Concepts defined relative to a historical period cannot track quality across periods

Evidence

A second, probably controversial, corollary is that contextualization is not a good idea. By contextualization I mean, for example, a conceptualization of democracy relative to a given historical period. It is true that the USA was a very good democracy for the 18th century, but it is also true that it is not a very good democracy in the 21st century. — Gary Goertz, Social Science Concepts and Measurement, 426

Categorization

• XREF: Speaks directly to historians’ insistence on period-relative standards of judgement versus comparativists’ fixed scales.