POLIS Lecture 2026 - What is Political Progress?

The Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge welcomes Professor Lea Ypi for the 2026 POLIS Lecture. Progress is both a necessary and a dangerous idea. It is necessary to motivate political action oriented to the future, and it is dangerous because the pursuit of progress has often given rise to episodes of paternalism, colonial domination and narratives of civilisational superiority. In this lecture, Professor Ypi will try to defend a more critical account of progress. She will start by distinguishing between moral and political progress, then explore the relation between political progress and justice. She will suggest that we make political progress not when we approximate an ideal of justice that is always known to us, but when the political institutions we construct reflect what we learn from the trials and failures of the past. She will further explain how we should understand progress in the norms of justice as the result of cumulative processes of evolution of different views of how power ought to be exercised.