Growing up in Marianao, a city next to Havana, Cuba, in the early 1950s, I remember the excitement of people in the neighborhood when our city’s side streets were paved and the road connecting Marianao with the capital was widened.

Even my Jewish immigrant parents, who just a few years earlier had discovered that their entire families had been wiped out in the Holocaust, partook of this hopeful sense of progress. Neither they nor our neighbors, nor Cubans in general, took for granted that it was inevitable.

This experience and others like it explain how material progress became part of what sociologist Alvin Gouldner called my “domain assumptions” — the fundamental inclinations and ideas about politics and the world that shape an individual.