It's the basic belief in open society, free speech, egalitarianism and meliorism (gradual progress).
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What if the real way forward weren't a great leap but grinding, tedious, unglamorously incremental change—what George Eliot called "meliorism"?
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Determinism, he argued, undermines meliorism – the idea that progress is a real concept leading to improvement in the world.
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William James was an earlier adherent to meliorism as a halfway between metaphysical optimism and pessimism. Meliorism is an idea in metaphysical thinking holding that progress is a real concept leading to an improvement of the world. It holds that humans can, through their interference with processes that would otherwise be natural, produce an outcome which is an improvement over the aforementioned natural one. Meliorism, as a conception of the person and society, is at the foundation of contemporary liberal democracy and human rights and is a basic component of liberalism.
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Meliorism was a wing of the Italian Communist Party. Its leader was Giorgio Napolitano, and counted among its number Gerardo Chiaromonte and Emanuele Macaluso. It was also referred to as the "right wing" of the Italian Communist Party, due to its more moderate views.
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Another important understanding of the meliorist tradition comes from the American Pragmatic tradition. One can read about it in the works of Lester Frank Ward, William James, and John Dewey. In James' works, however, meliorism does not pinpoint to progressivism and/or optimism. For James William James.
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This theory is known as telesis. (Also see: meliorism, sociocracy and public sociology). A sociology which intelligently and scientifically directed the social and economic development of society should institute a universal and comprehensive system of education, regulate competition, connect the people on the basis of equal opportunities and cooperation, and promote the happiness and the freedom of everyone.
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The former meliorists, including Napolitano, became mainly members of the Democrats of the Left, and were close to the positions of Piero Fassino and especially Enrico Morando. Il Riformista, a left-oriented Italian newspaper, is a publication whose ideas are close to those of meliorism. Some meliorists, including Massimo Ferlini, Lodovico Festa and Sandro Bondi, joined Silvio Berlusconi's party Forza Italia.
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Naukowe, 2000, page 105 and compared the Polish peasants to the Iroquois. King Frederick II, by Anna Dorothea Therbusch, 1772 Frederick undertook the conquest of Polish territory under the pretext of an enlightened civilizing mission, given his disparagement of Poland and its ruling elite, all of which provided a convenient entree for the "sanguine meliorism" of the Enlightenment and heightened assurance in the "distinctive merits of the 'Prussian way'".Hans-Jürgen Bömelburg, Friedrich II. zwischen Deutschland und Polen: Ereignis- und Erinnerungsgeschichte (Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner Verlag, 2011) p. 88 He prepared the ground for the partition of Poland-Lithuania in 1752 at latest, hoping to gain a territorial bridge between Pomerania, Brandenburg, and his East Prussian provinces.
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Walter Edward Weyl (March 11, 1873 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – November 9, 1919 in Woodstock, New York) was a writer and speaker, an intellectual leader of the Progressive movement in the United States. As a strong nationalist, his goal was to remedy the relatively weak American national institutions with a strong state. Weyl wrote widely on issues of economics, labor, public policy, and international affairs in numerous books, articles, and editorials; he was a coeditor of the highly influential The New Republic magazine, 1914-1916\. His most influential book, The New Democracy (1912) was a classic statement of democratic meliorism, revealing his path to a future of progress and modernization based on middle class values, aspirations and brain work.
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Kapur grew up in the utopian community of Auroville and his writing has increasingly addressed the topic of utopia and the search for alternatives. In an article in The New Yorker magazine titled "The Return of the Utopians," he has expressed skepticism about the potential of lasting change being achieved through utopian movements, calling instead for a focus on incrementalism and "meliorism." However, in an article from The Financial Times on the possibility of achieving a universal basic income, he expresses a less skeptical approach, citing utopia's value as a means of diagnosing the ills of society. Kapur is reported to be working on a narrative book about utopia set in Auroville.
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The name derives from the Italian verb migliorare (to improve), because its main goal was to improve the Italian capitalist system from the inside, by means of gradual reforms, according to a social democratic policy, rather than full-scale revolution. Its origins lay in the ideas of Giorgio Amendola, a prominent MP and member of the communist party during the period post-World War II, who thought about gradually abandoning Marxism in order to embrace social democratic and reformist theories. These ideas were suited to making alliances with more moderate left-wing parties, such as the Italian Socialist Party and the Italian Social Democratic Party. Meliorism received extensive derogatory treatment from the left wing of the Communist Party, headed by Pietro Ingrao.
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More recently, he has criticised neoliberalism, the global free market and some of the central currents in Western thinking, such as humanism, while moving towards aspects of green thought, drawing on the Gaia theory of James Lovelock. It is perhaps for this critique of humanism that Gray is best known.Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals Central to the doctrine of humanism, in Gray's view, is the inherently utopian belief in meliorism; that is, that humans are not limited by their biological natures and that advances in ethics and politics are cumulative and that they can alter or improve the human condition, in the same way that advances in science and technology have altered or improved living standards. Gray contends, in opposition to this view, that history is not progressive, but cyclical.
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Examples include values, attitudes, and ideologies regarding nature and environmental issues. In the book Pragmatic Environmentalism: Towards a Rhetoric of Eco-Justice, environmental philosopher Shane Ralston criticizes Cox's pragmatic function of environmental communication for being too shallow and instrumental, recommending instead a deeper account borrowed from Pragmatism: "[A]n even better way to move beyond a conception of pragmatic rhetoric as shallow instrumentalism and deepen the meaning of pragmatic[...] is to look instead to philosophical pragmatism’s other rich resources, for instance, to its fallibilism, experimentalism, and meliorism." Environmental nature communication occurs when plants actually communicate within ecosystems: "A plant injured on one leaf by a nibbling insect can alert its other leaves to begin anticipatory defense responses." Furthermore, "plant biologists have discovered that when a leaf gets eaten, it warns other leaves by using some of the same signals as animals".
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