Il tempo e la crisi. Analisi di un binomio costitutivo della modernità europea

Abstract

This article aims to reconstruct the history of the concept of crisis and its links with the main temporal models of European modernity, paying particular attention to Marxian thought and to some of the most significant critiques that have been addressed to it. During this historical and conceptual analysis, three objectives will be basically pursued: firstly, to show the positive meaning that ‘crisis’ has assumed within the modern philosophies of history and to investigate its debts with the Judeo-Christian tradition; secondly, to prove that Marx did not intend to support, as he has often been accused of, any staged and linear conception of history, but rather to highlight the existence of different temporal strata, within which ‘crisis’ does not produce any forced outcome; finally, to analyze how, between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, authors like Nietzsche and Spengler tried to eliminate – without succeeding – faith in historical progress.