Historically, the idea of innovation has been opposed to the idea of progress. From the Reformation through the Enlightenment, progress, even in its secular usage, connoted moral improvement, a journey from sin to salvation, from error to truth. Innovation, on the other hand, meant imprudent and rash change. Eighteenth-century conservatives had called Jacobinism “an innovation in politics,” Edmund Burke had derided the French Revolution as a “revolt of innovation,” and Federalists, opposing Jefferson, had declared themselves to be “enemies to innovation.”
