Transition Debate
= a debate that took place between Marxist historians and theorists, about the transition from feudalism to capitalism
Discussion
Jeremy Santora:
"This debate reached its peaks in the 1970s amidst an exchange between Robert Brenner, the progenitor of social property form analysis and Immanuel Wallerstein, the forebearer of world-systems analysis. Brenner (1976) kicked off this debate with a polemic against the stale models that dominated economic historiography: the demographic and commercialization models. While these models posited external causes to state-wide economic development, Brenner argued that the causes were internal, arising from the class conflict generated by social property relations. Taking this model as a point of departure, Brenner argued that the transition occurred during the 16th century in the English countryside.
Politically driven enclosures, made possible by a centralized state-structure, altered England’s social property relations which generated a conflict between landlords and tenant farmers over rent. Overtime this led to wide-spread dispossession and the market compulsion to commodify labor. To showcase the central importance social property relations in guiding development trajectories, Brenner adopted a comparative methodology, juxtaposing the English transition to capitalism with France’s to absolutism to Poland’s “feudal” standstill. There is thus for Brenner no necessary or teleological character to capitalist development, contra the commercialists. Instead, the dissolution of feudalism across Europe opened a set of contingent possibilities that were constrained, in each instance, by class struggles over social property relations. Wallerstein (1974a, 1992) offered a very different account. While he agreed both that class struggle played a determinative role and that the transition took place in the countryside, he argued, contra Brenner, that the transition to capitalism took place at the level of the world- system, not the nation-state.
For Wallerstein the nation-state is not a unit of analysis, but a unit of observation ... It was not, in other words, a totality encompassing the entire process of capitalist development. Rather, this process cut across state-boundaries, occurring at the level of the world-system. For Wallerstein, the existence of the Westphalian interstate system itself was a product of the transition, arising through the failure of the Habsburgs and Valois to establish an imperium (1974a:170–84). This enabled a balance of power which permitted the development of nation- states and enabled them to solidify the emergent world-economy. The Dutch picked up the pieces of the disintegrating Hapsburg empire to create a smooth operating framework for the world-economy, enabling England and France to become strong states and develop national economies (1974a:199). It was the failure of this imperial project that led to the capitalist world-system because it created a strong interstate system necessary to prevent the world- economies disintegration.
As should be evident, the primary difference between Brenner and Wallerstein is not, as the social property form school contends, over the primacy of production or circulation in the transition, but rather methodological. Not only do they differ in the geographic scale of their units of analysis, but they also differ in their modes of exposition. Brenner and his followers are formalists. They begin with a theoretical model and then narrate history through that model. Wallerstein, by contrast, began with the historical process and utilized it to construct a political sociology of capitalist transition. In other words, the social property form theorists start with the premise that England is a capitalist nation-state in the 16th century and then turn to the history whereas Wallerstein starts with historical processes and shows how they resulted in the development of capitalist social relations in England. These processes cut across the political jurisdictions that the Brennerites take as premises because they are processes occurring at the level of the world-system. The shift in unit of analysis is thus necessary to make sense of the transition.
While Wallerstein offers a superior methodological vantage point, his picture omits legal transformation."