Endless capital accumulation demanded endless power accumulation, reshaping the very meaning of progress.

Evidence

This process of never-ending accumulation of power necessary for the protection of a never-ending accumulation of capital determined the “progressive” ideology of the late nineteenth century and foreshadowed the rise of imperialism. Not the naive delusion of a limitless growth of property, but the realization that power accumulation was the only guarantee for the stability of so-called economic laws, made progress irresistible. The eighteenth-century notion of progress, as conceived in pre-revolutionary France, intended criticism of the past to be a means of mastering the present and controlling the future; progress culminated in the emancipation of man. But this notion had little to do with the endless progress of bourgeois society, which not only did not want the liberty and autonomy of man, but was ready to sacrifice everything and everybody to supposedly superhuman laws of history. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 393

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes the Enlightenment notion of progress (emancipation of man) from bourgeois progress (submission to superhuman laws of history) — a key conceptual distinction for the field toolkit.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s scaffolding goal: this bourgeois-progress-vs-Enlightenment-progress distinction is precisely the kind of conceptual vocabulary later Islamophobia readings presume.