The Historiography of Transition

Critical Phases in the Development of Modernity (1494-1973)

Paolo Pombeni

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317307174
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

Defining a "historic transition" means understanding how the complex system of intellectual, social, and material structures formed that determined the transition from a certain "universe" to a "new universe, " where the old explanations were radically rethought. In this book, a group of historians with specializations ranging from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries and across political, religious, and social fields, attempt a reinterpretation of "modernity" as the new "Axial Age."

1 Transition and Its Phases

Thoughts on Some Issues Raised

Paolo Pombeni

In 1936, the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga published a book, the English version of which was called In the Shadow of Tomorrow (Huizinga 1936). He was already something of an international celebrity for his 1919 book The Waning of the Middle Ages (Huizinga 1924) in which he had described an epoch-making turning point—middle ages shading into the modern era—as a gradual mingling of one epoch’s declining values with the rising values of the next. The 1936 work stemmed from the topic then being widely debated in Europe of what was seen as a “crisis of civilization”, and the various attempts to respond. Names like Spengler, Benda, Massis, Berdiaev, Huxley, and Paul Valéry, to mention a few, were engaged on this front. It is what is often dubbed “the spirit of the Thirties” (Wesseling 2011).

After the watershed of World War II, the mood changed quite surprisingly. People stopped discussing what was about to happen (“von kommenden Dingen”) as Walther Rathenau (1918) had written at the end of World War I, since the prophecies of disintegration seemed to have concerned the interwar crisis and this had to some extent been resolved by the outcome of the Second. After 1945 the world settled down, for all the apparent rift between the realism of western democratic constitutionalism and its eastern Jacobin/neo-authoritarian counterpart. But it seemed somehow tacitly agreed that this was a different interpretation of one and the same evolutionary root: “western rationalism” which, Max Weber taught, had been the linchpin of modernity (Schluchter 1979, 1980). Where people joined issue was simply over establishing which of the two interpretations was authentic, and which false and heretical.

“Modernization” would become the Grundbegriff of the post-45 era, soon to be bracketed with “development”. Both fell under that other Grundbegriff, “progress”, seemingly the quintessence of modernization, which some historians significantly boiled down to the real origin of the Enlightenment.

Roughly at the outset of the 1970s, the whole value of “modern” as a concept began to be questioned. There was a feeling, for some a certainty, that the concept was played out. I allude to the “postmodern” debate—a term I find ambiguous and unconvincing but which more or less signifies the dawning perception that some historical turning point might be at hand.¹ This sensation gradually gathered strength owing to a series of overlapping events: technological change of increasing magnitude; upsets to the geopolitical equilibrium, which were social as well as political; the transformation of economic systems; and various orders of problem in humanity’s relation to the natural environment.

I use these few ritual formulas to sum up a range of phenomena that are familiar.

Under my leadership the Istituto Storico Italo-Germanico (ISIG) in Trento has promoted research into transition as a historiographical issue.² Just as in the 1930s, scholars are nowadays increasingly being called to give some account of a crisis which is quite evident yet nonetheless quite ambiguous. On the one hand, it affects so many aspects of our lifestyle and especially the cultural paradigms we had learned to frame it in, but conversely, it has not yet really aged to make us accept that those paradigms need altering. Hence, many of us have the sensation that changes are still being forced into the mold of the traditional ideal-type of change,and that such changes will only lead the status quo to perfection—as though the surface area they cover is being expanded.

The present-day issue is naturally being further complicated by the perception that one can no longer speak of modernity in the singular: there are “multiple modernities”. What had seemed to be a worldwide process of modernization has failed to standardize everyone upon a model we might conventionally call western rationalism. It has actually given rise to a range of systems which, though evidently driven by enforced contact with such rationalism, have engendered forms of modernization that diverge widely from (and in some case openly conflict with) the western model with its assumption of superiority. Obvious instances of my argument are the cases of China, India, and a renascent Islamic world as a potential antagonist (Sachsenmaier and Riedel 2002).

But none of this alters the fact that we are seeking the key to the nature and extent of changes occurring at a particular stage of human history. We must assess the range of these and ask ourselves whether they stood out in any way from the normal dynamics of continuous change which distinguish human experience.

In the end, that is the real meaning of the term “crisis”: it means a point of separation and decision, and, hence, a turning point in the pattern of events (Koselleck 2006). The question to decide is whether, in the face of such complex and radical phenomena, historians could make do with the interpretive categories commonly adopted in framing and understanding the stages of a crisis or transition. The art of history has various ways round this conundrum. Some are complex and elaborate like the Sattelzeit ideal-type proposed by Koselleck, bound up with the sophisticated theory of multiple temporalities (Jordheim 2012). Others enlist the term “transition” in a more perfunctory manner: this we saw in the (somewhat abortive) description of the post-colonial stage, which was usually assumed to be a transition toward development; it was dragged out again at the fall of authoritarian regimes, first in western Europe (Portugal and Spain), then in eastern Europe (the disbanding of Soviet hegemony)—in these cases as a “transition toward democracy”.

The term “transition” here boils down to “changeover”, whereas in physics, and especially in atomic physics, it preserves the strong meaning of an alteration from one state to another. Hence, when we set about planning the research at the ISIG mentioned earlier, we had to face the objection that history is all one transition from point A to point B; at most there may be differing degrees of cost or difficulty entailed by the changeover.

That terms may be polysemantic is by no means a new discovery. Let me give a simple example. If we talk of “hunger”, we cannot bracket our daily urge to consume meals with humanity’s experience of famine. And the same goes for “transition”.

I do not mean transition as mere changeover from one system to another, since we are here dealing with transitions one may label “historic”—epochs of humanity’s experience that formed with a unifying thread of meaning whereby what is a long process stands as a (perhaps dialectical) building-block in the construction of later phases. Such epochs came to deserve a conceptual label (and attendant frame of meaning) that turned them into “meanings in themselves”.

Couched in such terms, the question of the “historic transition” as a Weberian ideal-type comes up against three other ideal-types: “historical epoch”, “anthropological culture” (i.e., the mechanisms creating “the Us circle”), and “social structure”.

By a historical epoch we mean a substantial time period, normally some centuries, which gets given a label that sums up its defining peculiarity as seen both by contemporaries and by later generations who somehow confirm the first perception. From this viewpoint a “historic transition” is not some particular period sandwiched between two historical epochs (like a gap between them), but the mechanism of evolution itself within a given epoch, such that its identity forms out of the decline of what came before, it comes more and more to dictate the course men steer in tackling the challenges of change thrust upon them by the changing times, and finally goes into crisis as other factors come up. These last need not dwarf the results achieved or the paths by which they were gained, but render the means that had hitherto obtained inadequate to respond fully or satisfactorily to the new phase of change.

As we shall see later in more detail, this constant dialectic operating within epochs forces us to identify a plurality of Sattelzeiten in the unfolding of a historical epoch.

The anthropological background is a fundamental point to watch, since a historical epoch is partly caused by a series of interpretive paradigms continuing to prevail within it. They may evolve, be adjusted or redefined, but they cannot expunge any feature of their basic make-up. Naturally, they may alter the degree of importance attaching to factors, arranging them closer or not to the center of the ideal delimiting circle, but they cannot eliminate them. “Cultural discrepancies” do, of course, exist in the forces that go to make such an anthropological background that in turn creates “the Us circle”, that is, the space within which the components of a given historical epoch interact and belong. There is always a certain dialectic between what is usually called “high culture” and so-called “popular culture”: in general on both these registers we find interaction among the various so to speak specialized cultures (religion, science, institutions, etc.), but in all cases the dominant cultural paradigm sees to it that such forms of knowledge are hierarchically sorted, assigning to each its position in the system and above all making whatever is not envisioned by the paradigm unviable (cultures have to adapt to the paradigm, otherwise they become deviant and are marginalized, if not expelled).

Such issues lead us to the thorny question of what role language plays in effecting historical transitions, as well as conditioning our approach to analyzing them. Today we are particularly on our guard about such matters, thanks to a view of history that derives in the main from Quentin Skinner³, from which there have been pronounced ramifications, extending to the analysis of political language (Steinmetz 2011a; Linke 2011).

Drawing explicitly on Weber as being the first to focus on this issue, Skinner notes:

It is characterized by the belief that our concepts not only alter over time, but are incapable of providing us with anything more than a series of changing perspectives on the world in which we live and have our being. Our concepts form part of what we bring to the world in our efforts to understand it. The shifting conceptualizations to which this process gives rise constitute the very stuff of ideological debate, so that it makes no more sense to regret than to deny that such conceptual changes continually take place. The more we succeed in persuading people that a given evaluative term applies in circumstances in which they may never have thought of applying it, the more broadly and inclusively we shall persuade them to employ the term in the appraisal of social and political life. The change that will eventually result is that the underlying concept will come to acquire a new prominence and a new salience in the moral arguments of the society concerned

(Skinner 1999, p. 62).

This approach goes well beyond the simple question of how concepts relate to the time when they are formulated, which is the valid contribution of research into “geschichtliche Grundbegriffe”.⁴ Skinner raises the question of whether “hard” nuclei remain or not within the evolving concepts that go on to form the pivot for their own development. It is precisely how and why such hard and uneliminable nuclei are preserved that leads to the phases at which the axial values of such nuclei form, becoming considered axial ages.⁵

What I have called the social structure is an important ideal-type. I do not use it in the banal sociological sense, but mean the organization shaping the hierarchy of belonging as opposed to the hierarchy of space and experience. This is the tool by which we explore the position of the various ingredients on the move within a particular epoch: the position of its subjects (man, woman, priest, governor, etc.), the juxtaposition of roles (those who have knowledge, elites, those who can render a system legitimate, etc.). We arrange them in relation to the hierarchy of space and experience. The social structure ideal-type is made up of many factors: for example, the relationship of those we have just mentioned with space, organizing the way it is used, or how it may be traversed in a time-frame, like the field in which information moves (information in an overall sense, not mere bits of ‘news’).

The “social structure” issue also includes “religion” as the bearing principle of order around which the structure needs to organize its components in terms of space-time and meaning. As early as 1968 the American sociologist Robert N. Bellah pinpointed this as a crucial issue of modernity. The fact that “the new mentality is even more important than the new science and the new technology” demanded that society should have “the capacity to absorb the change without either stagnation or breakdown”; hence “the great problem of the modern conception of change, then, was how to integrate it with a conception of identity, a conception traditionally provided by religion” (Bellah 1968). This may perhaps be said to mark the changeover in classical axial ages from cosmological to rational religions, culminating in the “symbolic realism” of Christianity which, for a while at least, would appear to break with the medieval tradition of reading the Bible symbolically, and attempt the difficult task of absorbing the latest clash between theology and scientific language into a form of evolutionist rationalism.⁶

In analyzing how these three components interact, we seek to define an “age of transition”. We here step beyond the normal scholastic distinction into different historical eras, since they cannot all be properly considered “ages of transition”. Of course, the changeover from one system of equilibriums which has achieved epoch-making value into another such system is the very stuff of historical research. One may argue whether it is a process of “evolution” or an “eternal return” of the two faces on which historical research has been grounded over the centuries. But we are always considering systems of transition between different equilibriums.

What I should like to explore at this point is a peculiar type of progression or changeover: one that serves as a “pivot” upon which the history of humankind revolves. Naturally, this is not something our research group claims to have discovered: we are picking up the idea of “axial age” (Achsenzeit), which was first put forward by Karl Jaspers in 1949 in his famous book Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte (Jaspers 1953).

The book partly stems from the philosopher’s cultural commitment following 1945 when he discovered the value of history as the basic way of educating people to understand the role of societies. This formed part of his involvement in the German renaissance and led him to work for the journal “Die Wandlung”. On this he formed an important association with Alfred Weber, whose sociology of culture plays a large part in the work on which we are engaged (Clark 2002).

Jaspers saw the five central centuries of the first millennium BC as “axial ages”. He styled them such because (to simplify) various civilizati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 Transition and Its Phases: Thoughts on Some Issues Raised
• Part 1 Cultural Approaches to the Transition Issue
• Part 2 Transition in the Religious Sphere
• Part 3 Transition in the Economic Sphere
• Part 4 Transition in the Political Sphere
• Contributors
• Name Index