One of Issawi's Laws, which I can't seem to find online, explained the laws of progress or lack thereof.
Its methods were education and insurrection, and it had a moral basis derived from Mazzini's own belief in God (though he was not a Christian) and in permanent laws of progress, duty, and sacrifice.
The content of the laws of progress, however, is an object of contention.
Enfranchised women would tend to vote for authoritarian figures, and so obstruct the natural law of progress toward an egalitarian society.
Anyone who believes in a law of progress should ponder the achievements of the Webbs, and what happened in the century that followed.
These two books provide further evidence of that law of progress: the Webbs, who are normally and correctly associated with the right of the Labour Party, were a million miles to the left of the Rt Hon Edmund Dell and his fellow wart-worshippers in Millbank.
If merely a heuristic device and not a universal law of progress, then, what is rationalization and whence comes his uncompromisingly dystopian vision?
The law of progress is simply that "every active force produces more than one change every cause produces more than one effect" (37).
Saint-Simon collaborated with the French mathematician and philosopher Auguste Comte (1798 1857), considered by many to be the founder of sociology, on the publication of the Plan of the Scientific Operations Necessary for the Reorganization of Society (1822), which claimed that politics would become a social physics and discover scientific laws of social progress.
"This law of organic progress is the law of all progress," he wrote, "whether it be in the development of the Earth, in the development of Life upon its surface, in the development of Society, of Government, of Manufactures, of Commerce, of Language, Literature, Science, [or] Art".
These days, business publications and technology conferences endlessly celebrate real-time dynamic planning, the widespread deployment of tiny but powerful sensors, and, above all, Big Data — an infinitely elastic concept that, according to some inexorable but yet unnamed law of technological progress, packs twice as much ambiguity in the same two words as it did the year before.
