Two (or More) Paths to Progress: Reconsidering Historical Developmentalisms
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Developmentalism is often regarded as the beite noire that haunts liberal political thought, justifying the civilizational hierarchies and liberal imperialism of the 17th to 19th centuries. But are all developmentalisms equally tied to Eurocentric, imperial philosophies? I consider this question through a close reading of two of the most prominent, influential, and divisive accounts of historical development from the modern era: those of Kant and J.S. Mill. While a chastened version of Kant's developmentalism runs through much contemporary cosmopolitan theory, Mill's thoughts on history have been widely derided as inexorably bound to British imperialism. This paper proposes an alternative reading of both Kant's and Mill's developmental philosophies. I argue that Kant's philosophy of history is embedded in an Enlightenment idealism bound to the view of non-European cultures as irrational, bound to either adopt Western norms or fade into obscurity. By contrast, Mill's turn to romanticism, in conjunction with his sociological approach to historical development, drew him to recognize deep cultural variability as an irreducible part of human diversity, and as affecting any given society's developmental trajectory. Against much of the current literature, I argue that Mill in fact provides us with a significantly more capacious liberalism than Kant's, and that his developmentalism provides the conceptual resources to think through multiple modernities.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".