Transition - The Awakening

We use the word “transition” to describe a particular scope of the transformations to be made to the modern globalized civilizational order. According to this specific use, we retain the definition given by Maurice Godelier (1990).

By transition we mean today a very particular phase in the evolution of a society, the phase in which it encounters more and more difficulties, internal and/or external, in reproducing the economic and social system on which it is based, and begins to reorganize itself, more or less quickly or more or less violently, on the basis of another system which finally becomes in its turn the general form of the new conditions of another system¹.

Godelier refers here to a process that affects a society, although his text deals with the transition process that affected European societies when they moved from a feudal to a capitalist economic and social formation. He thus speaks about processes and dynamics that affect in a concomitant way a set of societies that transit from a civilizational order to another.

This is exactly the meaning that we make ours. By transition to a civilization of the Awakening, we mean a set of processes and dynamics that are anchored in national territorial spaces and in institutional and organizational spaces in order to renew the order in place in response to a set of ills that make the old civilizational order less effective or efficient.

Two comments allow us to complete our thinking.

First, it is important to remember that the notion of transition is neutral philosophically or politically speaking. To transition does not necessarily mean to go towards a better situation. Transition qualifies the mechanics of transformation, not the transformative quality. In other words, there is neither a teleological function to this mechanism, nor a positive end in itself. The finality of the process is fundamentally linked to the games of the actors in place.

Secondly, it is equally important to note the holistic dimension of a transition taking place on a societal or civilizational scale. Therefore, we cannot reduce the transition to a single dimension : technical or energy. Nor can it represent a response to a single problem : global warming. A civilizational transition allows for an overall upgrade of the attributes of a civilization.

Notes

1
Godelier, Maurice (1990). The theory of transition in Marx. Sociologie et sociétés, 22 (1), 53 – 81), p. 53.