Abstract
“Developmentalism” is often regarded as the bête noire haunting liberal political theory, justifying modern civilizational hierarchies and liberal imperialism. But are all developmentalisms equally tied to Eurocentric, imperialist philosophies? I consider this question through a close reading of two of the most prominent, influential, and divisive modern accounts of historical development: those of Kant and J. S. Mill. I argue that Kant's philosophy of history is embedded in an Enlightenment idealism treating non-Europeans as bound to either adopt Western norms or fade into obscurity. Conversely, the influences of Romanticism and sociology led Mill to recognize cultural differences as indelibly affecting any society's development. Given this, I argue, against much of the current literature, (1) that Mill provides us with a significantly more capacious liberalism than Kant's; (2) that his developmentalism holds the conceptual resources to understand progress as a pluralistic and culturally differentiated process; and so, more broadly, (3) that not all liberal developmentalisms are equally bound to imperialist politics.
Keywords
“Developmentalism” is often regarded as the bête noire that haunts liberal political thought, justifying the civilizational hierarchies and liberal imperialism of the 17th to 19th centuries. As postcolonial theorists have persuasively demonstrated, developmental conceptions of human progress and historical time have long played a central role in sustaining what Edward Said describes as Europeans' “positional superiority” 1 over the non-European world. From early natural law theorists’ treatments of the “barbarians” in the new world, to the Enlightenment's stage-based theories of social, economic, and political progress, to the discourses on “civilization” justifying 19th century European imperialism, philosophies of history and human development have long framed the moral and political distance between Western and non-Western peoples in the modern political imaginary. 2 This “historicist” impulse, as Dipesh Chakrabarty describes it, animates what he and Uday Mehta characterize as modern liberalism's “waiting room of history,” the state of nonage (in Chakrabarty's terms, “the ‘not yet’ of historicism”) treating non-Europeans as wards, rather than as subjects, of modernity. 3 This historicism is by no means a merely historical phenomenon; as Thomas McCarthy, James Tully, and Brett Bowden (among others) argue, the developmentalism underlying modern liberalism continues, in important ways, unabated (though in appropriately updated tropes) in the neocolonialisms of our own era. 4
But are all developmentalisms equally tied to Eurocentric, imperial philosophies? Are, as these critics suggest, all forms of liberal developmentalism merely variants of a singular and relatively cohesive historicism? And, importantly, are all liberal conceptualizations of human history and development equally complicit in philosophies and practices of domination, such that we ought to engage, as Chakrabarty suggests, “in a radical critique and transcendence of liberalism” 5 ?
In this paper, I argue against the view that liberalism tout court is undergirded by a singular, persistent historicist developmentalism. I aim to distinguish between two lines of liberal developmentalism that are, I will argue, philosophically distinct and distinctive – that is, that understand historical advancement and human progress in importantly different ways. I do so through a close reading of two of the most prominent, influential, and divisive accounts of historical development from the modern era: those of Immanuel 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 philosophies of history and human development. I argue that Kant's philosophy of history is embedded in an Enlightenment idealism bound to the view of non-European cultures as irrational and immature, destined to either become appropriately Westernized or fade into obscurity. By contrast, Mill's turn to Romanticism, in conjunction with his sociological view of historical progress, drew him to recognize deep cultural diversity as valuable, as a fixed and permanent condition of human life, and as affecting any given society's developmental trajectory. Against much of the current literature, I argue that Mill's treatments of human history and diversity are significantly more capacious than Kant's, and that his developmentalism provides the conceptual resources to understand human progress as a contingent, pluralistic, and culturally differentiated process. In so doing, I aim to show that different traditions of liberal thought encounter, situate, and respond to the fact of human diversity in importantly distinctive ways and that some may be less internally bound to imperialist politics than is often seen to be the case. 6
In Section 1, I begin by sketching current and prominent interpretations of Kant's and Mill's liberalisms, with a focus on their respective treatments of the relationship between Western and non-Western peoples. I then outline Dipesh Chakrabarty's “two histories of capital” as a helpful analytical frame for capturing the harms of historicist developmentalism. Against much of recent literature addressing Mill's liberal imperialism, I argue, in Section 2, that his philosophy of history is in fact broadly mischaracterized as monological, deterministic, and universalistic. In Section 3, I show that Kant's teleological history is internally bound to a functionalist account of racial/cultural diversity that treats such forms of difference as mere conduits for humanity's broader moralization, and consider the problems that this incurs for his conceptualization of non-Europeans. I conclude, in Section 4, by arguing that Mill's sociological developmentalism provides the resources to understand human progress as an inexorably pluralistic and contingent process, while Kant's monological historicism exemplifies the problems that Chakrabarty and other critics attribute to liberal developmentalism more broadly. Liberal developmentalisms are not born equal, and neither are they equally bound to a logic of colonial domination.
1. Kant, Mill, and historicism
In recent decades, Kant and neo-Kantian philosophies have enjoyed a fairly prominent pride of place in the world of political theory. Since the 1970s, Rawls' Kantian constructivism has generated a surge of interest in Kant's moral and political thought as an important resource for Anglo-American political thought. As William Galston puts it, contemporary normative theory “has rested to an extraordinary degree on Kantian foundations … Kant [has] unexpectedly become the preeminent practical philosopher of our day.” 7 This extends well beyond Rawls; much contemporary deliberative and democratic theory rests on Kantian foundations, while critics of deliberation often take issue with precisely this Kantianism. Kant also figures prominently in current international and cosmopolitan political thought. From Habermas' reflections on the project of perpetual peace to Seyla Benhabib's hospitality-based cosmopolitanism, Kant's dream of a law-governed global order continues to inform contemporary reflections on international justice, right, and law. 8 A suitably chastened Kant also provides normative direction for Thomas McCarthy's recent “critical theory of development”; Kant's “approach to the tasks of universal history,” he argues, “is a more viable option today than more strongly theoretical approaches descended from Hegel, Marx, or the evolutionary theories that succeeded them.” 9
Kant thus retains a substantial currency in contemporary cosmopolitan political thought; he continues to frame the normative stance governing the relationship between the world's states and peoples in important ways. His credibility as an international theorist is further buttressed by his explicit and well-documented opposition to European imperialism. Imperialism, in Kant's view, was a fundamentally irrational mode of global interaction; not only did it detract from peaceable international relations, both present and future, but it also inhibited commerce, a much more fruitful form of global intercourse. Kant also understood imperialism as unwarranted from the perspective of right; a state's interest in interfering with an existing condition of right, he argued, “can no more annul that condition of right than can the pretext of revolutionaries within a state.” 10
While Kant's moral, political, and practical philosophy thus informs contemporary political theory in important ways, J. S. Mill's thought has fallen on hard times. Recent work by Jennifer Pitts, Bhikhu Parekh, Thomas McCarthy, and Uday Singh Mehta (among others) has subjected Mill's liberalism to deep and persuasive criticisms. 11 The charges against him are as varied as they are damning. Critics contend that, inheriting his father's deeply Eurocentric views of historical advancement, Mill conjoined an impoverished, reductive account of the Scottish Enlightenment's four-stage theory of development with a Benthamite utilitarianism. This generated a rigid index of social progress ranging societies by fixed stages of social, economic, political, and moral development. The resulting civilizational hierarchy provided the theoretical justification for British colonialism, which Mill's long tenure at the East India Company certainly appears to confirm.
J. S. Mill is also accused of reproducing, and even furthering, James Mill's faith in a universal path of human history; societies were understood to progress through discrete stages of social development, marked out by Europe's historical trajectory. History, in the Mills’ view, charted humanity's progressive rationalization, our movement from savagery, to barbarism, and upwards toward civilization—in other words, toward Europe. This universalistic historicism failed to register the internal value of non-European cultures; non-European social forms represented little other than Europe's own past frozen in time. This not only justified the “benevolent” colonization of subject peoples, but also ignored the particularity of any given society by “assimilat[ing] all ‘rude’ peoples into a single category of moral and political inferiority.” 12 Mill's conceptualization of historical progress is, then, emblematic of the Western inclination to posit “historical time as a measure of the cultural distance (at least in institutional development) that was assumed to exist between the West and the non-West.” 13
Dipesh Chakrabarty's distinction between two modes of historical thought helps to capture the harms in the historicism attributed to Mill. Drawing on Marx's history of capital, Chakrabarty distinguishes between two kinds of histories: History 1 (H1) and History 2 (H2). H1 is “the universal and necessary history posited by the logic of capital. In this history inhere the Enlightenment universals” 14 associated with historicism. H1s are the totalizing histories characteristic (in Chakrabarty's estimation) of “Marxist or liberal views of the world,” which “[take their] object of investigation to be internally unified, and [see] it as something developing over time.” 15 H1s understand historical progress as conforming to a unified developmental logic; this generates the “waiting room of history” that portrays non-Western social forms as farther back on a given historical-temporal continuum by interpreting global history as a singular and monological process. This “totalizing thrust,” 16 this impulsion toward unity, drives H1s to treat forms of diversity and difference as remnants or irrationalities, the remainders and social idiosyncrasies that the sweep of a rationalizing modernity will inevitably eradicate. Mill's view of modernization, according to critics, exemplifies these totalizing impulses, leading him to treat historical progress as “a process of translation of diverse life-worlds and conceptual horizons about being human into the categories of Enlightenment thought.” 17
History 2 is, conversely, a mode of historical thought that in Marx's account resists the imperative of capital, and in Chakrabarty's, is “thought of as a category charged with the function of constantly interrupting the totalizing thrusts of History 1.” 18 History 2 alludes to the recalcitrance of people and events that struggle against the singular logic of History 1. H2s are the histories that fail to conform to the internal unity of H1, the irreducible elements of heterogeneity and uncertainty that, despite H1's impulse to “subjugate or destroy the multiple possibilities that belong to History 2,” 19 constantly remain at the margins of H1's narrative. Where H1 aims to draw together its constituent elements within a given and particular logical–chronological framework, H2s describe “ways of being human … in manners that do not lend themselves to the reproduction of [that] logic.” 20 H2s are, then, the heterogeneous and subaltern modernities that resist the explanatory sweep of a singular narrative of modernization. In the same way as “the idea of History 2 allows us to make room, in Marx's own analytic of capital, for the politics of human belonging and diversity,” 21 a greater openness to the varied H2s that resist Western historicism similarly makes room for a pluralistic conceptualization of human development. “To provincialize Europe in historical thought,” Chakrabarty argues, is “to struggle to hold in a state of permanent tension a dialogue between [these] two contradictory points of view.” 22 An appropriately “provincialized” mode of historical reflection opens itself to the H2s that are not reducible to H1's narrative. Only by recovering the heterogeneous histories and experiences that the historicist inclination aims to suppress do we stand to treat social and cultural differences as something other than relics, destined to fade with the advent of progressive modernization.
In the critics' view, Mill's developmentalism exemplifies historicism's totalizing impulses; his account of history is, in their estimation, decidedly closed to the diversity and heterogeneity of H2s. Herein lies its central failure: as a unified and universalistic chronicle of humanity's progressive rationalization, Mill's history is unable to recognize the value of social and cultural difference. His views of civilization and human development reflect what Uday Mehta describes as “the stark binary of the backward and the progressive, with nothing in between … this condition in which the in-between cannot be acknowledged points to the impoverishment of the hermeneutic space that Mill imagines in the encounter with the unfamiliar.” 23
2. A matter of (national) character: Sociology, Romanticism, and human history
Is the hermeneutic space in which Mill encounters the unfamiliar really so impoverished? Did he actually understand human history as the unfolding of a singular and universal trajectory, marked out by Europe, through which all societies were destined to pass?
Mill's faith in the Enlightenment's universalism and stage-based histories is frequently attributed to his father's well-documented influence over him. 24 James Mill was unequivocally committed to the Enlightenment's scientific rationalism, a commitment that informed both his writings on history (as is evident in his History of British India) and his endeavors as a colonial administrator. 25 Critics such as Mehta, Pitts, and McCarthy thus contend that “James's son, John Stuart … subsequently imported this idea of progressive colonial domination.” 26 But did J. S. Mill really follow in his father's footsteps so closely?
As is well known, Mill's great depression stemmed in no small part from the rigidity of the strict utilitarian upbringing to which his father subjected him. As he documents in his autobiography, the “mental anguish” into which he fell in 1826 stemmed from his overly analytical formation, and particularly, from its neglect of the affective dimensions of human life. His education's intensive focus on the perfection of rational and scientific faculties had, he reflected, been a great detriment to his emotional and aesthetic development; “[m]y education,” he recognized, “had failed to create these feelings in sufficient strength to resist the dissolving influence of analysis.”
27
James Mill's commitment to forming his son into a perfect utilitarian had, not surprisingly, paid little attention to the cultivation of emotions and sentiments.
28
Mill eventually emerged from his crisis by immersing himself into the world of Romantic poetry, finding the counter to his overly analytical education in the works of Wordsworth and Coleridge. From them, he cultivated a life-long sensitivity to the affective facets of human experience, leading him to fundamentally re-think the moral psychology animating his father's philosophy. Mill recounts a deep transformation, as of 1829—the very moment “when the Coleridgians… made their appearance in the Society”
29
—in his understanding of human nature, and more particularly, of the foundations of political life: I found the fabric of my old and taught opinions giving way in many fresh places … The conflicts which I had so often had to sustain in defending the theory of government laid down in Bentham's and my father's writings, and the acquaintance I had obtained with other schools of political thinking, made me aware of many things which that doctrine, professing to be a theory of government in general, ought to have made room for, and did not … I could not help feeling … that my father's premises were really too narrow, and included but a small number of the general truths, on which, in politics, the important consequences depend … This made me think that there was really something more fundamentally erroneous in my father's conception of philosophical method, as applicable to politics, than I had hitherto supposed there was.
30
Lynn Zastoupil provides a compelling account of the influence of Romanticism over Mill's thought, and particularly, as leading to significant intellectual divergences from his father.
32
As he observes, from the romantics, he learned to appreciate the mind as an organic whole in which emotions played an important part alongside the rational faculties. This led Mill to criticize Bentham and the utilitarians for not understanding the importance of sentiments of loyalty in political affairs. People believed in political institutions or held to political customs for more than rational reasons, and a sound political theory needed to recognize this.
33
Taking, as we have seen, next to no account of national character and the causes which form and maintain it, he was precluded from considering, except to a very limited extent, the laws of a country as an instrument of national culture: one of their most important aspects, and in which they must of course vary according to the degree and kind of culture already attained … Very different institutions are needed to train to the perfection of their nature, or to constitute into a united nation and social polity, an essentially subjective people like the Germans, and an essentially objective people like those of Northern and Central Italy.
38
Mill's consciousness of the irreducible plurality of human cultures led him to directly criticize both Enlightenment rationalists and strict utilitarians who treated Europe's development as charting a “universal” trajectory which all societies were destined to traverse. Far from arguing—as his father did—that the spread of reason and Enlightenment would lead to progressively rationalized and singular forms of social organization, Mill's turn to Romanticism attuned him to the deep and inalienable cultural differences endemic in all societies. In his 1840 essay on Coleridge, he explicitly criticized Enlightenment philosophers for “mistaking the state of things with which they had always been familiar, for the universal and natural condition of mankind,”
40
and was equally skeptical of some of his own contemporaries, who were “apt to mistake their own idiosyncrasies for laws of our common being, and the accidents of their position, for a part of the destiny of our race.”
41
In so doing, Mill maintained, they obfuscated the particularistic and highly contingent historical genesis of their own presumptions; the universalizing impulse led them to a view of human nature and political organization that uncritically posited Western European norms as a-historical. In contrast, Mill drew on the “Germano-Coleridgian” doctrine to argue that [e]very form of polity, every condition of society, whatever else it had done, had formed its type of national character. What the type was, and how it had been made what it was, were questions which the metaphysician might overlook.
42
Romanticism led Mill to a central insight of his developed political thought: cultures comprise particular, idiosyncratic repositories of sedimented custom and tradition that go to the core of human societies, indelibly affecting their character and development. This conviction pervades Considerations on Representative Government (1861), the fullest expression of his mature political philosophy: differences of national character, culture, and history draw societies in different directions that require accordingly distinctive forms of government. Legal and political institutions' design demanded a profound understanding of a given people's moeurs; “it would be a great mistake in any legislator,” Mill argued, “not to shape his measure so as to take advantage of such pre-existing habits and feelings.” 44 Cultural differences indelibly and profoundly affected the developmental trajectories of all societies; Bentham's failure to recognize that political order and stability depended on institutions suited to a given people's national character was, in Mill's view, the central flaw of his political theory. Mill's Romanticism turned him away from his father's rationalist conviction in a universal path of human progress, and toward a much more nuanced understanding of social development as a culturally differentiated and highly variable process. 45
His sociological inclinations reinforced both this pluralized conception of development and his view of Europe's historical trajectory as the result of contingent, fortuitous circumstances, rather than as charting a universal course of progress. In Book 6 of the System of Logic (1843), Mill's most elaborate exploration of the principles of historical succession, he pointedly argued against the presumption of a singular path of human development, criticizing Guizot's universal histories and the “the French school” of “philosophizing in the social science” as “chargeable with a fundamental misconception.” 46 Against Guizot's view that a universal ordering of social stages could be gleaned from European history, Mill claimed that “if there be such laws; if [there be such a] series of states through which human nature and society are destined to pass … the order of their succession cannot be discovered by modern or by European experience alone.” 47 Europe's development had resulted from “a contest of rival powers for dominion of society,” 48 rather than from any particular course of rationalization that we might anticipate other societies to reproduce. As Georgios Varouxakis notes, Mill's mature writings on historical development from the 1840s (including the System of Logic (1843), “Guizot's Essays and Lectures on History” (1845), and “Michelet's History of France” (1844)) consistently treat systemic social antagonism as the central mechanism pushing progressive advancement (in contrast with his earlier, St.-Simonian faith in the political stewardship of an enlightened elite). 49 Europe's “spirit of improvement” was, then, the direct result of its (by no means intentional) preservation of “rival powers naturally tending in different directions.” 50
And yet, this was hardly the only way for a society to progress; Mill described commerce, industrialization, national culture, military operations, and innumerable other sociological factors as equally influential in developing a society's capacity for “social combination.” Far from treating Europe as uniquely civilized, he warned that an unchecked European power was likely to produce “a darker despotism, one more opposed to improvement”
51
than China's, his perennial example of unbalanced power. Rather than charting a determinate path of convergent, progressive rationalization, Mill's Europe is a history of mongrelization and contingency; it was only the fortuitous mixture of “Roman, Christian and Barbarian ingredients”
52
that produced modern Europeans and established the conditions for their advancement. Mill neither treated European history as universal, nor even as uniquely civilized; he in fact asserted that the earliest known civilization was, we have the strongest reason to believe, a negro civilization. The original Egyptians are inferred, from the evidence of their sculptures, to have been a negro race: it was from negroes, therefore, that the Greeks learnt their first lessons in civilization.
53
Mill's commitment to empiricist social science further strengthened this view of historical progress as indeterminate, differentiated, and variable. In the System of Logic, he distinguished between “universal” and “empirical” laws in explaining social development as subject to non-deterministic causal laws. While the former describe fixed, unchanging, and scientifically-derived principles, the latter refers to “a generalization … its truth is not absolute, but dependent on some more general condition.” 55 Empirical laws describe tendencies, observable over time but not amenable to scientific predictability, and subject to the influence of innumerable factors. Social progress follows these variable, empirical principles; as a consequence, Mill argued, “[t]he succession of states of … human society cannot have an independent law of its own.” 56 History unfolds not in conformity with rigid and universal laws, but rather, in accordance with broad, mutable empirical laws; Mill was thus entirely critical of “[t]he misconception [that] consists in supposing that the order of succession which we may be able to trace among the different states of society and civilization which history presents to us … could ever amount to a law of nature.” 57 Societies develop in unpredictable, complex ways, under the sway of an incalculable range of social, economic, cultural, and historical influences. As a result, Mill argued, “[t]here is, indeed, no hope that these laws, though our knowledge of them were as certain and as complete as it is in astronomy, would enable us to predict the history of society.” 58
Mill's pluralistic understanding of social development also animated his valuation of “the social science.” He regarded political science, sociology, and ethology (his ill-fated foray into a science of character formation) as fundamentally practical disciplines, providing the tools required to steer differently situated societies toward their respective progressive ends. It was because societies developed in unpredictable and idiosyncratic ways that Mill saw the social sciences as so important: they enabled legislators and social scientists to steer progress in conformity with different peoples' national characters. As he understood it, the task of the social science was “to surround any given society with the greatest possible number of circumstances of which the tendencies are beneficial.” 59 Far from espousing a crude or mechanistic view of societies uniformly progressing through fixed stages of advancement, Mill conceived of development as a highly disaggregated, uneven process. 60 The social sciences constituted powerful tools of empirical analysis, drawing out the particular attributes—national character, history, “state of civilization”—of a given society to encourage its particular advancement. As Mill saw it, “[t]he deductive science of society will not lay down a theorem, asserting in an universal manner the effect of any cause; but will rather teach us how to frame the proper theorem for the circumstances of any given case.” 61
Mill's dual commitments to Romanticism and empiricist sociology thus led him to decisively reject deterministic and universalistic conceptualizations of historical development. While James Mill maintained an enduring conviction in humanity's ineluctable rationalization, the younger Mill was too keen a sociologist to retain this idealist's faith in a given course of human advancement. Social progress was, in his view, deeply variable, a matter of complex sociological evaluation, and not the foregone conclusion that the Enlightenment's teleological histories projected onto an ever more rational horizon. If history would not, in fact, lead humanity toward a singular, European end, then sociology, ethology, and political science were the instruments that inexorably diverse societies could employ in steering toward their own, pluralized modernities.
3. A monological enlightenment: Kant's teleological history
How, then, does Kant conceive of history and diversity?
Kant holds a teleological view of human history, most clearly elaborated in a series of essays from the mid-1780s engaging Herder (“Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim” (1784), “Conjectural Beginning of Human History” (1786), and “Review of Herder's Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Humanity” (1785)), but also consistent with the broader account of humanity's moral progress pervading the 3rd Critique and many of his postcritical texts, such as the essay on “Perpetual Peace” (1795), the Anthropology (1798), the Religion (1793), and the Contest of Faculties (1798). As he describes in “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim,” [a]ll natural predispositions of a creature are determined sometime to develop themselves completely and purposively … In the human being (as the only rational creature on earth), those predispositions whose goal is the use of his reason were to develop completely only in the species, but not in the individual … if nature has only set the term of his life as short (as has actually happened), then nature perhaps needs an immense series of generations, each of which transmits its enlightenment to the next, in order finally to propel its germs in our species to that stage of development which is completely suited to its aim.
62
It's important to note that Kant's teleological history is regulative, and not determinative; in contrast with Aristotelian teleologies, Kant clearly acknowledges that human reason is incapable of grasping, in any objective sense, what nature's ends actually are. 64 Teleological principles (and a teleological history) pertain to the way that beings of our kind—imperfectly rational and capable of failing in our moral duties—can understand ourselves and our place in the world, as morally progressive agents. These historical–teleological reflections play an important role in moral life by sustaining moral hope; in the face of a world run through by war and irrationalities that often appear obdurately resistant to moral reason, our historical progress points us toward a brighter future. Humanity isn't enlightened, Kant noted, but is rather in the process of enlightenment; despite our many and serious moral failings, a teleological history upholds our faith in moral progress and makes sense of our vocation as rational, yet flawed, beings. Teleological history is thus neither morally insignificant, nor a matter of mere hypothetical speculation. A progressive account of history preserves us against “moral despair,” the despondency to which human beings are prone when faced with the seeming impossibility of a properly moralized world.
This historical advancement was, in Kant's view, underwritten by human nature itself. We progress because of our inborn unsocial sociability, nature's providential mechanism quietly (and unconsciously) pushing us toward our moral ends. Progressive antagonism operates at several levels of human intercourse. As individuals, Kant maintains, we are under the sway of equally compelling compulsions to live in society and to resist its constraints; “it is this resistance that awakens all the powers of the human being.” 65 Just as the trees in the forest grow higher to reach the light (to borrow Kant's own metaphor), so too do human beings develop themselves through the restrained antagonism of social existence. As societies, we develop increasingly rationalized forms of political association, which facilitate maximal individual antagonism within the constraints of a law-governed order. History thus chronicles our movement toward progressively more rational political states, as the external conditions enabling the unfolding of our latent capacities. “One can regard the history of the human species in the large,” Kant asserts, “as the completion of a hidden plan of nature to bring about an inwardly and, to this end, also an externally perfect state constitution, as the only condition in which it can fully develop all its predispositions in humanity.” 66 Unsocial sociability also operates at the global level; international war is the unfortunate, if necessary, mechanism driving human societies from less to more rational forms of global interaction. The same unsociability driving us to progress as individuals in society generates a systemic antagonism between societies, pushing us “to go beyond a lawless condition of savages and enter into a federation of nations.” 67
The unfolding of our rational nature thus drives us toward very particular forms of political organization, the only forms of government conforming to the idea of right on domestic, international, and cosmopolitan levels. At the domestic level, we move toward republicanism, “the sole constitution that issues from the idea of the original contract, on which all rightful legislation of a people must be based” 68 ; at the international level, “[t]he right of nations shall be based on a federalism of free states” 69 ; finally, regulating the global interaction between individuals and states, “that which nature has as its aim … a universal cosmopolitan condition, as the womb in which all original predispositions of the human species will be developed.” 70 A teleological history charts our individual, domestic, and international progress toward an increasingly rationalized future.
This teleology portrays humanity as progressing toward equally particular forms of social life. Kant's history is a convergent one, pointing us toward determinate social and political end-points given by our inborn rational nature—and unsurprisingly, the modernity upon which humanity converges is Europe's.
71
“The human being,” he argues, “is destined by his reason to live in a society with human beings and in it to cultivate himself, to civilize himself, and to moralize himself by means of the arts and sciences.”
72
History traces the progress of humanity's enlightenment; as we throw off the chains of our self-incurred immaturity, we move toward forms of social and political organization that increasingly depend on our intellectual faculties. This is the order that the philosopher uncovers behind the veil of the everyday: humanity advances from “the purposeless condition of savages” to increasingly rationalized forms of sociality, ultimately “enter[ing] into a civil constitution, in which all those germs could be developed.”
73
But of course, not all civil conditions are equally capable of shepherding our latent rational capacities to their realization. In “Conjectural Beginning of Human History,” Kant speculates on the progressive “leaps” comprising “the transition from the savage life of hunters to the … pastoral life.”
74
Social progress proceeds diachronically; we move from this “savage life”—which Kant describes as “a certain raw state in that the animal in this case has so to speak not yet developed the humanity inside itself”
75
—and toward settled, agricultural societies. From these increasingly stable forms of sociality, Kant argues, culture had to arise … but most importantly there had to arise also some arrangement for a civil constitution and public justice…. Bit by bit, from this first and crude inception, all human art, among which that of sociability and civil security is the most beneficial, could gradually develop, humankind multiply, and extend itself everywhere from a central point, like a beehive sending out already formed colonists.
76
How, then, does the non-European world figure in Kant's philosophy of history? 78 Kant's understanding of non-European societies is based on his conceptualization of the function of race in human history. Drawing on Buffon, and alongside Blumenbach, Kant developed a monogenetic and nonphysiognomic theory of human origins in his 1775 essay “Of the Different Races of Human Beings” (and subsequently developed in “Determination of the Concept of a Human Race” (1785) and “On the Use of Teleological Principles in Philosophy” (1788) 79 ). Rejecting polygenetic accounts of human difference implicit in thinkers such as Voltaire and Hume, and explicitly articulated in Lord Kames' Sketches of the History of Man, Kant's racial theory aims to provide a plausible and parsimonious account of humanity's shared origins, despite our external differences. He identifies four races of human beings, descended from a single phyletic origin: “1) the race of the whites, 2) the Negro race, 3) the Hunnish (Mongolian or Kalmuckian) race, 4) the Hindu or Hindustani race.” 80 The phyletic origin—the “original human being”—contained all four seeds, or “germs” (Keime), from which the different races evolved. As human populations spread across the globe, climatic variations “activated” given germs in different groups of people, developing the racial character best suited for their respective environments. This character “takes root over a long series of generations in the same climate until it becomes a persistent race which preserves itself even if such a people afterward acquires new residences in milder regions.” 81 Once a germ develops, it becomes permanent, hereditary, and exclusive, extinguishing the others and fixing a population's race. The distinguishing feature of race, then, is the unfailing heredity of given, determinate characteristics that distinguish between members of a single phyletic family. 82 While human beings share a common origin, different adaptations establish the dominance of given seeds, leading populations to coalesce into determinate groups demarcated by ineradicable, hereditary racial characteristics.
Like his broader account of human history, Kant's account of race is regulative, not descriptive, falling under the auspices of “natural history” rather than “the mere description of nature.” 83 While a “description of nature” comprises a mechanistic account of natural phenomena, “natural history” aims to explain the sensible world and causation in relation to a broader natural purposiveness. 84 Natural history incorporates forms of reflective judgment enabling us to understand the phenomenal world in relation to our moral ends. Race, Kant argues, is not comprehensible from the perspective of natural description: from a merely descriptive standpoint, race indicates little other than the phenotypic differences between groups of human beings. Only by adopting the perspective of natural history can we properly understand racial difference in relation to the larger purposive organization of the natural world and to our place within it. The very concept of race is thus bound to the telos of the human species, in relation to which our phyletic origins, differentiation, and development become comprehensible. Race is the mechanism through which human beings of a single, common stock become capable of populating the globe, in accordance with nature's own intention; it explains the purpose of human difference in relation to our natural ends. By providing the four germs enabling environmental adaptation, nature equips us with the tools to fulfill our destiny: to populate and moralize the world. Race thus does not concern the physiological distinctions of human varieties (which cannot speak to purposes), but rather addresses our teleologically-given natural ends: “the evolving seeds were distinct but originally implanted in one and the same line of descent purposively suited for the first general populating of the earth through their offspring.” 85 The concept of race, for Kant, concerns how we ought to conceive of human origins and development in relation to nature's intentions, of which our own rational perfection is the ultimate end.
Racial difference is, then, internally bound to humanity's moral and historical progress: race, and the human diversity that Kant explains with it, is intelligible only from a teleological–historical perspective, as a mechanism moving the species toward its moral endpoint. Beneath the mess of social, cultural, and racial diversity, we can discern an underlying order through which these forms of difference can be made intelligible. The world comprises a fantastic array of peoples, languages, customs, traditions, and modes of life; the promise of history is to draw them into a singular moral and political order, in which their true value can be clearly appraised.
4. Evaluating developmentalisms
How, then, are we to evaluate these two competing visions of historical progress? How are we to interpret their conceptualizations of human diversity and difference—and more specifically, of the non-European world?
My interest here lies not in assessing Kant's and Mill's own views of non-Europeans, but rather, in the philosophical treatments of human difference that underlie their historical developmentalisms. In light of extensive literatures addressing the impacts of their respective Eurocentrist and racial prejudices, 86 I aim less to focus on their own limitations (in this regard) than to consider how both thinkers encounter human diversity, and how their understandings of human development situate social, cultural, and racial difference. This is not to minimize the value of this critical scholarship, but rather to resist the not-uncommon tendency to treat Kant's and Mill's views on imperialism as clearly (or sufficiently) reflecting their broader accounts of social, cultural, and racial pluralism. As I hope to have shown, both Kant's and Mill's conceptualizations of, and responses to, human diversity are far from exhausted by their respective treatments—critical or supportive—of imperial and/or colonial expansionism. My aim here, then, is to focus on how each understands human difference in relation to humanity's social, political, and moral progress. If we aim to identify the ongoing harms in liberal developmentalism, what's of interest is not Kant's and Mill's own prejudices, but rather, the way that these fit within the broader architecture of their liberalisms. Can they make sense of—and find value in—human diversity on its own terms, or do they understand these forms of difference as irrationalities, as evidence of historical immaturity? To return to Chakrabarty, how open are Kant's and Mill's H1s to the influence of H2s?
As we have seen, Kant conceives of humanity's historical progress as universal, stage-based, and convergent. Leaving aside his racial prejudices, Kant's view of history—and more particularly, of non-Europeans' place in it—suffers from (at least) two substantial problems.
First, Kant's conceptualization of race—the lens through which he understands human diversity in relation to historical progress 87 —is inextricable from a history that can only treat such diversity and difference as aberrations, as more “primitive” forms of life bound to become Europeanized or fade away with the advent of humanity's progressive rationalization. 88 Non-Europeans are, in Kant's estimation, merely in “a certain raw state” 89 ; like the Tahitians whose lives' are advanced by the gift of European contact, savages and barbarians the world over are ultimately destined to adopt “rational” social and political institutions. Convergent histories are singular histories: progress and modernization describe precisely the process of shedding the “irrational” features of social and political life. As Thomas McCarthy observes, “[t]he tendencies toward monoculturalism that surface in Kant's account of progress, the insignificant role he envisions for reciprocal intercultural learning, is prefigured in his fundamentally monological conceptions of reason and rationality.” 90 Feminist and postcolonial theorists have further argued that Kant's view of rational agency troubles not only his developmental account of history, but his moral theory more broadly. Kant's conceptualization of history, then, leaves no space for understanding human difference and cultural diversity on their own terms; the social and cultural lives of non-Europeans are, quite simply, further behind.
Second, Kant's philosophy of history is incapable of interpreting racial or cultural difference in noninstrumental terms. From the point of view of a universal history, racial differentiation is comprehensible only as a condition for humanity's ultimate moral realization; it is only intelligible from the perspective of a purposive natural history as a mechanism enabling the adaptation to, and population and moralization of, the entire world. 91 The value of non-European races is thus measurable only in relation to the species' moral ends; a purposive nature creates divergences from the original “Phyletic Species: Whites of brunette colour” 92 only to enable humanity to fulfill its moral destiny. Non-European races are thus instrumentalized; they have no value in themselves. Their “nature” and their differences—or perhaps more accurately, their deviation from the phyletic origin—are comprehensible from a teleological rather than a transcendental perspective, in relation to their functional role in humanity's moral development, rather than as ends in themselves. Kant's philosophy of history fails to recognize non-Europeans as valuable, end-setting beings; they are, rather, transitory figures paving the way for a moralized humanity.
To return to Chakrabarty's critique of historicism, Kant's H1 exhibits precisely those totalizing impulses toward suppressing human heterogeneity. Kant's H1 leaves no space for an H2, for recognizing the value of diversity and plurality. Social, cultural, and racial differences are drawn into Kant's historicist narrative, their value derived from their place in a unified account of modernization and universal progress. Among its many sins, Chakrabarty notes that historicism treats Europe's history as History, the objective historical time in relation to which all other histories are situated, and are bound to explain themselves. In Kant's case, this is plainly true. Racial and cultural differences are valuable only in terms of their function in humanity's inexorable rationalization; their histories are comprehensible only in relation to the objective standard set by Europe. Kant's view of human development is, then, incapable of treating diversity on its own terms, of finding any value in different peoples, customs, or cultures outside of the explanatory framework of a universal history. It leaves no space for H2s, for heterogeneity, or for the recognition of the internal value of different ways of life.
What, then, of Mill? As with Kant, Mill's racial prejudices are as evident as they are problematic. But does he, as critics charge, understand the non-European world as simply frozen in time, further back on the civilizational track carved out by Europe? Is Mill's H1 open to “provincialization,” to the influence of H2s?
As I hope to have shown earlier, Mill emphatically rejected the determinism, parochialism, and teleology underlying the Enlightenment's universal histories. His commitment to empirical sociology drew him to conceive of social progress and historical development as fundamentally context-dependent, unpredictable processes. In Mill's view, no H1 exists without its H2s; in light of this ineliminable heterogeneity, the task of social science was “not [to] give the laws of society in general, but the means of determining the phenomena of any given society from the particular elements or data of that society.” 93 This is not to suggest that Mill's history is wholly relativistic or that it lacks an H1 altogether. History did, in his estimation, move in certain broad directions: as societies progressed, power would progressively shift from individuals to masses, democracies would become more common, human beings would gain greater control over the natural world, and educational levels would rise. Yet, these broad tendencies were entirely subject to the innumerable H2s that different cultural and historical particularities would incur.
And in Mill's view, no such particularity exerted a greater influence over a people's social and political life than its national character. Mill's Romanticism attuned him to the fact that a society's national character—its culture—was neither incidental to it, nor would it fade away with time. Cultures were not only ineradicable from the human condition, but were in fact extraordinarily valuable. They comprised the repositories of a society's collective life and experiences; they were the reason that people cared about their shared fate; they imparted value to given forms of social and political life. History's sweep was not destined to pass over these differences, or to iron them out, but would rather pass through them. Mill not only recognized the internal value of national character, but also clearly saw cultural differences as exerting a profound effect over different societies' historical development: the laws of national (or collective) character are by far the most important class of sociological laws … above all, the character, that is, the opinions, feelings, and habits, of the people, though greatly the results of the state of society which precedes them, are also greatly the causes of the state of society which follows them.
94
will contend that it would have been possible, setting out from the principles of human nature and from the general position of our species, to determine a priori the order in which human development must take place, and to predict, consequently, the general facts about history up to the present time.
95
In total, then, Mill's conceptualization of humanity's historical development clearly diverges from Kant's insignificant ways. Kant encounters human diversity and cultural differences as, at best, window dressing on humanity's progressive rationalization, and at worse, as forms of alterity destined to become extinguished or molded into a suitably European shape—in Homi Bhabha's terms, into mimics that inevitably fall short of the original. 96 In contrast, Mill understands cultural differences as constitutive and valuable dimensions of the human condition. Where Kant's H1 is mired in the totalizing impulses of Enlightenment historicism, Mill's H1 is indelibly inflected by H2s. As Mill asserts, “different portions of mankind, under the influence of different circumstances, have developed themselves in a more or less different manner and into different forms.” 97 Kant's history charts the steady decline of these differences; Mill's, conversely, is shaped by them.
5. Conclusion
In his recent “critical theory of development,” Thomas McCarthy argues that liberal developmentalism has been, and continues to be, pervaded by a troubling monoculturalism; “development,” in the many theoretical accounts that he traces, has been synonymous with Western modernity. A critical theory of development aims to turn the tools descended from Western thought against its own failures and draw in historically marginalized voices; “the resources required to reconstruct our traditions of social and political thought,” McCarthy contends, “can be wrested from those traditions, provided they are critically appropriated and opened to contestation by their historical ‘others’.” 98 This kind of critical re-appropriation draws on the context-transcending nature of liberal ideals; it enjoins us to “rethink putatively universal basic norms and reshape their practical and institutional embodiments to include what, in their limited historical forms, they unjustly exclude.” 99 A critical theory of development aims to recognize and incorporate the distinctiveness of non-Western modernities, to provincialize Europe, and ultimately, to “[replace] the idea of a single path to a single modernity with that of a multiplicity of hybrid forms of modernization.” 100
While entirely sympathetic to such a project, this paper aims to complicate the presumption that sustains it: that a relatively singular, coherent, historicist developmentalism in fact underlies liberal political thought. Not all liberal developmentalisms are equally complicit, at a conceptual level, with the Eurocentrism that McCarthy, Chakrabarty, Tully, and others identify with the imperialism of the modern era. Kant and Mill both held entirely reprehensible views of non-European peoples, and those prejudices undoubtedly influenced their moral and political theories. And yet, a project of critical re-appropriation ought to consider where, exactly, Kant's and Mill's parochialisms fit within the broader architectures of their thought. Their own limitations do not, in themselves, wholly impugn their ideas; as a number of contemporary Kantians and Millians have demonstrated, there is little to stop us from, along with McCarthy, drawing valuable normative insights from behind their chauvinisms.
The enduring harm of their prejudices, then, lies not in the prejudices themselves, but in the ways that their broader philosophical systems encounter and incorporate the fact of human difference. The true harms of certain kinds of liberal developmentalism lie in foreclosing the agency of subaltern persons and peoples, in failing to recognize the internal value of human diversity, and in constructing monological views of progress incapable of treating cultural differences as anything other than aberrations. And yet, not all liberal developmentalisms are equally bound to, or complicit in, such a monoculturalism, and not all liberalisms are equally implicated in projects of domination. To refine our view of the internal workings of liberal developmentalisms is not to deny or to minimize their historical complicity in colonialism and subjugation. It is, rather, to consider the philosophical resources that we might draw out from behind those historical failures.