Revolution - Fortschritt - Evolution

Different ideas about the history and future of our society play a central role in political discourse: concepts such as progress or revolution provide us with explanatory patterns for past history, but also outline the 'horizon of expectations' for future developments. The focus here is on the changing concepts of history and future in the debates of German social democracy, which were at times drafted with a close orientation to natural history evolution. In this volume, these evolutionist semantics are examined from a conceptual-historical perspective.