THE DEBATE OVER POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT AS CONCEPT AND SCIENCE: A REPLY TO MY CRITICS by Stephen Chilton Department of Political Science University of Minnesota - Duluth Duluth, MN 55812-2496 (U.S.A.) (REVISED: July 29, 1996) (PRINTED: November 9, 1997) (REF: ART\DEBATE) To be presented at the panel, "Development and Modernization Theory Revisited", at the annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, April 1994. I am indebted to John Booth, Bernhard Kittel, and several anonymous reviewers for encouragement, feedback, and intelligent commentary. THE DEBATE OVER POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT AS CONCEPT AND SCIENCE: A REPLY TO MY CRITICS ABSTRACT Chilton (1988b) and Chilton (1991) propose a conceptualization of political development based on Kohlberg's theory of the development of moral reasoning generalized to cultures via a carefully-drawn, new conceptualization of culture. Chilton (1992) argues that the field of political development is not yet a scientific field but could become so if it followed a program of conceptualization, theorization, and testing. Many objections have been lodged against these works. This paper replies to the following, more serious of these: * Several prior theorists have demonstrated that political development is a meaningless term. * Even accepting that the term is capable of definition, the very difficulties of measurement pointed out in Chilton (1992) demonstrate that it is useless for scientific testing. If we can't tell whether development has occurred, of what scientific use can it be? * When put into the context of concrete development work, the conceptualization is ambiguous regarding its moral claims. On the one hand, development workers are supposed to advance development projects; on the other hand, the normative justification for their doing so is removed. * The "analytic approach"--advancing theoretical requirements for an adequate conceptualization of political development--is unconvincing and irrelevant to a real science. I conclude by arguing that these objections all derive from my claim that an adequate conceptualization of political development requires normative grounding, and I challenge my critics to engage this claim directly. THE DEBATE OVER POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT AS CONCEPT AND SCIENCE: A REPLY TO MY CRITICS To those who advocate a cut-and-dried division of labor, research traditions representing a blend of philosophy and science have always been particularly offensive. Marxism and psychoanalysis are cases in point. They cannot, on this view, help being pseudosciences because they straddle normal and abnormal discourse, refusing to fall on either side of the dividing line. . . . What I know about the history of the social sciences and psychology leads me to believe that hybrid discourses such as Marxism and psychoanalysis are by no means atypical. To the contrary, they may well stand for a type of approach that marks the beginning of new research traditions. What holds for Freud applies to all seminal theories in these disciplines, for instance, those of Durkheim, Mead, Max Weber, Piaget, and Chomsky. Each inserted a genuinely philosophical idea like a detonator into a particular context of research. Symptom formation through repression, the creation of solidarity through the sacred, the identity-forming function of role taking, modernization as rationalization of society, decentration as an outgrowth of reflective abstraction from action, language acquisition as an activity of hypothesis testing--these key phrases stand for so many paradigms in which a philosophical idea is present in embryo while at the same time empirical, yet universal, questions are being posed. It is no coincidence that theoretical approaches of this kind are the favorite target of empiricist counterattacks (Habermas 1990a:14-15). In two previous books (Chilton 1988b, 1991), I have proposed a conceptualization of political development based on Kohlberg's theory of the development of moral reasoning generalized to cultures via a carefully-drawn, new conceptualization of culture. A recent paper of mine (Chilton 1992) argues that the field of political development is not yet a scientific field but could become so if it followed a program of conceptualization, theorization, and testing. Many objections have been lodged against these works. This paper replies to the more serious of these. Since their authors wrote independently of each other, the objections themselves are from diverse frameworks and are here taken up in separate sections. The concluding section draws together these disparate objections as different aspects of social science's difficulty encountering the basic problem of normative grounding. 1. The "Meaningless Term" Objection Huntington (1971) suggests that we "Change to 'Change'", arguing that political development is confused of definition, cannot be distinguished from other forms of change, and should therefore be abandoned as a concept. Riggs (1981) provides support for this position by analyzing the origins and the implications of the term. The continuing multiplicity of conceptualizations of political development is said to arise from the phrase's being an "autonym" and a "power word"., Although cited by neither Huntington nor Riggs, Gallie's (1956) argument that there exist "essentially contested concepts" is sometimes advanced to buttress this position. Considerations such as these lead an anonymous reviewer of Chilton (1992) to write, "The phrase political development is rarely used any more because no scholarly consensus could be reached about what progress in the political realm would entail. Most people who work in this general area would not say that they study [political] development, and individual studies almost always focus on some small facet of the vast aggregation of changes we call development. Comparative development is thus a catch-all phrase indicating a general area of study, not a dependent variable." Objection 1.1. Political Development Is an Essentially Contested Concept Gallie's argument is potentially the most damning, so let us examine it first. I start by distinguishing Gallie's (1956) real argument from the common, shallow understanding of him. The shallow understanding is, "Anything we argue about, find hard to agree on, and aren't particularly interested in finding agreement on must therefore ('according to Gallie') be essentially contested." But Gallie's argument is far from this. According to him, essentially contested concepts are those which meet seven specific criteria. I list these criteria below and then discuss whether the concept of development meets them. Page numbers are from Gallie (1956): I: The concept "must be appraisive in the sense that it signifies or accredits some kind of valued achievement" (171). II: "This achievement must be of an internally complex character, for all that its worth is attributed to it as a whole" (171-172). III: "Any explanation of its worth must therefore include reference to the respective contributions of its various parts or features; yet prior to experimentation there is nothing absurd or contradictory in any one of a number of possible rival descriptions of its total worth, one such description setting its component parts or features in one order of importance, a second setting them in a second order, and so on. In fine, the accredited achievement is initially variously describable" (172). IV: "The accredited achievement must be of a kind that admits of considerable modification in the light of changing circumstances; and such modification cannot be prescribed or predicted in advance" (172). V: "... each party recognizes the fact that its own use of [the concept] is contested by those of other parties, and that each party must have at least some appreciation of the different criteria in the light of which the other parties claim to be applying the concept" (172). VI: "... the derivation of any such concept from an original exemplar whose authority is acknowledged by all the contestant users of the concept" (180). VII: "... the probability or plausibility ... of the claim that the continuous competition for acknowledgement as between the contestant users of the concept, enables the original exemplar's achievement to be sustained and/or developed in optimum fashion" (180). Unfortunately for those who seek to claim that development is essentially contestable, it satisfies only criteria I, II, and IV: I: Development is certainly an appraisive concept. We value political development, and even were there theorists disposed to deny such normative concern, my own perspective explicitly adopts it. II: Pye (1966) speaks of a development "syndrome" containing at least three facets. I have argued in Chilton (1988b) that there exist many facets of development, including "decalages" among disparate subcultures and among different social arenas. III: Development does not meet this criterion. The assignment of different weights to different facets of development assumes that the different facets are not themselves integrated and, more to the point, that there does not and cannot exist any standard for reconciling initial differences among proponents of different weighting schemes. This criterion demands that we make a strong metaethical assumption: that we are unable to resolve normative questions. In effect, those who would argue that development is "essentially contested" are assuming their conclusion. IV: I have argued (Chilton 1991) that different societies will evidence development in different forms, and even modified one of the FTRs to admit the possibility that the recognition of development might not be describable in advance. V: One characteristic of cognitive development (and of moral reasoning development in particular) is the inability of people at one stage of development to recognize or repeat or apply reasoning more than one stage of reasoning above their own (Chilton 1988b:59-62). While partisans of different conceptions of development might recognize that their conceptions are contested, they may well have unequal understandings of each other's claims. VI: There is no single exemplar of development; this is even more true when we talk about development beyond the current acme of social forms. VII: Since criterion VII is predicated on criterion VI, which is itself not satisfied, this criterion is also not satisfied. In sum, only three of Gallie's seven conditions apply to the concept of development, so one cannot enlist Gallie's argument to call development essentially contested. Objection 1.2. Political Development Has Too Many Meanings Even if Gallie's philosophical argument does not hold, however, we still face the real confusions noted by Huntington, Riggs, Pye, and Park. Political development IS defined in multiple ways. Its origin DOES NOT settle its meaning. It DOES have consequences for power. What profit in continued arguments over development's meaning? I argue that a comprehensive understanding of social change requires our coming to grips with the normative issues implicit in "development". This assertion is not the commonplace confession that researchers' normative positions affect their selection of research topics and their interpretation of their findings. It is, rather, an assertion of the necessity for social science to take into account the power of normative beliefs that arises from good reasons for holding these beliefs (as opposed to, for example, the power of such beliefs that arises from the psychological needs they serve). Because people operate on the basis of these moral considerations--potentially at any time, and certainly some of the time--, social scientists must take these moral considerations into account and thus must include an account of moral reasoning. I now make a "doubly reflexive" argument that this account must itself be normatively grounded, i.e., it cannot be a solely empirical account of moral choices; it must have normative validity, not just empirical accuracy. First, any solely empirical account can be undercut by its objects asking the "open question", "But should we behave in this way?" Unless the account is itself normatively grounded, its objects will slide out from under its empirical predictions. The argument is thus reflexive in that its objects can themselves inquire about it and potentially alter their behavior, thus transforming themselves from objects to subjects. Unless the theory asserts something with normative power, unless it is respectful of its subjects' normative impulses, they may well choose to act against it, if only to spite the presumptuous development specialist. Second, we cannot retreat to a position that the theory describes not any real normative stance but only what appears to its subjects to be good reasons (for example, describing Moslems' adherence to Islam without thereby granting Islam any normative power). This tactic falls prey to the second form of reflexivity, in that a comprehensive theory of moral reasoning must apply as well to us, the theorists. This makes it impossible for us to distance ourselves morally from the objects of our theory, saying that their morality is governed by nonmoral forces but our morality is the real thing. As Habermas has long pointed out, moral speech always already contains universalizable claims and expresses a willingness to redeem those claims in discourse with the other. It is due to these considerations, I believe, that development theorists have in practice rejected Huntington's suggestion, despite continuing disagreement over both political development's meaning and its normative ground. Political development has dynamics that include humans' willingness to act morally--"human devotion", if you will--and even to transcend their existing morality; nondevelopmental change does not. A merely linguistic shift to "change" will not alter that difference in dynamics between development and other change. Despite our reluctance to plunge into the thickets of normative discourse, social scientists' implicit recognition of this has meant in practice our finding ourselves unwilling to walk away from the idea of "development"., Objection 1.2.0.1. The Problems of Validation In Chilton (1992:9) I discuss a number of problems an observer would have in deciding whether development had occurred. Even if "development" somehow acquired a standard meaning--I suggest mine--, these problems are surely discouraging, and cast doubt on the usefulness of the conceptualization. If any such conceptualization is so hard to measure, and if the results obtained from it are so difficult to interpret, can the measure itself be valid? How can we explain something if we cannot tell whether or not it has happened? Let us examine carefully the relationship between validity and difficulty. Note first that political development is not unmeasurable in principle, which would automatically prohibit its use; unmeasurable concepts have no place in science. Whether a society has changed to a normatively superior state is certainly difficult to measure, and the conceptualization of "normatively superior" is fraught with difficulties, but these do not mean that it is unmeasurable in principle. Some analysts hold that normative discourse is in principle unresolvable, pointing to the multiplicity of normative positions in the world. Unfortunately, this position rests on the metaethical assumption that there can be no universal principles underlying normative discourse, a claim that is at the very least unsubstantiated, even if one refuses to accept the implication of Kohlberg's cross-cultural researches that there are universal underlying principles of moral judgment. To move from the empirical observation that people hold different normative stances to the metaethical claim that such stances are of equal normative value or are incapable of discursive resolution--this movement is the "naturalistic fallacy" of deriving ethical claims from empirical facts. So unless better arguments can be lodged against normatively grounded conceptualizations, we are not talking of them being unmeasurable in principle but only of them being difficult to measure. Other things being equal, we naturally prefer conceptualizations that are easy to measure. However, other things are rarely equal, and the presence of human devotion in social dynamics throws us willy-nilly into the thickets of normative arguments. Of course we could choose to ignore the role of normative commitments, but a social science would be strange indeed that could not distinguish, say, the behavior of the citizenry under a legitimate government from that under an illegitimate government. For example, Friedman (1994:55) comments that the nonviolent tactics of "This Is Our Land", an organization of Israeli West Bank settlers devoted to resisting the Israeli- Palestinian peace process and retaining the West Bank lands for Israel, are "not popular among the settlers, and the movement has not caught on." No kidding. A social science which could not understand the difference between Gandhian tactics devoted to, say, ending segregation and those devoted to expelling an indigenous people and which could not understand the relationship of those differences to the ethical bases of the respective movements--such a social science would surely miss something central to social dynamics. The above argument seems sufficient logically, but the reader may still feel depressed at the effort demanded. I advance, therefore, an analogy to give a sense of the future rewards that will follow our present challenges. I believe we are in the situation of the medieval alchemists, who must have been similarly discouraged by the proto-chemists' demands for exact measurement, purity of materials, reproducibility, and so on; such demands must have appeared to the alchemists as nit-picking and burdensome. The alchemists were not without their own successes, and the rewards of "chemistry" must have seemed both marginal and uncertain; they had no way of foreseeing the enormous power that the science of chemistry would bring to humanity. The proto-chemists, for their part, had little to bring against the alchemists: with molecular theory still in the future, with their methods and standards still being worked out, they had logic but not results on their side. We social scientists are in the position of the alchemists: lacking a paradigm, sure, but having our own successes, comfortable in the rewards our existing knowledge and successes bring us, reluctant to face the terrible difficulties entailed by normative grounding, and unaware of the benefits to be reaped therefrom. So my appeal, as opposed to my argument, is for us to heed these logical considerations and let them point us to a true social science. 2.Objection: "Tutorial Ambiguity" Without disputing the genetic-epistemological basis of my concept of political development, Kittel (1993) finds unclear the extent to which I see less-developed cultures as necessarily following the more-developed. On the one hand, he says, I anticipate that less-developed cultures will follow in the footsteps of the more-developed: If development indeed exists as a concept, it must be located in the cultural system, and the task of development workers must therefore be the quite difficult one of facilitating the establishment of certain intersubjective understandings despite existing, quite different understandings (Chilton 1991:92). On the other hand, he notes that I give leave to "less-developed" cultures to pursue an independent course of development: Even if two cultures are at different developmental levels, development policy does not require that the less-developed culture become like the more-developed. Cognitive development only occurs when reasoners find and resolve ambiguities and contradictions within their own cognitive structure (Chilton 1991:115). My development worker is now apparently in a pickle. The first statement calls for h/her moral judgments, while the second seems to remove h/her normative ground. What is the hapless worker to do? Kittel has arrived at a key juncture of my theory. Normative ground is usually taken to imply a position from which, as the Tortoise said to Achilles in a related context (Carroll 1956:2404), morality "would take you by the throat, and force you to do it!" But I have an understanding of normative ground that while weaker and more defensible, still suggests and authorizes practical directions. While I advance good reasons for believing my conceptualization of political development is right, and my perspective expects development workers to do so as well for the projects they propose, my understanding of political development still recognizes that the reasons advanced are subject to the test of practice, of discourse: do they persuade? On this reading, normative ground becomes not an absolute but instead, as Habermas (1990a) expresses it, a "stand-in" for the truly universalistic theory that we are attempting to discover. As he puts it in another context, we are always already in the position of asserting universalistic claims and yet having to do so from a contingent basis. There is a dialectical relationship between the theory providing our normative ground and sociological understanding, on the one hand, and our empirical success in fostering development using the directions suggested by it, on the other hand. First, the theory is necessary to devise directions and to interpret the results. In its normative aspect, the theory helps us understand what issues in a society constitute NORMATIVE issues (as opposed to, say, issues of prudence or rational implementation) and what moral resolutions are possible. In its sociological aspect, the theory helps us to understand what directions are likely to be fruitful: what forces keep the issue from being resolved, what social classes can be mobilized, and so forth. Second, the results we obtain from our developmental "experiments" reflect back on the original theory. For example, we have to ask what implications for our theory the success or failure of a particular development project has. (Examples of such inquiry appear in Chilton 1992:9). This dialectical relationship between theory and evidence is plain in the modern philosophy of [physical] science; the addition of normative issues, however, changes the nature of evidence, interpretation, and proof. Kittel (1993:69-70) also criticizes my work by claiming it authorizes moral imperialism and leads to ethnocentric theories of development: When [Chilton] transfers this process [moral reasoning development] by analogy to societies, this means that societies on a "morally more inferior level" would adapt themselves to those ways of relating which take place among the "most advanced". With that, Chilton lets the scientific imperialism of someone like Rostow return through the back door. Possibilities of development alternative to western culture are made impossible. I hope my remarks above have already indicated that my position neither authorizes moral imperialism nor requires western development. The dialectic of development efforts certainly acknowledges that our moral assertions, including those latent in the development programs we suggest, are universalistic in nature. "This is right for you," we claim. But to refer once more to Habermas's formulation, we are simultaneously making these suggestions in recognition that we can only make them contingently. This dual perspective completely transforms our orientation toward those we would see develop: from alien objects of our theories to fellow subjects of a universal moral-developmental discourse. While we will inevitably start with development suggestions from western culture, our openness to our fellow- subjects in this discourse means that we are by no means trapped within the western framework. So in reply to Kittel, my position is that normative issues can be (indeed, must be) raised by development workers, but that they can be raised without the moral imperialism and ethnocentrism usually associated with them. 3.Objection: The "Irrelevance of Theory" To justify my particular conceptualization of political development, I employ the so-called "analytic approach", which uses "fundamental theoretical requirements" [FTRs] to select among alternative conceptualizations of political development (Chilton 1988b, 1991, 1992). The question arises, however, whether these theoretical considerations are of any use in assessing alternative conceptualizations, when the utility of those conceptualizations can ultimately be established only through the concrete results of their application. Some critics object to philosophical discourse over what seems to them an empirical question. It is true that purely theoretical considerations cannot establish the utility of a concept. Nevertheless, philosophical discussion does have at least two useful purposes. First, theoretical considerations can set limits on the forms of concepts. Good theoretical considerations distill the experience of many prior researchers regarding the features that seem to make theories useful or not. Although researchers are entitled to define concepts as they like, this does not mean that all concepts are equal or that researchers recognize in advance what concepts will be useful. For example, operational ease has an immediate attraction, but the most easily operationalized concepts might not be the most useful. The failure of a concept to produce any meaningful results might ultimately doom it, but this might occur only after years of effort had been wasted, when a week's worth of theoretical attention could have indicated more fruitful avenues. But even this justification is too strictly empirical for my taste; I think theoretical considerations have a power of their own. My own work has often relied on a distillation of my own experiences, albeit also informed by the successes and failures of prior researchers. I am not taking a Kantian position that the introspective reasoner can decipher the world from abstract thought, but I do claim that s/he can shed some light on a subject. Abstract thought does represent enough of an autonomous domain to be worthy of a dialectical relationship with sheer empiricism. Second, theoretical considerations can point out unconsidered and fruitful possibilities. Einstein developed his theory of relativity, for example, after a philosophical scrutiny of the theoretical underpinnings of Newtonian physics. Discovering that Newtonian physics was predicated on the assumption of absolute time and space, Einstein considered alternative premises--and the rest is history. 4. Conclusion: The Problem of Normative Grounding The disparate objections raised to my work arise from a common origin: a reluctance to accept that normative issues are an essential part of political development research, essential not in the obvious sense that development theorists share a concern about the objects of our theories, but rather in the sense that the empirical validity of our ideas about development depends on the normative validity of our conception of what is better about being more developed. Like the other theories described by Habermas in the epigraph, this approach to political development "insert[s] a genuinely philosophical idea like a detonator into a particular context of research", producing a paradigm "in which a philosophical idea is present in embryo while at the same time empirical, yet universal, questions are being posed." And as with a detonator, explosive objections are the result. [1:] Because normative grounding is so difficult to provide, Huntington and Riggs jump from the factual observation that there are many definitions of development to the metatheoretical conclusion that the concept is inherently meaningless. When applied to development, Gallie's argument rests on a similar assumption, that meaningful normative discourse is not possible. [2:] The presence of philosophical arguments means that development cannot be a science in the same sense as physics, but it can still be a science--a "reconstructive science", in Habermas's (1990b) terminology--in having clear conceptualizations, testable hypotheses, standards of evidence, and so on. The necessary tests, however, are more complicated (or at least less transparent) than those in the physical sciences, meaning that the connection between theory and data is more complicated, more difficult to interpret. [3:] Development programs have to engage in discourse instead of taking the easier and more familiar course of ordering compliance. [4:] A critic might object to theoretical analysis (i.e., my use of the analytic method) even if my conceptualization of political development did not raise the issue of normative grounding. But I believe that the objection to theoretical analysis has the same root as the objection to normative grounding: a belief that ideas are epiphenomenal: epiphenomenal to the "realities" of objective data, on the one hand, and epiphenomenal to the "realities" of social action, on the other. But I contend that theoretical concerns can affect and aid our empirical inquiries, even for sciences that are not explicitly "reconstructive" in orientation. When we add to "objective" social theory the recognition that the actual validity of normative ideas affect the very social behavior we seek to explain, then theoretical analysis passes from being probably useful to being essential. In sum, it appears to me that my critics need to address the central issue of whether normative grounding must be embedded in any conceptualization and theory of political development. While their objections derive from my insistence on its inclusion, they have not to my knowledge engaged my arguments for it. Their objections accordingly seem to me epipheral (and, of course, wrong). I challenge them to engage the issue directly. BIBLIOGRAPHY Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1988). Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York: Continuum. Lewis Carroll (1956). What the Tortoise Said to Achilles. In James R. Newman. The World of Mathematics, volume 4. New York: Simon & Schuster. Pp.2402-2405. Stephen Chilton (1988a). Any Complete Theory of Social Change Inevitably Incorporates a Normatively Grounded Theory of Moral Choice. Journal of Developing Societies 4:135-148. Stephen Chilton (1988b). Defining Political Development. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Stephen Chilton (1991). Grounding Political Development. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Stephen Chilton (1992). Toward a Scientific Theory of Political Development. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago. W. B. Gallie (1956). Essentially Contested Concepts. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 56(n.s.):167-198. Jrgen Habermas (1990). Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, translated by Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Jrgen Habermas (1990a). Philosophy as Stand-In and Interpreter. In Habermas (1990:1-20). Jrgen Habermas (1990b). Reconstruction and Interpretation in the Social Sciences. In Habermas (1990:21-42). David Held (1980). Introduction to Critical Theory. Berkeley, CA: University of California. Samuel Huntington (1971). The Change to Change: Modernization, Development, and Politics. Comparative Politics 3:283-322. Bernhard Kittel (1993). Review of Stephen Chilton Grounding Political Development. Zast 17/18:68-70. Samuel L. Long, ed. (1981). The Handbook of Political Behavior, Volume 4. New York: Plenum Press. Han S. Park (1984). Human Needs and Political Development. Cambridge, MA: Schenkman. Fred W. Riggs (1981). The Rise and Fall of "Political Development". In Long (1981: Chapter 6). INTRODUCTION * Welcome to the first panel in the "Comparative Politics: Developing Countries" section. * John Booth organized this; stand up and take a bow. * John is a Regents Professor at the University of North Texas (Denton). * We have four panelists and a discussant, and I want to allow time for panel responses and for discussion and questions from the audience. So I've asked the panelists to limit their presentations to ten minutes, with another minute for slack. * We'll go in the order shown in the program. * I have a kidney disease, so I may have to leave in the middle; this is not a reflection on the speaker. MY PRESENTATION * The panel title: "Modernization and Dvelopment Theory Revisited" * Why are we revisiting this area? * Because the terms are CENTRAL TO OUR EXPERIENCE and yet HARD TO CONCEPTUALIZE AND MEASURE. * I believe the central reason for both is that development theory must be normatively grounded. * In Habermas's terms, development science is a "reconstructive science", not analogous to the physical sciences. * Reconstructive sceince means there's a dialectical relaitonship between our normatie understandings and our empirical facts. There is NOT a fact-value separation. * I've written several books and articles to that effect. * This paper replies to four of the common objctions: >> The concept is meaningless: diverse; "essentially contested". >> Incapable of testing, because the moral judgments are so hard >> Normative ground of development workers is unclear >> [Too complex--has to do with the logic of my argument.] * But I don't want to reply to these here in this discussion; I do in the paper. * I basically want to argume that all the objections come from the sencral issue that normative grounding is central. * Seen directly in Escobar's paper. Latent in Horan's. "Lying in wait" in Cason & White's. SPCIFIC COMMENT/NOTES ON JENNIFER HORAN'S PAPER WHICH I WANT TO REMEMBER [BUT WHICH, BEING BURIED HERE, I WILL UNDOUBTEDLY SOON FORGET] * Horan adopts a common strategy: Look at what we think is development and identify what is CENTRAL (not just causes, consequences, correlates, or small constituent parts). >> We have to argue that it's CENTRAL. (That's what Escobar argues.) >> We are aided in that by the examination of what aspects are normtively significant. LUIS ESCOBAR "Becoming White" as a concept in Peru: when people move up, they adopt the upper-class attitudes (e.g., about opening up the economy). I would argue that this is not a matter of individuals changing their minds (Weber seems to focus on the individual) but of having to deal with the political realities of a new culture. MY OWN COMMENTS, AND ON THE DISCUSSANT'S * The presentation went very well: light & lively; respectful. * The discussion of power is indeed lacking in the paper, but it isn't an idealist conception. * I'm not satisfied with my defense of the need for normative grounding. PD & Science: * Rejecting PD means committing the naturalistic fallacy * Ignoring PD also implicitly means that. What else does it mean?--failure to recognize...[?] Can political development be a science? A reply to my critics * Odd that their reaction is simultaneously fury at my demands and a "we aren't a science anyway", like the old defense. * "Must" and "tone"--make universal claims, but contingently. They object to my making the claims, but don't refute them. * Philosophical analysis, not experimentation, was how Einstein came upon the theory of relativity. A LIST OF CRITICISMS * The "impotence of theory" argument: >> "However much I admire his painstaking efforts at theoretical rigor, I have doubt if this enterprise is of much use in the context of the third world. . . . in practice all too often, development has just meant westernization." [xx DU] >> * The confusion between theory and conceptualization: >> "However much I admire his painstaking efforts at theoretical rigor, I have doubt if this enterprise is of much use in the context of the third world. . . . any theory of development is better if it is grounded in the culture and history of a specific society." [xx DU] * The normative status of a development worker's claims: >> "Chilton's approach is refreshing in the closely structured analytical system with which he introduces his conceptualizations. He succeeds in overcoming the superficial typologizations of early studies about political culture (prototypically present in G. Almond etc.), and in deriving his concepts from metatheoretical considerations. While in doing this he embarks on a path to which he adheres with admirable consistency, this path however also has extremely problematic consequences which Chilton can only insufficiently avoid/invalidate. For although he vehemently disputes the assertion that the stages of human moral development   l… Kohlberg have a normative connotation, it remains unclear how the conceptual ad hoc dynamic, which he sets in motion with the assertion that there are stages of moral social development, does not have to flow into a paternalism of 'more highly developed' societies towards others. For according to Kohlberg, human moral development from child to adult proceeds in the course of socialization, that is therefore to say of in the course of assimilation and integrating of the young person into the ways of relating, which adults set in motion. [??] When he transfers this process by analogy to societies, then that means that societies on a 'morally more inferior level' would adapt themselves to those ways of relating which take place among the 'most advanced'. With that, Chilton lets the scientific imperialism of someone like Rostow return through the back door. Possibilities of development alternative to western culture are made impossible. To be sure, Chilton seems to be completely aware of this, and he even emphasized: 'Even if two cultures are at different developmental levels, development policy does not require that the less- developed culture becomes like the more-developed. Cognitive development only occurs when reasoners find and resolve ambiguities and contradictions within their own cognitive structure.' (115) So far so good. But a little earlier he writes: 'If development indeed exists as a concept, it must be located in the cultural system, and the task of development workers must therefore be the quite difficult one of facilitating the establishment of certain intersubjective understandings despite existing, quite different understandings.' (92) Developmental workers are thus supposed to change other ways of relating without allowing their own understandings to influence the transformation? Isn't that asking a bit much? Where would they get the justification for it? Out of the moral superiority of their own culture? Chilton: 'Like people, societies are free to critique the policies and practices of other societies: to note contradictions and make suggestions.' (114) And so societies don't simply become subjects, but rather the sort which can make judgments about others. How he means to reconcile such a position with his pleas for a bottom-up effort escapes me." [Kittel 1993:69-70] *