The developed-undeveloped dichotomy descends from Scottish commerce-civilizes theory

Evidence

In conceptualising a civilised society as a market society with a highly developed division of labour, Mises drew on the thought of Adam Smith, whom he credited with the discovery of the eternal law of social evolution that every civilisation must follow if it is not to fall back into barbarism. Mises placed himself within in a tradition that stretched back to the Baron de Montesquieu’s belief that commerce ‘polishes and softens [adoucit] barbarian ways’, which informed Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, including Smith and Adam Ferguson, for whom the history of civil society was one of slow and gradual progression from the ‘rude and infant state’ of unsettled tribes, to the industry, arts, sciences and class divisions of ‘polished’ commercial nations. This reference to the polishing function of commerce is likely to be the root of the term ‘polished nations’, which the Scots used to refer to civilised, commercial nations, in contrast to ‘rude’ ones. In Ferguson’s great Essay on the History of Civil Society, a polished nation is defined by its refinement and sensibility as well as its commerce, division of labour and wealth. The idea that commerce was civilising gave impetus to the dichotomy later expressed under the oppositions ‘civilised-uncivilised’, ‘advanced-backward’, and ‘developed-undeveloped’. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 111

Categorization

• XREF: Directly connects to the developed-undeveloped and civilizing-mission work (A Mission to Civilize; A Different Shade of Colonialism); ties development discourse to its intellectual genealogy. — connects to: Commerce-as-civilising gave rise to the developed-undeveloped dichotomy. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 111
• SEED: Angles an essay on how ‘developed/undeveloped’ derived from ‘polished/rude’ nations: how a commercial metric quietly smuggled moral and racial ranking into development economics.
• DEFINE: Explains the conceptual origin of the polished/rude and developed/undeveloped oppositions in Scottish Enlightenment commerce theory.

Broader Connections

• Commerce-as-civilising gave rise to the developed-undeveloped dichotomy. #corroborates (1.00) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 111