Towards a Philosophy of Crisis

Abstract

Thirty years ago, Fukuyama announced the end of history in the form of the triumph of liberal democracy and free markets. Crises were going to be something of the past. Today, crises abound. Does this mean that the eschatology of the 1980s and 90s should give way to a crisology? Given the many ways in which the vocabulary of crisis is used, and crises are instrumentalized, can the word crisis become a rigorous philosophical concept? In this essay, I analyze the extent to which, and contexts in which, philosophy has claimed crisis as a central concept (section 2); offer a tentative typology of crisis in relation to the problem of normativity (section 3); conclude with a few remarks on critique as the philosophy of crisis (section 4).