070311 VO Transition & Transition Debates in Global History (2006S)

Many scholars and historiographic currents tried to answer the question what constituted the capitalist world-system or modernity by interpreting how they came into being - This is how the concept of transition became a central notion in an otherwise broad spectrum of approaches. Explaining how and why a society changed was and still is a means of explaining what society is. For approaches that referred to the Marxist heritage this became known as the debate about the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Apart from these debates there are a number of other contributions which are equally critical of modernisation theories, keeping at the same time more distance to Marxist concepts. Some of the historians and thinkers who belong to these are e.g. Arnold Toynbee, Karl Polanyi and Michel Foucault.
In this lecture the content-related issues of the different ways how transition may be conceptualised will be presented as well as the historical contexts in which these debates took place.