Cover Page -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- Foreword -- Introduction -- The second Labor of Hercules -- After history -- Whence, how, whither? -- 1 Perspectives on Progress: A History -- The Great Exhibition -- The meaning of the history of ideas -- Koselleck: the history of ideas of progress -- Ideas of progress and related categories of change -- 2 From the Ancients and the Moderns: A Door to the Future -- The Querelle between the Ancients and the Moderns -- A new look at an old question -- Perfection and perfectibility -- 3 From Romanticism to the Avant-Garde -- The nineteenth century: Comte and Spencer -- Nineteenth-century cultural science: from cave paintings to Rembrandt -- Modernism and the avant-garde -- 4 On Making Revolution -- 'The little Modernsky' -- The present as the past of the future -- The structure of artistic revolutions -- The progress argument -- The periodizing museum -- Progress as aporia -- 5 Innovation in Painting and Architecture: De Stijl -- Abstraction and the beauty of a grain silo -- The new style and the spirit of the time -- Innovation in architecture -- Innovation in painting -- Consistent development -- The artistic revolution of De Stijl -- De Stijl and posterity -- 6 The End of Art -- The cakewalk in the present -- The avant-garde as apotheosis: the end of art -- Forward again: the end of Arthur Danto -- Farewell to progress? -- 7 A New Approach to an Old Concept -- Ever richer -- Art as cognition -- Progress as regulative principle -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index of Names.