Progress was defined as increasing inequality produced by elite minorities

Evidence

Le Bon also made the point that the ideas and culture of a nation were developed not among the mass of a nation but largely among its elite. Between the masses in a country such as Egypt therefore, and those in parts of Europe, the difference in the level of development might not be very great. ‘What most differentiates Europeans from Orientals is that only the former possess an élite of superior men’, he explained. This small phalanx of eminent men found among a highly civilised people ‘constitutes the true incarnation of the forces of a race. To it is due the progress realised in the sciences, the arts, in industry, in a word in all the branches of civilisation.’ As so much of the ethnographic writing of this period was demonstrating, individuals in less civilised communities displayed a great degree of equality among themselves. From this there followed an important conclusion, which helps explain the popularity of Le Bon among writers of a certain class in Egypt. Modern progress must be understood as a movement towards increasing inequality. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 398

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to my other reading on how colonial/scientific elites legitimated hierarchy through evolutionary rhetoric — resonates with the Milgrom and social-capital material on how elites manufacture trust and order. — connects to: Progress toward increased production is itself a bourgeois prejudice
• SEED: An essay angle: how the modern concept of ‘progress’ was explicitly theorized as institutionalized inequality — useful counter-history to present-day meritocratic progress narratives.