The Transition To The Human World of Democracy, From Early Marxism To 1989 - European Journal of

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European Journal of Social Theory 5(2): 219–243

Copyright © 2002 Sage Publications: London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi
‘The Transition To The Human World

Of Democracy’
Notes for a History of the Concept of
Transition, from Early Marxism to 1989
Nicolas Guilhot
E U RO PE A N U N I V E R S I T Y I N S T I T U T E , F LO R E N C E
Abstract
Whether to a ‘liberal’ or a ‘people’s’ democracy, the evolution of modern
political systems has been consistently theorized as a ‘transition’. Elaborated
within Marxism as the ‘transition to communism’ and later recycled by
modernization theory and comparative politics, this concept has been tightly
connected to the development of macro-societal analysis. This paper argues
that any attempt at writing its history should be sensitive to the deep-seated
ambivalence of this concept, which has alternatively lent itself to either tele-
ological or non-teleological interpretations. But far from matching the
ready-made division between Marxist and non-Marxist political sociology,
this ambivalence has always been internal to these different social scientific
traditions. As a result, the same conceptual issues and tensions can be
identified within the Marxist and, later, Soviet doctrine on the one hand, and
Western social sciences on the other hand, from the sociology of develop-
ment of the 1950s to comparative democratization in the 1980s.
Key words
■ communism ■ democracy ■ Marxism ■ modernization ■ transition
‘For once you have arrived at the animal kingdom of politics there is no reaction that
can go further back and no way of progressing beyond it without abandoning its basis
and effecting the transition to the human world of democracy.’ (Marx, Letter to Ruge,
May 1843)
It has been observed that since the mid-1970s, there is virtually no country that
does not derive its legitimacy from being democratic, or at least from striving for
democracy, in the guise of a ‘transition’, whether in its liberal-capitalistic or
communist understanding (Offe and Preuss, 1991: 143). From that viewpoint,
the collapse of the Soviet Union and of its political satellites in 1989 has not
1368-4310[200205]5:2;219–243;024255
220 European Journal of Social Theory 5(2)
brought about any fundamental change; on the contrary, the transition to

communism in which these countries have been installed for decades only
became a transition to liberal democracy and capitalism. The objectives to be
reached have been radically revised and the societal development has been recast
along different lines, but the process has been consistently understood as a ‘tran-
sition’. The term itself has been construed as a key concept of political science
when it set out to analyse the dynamics of political regime change in a broad
comparative perspective, and by the early 1990s, this term had gained widespread
currency, from journalistic parlance to academic vernacular. Undergoing a tran-
sition to democracy had become the historical condition of most of the contem-
porary world.
While the profound changes involved in the collapse of communism have
been the focus of all attention and the break with the past has been insistently
emphasized, a deeper, underlying continuity has been overlooked: namely, that
the whole process of political and socio-economic change in post-communist
countries was paradoxically framed – and, to a certain extent, prescribed –
through a concept directly inherited from the Marxist tradition. ‘Transition’ has
meant in the first place and for a long time transition to communism, and it has
been a central tenet of the official ideology of those very countries that had now
to embark upon the road to democratic institutions and a capitalist market
economy. It was also a central programmatic point of social democrats. There is
more to it than a mere semantic coincidence or an irony of history: this paper
argues that many features of the ‘transition to democracy’ are actually derived
from the orthodox Marxist conception of transition. The widespread perception
that these countries had ‘no alternatives’ but to adopt Western-style political and
economic institutions was nothing but the liberal transposition of the inevitabil-
ity of communism. While in Marx the transition to communism was to bring
about the end of (pre)history and the beginning of the history of freedom, similar
eschatological overtones could be heard in 1989 before finding their mouthpiece
in the person of Francis Fukuyama. The teleology that was built into the concept
of transition was well suited to the anxieties of those eager to work out a new
world order and to the need to ascribe a clear meaning and a direction to these
unexpected events. However dramatic the changes have been, therefore, they
seem to have left unaffected some essential features of a conception of social
change inherited from an intellectual tradition that was allegedly collapsing with
the regimes that had officially endorsed it. This continuity is indeed striking,
notwithstanding the repeated claims about the absolute anomaly of these events
in the light of mainstream social theory and established conceptions of social
change.
This paper prepares the ground for a conceptual history of the idea of ‘tran-
sition’ as a mode of social change, from Marxism to post-war social sciences, and
to assess its scientific use at the time of the fall of communism. In particular, it
seeks to work out the historical basis of those meanings, assumptions and impli-
cations that still underlie the concept today and regulate its use, while it also
points to those alternative understandings of ‘transition’ that have fallen out at
Nicolas Guilhot The Human World of Democracy 221
some point, or that have not withstood the diffusion of the term into new fields
of application. This is to say that the contemporary concept of transition is not
a consolidated compendium of its entire past, and that its history is not linear or
cumulative, but extremely selective. Rather, this concept is a contingent outcome
that should be replaced in the perspective of historical struggles between contend-
ing interpretations of it. From that viewpoint, as it will be argued, there are
already diverging understandings of ‘transition’ within the Marxist tradition, in
which it definitely was, at least until the 1930s, a ‘contested concept’ (Connolly,
1983[1974]) in the definition of which nothing less than the identity of the
Soviet state and the historical situation of Soviet society were at stake. This is to
say that what is problematic is not so much the Marxist descent of the concept
of transition as the precise location within Marxism of the theoretical lineage
which has transmitted this concept to us and which has given it its prominent
features. Only a closer inspection of this early use of that concept can yield some
insights into its current functions of definition, legitimation and management of
social change.
I first present the concept of transition that emerges in the works of Marx, in
particular in his study of precapitalistic economic forms and of the transition to
communism. I then move on to the debates of the 1920s and 1930s among Soviet
jurists that end up with a complete reworking of the notion of transition. While
with Marx, it captured the transformative capacity of social formations and
located communism not at the endpoint of a revolutionary process but as the
driving force of this process, the Stalinist interpretation of the transition asserted
the absence of the social prerequisites of communism and the primary role of the
state in generating them. In the last two sections of the paper, which deal with
the establishment of the concept in the post-war social sciences, from the soci-
ology of modernization to the comparative study of democratization processes, I
emphasize the analogies with previous Marxist patterns of thought in these
Western-liberal social scientific developments.
History, Evolution and Revolution: the Idea of Transition

in Marx
The concept of transition cannot be separated from a specific representation of

history as a process oriented in accordance with general laws of historical evol-
ution. Such a view presupposes that history can be broken down into distinct but
articulated stages corresponding to characteristic levels in the development of
human faculties or societal configurations. It also implies that the temporal distri-
bution of these stages reflects some kind of order accessible to reason: in that
sense, it makes visible the intrinsically meaningful character of history through
its unfolding toward a final destination. The evolutionary theory of the stages
emerged with the Enlightenment and has informed all subsequent ideologies of
progress, for which history bears testimony of the realization of the highest
human faculties, of the completion of the perfectible nature of mankind, as in
Rousseau or Kant. This enlightened view of history, exemplified for instance by

Condorcet, who distinguishes in his sketch of a universal history ten different
stages of the development of mankind, has been reworked by German idealism,
notably by Hegel, and transmitted to the nineteenth century when Saint-Simon
and later Comte formulated the law of the three ages of mankind, or when Marx
turned these historical stages into different modes of production.
Although it finds its recent origins in the Enlightenment period, this form of
historical consciousness is also a secularized interpretation of a theological under-
standing of history as the realization of divine Providence and of the earthly realm
of God. The idea that history has a meaning connected to its progression towards
a final destination could indeed be asserted only on the basis of a Judeo-Christian
experience of time and of expectation. While modern philosophies of history
have transformed the nature of what was to bring human history to completion
(from Providence to the Hegelian Spirit, scientific Reason, Industrialism, or the
Proletariat), they have done so within a rather unmodified teleological frame-
work. But at the same time, they have increasingly immersed the forces acting in
history within the modern world: with Marx, early sociological thinking has
translated into mundane terms the principles of universal history and located
them within the dynamics of modern societies. It is therefore when the laws of
progression from one historical stage to another could be retrieved from the
observation of social change that the concept of transition became a central
concern to the nascent sociological disciplines. The first problem to be addressed,
therefore, regards the relationship between the concept of transition and this
teleological background.
■
We find in Marx a representation of history that is to some extent earmarked by
the evolutionary views alluded to above.1 He distinguishes stages of historical
evolution that correspond to different modes of production. The Formen provide
us with several examples of such stages: Ancient Classical, Asiatic, Slavonic,
Germanic, Feudal, to name but a few (Marx, 1964[1857]: 95). These stages differ
from each other to the extent that they represent qualitatively distinct and
increasing levels of the development of productive forces: their historical
sequence therefore expresses a rationality and a form of progress. Nineteenth-
century capitalism, which succeeds feudalism, is the highest of those stages but
also the last characterized by class antagonism. This evolutionary historical
scheme is also one of historical causality: as it is too well known to be presented
in greater detail here, suffice is to say that it relies on a conception of change in
which the transformations in the composition of the ‘forces of production’, enter
into contradiction with and affects the ‘relations of production’ and their insti-
tutionalized expressions such as the State and law. But this scheme seems to be
overdetermined by an all-encompassing teleology. With capitalism, human
history has reached the last stage of its class-based development, and created the
social prerequisites for its superseding in the form of communism:
The bourgeois relations of production are the last antagonistic form of the social
process of production . . . But the production forces developing within bourgeois
society create also the material conditions for a solution of this antagonism. The
prehistory of human society accordingly closes with this social formation. (Marx,
1987[1859]: 263–4)
The question of transition, i.e. of the passage from one mode of production
and its correlate social formation to another, seems to be embedded in a broader
historical trend that is not completely deprived of teleological accents. This
‘eschatological’ Marx has been the main focus of the interpretations of Karl
Löwith and Jakob Taubes – the former stressing the role of the proletariat stand-
ing for the elected people that will realize the eschatological end of history
through a world-wide revolution, and the latter reading the Capital as the ‘unveil-
ing of last things’ and stressing the apocalyptic and messianic rhetoric at work in
his analysis of the contradictions of capitalist society and of its impending
collapse (Löwith, 1949: 44–5; Taubes, 1991[1947]).
But these residual traces of a theological and teleological conception of social
change as determined by a historical finality enter in contradiction with other
elements. To a large extent, Marx elaborated the concept of transition within but
also against the idea of an all-encompassing historical finality. He progressively
distanced himself from the evolutionary determinism contained in the represen-
tation of history as a succession of stages. The historical context was not foreign
to this development: the failure of the 1848 workers’ movements throughout
Europe had pointed at the limits of such a linear scheme of social evolution and
of the ‘necessary’ character of this evolution. To a certain extent, the Capital can
be read as an answer to this problem. Therein, Marx suggests that the contra-
diction between capital and labour, between relations and forces of production,
does not entail the elements of its necessary and imminent resolution, but on the
contrary has the capacity to constantly perpetuate or re-deploy itself at higher
levels.2 Class struggle is then understood as having a rationality of its own, specific
and contextualized, prevailing over any finalized historical evolution. Rather than
expressing an imperative and necessary evolution, history now indicated a mere
tendency, the intensity of which is shaped by social forces. In other words, the
dynamics of transition are given absolute primacy over the teleological unfold-
ing of history. The development of this notion thus tends to strongly relativise
the idea of a linear succession of historical stages and to stress the open-ended
aspect of concrete situations. The prospects of a transition to communism in
Russia, for instance, led Marx to develop a set of ‘anti-evolutionary hypotheses’
(Balibar, 1993: 106).
This distantiation from teleology entails important consequences for the way
social change is understood when described as a transition. In the first place, it
implies that social change is not determined by an external principle, by a grand
design that is progressively turned into social and institutional reality. In other
words, when speaking about transition to something, we should not understand
a relationship of externality between the process and the endpoint: on the
contrary, Marx’s theory of transition implies their complete overlapping, if not

their identity. Two passages illustrate this principle.
The first regards the discussion of the social systems that are prone to evolve
towards capitalism. While some (Asiatic, Slavonic, etc.) resist social differentia-
tion, feudalism is considered to allow for the specific preconditions that make
capitalism possible, such as a division between production and trade, the emerg-
ence of craftsmen guilds and landless classes (Marx, 1964[1857]: 83). Strictly
speaking, these preconditions signify that the transition to capitalism appears as
a process which takes place within a given mode of production or historical stage
– i.e., with the emergence of a class of merchants, bourgeois society arises in the
interstices of feudalism – and transforms it into a new social configuration. What
is implied thereby is that capitalism is not an end-product, but an active force
that carries out the transition itself. It is not a final destination, but an actual
revolutionary force already present in the social order it destroys.
The second set of texts in which the dynamics of transition is exposed deals
with the transition to communism. Although it is beyond the scope of this paper
to reconstruct the whole genealogy of this specific figure of transition in Marx,
some relevant features may be noted.3 Whenever Marx has dealt with the issue
of the transition to communism, he has emphasized that communism was not
an institutional or societal formula defined ex ante that the revolution should
translate into practice: ‘Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be
established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself. We call commu-
nism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things’ (Marx,
1987[1845–6]: 49). Once again, the form and content of the transition are not
determined by a forward projection of communism, but, on the contrary,
communism is already present in and determined by the process of transition.4
In other words, transition does not lead to communism but expresses it. This
reading of Marx allows us to insist on the fact that the concept of ‘transition’ does
not posit a norm of social change but, on the contrary, indicates a mode of social
change producing its own norm. This idea is further developed in a sketch of the
transition to communism, when the notion of transition gains full-fledged
conceptual status.
Another important element defining the concept of transition is the relation-
ship implied between social change and the state. In the German Ideology, Marx
and Engels write that with the development of capitalism, the proletariat will find
itself ‘directly opposed to the form in which, hitherto, the individuals, of which
society consists, have given themselves collective expression, that is, the state’
(Marx, 1987[1845–6]: 80). This antagonism is unavoidable, insofar as the State,
its apparatuses and the legal order it enforces are the institutional reality and the
instruments of the domination of capital over labour. The Critique of the Gotha
Program provides the canonical description of the general form of the transition:
‘Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary
transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political
transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dicta-
torship of the proletariat’ (Marx, 1987[1875], 95). He then distinguishes the
famous two stages of the transition. In the first stage, the communist society
which has just ‘emerged after prolonged birthpangs from capitalist society’ will
have to make use of bourgeois law in order to secure the conditions for a class-
less society, since ‘right can never be higher than the economic structure of society
and its cultural development which this determines’ (p. 87). But the use of these
instruments will aim at making them useless: in a second, higher, stage, with the
abolition of classes, the structures that were meant to maintain class domination,
such as the state and law, will eventually lose their raison d’être and cease to exist:
then, ‘the narrow horizon of bourgeois right [will] be crossed in its entirety’
(Marx, 1987[1875]: 87).
In all its occurrences, the theme of the transition is inseparable from that of
the withering away of the state. Against Lassalle, Marx has repeatedly rejected any
possibility of realizing the political transition through the use of the state. The
notion of dictatorship of the proletariat does not contradict this principle. In
the preface of the 1872 German edition of the Manifesto, written one year
after the experiment of the French Commune, Marx, citing the Civil War in
France, has insisted on the fact that the Commune had proved that ‘the working
class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for
its own purposes’ (Marx and Engels, 1969[1872]: 98). The Commune was
indeed merging the two phases of the transition, the dictatorship and the with-
ering away of the state. On that basis, it has been argued that Marx’s distinction
between two phases of the transition process is actually a purely analytical distinc-
tion, while in practice it remains a unitary process (Negri, 1998: 184).
With the theme of the withering away of the state, Marx provides only a nega-
tive characterization of the transition. One would look in vain for any specific,
positive, proposal as to the institutional and political forms it could take. But this
is in line with the definition of communism not as an institutional set-up but as
the movement of abolition of the ‘present state of things’. It only emphasizes once
again the non-prescriptive nature of the concept. As to the precise institutional
features of communist society, they are left to the innovative capacity of workers
movements, capable of generating new forms of free association. The Commune
– in which Marx saw ‘the political form at last discovered under which to work
out the economic emancipation of labour’ (Marx, 1969[1871]: 223) – was one
possible realization of it.
These indications allow us to briefly specify the concept of transition in Marx.
In the first place, it entirely confirms the subordination of political ‘superstruc-
tures’, of the forms through which a society represents but also rules itself, to the
underlying configuration of socio-economic relations. The state and the legal
order are formalized reflections of specific social formations, and they must there-
fore change with the latter. Second, the outcome of a transition process is not
predetermined. In that sense, the concept of transition is not teleological in two
ways: first, because with Marx, it emerges in an effort of liberation from any phil-
osophy of history positing its end as the completion or the realization of a
preestablished principle. Second, because when it is construed as the transition
to communism, it does not refer to communism as an institutional order that
has to be reached, but as the actual and alternative force within capitalism which
expands through the destruction of the capitalistic organization of society. Seen
in this light, the concept of transition in Marx can be said to be relatively non-
normative, since it does not articulate social change to any higher goals awaiting
historical validation. Instead, the ‘outcome’ – but the term is improper – of tran-
sition is immanent, already included and active in the process of transition itself.
Transition is thus a concept that locates the site of social transformation in social
relations.
Transition to Communism: Soviet Social Science in the

1920s and the 1930s
With the advent of the Russian Revolution, the problems of the transition to
communism gained an acute theoretical and practical significance. The transition
was actually taking place, and its substance, rhythm and pace had to be
thoroughly defined. This placed the notion of transition at the centre of politi-
cally sensitive scholarly debates. Two opposite interpretations of the concept
emerge during the early Soviet. The first, relatively in line with the Marxian thesis
of the withering away of the state, will be developed by Lenin and Leninist legal
scholars; the second will signal a shift back toward a normative and teleological
understanding of social change, relying massively on the guidance of the state,
and it will soon be endorsed as the official ideology of the Stalinist regime.
Already in 1917, Lenin had reasserted the validity of and specified Marx’s
analysis. Against Kautsky, for whom communism would naturally evolve out of
capitalism once the proletariat had seized state power by means of elections and
implemented its policies, Lenin reasserts that transition means first and foremost
the destruction of the capitalist state, and that it is the experience of mass move-
ments which will find the political forms that replace it. As far as the social func-
tions of ‘control’ and ‘accounting’ are concerned, he believed that when
performed by each in turn, they would be internalized and become habits, thus
allowing society to dispense with laws and organized coercion (Lenin,
1974[1917]: 431). The perspective of the withering away is thus taken as the
basis of the revolutionary prospects. The Leninist interpretation is thus in line
with Marx, and it reasserts the non-prescriptive, non-teleological meaning of the
concept of transition.5 This perspective will be further developed in the 1920s
and 1930s, when the notion of transition becomes central to the debates on the
nature of Soviet law. The understanding of transition as the withering away of
the state resulting from social transformations will be developed by such jurists
as Stuchka, Krylenko or Pashukanis. For them, the refutation of juridical norma-
tivism goes hand in hand with an analysis of law as entirely derived from social
relationships. Since the existence of legal norms is intrinsically linked to the
phenomenon of class domination (Stuchka), they emphasize the anti-normative
contents of Marx’s definition of the transition, thus giving birth to a legal doctrine
rightly labelled ‘jusnihilism’ (Zolo, 1974: 37). Pashukanis, for instance, posits a
morphological equivalence between the legal order and the relations of produc-
tions – known as the ‘commodity-exchange theory’: the legal form, the very idea
of law, is rooted in the form that the exchange of goods take in a capitalistic
market, namely that of equivalent value.6 Therefore, with the superseding of
mercantile relationships, not only bourgeois law, but the juridical form in general
will dissolve. In Pashukanis’ reading of Marx, ‘the transition to expanded commu-
nism [should not be conceived of ] as a transition to new forms of law, but as the
dying out of the juridic form in general’ (Pashukanis, 1951[1927], 123). As a
consequence, any idea of a ‘proletarian law’ is meaningless since it presupposes
that ‘the form of law is deathless’ (p. 122), i.e. a plain contradiction with the
social transformation of the transition period.
■
These characterizations of the transition process culminating in the ‘jusnihilistic’
approach can be considered as reflecting rather faithfully the thinking of Marx
on the transition period. But this interpretation of transition also becomes
increasingly contested within Soviet governmental circles during the 1930s. A
contending theory of transition, elaborated by Yudin, Vyshinksy, Golunski and
Strogovich – who can be considered the legal theorists of the nascent Stalinist
system – was developed and opposed to those interpretations. Although based on
the same texts – which, by that time, were less a distinctive reference but rather
the common element within which differences could be expressed – this theory
rapidly became the only legitimate one and supplanted any alternative
interpretations.
It is possible to delineate the characteristic features of this understanding of
the transition in the very harsh criticism that Vyshinsky directed at Pashukanis
in his Address at the First Congress on Problems of the Sciences of Soviet State
and Law in 1938 (Vyshinsky, 1951[1938]). Rejecting Pashukanis’ identification
of the legal form with exchange relationships, he argued that the internalization
by the masses of the norms of post-revolutionary society, the raising of produc-
tivity and the defence against the counter-revolution required the extensive use
of a proletarian form of legality. In doing so, he was counterpoising a normative
interpretation of social change during the transition period (Kelsen, 1976[1955]:
112). The withering away of law, in this perspective, was substituted by the
strengthening of legal and coercive instruments; the withering away of the state
by state-building: ‘After the triumph of the socialist revolution, the proletariat
[was] confronted with the task of strengthening the state to the maximum degree’
(Vyshinsky, 1951[1938]: 312). Vyshinsky furthermore stressed Stalin’s thesis that
the ‘capitalistic encirclement’ and, therefore, ‘socialism within one country’, was
provisionally suspending the withering away of the state, postponed for a better
future.7 As a result, the hitherto widely accepted understanding of the transition
period could not be upheld without being considered an attempt to undermine
and destabilize the regime. It thus became a heretical doctrine.8
The new official redefinition of the transition period entails far-reaching
consequences and implies a different model of social change. First, while the
concept of transition was previously divorced from any specific institutional

setting, it was now solidly reattached to a particular kind of stateness and legal-
ity embodied in the Soviet institutions. From that viewpoint, transition was not
conceived any more as a period of transformation of one historical stage into
another, but as a historical stage itself: ‘The transition from capitalism to class-
less society is thus an entire historical period’ (Golunski and Strogovich,
1951[1940]: 351). This historical period, as it is well known, will also be a
specific mode of production called ‘socialism’, inserted between capitalism and a
postponed communism.9 Transition thus becomes identified with a particular
kind of social change inserted within specific institutional, political and econ-
omic mediations to which it is subordinated. In other words, it becomes a
prescriptive concept.
Second, while communism was, at least in Marx, already present in the tran-
sition, it becomes now a projection into the future which has to be realized at
any human, ecological and economic costs. From a matrix of social change it
becomes a utopian project that orients change, thus giving a strong teleological
twist to the Marxian concept of transition.
Third, with the abandonment of the thesis of the withering away, an entire
conception of social change has been radically revised. The Marxian notion of
transition implied an isomorphism between social relations and social insti-
tutions, with a methodological acknowledgement of the subordination of the
latter to the former: in this perspective, social change could not be about
the internalization by society at large of new political norms but only about the
production of new types of social relations (which could be subsequently formal-
ized as norms). The Soviet conception of the transition – illustrated by Vyshinsky
– as the internalization by the masses of the revolutionary norms of which the
proletarian state is the repository completely inverts the terms: the locus of social
change moves away from social relations and is located in state institutions inhab-
ited by a vanguard elite. This elite appears as the leading force of social change,
since it embodies the communist project and is, so to speak, before its time, while
social structures lag behind it. Its role is to bring the ‘masses’ up to the task of
their ‘historical mission’, of which the political elite is the unique interpreter. In
this perspective, the isomorphism between social structures and superstructures
disappears. Instead, transition is now characterized by a discrepancy – or by what
Bettelheim has called a ‘non-correspondence’ between the various levels of social
relations (Bettelheim, 1976: 81; 1975: 24–8) – between social structures and the
state. The paradoxical consequence of this reinterpretation of the concept is that
the Soviet state intervenes into the social fabric in order to generate the very social
structures that will ‘match’ or sustain it, and constitute its ‘real’ basis. This inter-
vention will be nothing but the top-down diffusion and inculcation of the norms
posited by the state, which has historically meant a mix of administrative repres-
sion, forced education and economic planning.
This way of conceiving the transition also raises the issue of the social
prerequisites of political change: socialism signifies indeed a pause on the way to
communism – postponed as an endpoint – the social prerequisites of which are
considered to be lacking. The only concrete anticipation of communism is to be

found in the state, which has therefore to produce the social preconditions for
further change. It would not be an overstatement to say that this understanding
of transition defines a situation of exception. This exceptionality is not only
political, but also epistemological: compared to the previous assumptions of
Marxist theory, the transition period inverts the explanans and the explanandum
when it sees social structures and social relations no longer as the underpinning
principle of the political order but as the product of technocratic control. The
state has become the locus of the social fabric; the primum motus of social change
is the will of the Party. From the autonomous production of new forms of social
relations, the transition has become the assimilation and internalization by
society, under state supervision, of norms embodied by the state.
Two Models of Transition
The inquiry into the historical development of the Marxist doctrine of transition
and the construction of its ‘orthodox’ ideology shows that the concept of tran-
sition lends itself to two distinct understandings, quite opposed, if not contra-
dictory. The first, which can be associated with early Marxism, has been
historically supplanted by the second, linked to the rise of Stalinism and to the
development of an official ideology of the Soviet regime. If we leave aside the
historical contents and specificities of these respective interpretations and concen-
trate instead on their formal aspects, it is possible to derive two models of social
change that contend for the label of ‘transition’. For the sake of simplicity, I will
designate these models as Transition 1 and Transition 2 in Table 1.
Obviously, these abstractions do not claim to have any historical or descrip-
tive validity. They cannot adequately capture the diversity of nuances or even
divergences in the theorizing of transitions. Even within the Marxist tradition
that has just been overviewed, it is possible to distinguish more than two
approaches: an evolutionary one, a dictatorial one, but also a conflict-based one,
typical, for instance, of Luxemburgism. However, in their clear-cut opposition,
these two models illustrate in an exemplary manner the terms around which the
rationalization of societal change diverge, as well as the stakes of these diver-
gences. Briefly spelled out, it can be said that the Transition 1 model envisages
social change as a process, while in Transition 2 it is seen as an outcome. This central
opposition could even be generalized further, to cover pre-sociological views of
society based either on organic (1) or on technical (2) metaphors, on a natural
order (1) or on an organized plan (2) – such as classical economic liberalism (1)
vs. neo-mercantilism à la List (2). But my argument here is specifically concerned
with the narrower concept of ‘transition’, from the mid-nineteenth century
onward, as it has been construed within the social sciences. From this viewpoint,
the two models offer a clear image of the basic theoretical choices confronting
any theory of transition, across disciplines and traditions.
These two ways of theorizing transitions are not specific to the discussions of
Table 1 Models of social change as transition

TRANSITION 1 TRANSITION 2
Non-teleological: social change is neither Teleological: social change derives its
explained nor determined by a finality. meaning from a forward projection of its
supposed outcome.
Non-prescriptive: the concrete modalities Prescriptive: social change occurs only
of social change are not specified through specified institutional and
ex ante. political mediations.
Productive/Genetic: social change is the Coercive/Educational: social change is the
production of new social relationships internalization by society at large of new
that can be subsequently formalized as (political, legal, cultural, etc.) norms.
norms.
Simultaneous: social and political Sequenced: social and political structures are
structures are not distinguished. The separated, and the latter is given primacy
transformation of the former involves over the former in the dynamics of social
that of the latter. change.
Autonomous: social change, as the Heteronomous: social change is conceived on
interplay of different social levels and the basis of an overriding dichotomy
formations, has its principle in itself. It state/society (or elite/society). It results
ultimately affects the political and legal from external interventions (whether
orders. state-led or elite-led).
Revolutionary: change occurs as the Evolutionary: social change is ‘diluted’ in
assertion of an alternative principle to time and articulated as the composite of
the existing legal and political order. successive steps or sequences.
the transition to communism: they can be regarded as the two generic models of
the emancipatory promise of transition to democracy, whatever meaning is
associated with that term (‘popular’ or Western liberal.) The analysis of social
change in terms of transition, therefore, even in intellectual traditions and disci-
plines extremely remote from Marxism, is always amenable to one of the two
conceptualizations summarized above, either epistemologically or historically.
The prospects for the transition to some form of socialism or communism have
still provided an object of debate and research within Marxism until the late
1970s, as various works testify (e.g. Bettelheim, 1976; Stephens, 1979). But far
from being confined to this academic and political tradition, the concept of tran-
sition has been widely disseminated across different fields and disciplines. It has
come to be frequently used in sociology, cultural anthropology or demography,
almost as a synonym of modernization. And, as I mentioned in the introduction,
there has been since the mid-1980s a resurgence of the concept in the compara-
tive analysis of democratization processes – or transitions to democracy.10 As we
shall see, it is possible to identify in these research programmes, i.e. moderniz-
ation theory and comparative democratization, some of the main features of the
opposition between the two models previously outlined.
A New Evolutionism: Modernization Theory and Political

Development
In the post-war period, Western social sciences have generated a research

programme in macro-societal and comparative-institutional analysis which can
be said to hinge entirely on the concept of transition. Modernity, under the form
of pluralistic, competitive politics and a capitalistic economic system of produc-
tion, was the common end-stage toward which traditional societies evolved.
These processes were analysed within a conceptual framework influenced by the
structural functionalism of Parsons’ sociology, and by the dichotomy between
tradition and modernity that these theories sought to specify. At the risk of
simplifying excessively, the conception of democratization as a process of
modernization can be briefly sketched as follows: It generally assumes that there
are functional prerequisites for democratization, when it posits political plural-
ism at the endpoint of an ideal process of social differentiation. In its most general
characterization, this process can be the result of a diversification of the work-
force induced by technological evolutions (Harrison, 1988). Or it can be broken
down into distinct socio-economic trends including wealth, industrialization,
urbanization and education, as in Lipset’s analysis (1959), which produce modifi-
cations in the behaviour of social agents and a diversification of social relations
that find their expression at the political level, since they extend political demands
and broaden participation. The refinement of modernization theory that some
authors sought by taking into account cultural factors and value orientations goes
along the same lines when they understand ‘socialization’ structures as a variable
intervening in the modernization process and influencing the political system
(Almond and Powell, 1966). Whether in a structural or more psychological key,
respectively exemplified for instance by Lipset and Inkeles, the ideal process of
transition to political modernity was presented as dependent upon a certain
number of prerequisites and upon structures of socialization. In that sense, it was
driven by societal evolutions, including economic progress.
It is not possible, within the confines of this article, to cover at length the
literature on political development associated with modernization theory.11 It is
useful, instead, to concentrate upon the exact positioning of this theory vis-à-vis
the two models presented above. I argue that modernization theories mobilize
explanatory patterns belonging to the model of social change previously schema-
tised as Transition 1, while they embody a set of normative expectations more
characteristic of the model called Transition 2. Although they were an attempt at
providing an alternative to the Marxist account of social development, moderniz-
ation theories still maintained a vision of social change whereby the evolving
system of social relations – now captured under the term ‘structural differentia-
tion’ – subordinated to its functional requirements the forms of political organiz-
ation. The political system, indeed, was not theorized as a separate entity, nor
granted ontological privileges vis-à-vis other social subsystems. In that sense,
modernization theories shared with the Marxian scheme formalized as Transition
1 a similar view of history as a succession of typical social configurations, but they
also maintained the Marxian principle of analogy between social and political
structures under the guise of functionalism between different social subsystems
– when they did not treat the political as a dependent variable.12 As Eisenstadt
has correctly argued,
. . . the vision of the historical process which was connected to all these developments
was very much in line with the classical evolutionary one . . . Above all, they share
some crucial assumptions about the nature of the transition between different stages
of social development – a concept which was central to evolutionary and Marxist
sociology alike . . . [and they] assumed that the transition from one stage to another
involved a radical break with the past and concomitant change in all spheres.
(Eisenstadt, 1985: 12)13
However, if they are clearly located under the first column of Table 1,
modernization theories and the sociology of development depart from that model
in one crucial respect. Insofar as they sought to build a general theoretical frame-
work explaining both the late modernization and the democratization of
societies, they also generated ideal-typical models of that process. While the
process of modernization was seen, in practice, as open-ended and revolutionary,
it was theorized as teleological and evolutionary, with the USA of the 1960s
embodying its ideal endpoint: ‘political development was identified with the
attributes of English and American liberal constitutional democracy’ (Packen-
ham, 1973: 198). Almond and Verba’s Civic Culture, (1963) or Inkeles’ ‘Indus-
trial Man’ (1960), for instance, illustrate this teleological twist of modernization
theory when implying that the attitudes and values functional to the process of
modernization are basically those that US national surveys were revealing at the
same time: acquisitive individualism and depoliticized pragmatism, triumphing
over obsolete ideologies in a middle-class society. With Western history embody-
ing the norm of development, modernization theory involved a teleological
element that was not easily associated with the rest of its theoretical assumptions.
The research programme which originated in the 1950s around these issues
thus entailed contradictory orientations and internal tensions. On the one hand,
it set out to explain political forms by their economic and societal underpinnings,
following closely the Transition 1 model. On the other hand, however, it also
related these political forms to a teleological yardstick. This tension can be traced
back to the ambivalent attitude that modernization theory nurtured toward the
process of political transition, especially when it was envisioned in developing
countries. Both the lessons of the interwar period and the prospects of decoloniz-
ation had indeed contributed to raising deep suspicions about the potential
effects of mass participation in the political process. In particular, it was feared
that the eruption of mass politics in ‘traditional’ societies would have disrup-
tive and destabilizing effects rather than leading towards a universal model
of constitutional democracy. This ambivalence about the whole process of
democratization is actually constitutive not only of these specific theories, but
of the bulk of post-war American political science, which saw democracy as
something valuable insofar as it could be limited and secured (see Ball, 1995).
The epistemological assumptions of modernization theory were therefore at odds

with the implicit political goals built into the model. In particular, it was ill
equipped to provide means of controlling socio-political evolutions, since it relied
principally on a type of explanation of social change that can be associated with
Transition 1, while it was seeking to provide a social scientific knowledge lending
itself to an instrumental use characteristic of the Transition 2 model. In other
words, it was analysing social change as an autonomous phenomenon, while in
fact looking for a formula of social control.
The overall failure of this research programme has been repeatedly stressed.
The more modernization theorists sought to specify their concepts and their
indices, the more remote were the prospects of a smooth transition to Western-
style democracy in the developing world. This paradox can be traced back to the
conflict between a selective use of modernization theory and a political agenda
which was basically focused on the containment of mass participation and the
need for authority and leadership capable of gate-keeping access to the political
process. In that sense, there was a very clear recognition that political ‘transitions’
were not unilinear or evolutionary processes leading to Western-style democracy
and political stability – combined, however, with a normative commitment to
ensure such an outcome.14 Paradoxically, the model of social change that I have
called Transition 1 has provided the dominant explanatory framework of the
political development literature, while at the same time its consequences and
implications were precisely what this research programme sought to avoid or
prevent: this model was both the theory and the problem. In other words, the
literature on political development which constituted a separate academic disci-
pline from the mid-1950s to the 1970s can be read as a constant problematiz-
ation of its own theoretical foundations, which eventually led to a paradigmatic
change and the abandonment of the first model of transition.
This change actually occurred through a very simple displacement: while the
subordination of political structures to societal transformations was a methodo-
logical axiom of modernization theory and political development, it rapidly
became a mere discrepancy that could and should be corrected, a ‘lag in the
development of political institutions behind social and economic change,’ as
Huntington put it (1968: 4–5). It was therefore possible to conceive of a ‘defen-
sive modernization’ that would pre-emptively organize the enlargement of mass
participation, maintain control over its boundaries and structure the process of
social change. If modernization theory tended to show the non-alignment of
social structures with the requisites of political democracy in the developing
world, the transition to democracy would have to be produced by political will
and determination. Active politics would achieve what grand theorizing could
not promise: pessimismo della ragione, ottimismo della volontà. Modernization,
which was previously understood as a process, now became a programme. This
theoretical development obviously meant a dramatic shift away from any concep-
tion of social change that could fall within the first model presented above. It
implied, among other things, an insulation of the political institutions from
societal pressures, and the possibility that change be instigated, organized and
driven by the political institutions and their elite. In other words, it involved a
turn to a concept of transition best exemplified by the Transition 2 model. The
concept of ‘transition to democracy’ was adopted as a keyword in political science
precisely when this new theoretical course was endorsed.
Comparative Democratization
The rise of counter-narratives of modernization, such as dependency theory or

world-system theory, contributed to no small extent to the refutation of main-
stream modernization and political development theories. But even though they
challenged the elitist and conservative bias of modernization theory, these new
research programmes hinged on an equally structural understanding of the
modernizing process that was only extended beyond the boundaries of the
nation-state. As a result, they were equally challenged by the rise of a micro-
sociology reasserting the role of agency in shaping social contexts and producing
or reproducing institutions and structures. The evolution of the comparative
analysis of change in the 1980s indeed took the direction of a inquiry into the
role of ‘institutional entrepreneurs or elites’ (Eisenstadt) that can be safely related
to the model presented as Transition 2.
Broadly speaking, the resurgence of this model has involved a reformulation
whereby what was previously understood as the autonomous, all-encompassing
development of social structures and relations could become the object of instru-
mental action or strategies, or in other words a direct purpose of agency. The
knowledge of social dynamics that modernization theories sought to provide had
to be substituted by a knowledge for social change – which in turn implied that
political and socioeconomic structures or spheres be not only distinct, but rela-
tively independent. The mechanisms of regulation and control had to be auton-
omous. In sociology, the methodological assertion of the autonomy of political
structures can be associated, for instance with the work of Theda Skocpol on the
state as an independent institution ‘in its own right’ (Skocpol, 1979: 28; see also
Evans et al., 1985), which led its proponents to study the effects of the organiz-
ational forms of the state on social structures rather than the contrary. In
comparative politics, the focus on democratizing agents is characteristic of the
research programme on ‘transitions to democracy’ that emerged in the mid-
1980s. Starting with an internal critique of modernization theory proposed
already in the 1970s by development sociologist Dankwart Rustow (Rustow,
1970), it has evolved toward an account of transitions centred on the role of
political actors. This perspective, endorsed by political scientists such as Juan
Linz, is later developed, interestingly enough, by former structuralists such as
O’Donnell and Schmitter, who assign a central position to the strategic choices
of political actors in their analysis of democratization processes (O’Donnell and
Schmitter, 1986). Overall, the abandonment of modernization theory has been
accompanied, across social scientific disciplines, by an attempt to capture social
change prevailingly through the categories of a theory of action. The call for a
‘neo-modernization’ theory intended to renew the discipline in the light of the

events of 1989, popularized by Edward Tiryakian (1991), can indeed be matched
without hesitations to the simultaneous efforts taking place in political science,
since it stresses in the same manner the ‘voluntaristic’ dimension of social change
and meets the concerns of political scientists when it equates ‘the period of
modernization’ with ‘the transitional period from one regime to another’. By
focusing on the transformation of political regimes and opting for agency-based
explanations, these overlapping research orientations have tended to restrict the
question of social change to that of legal-institutional – rather than structural –
transformations that can be attributed to specific agents. As Raj Kollmorgen
observes, in these approaches, the concept of transition refers specifically to ‘the
substance and the time-span of the modification of the ‘politico-institutional
order’, while ‘the inherited economic order’ is only ‘marginally’ used as an
explanatory factor (Kollmorgen, 1994).
In its current social-scientific use, the concept of transition has, therefore,
emancipated political structures from socio-economic determinations, and
construed the latter as the result of strategies pursued in the former. By the same
token, contemporary analyses of ‘transitions’ reactivate a technological, engi-
neering model of social change that has been previously identified as Transition
2. As a result, such analyses mobilize a set of conceptual and explanatory patterns
that do not substantially differ from those defining ‘transition to communism’
within the Marxist orthodoxy. Both imply a view according to which political
structures and institutions are the primary site of social change, while society at
large has to subsequently readjust itself to their evolution. Far from being the tail-
end of social change, the political institutional order initiates it. Both also involve
a teleology whereby social change is understood as the realization of a purpose
rather than the expression of a present potentiality.
■
The separation of political from social structures involved today in the concept
of transition has been achieved through a critique of the functionalism charac-
terizing modernization theories. Rustow’s article on ‘transitions to democracy’,
published in 1970 and often considered, in retrospect, as a founding text of
contemporary democratization studies, has more or less set the terms of this new
approach. Therein, he argues that the functional approach is valid only to the
extent that it accounts for the stability of established democracies. But as far as
their establishment was concerned, he suggested that modernization theory was
not very helpful, while that question had a greater ‘pragmatic relevance’ (Rustow,
1970: 340). Grand theorizing had thus to be replaced by a more sectoral and
policy-oriented approach whereby social change would no longer be an auton-
omous and all-encompassing phenomenon but could be seen as an outcome
dependent upon the specific strategies and choices of a distinct political elite. The
distinction between society at large and a restricted elite in a position to initiate,
control and channel social change indeed lies at the core of the academic litera-
ture on ‘transition to democracy’. Against the sociological literature emphasizing
the role of economic structures and socialization processes, Rustow has asserted
that democracy ‘is acquired by a process of conscious decision at least on the part
of the top political leadership’. While acknowledging the fact that there has to be
a specific social ‘background’ and a set of ‘conditions’ for political change, he
nevertheless reduced it to ‘a genuine choice [that] does not flow from those two
conditions’. As a result, ‘a small circle of leaders is likely to play a disproportion-
ate role’ (p. 355). Similar claims have been made by Linz who asserted, against
sociologists in general and Marxists in particular, that ‘the true dynamics of the
political process’ must be traced back to the ‘choices’ of political actors, not to
social structures (Linz, 1978). In reducing the process of transition to the conse-
quence of the choices made by an elite, the notion of transition to democracy
reactivates an explanatory pattern that was proper to the reinterpretation of the
transition to communism when it conceived social change not as an autonomous
social process but as the realization of the designs of a vanguard (Transition 2).
Both are cases of social change by design. This implies that there is no longer any
isomorphism between social structures and political or legal institutions, as it was
the case with any theory belonging to Transition 1. Instead, there is some sort of
epistemological exception whereby, for the duration of the transitional period,
political institutions do not mirror societal configurations but have a life and a
logic of their own, relatively unconstrained by social structures.15 As a result, it
is assumed that ‘ “normal science methodology” is inappropriate in rapidly chang-
ing situations’ and the ‘ “normal” social science concepts and approaches’ are
temporarily inadequate (O’Donnell and Schmitter, 1986: 4). Both the under-
standing of the transition to communism that emerged in the 1930s and the tran-
sition to democracy discourse of the 1990s share this kind of exceptionalism,
whereby a set of actors is momentarily emancipated from the structural
constraints that define ‘non-transitional’ periods. In both cases, a vanguard of
democrats – whether a workers party in one case, or reformers in the other – is
taken to generate social change and, subsequently, to bring social structures in
conformity with a project endowed with all the attributes of historical necessity.
Democracies, in that sense, are indeed ‘crafted’ (DiPalma, 1990).
■
The concept of ‘transition to democracy’ also hinges upon a progressive, reformist
and evolutionary conception of social change as opposed to a revolutionary one.
The idea that political regime changes must be gradual, limited and controlled,
as well as the concomitant rejection of the revolutionary paradigm of social
change, is justified by the fact that more radical changes would undermine or
threaten the democratic conquests already achieved. In a passage of their book
on democratization, O’Donnell and Schmitter elucidate that point, while at the
same time they explicitly connect the theme of the ‘transition to democracy’ to
the former Marxist paradigm of transition that was presented in the first part of
this article. The passage deals with social and economic democracy, that they call
‘socialization’, and with the possible simultaneity of two transitions, ‘to political
democracy and to socialism’ (O’Donnell and Schmitter, 1986: 13). The authors
assert that ‘political democracy per se is a goal worthy of attainment, even at the
expense of forgoing paths that would seem to promise more immediate returns
in terms of socialization. Not only is the probability of success much lower and
the likelihood of their promoting an authoritarian regression much higher, but
the taking of such paths seems to require, at least in the interim, the installation
of a popular authoritarian regime’ (O’Donnell and Schmitter, 1986). What is
worthy of attention is the extent to which this passage echoes the transition
debate that had taken place within Marxism, and the direct, explicit reference to
the ‘transition to socialism’. While the authors reject the hypothesis of a straight
transition to socialism on the grounds that it would bring about some modern
form of dictatorship of the proletariat, they do so only to introduce a two-stage
model of transition, in which socialism is a potential outcome postponed to a
better and safer future. In other words, they propose an evolutionary sequence
wherein socialism can only follow the prior establishment of political democracy,
exactly in the same way that the transition to communism was divorced from and
postponed after the transition to socialism in the Transition 2 model. And this
sequencing is justified on the same grounds: the transition to communism (and
the withering away of the state) was also postponed because, as we have seen, it
would allegedly endanger the existing revolutionary conquests.
■
Third, as a result of the former assumptions (autonomy and primacy of the
political and legal structures), the transition to democracy and the official Marxist
definition of the transition both rely on a similar conception of political trans-
formations as events that do not need social prerequisites in order to occur.
Autonomous vis-à-vis the level of development of the economy, political struc-
tures are also autonomous with respect to the cultural, moral or cognitive
resources that are considered to underpin Western political institutions. Instead,
the model referred to as Transition 2 implies that the political structures, the state,
are in position to generate such resources, in order to transform the newly crafted
political legality into social norms producing compliant behaviours and ensuring
social integration. This conception of social change by design therefore includes
an educational or disciplinary component in that it is followed by the creation
of a ‘social consensus’ (Ethier, 1990), or the ‘habituation’ (Rustow, 1970: 358)
of social actors to the new political rules. The task, in other words, is to create
new social subjects acting in conformity with the political norms embodied by
state institutions – a perspective which is typical of the second model of tran-
sition that has been previously outlined. The multiple programmes of ‘civic
education’ or ‘training’ delivered by national and international agencies in Eastern
Europe with a view to creating active ‘civil societies’ are, in that sense, logical
extensions of this conception of social change: social structures are seen as lagging
behind political institutions and can be brought in line with them through
various forms of social engineering.
■
Finally, the idea of ‘transition to democracy’ has massively reintroduced the tele-
ological understanding of social change that distinguished Transition 2 from
Transition 1. This understanding has never been more clear-cut than with the
collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. As a result, the processes of transition
to democracy have been seen as embedded in a broader historical trend that
culminates in Western liberal political and economic institutions. This historical
teleology therefore ascribed a predetermined meaning and direction to these
events. This aspect is not absent from academic writings: Juan Linz, for instance,
has argued that, compared to the century-long process of democratization in
Western Europe, contemporary societies in transition ‘must telescope such a long
historical process into a few critical years’ (Linz, 1990: 143). The teleological
understanding of democratization processes has also been popularized by
Huntington, who located such events within broader, long-term historical ‘waves’
of democratization (Huntington, 1991). In a very different manner, some of
Habermas’s writings on Eastern Europe are informed by the same evolutionary
view, when they present the transition to democracy as a ‘catch-up revolution’
(Habermas, 1991) that should align these countries on the trajectory of a political
modernity from which they have been insulated by what retrospectively appeared
as a historical accident. It can be argued, therefore, that the ‘end of history’ thesis
popularized by Francis Fukuyama (1991) was only a radical expression of a more
diffuse perception. The idea that social transformations are subordinated to a
higher historical goal of which they are only the instrument was also at the centre
of the official doctrine of the transition to communism, as we have seen. Liberal
democracy and the market economy have been posited as the endpoint of the tran-
sition process, as an ideal that Eastern European societies had to match, just as
communism was an ideal projected in the future that had to be built at any cost.
Conclusion
In the history of the social sciences, the concept of transition has thus lent itself
to two different interpretations. Notwithstanding the political agendas and the
ideological orientations characterizing various intellectual traditions or research
programmes, these rival interpretations have constantly resurfaced under
different forms in the analysis of democratization processes or, more broadly, in
the modern narratives of social emancipation and progress. What appears is that
there is not a ‘Marxist’ concept of transition as opposed to a ‘non-Marxist’ one.
Instead, the two modes of social change that I have described have both coexisted
within Marxism and within the social sciences. The first involves a strong social
ontology, while the second implies a social technology. The former is usually
associated with macro-sociological paradigms, while the latter tends to codify and
rationalize political practices. Taken together, they certainly represent the two
dominant understandings of social change throughout a modernity which has
constantly been inhabited by the tension created thereby.
This tension has clearly appeared in the different formulas for a ‘transition to
democracy,’ always oscillating between two dominant models. Whether it has
been understood as the construction of communism or the building of a liberal
capitalistic order, the process of transition has been theorized in a similar manner,
which falls within the second model of transition presented above. And it is
indeed remarkable that it is usually after or concomitantly with revolutions
(whether 1917 or 1989) that purposive and teleological conceptions of social
change which I have redescribed as Transition 2 have replaced the structural and
impersonal conception labelled Transition 1. This, in turn, opens perspectives on
the possible affinities existing between historical periods of macro-social change
and the rise of a particular understanding of transitions that identifies an agent
of historical change, thus relocating historical transformation under the
categories of subjectivity. By the same token, such an understanding replaces
events within a teleology instead of replacing them within structures of causa-
tion. It is indeed possible to ask with Bourdieu whether it is not a fundamental
temptation of the social sciences in front of ‘critical events’ (and transitions are
certainly such critical events) to abandon the scientific protocol requiring that
‘extraordinary’ events be replaced within chains of ordinary events, and to opt
instead for a closure of the event on itself and a teleological understanding
suggesting that some historical moments ‘are more historical than others’
(Bourdieu, 1984: 209–10). This implies a methodological exceptionalism that is
fully developed in the theories of transition here identified under the label Tran-
sition 2, and that could be indeed the price that social sciences pay when they
strive for immediate political benefits.
Notes
The author would like to thank András Bozóki, Heidrun Friese, Alana Lentin, Claus Offe,
Philippe C. Schmitter, Peter Wagner and Danilo Zolo for their comments, criticisms, and
suggestions. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 34th World Congress of
the International Institute of Sociology, Tel Aviv, 11–17 July 1999.
1 On evolution and history in Marx, see Krader (1978).
2 This is, for instance, the case when Marx indicates that class struggle is both directed
against capital and a factor of capital valorization and accumulation insofar as it
induces capitalists to develop technical innovations or new forms of work organiz-
ation whereby relative surplus value is extracted. See the chapters on the ‘working day’
and on ‘machinery and modern industry’ in Capital.
3 For a general study of transition to communism, see Zolo (1974).
4 On this issue, see Negri (1998).
5 For the evolution of Lenin’s positions after 1917, see Carr (1953: 233–49).
6 For more detailed accounts of the commodity-exchange theory, see Hazard (1951);
Fassò (1988: 258–60). For a normativist critique, see Kelsen (1976[1955]: 89–111).
7 ‘Will the state be preserved among us likewise during the period of communism as
well? The answer is ‘yes’: it will be preserved unless capitalist encirclement shall have
been liquidated.’ Stalin (1951[1939]: 348).
8 As Vyshinsky argued at the time: ‘To preach the withering away of the organs of
punishment and repression represented an attempt to give us over with our hands tied
. . . into the robber clutches of the wreckers, terrorists, and diversionists whose trai-
torous undertaking – happily for us – did not succeed and who were mercilessly
uprooted and destroyed by our notable Stalin intelligence service, headed by Nikolai
Ivanovich Yezhov’ (Vyshinsky, 1951[1938]: 311).
9 This is the way in which the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia, published in the 1950s, which
can be considered as an official compendium of Stalinism, defines it at the entry ‘tran-
sition’ (perehod). See Vvedenskiy (1955).
10 Even though a number of political scientists – especially but not only in the German-
speaking academia – have preferred the concept of ‘transformation’, less evolutionary
and more linked to systemism.
11 For a critical overview, see Cammack (1997).
12 Robert Packenham (1973: 212) has stressed this methodological overlapping of
modernization theories with Marxism, characteristic of the break with the previous
‘legal-formal’ that characterized American social science.
13 It is not coincidental, therefore, that modernization theory – and notably the work
of Parsons and Rostow – was imported in Eastern Europe in the 1980s, when the first
courses of ‘political science’ replaced ‘scientific socialism’ in some universities. For the
young reformist scholars who took up the discipline, an evolutionary, structuralist,
future-oriented modernization theory was the most acceptable substitute for an
embalmed Marxist doctrine. (I thank András Bozóki for his instructive conversation
on this issue.)
14 ‘While we no longer expect to arrange social and political systems in an evolutionary
sequence, we are vitally concerned with the patterns of development in societies that
have set as their goal the liberal democratic model of politics’ (Kahin, Pauker and Pye,
1955 – quoted in Cammack, 1997: 59).
15 On this suspension of the explanatory power of social structures, see Karl and
Schmitter (1991).
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■ Nicolas Guilhot holds a PhD from the European University Institute, Florence.
He has written on the sociology of democratic and human rights activism. He now
works on international philanthropy. Address: European University Institute, Via
dei Roccettini, 9, I–50016 San Domenico di Fiesole (FI), Italy. [email:
nicolas.guilhot@iue.it]

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04 Guilhot (jr/d) 11/4/02 1:09 pm Page 219

European Journal of Social Theory 5(2): 219–243

‘The Transition To The Human World

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brought about any fundamental change; on the contrary, the transition to

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History, Evolution and Revolution: the Idea of Transition

The concept of transition cannot be separated from a specific representation of

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Rousseau or Kant. This enlightened view of history, exemplified for instance by

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contrary, Marx’s theory of transition implies their complete overlapping, if not

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Transition to Communism: Soviet Social Science in the

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concept of transition was previously divorced from any specific institutional

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considered to be lacking. The only concrete anticipation of communism is to be

Two Models of Transition

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Table 1 Models of social change as transition

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A New Evolutionism: Modernization Theory and Political

In the post-war period, Western social sciences have generated a research

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The epistemological assumptions of modernization theory were therefore at odds

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The rise of counter-narratives of modernization, such as dependency theory or

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‘neo-modernization’ theory intended to renew the discipline in the light of the

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Almond, Gabriel and Powell, G.B. (1966) Comparative Politics: A Developmental

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Carr, Edward H. (1953) The Bolshevik Revolution 1917–1923. London: Macmillan.

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