In the aftermath of the Holocaust many argued it was grotesque to talk about progress, about Hegel, about the cunning of reason. It wasn’t to be made sense of – the unpredictable evil of it disproved progress, disproved an interested benevolent god, disproved the natural goodness of man, disproved a lot things. It left a hole in our human nature.

But if Hegel was right about progress, the idea of the ‘cunning of reason’ is not that the Holocaust was some cunning way of enticing progress, but a horrific veering off from reason that demands instead a reasonable response – how might we avoid something like it happening again?

And since then, there has been a lot of good research on why genocide happens – I’ve explored some of it in this video – research that helps us see the causes and try to institutionalise and culturalise their avoidance, to create inoculations against them in the same way we avoid cholera.

As our ability to influence the world around us as a species grows, the tripwires that we lay become all the more threatening, the stakes are higher; as we become more powerful we become more dangerous to each other. With AI, the Anthropocene, nuclear weapons, the large levers of state power, big capital, we live in a crucial moment, and we must protect against our worse impulses and incentivise our best, or we could, quite easily, trip up and wipe ourselves out. I think all of those threats are not hyperbole, they are very real.

But if we look to how people in the past have capitalised on the possibility for liberty, we have to be cautiously but actively optimistic. I think when we look at the Dark Side and the Progress in history, the word that comes to mind is bittersweet.

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