We live in an age that mistakes acceleration for progress. The speed of production, the expansion of data, the cult of innovation — all are celebrated as signs of vitality. Yet beneath this restless surface lies a quiet exhaustion. The old faith in progress — once both moral and material — has hollowed into mere motion. Our societies grow richer but less cohesive, technologically advanced but spiritually thin. The crisis of our time is not only ecological or economic, but civilizational: a loss of meaning, proportion, and measure.
The Keynesian Horizon Reconsidered
When John Maynard Keynes imagined a post-scarcity economy in his 1930 essay Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren, he foresaw a world where humanity, freed from material want, could turn its attention to “how to live wisely and agreeably and well.” His was not a utopia of endless consumption but of selective sufficiency — a society capable of choosing what not to grow.
Keynes’s insight remains radical: the goal of economic policy is not infinite expansion, but stability, balance, and the cultivation of the good life. Growth, in his vision, was a means, not a measure of success. Yet the postwar world, while inspired by his ideas, converted them into technocratic Keynesianism — a model of fiscal management and productivity, not of ethical restraint. By the 1970s, when the welfare state faltered under inflation and global competition, Keynes’s moral vision had already been replaced by the language of efficiency and markets.
Still, the deeper Keynes — the philosopher rather than the technician — offers the seed of a new progressivism. His economics implied a political humanism: that the purpose of wealth is to enable culture, to give space for leisure, creativity, and social peace. In this sense, Keynes belongs less to the world of bankers than to that of builders, artists, and architects. His economics is not about accumulation but about composition.
Selective Growth: The Ethics of Measure
If we accept that unbounded growth leads to ecological exhaustion and social disintegration, the challenge is not to stop growing altogether, but to grow with discrimination. This idea — selective growth — could be seen as the moral continuation of Keynesian economics.
Selective growth asks: What deserves to grow? What should remain constant? What must be reduced? It shifts the focus from quantity to quality, from aggregate expansion to conscious prioritization. In practice, it means investing in what sustains human and ecological well-being — education, care, craft, public space — while curbing what accelerates alienation and depletion.
This is not nostalgia or austerity, but a new humanism of restraint. Keynes himself might have called it “a return to the permanent things.” In a society that worships novelty, this principle would restore the virtue of duration — an appreciation for continuity, maintenance, and repair.
Architecture as the Measure of Civilization
No field mirrors the crisis of modern progress more tangibly than architecture. The twentieth century believed in the transformative power of construction: from Le Corbusier’s radiant utopias to Paul Rudolph’s monumental social optimism. Buildings were conceived as material expressions of collective purpose.
But as the welfare consensus eroded and the market assumed command, architecture lost its ethical footing. What had once been the language of civic care became the vocabulary of spectacle. Concrete, once a symbol of social permanence, turned into a medium of aesthetic excess or nostalgic ruin.
Yet architecture still holds a unique potential to redefine progress in visible, material form. It can make the principles of selective growth tangible — by valuing reuse over replacement, continuity over rupture, density over sprawl. The most progressive architecture today is not the one that dazzles, but the one that repairs: that reinterprets existing structures, honors local craft, and measures ambition by endurance.
In this sense, postwar Brutalism — so often dismissed as heavy or obsolete — offers a crucial lesson. Beneath its rough surfaces lies a moral idea: that architecture can be truthful, social, and durable. The Brutalist project was, at its core, Keynesian — not in style, but in spirit. It believed in a public good, in measured optimism, in the commonwealth of concrete. Revisiting that ethic now is not nostalgia; it is necessity.
A Society Without Measure
The deeper danger of our age is not collapse, but loss of measure — a condition where limits are seen as obstacles rather than as forms of wisdom. Religion once provided measure through transcendence; politics once did through ideology and law; architecture once did through proportion and permanence.
Now, in their absence, everything becomes fluid and temporary. Festivals replace rituals, branding replaces belief, and construction becomes perpetual demolition. The social body continues to move, but without rhythm or destination — an organism still alive, yet without pulse.
This loss of measure produces not only ecological waste but spiritual fatigue. A society that no longer distinguishes the necessary from the superfluous eventually loses both. It becomes, in Keynes’s prophetic words, “capable of all but incapable of choice.”
Toward a New Definition of Progress
To renew the idea of progress, we must reunite the material and the moral, economics and aesthetics, growth and grace. Progress cannot mean accumulation, but attunement — the alignment of human aspiration with the enduring capacities of the planet and the dignity of the individual.
In practice, that means a new alliance between economy, architecture, and education:
Economically, a shift toward selective Keynesianism — public investment guided by moral purpose rather than mere output.
Architecturally, a culture of care — building less, but better; designing for adaptability, community, and temporal depth.
Culturally, a pedagogy of measure — teaching that restraint, maintenance, and continuity are not signs of stagnation but of maturity.
Such a transformation would not be reactionary but truly progressive: a movement from expansion to equilibrium, from speed to depth, from consumption to contemplation.
The Wish and the Vision
If there is hope, it lies not in utopia but in restoration of consciousness — the rediscovery that progress is not a race but a rhythm. Humanity will endure not by conquering the earth, but by learning to dwell within it again.
Let the measure of progress, then, be not how much we produce, but how deeply we belong. Let architecture once more be the art of belonging — the slow, deliberate shaping of places that make the world inhabitable, not spectacular.
Let economics serve not growth, but the good life in common.
In this sense, Keynes’s unfulfilled dream remains our most urgent task:
to build a civilization that, having mastered production, learns again the grace of measure — a civilization mature enough to choose what to keep, what to renew, and what to leave behind.
True progress does not lie in devices, buildings, or markets, but in awareness, empathy, and a sense of measure. The twenty-first century could and should become the first age in which inner development matters more than outward achievement. If progress means that humanity joins power with insight, it would mark the beginning of a new, more human modernity.
Luigi Monzo 