Beyond Development and Morality 145Piaget’s notions of progress were deeply imbued with “Western forms of
reasoning. Stigmatizing and dubbing as inferior, the irrational” (Burman,
1994/2016 p. 246), Piaget echoes the themes of Western progress so
common to his historical moment. Progress was seen as particular to the
West and driven by a transcendent sense of teleological inevitability. The
emerging logic of capitalism blended with a profound belief in the logic of
science was central to the origins of developmental psychology and
particularly industrial capitalism.
Indeed, developmental psychology echoes its genesis under
industrialism capitalism by extending and imbricating the logic of the
factory into our education system, our family structures, our concepts of
care and affiliation, as well as our sense of personal worth (Burman,
1994/2016; Wasiak, 2011). The hegemonic force of development as a
driving factor in capitalist production extends beyond the factory floor into
our very psyches (Foucault, 1975). The logic of capitalism as a system
premised on profit as its defining characteristic is mutagenic in its effects
on social relations, muting their capacity as systems of care and shaping
them as centers of social entrepreneurship.
The ability of capitalism to appropriate and transform the inherent
ecological processes of living things into abstract transcendent notions
emptied of any sense of immanent value has been a hallmark of
mainstream developmental psychology. Starting with the powerful
structural proposal that the movements of human beings across time can be
universally mapped as a series of discontinuous and universal structures,
developmental psychology invokes the logic of the industrial capitalist
mode of production.
Although Piaget’s work was driven by a structural logic premised in
the enlightenment value of the capacity to uncover universal truths, at
another level his accounts of his encounters with children was more
nuanced. While Piaget saw stages as inherent to human development, he
did not see his four stages as universal or rigid demarcations. Instead, he
proposed that the movement across stages was idiosyncratic to each child
(Burman, 1994/2016; Wasiak, 2011). The shift towards development as
uniform, progressive, linear, and product focused was developed by post-