Two (or More) Paths to Progress : Reconsidering Historical Developmentalisms

"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