Social Histories of “Bildung” between universal and national ambitions and global emergences

In debates of international standardization of national education systems, Bildung is across Northern Europe mobilized as Kampfbegriff against competence orientation and instrumental utilization. However, ‘Bildung’ can also be understood as a concept of applied knowledge, directed towards creating the ‘right kind of’ human beings for the state and ‘the culture’. This calls for a reopening of the historiography of the conceptual traditions of Bildung in the intersections between intellectual history and social history, dealing with the social and political use of the concept and the national practices and spaces in which it developed and transformed globally.