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Crisis in Modernity
A sign of the times
between decisive change and
potential irreversibility
Lin Chalozin-Dovrat
Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV), Paris, France
Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel

1.

Introduction

Since the mid-20th century the concept of crisis has gradually gained the attention of political
thinkers and historians. The general crisis that has overtaken the modern world everywhere and
in almost every sphere of life, wrote Hannah Arendt in 1958, manifests itself differently in
each country, involving different areas and taking on different forms (2006: 170). That this is
an age of crisis seems the least controversial of statements, remarked historian Randolph Starn
in 1971 (p. 3). These observations, identifying crisis as the sign of the times, are probably not
less pertinent today. Crisis is a frequently used term, and it often expresses a general sentiment
towards our contemporaneous world. But when we describe our times in terms of crises, what
exactly do we want to say? What does crisis mean?
The high rate of appearance of the words crisis in English, crise in French and Krise in
German, has generated an ambiguous attitude among researchers. On the one hand, the growing
* The final version of this text appeared as an introductory chapter in Discourse and Crisis: Critical perspectives
and is under copyright (John Benjamins, 2013). To cite this chapter:

Chalozin-Dovrat, L. (2013). Crisis in Modernity : A sign of the times between decisive change and
potential irreversibility. In A. De Rycker & Z. M. Don (Eds.), Discourse and Crisis: Critical
perspectives (pp. 6997). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins (DAPSAC).

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use of the term since the mid-18th century, particularly in the social and political realms, is too
significant to ignore and is deemed to reveal important information on Western European
cultural history. On the other hand, crisis and its counterparts are often used loosely, they
appear in the most varied contexts and do not seem to have a stable signified. As it was recently
put by the writer Michel Surya, discussing the discourse on the global economic crisis: Crisis
: every day, everywhere, on all possible tones. [...] In fact, most of the time, we dont even see
any more what we talk about when we talk of crisis, so much weve talked about it, while
referring to all matters [...] (2009: 5).1
The aim of this chapter is to explore the semantics of crisis in light of its diachronic path
and in view of the cultural, political and scientific arenas in which it played a part. I will argue
that the history of crisis is a valuable case for showing the development of our cognition of
change in modern times, and conversely, that critically acknowledging the historical dimensions
of our perceptions of change may lead us to a more accurate understanding of the semantic array
of the term in its present-day usage. Thus, it is important to point out that the chapter is not a
corpus-based study in historical semantics or in critical discourse analysis (CDA). Rather, the
main objective is to discuss the notion of crisis within the much broader frameworks of political
theory and the history of ideas, both of which, among other theories, inform CDA as a scholarly
endeavour.
I will further claim that the allegedly obscure nature of the signifier crisis is the result of
the specific semantic processes of abstraction the term was subject to. Beginning in the mid-18th
century, the word was favoured by political writers and philosophers, and during the 19th
century, it was also adopted by the emerging social sciences in their successful attempt to
1. Crise : tous les jours, partout, sur tous les tons. [] On ne voit plus en effet, la plupart du temps, de quoi
on parle quand on parle de crise, tellement on en a dj parl et tout propos [].

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consolidate new types of knowledge about change. Adapting to the rapid transmutations in the
awareness of change, crisis was abstracted from the realm of the immediate experience of
action and became a general abstract notion. Serving various interests at an era when the very
conception of temporality underwent radical changes, crisis and its intricate semantic history
thus expressly demonstrates to which degree the formation of meaning is a political
phenomenon. Moreover, it shows how the construction of knowledge, and especially knowledge
about the human experience of time, is set within a cultural and political context and interacts
with it (Foucault 1969). In the final analysis, crisis was and still is an expression of the concrete
experience of decisive change. It conveys this particular aspect of temporality related to abrupt,
unexpected and vital transformation, and it forewarns of a crucial development in the state of
affairs. These semantic traits also made the classic notion of crisis compatible with the modern
awareness of time.
The German historian Reinhart Koselleck devoted an extensive work to the evolution of the
concept of crisis in Western European languages, and in many respects his seminal work is the
basis of the present chapter. Since the late 18th century, and particularly following the French
and American revolutions, argued Koselleck, crisis has become an expression of a new sense
of time which both indicated and intensified the end of an epoch (2006: 358). This sense of time
is specifically modern: according to Koselleck, crisis heralded a new conception of historical
time that was deeply embedded in the political conditions of 18th-century Western Europe. But
how did the term crisis proper emerge as a subject matter for wide intellectual attention? In the
next section, I will describe key moments in the developments in Western European thought that
lead to the mid-20th century scholarly interest in the word crisis and its political functions.

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While the successful dissemination of the term during the past two centuries has drawn
much attention, it also produced reserves. [T]he concept remains as multi-layered and
ambiguous as the emotions attached to it, commented Koselleck (2006: 358), and many
commentators share his impression that the noun crisis conveys too many diverse ideas about
time and historicity, and it might be nothing more than a catchword (Bally 2004 [1930]; Starn
1971; Holton 1987; Hauser 2009, among others). The trouble with crisis the concepts
notorious resistance to analysis will be examined in a third section. I will contend that the
embarrassment provoked by the concept does not simply result from the terms polysemous
nature or its inflationary use. Crisis genuinely defies common ideas about time semantics and
time conception, because it does not match one unique visual image of temporality. Contrary to
Kosellecks initial intuition, crisis shows that time expressions do not entertain a one-to-one
correspondence with visual images, and that time imagery is not fixed, but rather changing.
In fact, the diachronic trajectory of crisis indicates that the vagueness attributed to the term
is the flip-side of semantic abstraction. In a fourth section, I will examine the history of crisis
from classical times to modernity and will suggest detailed analysis of the semiotic, cognitive
and epistemic aspects of the phenomena of abstraction. Crisis was involved in the emergence
of the image of time as History and in numerous scientific efforts to determine the regularities of
historical change. Consequently, the term took on a significant role in abstracting time from
human action, and participated in the modern endeavour to transform change into an objective
observable fact epitomized by graphic representations. In other words, the consecutive processes
of semantic abstraction that crisis went through, also yielded the analytic idea that crisis
should be expected to univocally match one graphic representation. Encapsulating the

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inextricable association between cognitive, epistemic and political processes, crisis
demonstrates in which ways semantics and the history of ideas mutually correlate.
The analysis of the trends of abstraction affecting the meaning of crisis brings forward
several central semantic attributes that are still dominant in the current uses of the term. In the
fifth section, I will expressly relate to these salient clusters of meaning, and will examine their
synchronic interrelations in light of the findings of the diachronic analysis. The synchronic
outlook on the semantic network that crisis has fashioned over time emphasizes the positive
functions of abstraction: abstraction engenders not only the erosion of meaning, but also new
ways to mean. Finally, the evolution of the terms signification from the classical notion of
decisive change to the abstract statistic idea of potential irreversibility nowadays, reveals the
power of political motivation in the schematization of our common conceptions of change, and
respectively, the role of crisis and its semantic history therein.
As observed by Koselleck (2006), the modern histories of the terms crisis in English,
crise in French and Krise in German are strongly interrelated. While it is evident that there
are certain differences in the use of these words in their respective languages (specifically in
lexical compounds such as the French crise cardiaque, meaning heart attack in English), I find
that the discussion of the questions at hand would benefit more from a unified approach, such as
the one that has been employed by conceptual historians. Consequently, in what follows, the
signifier crisis will also be taken to stand for its French and German equivalents crise and
Krise. Italics will be used for the concept that the noun denotes (crisis).

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2.

The concept of crisis in Western European thought

Around the time of the American and French revolutions, the theme of crisis started to register in
both popular and philosophic literature. Crisis Thought, the philosophical enquiry about the
concept, had first emphasized the acute experience of overwhelming change. Beginning in the
mid-19th century, the growing yet undefined awareness of a cultural and epistemic crisis
gradually generated a literature identifying the state of crisis as an actual historical condition a
state of affairs that was produced in a concrete time and place. By the mid-20th century, it also
led to an explicit scholarly interest in the term crisis and its political functions. The present
section will examine this evolution in two parts.

2.1 The emergence of Crisis Thought


Towards the mid-19th century, the awareness of a radical change shaking the accepted belief
systems started to show in Western European thought. At the time, the German-speaking
intelligentsia was largely preoccupied with the philosophical legacy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Hegel, who died in 1831. It was principally among the debaters of Hegelian optimism that Crisis
Thought took shape. In his ironic critique of Hegelianism, the Danish thinker Sren Kierkegaard
was a precursor in articulating the experience of crisis as a philosophical problem (Guest 1990).
Kierkegaard attacked Hegels conviction in the virtues of European civilization, and his
unbounded confidence in the prospects of a positive philosophical system. Unmasking the false
promise of affirmative knowledge, Kierkegaards writings opened the way for a thought
stressing the absurd in human existence.
While Kierkegaards work focused on the critical dimension of the individuals religious
experience, the term crisis first became pivotal to another important critique of Hegels works,
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directed at the social condition of men. In Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Communist
Manifesto (1848) and in Marxs Das Kapital (1867), crisis was regarded as the major mode of
historical change. Though the word was principally mentioned in an economic context,
according to Marx and Engels the dynamics of crisis bore general and decisive consequences for
the political and social realities of European history.
The image of an existential and irreparable rupture achieved its full expression with the
writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, associating the metaphysical, religious, historical and cultural
factors of the European crisis. Nietzsche demanded of his readers a new form of philosophical
realization, and required repudiation of traditions and exuberance in the face of the loss of
continuity. His thought thus placed the experience of crisis at the centre of Western
consciousness.
Hence, by the end of the 19th century, the notion of crisis established itself in European
thought as an inescapable fate that should be accepted as a cultural identity. Careful reading of
the central works of 19th century thinkers and novelists allowed philosopher Karl Lwith (1995)
to portray this identity as a particular temporal consciousness: European civilization was
condemned to a state of seemingly unending historical disruption. With its downfall being
unavoidable, Europe was either doomed to decay, or admit its condition. In fact, the chief trait of
the cultural experience of crisis was discontinuity, afflicting the permanence of time and
meaning. After a century of frequent political upheavals and accelerated technological
developments, nostalgia could not obliterate the understanding that there was no going back to
the times before the French and American revolutions. The repeated images of History in the
cultural production of the last quarter of the 19th centurys show that the familiarity of time itself

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seemed perturbed: the past bequeathed only void to the future, and as a result, the intelligibility
of the present was put at risk (Arendt 2006 [1960], 1990 [1963]; Lwith 1995).
By the turn of the 20th century, Europe was facing utterly new and unknown cultural,
political and technological realities. However, the ideal of progress did not compensate for the
experience of shattered continuity. The discordance between the grand promises of science and
the actual needs of humanity carved an incommensurable fissure between a perpetually
anticipated future and the image of a forever-gone glorious past (Arendt 2006 [1958], 1990
[1963]). While historical time and temporality were recurring themes in the work of thinkers,
writers and artists, crisis well expressed the sense of malaise placed in Western European
consciousness. Since what was said about the world inexorably failed to restore the worlds
meaningfulness, philosophy was assigned a daunting task: to inquire what was the meaning of
the crisis.
It was in this climate that Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, made an explicit
attempt to address the notion of crisis, both as an object of philosophical investigation and a
pressing question of the present. In the wake of the Great War (19141918), philosophy had to
direct its attention to the way knowledge was produced, he claimed. Especially after the war,
wrote Husserl in 1930, the younger generation felt that [i]n our vital need [...] science has
nothing to say to us (1970: 6). Since science excludes in principle precisely the questions
which man [...] finds the most burning (1970: 6), the idea of science itself had to be diagnosed.
Hence, within Husserls thought, crisis was set as the axis of a necessary reflection on the human
relation to knowledge. Crisis, an effect of the historical conditions, demanded from philosophy a
responsible response, and thus became the principle of an urgently needed new way of thinking.

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2.2

The thought about crisis

Whereas up until the end of the Second World War Crisis Thought had focused on the
experiences of crisis, in the late 1950s the concept itself emerged as a subject matter for first
investigation. In the writings of Hannah Arendt (2006 [1958], 2006 [1960], 1990 [1963], 1969),
the term crisis was inserted within a conceptual web sketching the political sentiment of
modernity. Related to the mode of temporality instated by the French Revolution, crisis is
depicted as a political and aesthetic phenomenon: a human-size concrete experience, common to
the individuals living together in the community. Crisis, observed Arendt, conceptualizes the
loss of shared meaning, the demise of the political communitys immediate relation to its own
reality: In every crisis a piece of the world, something common to us all, is destroyed. The
failure of common sense, like a divining rod, points to the place where such a cave-in has
occurred (Arendt 2006 [1958]: 175).
Writing at about the same time, Koselleck devoted his attention to statements about crisis
and their political function prior to the French Revolution. According to his analysis, the concept
played an important role in the efforts of the 18th-century bourgeoisie to take political power,
while masking its political motivation by a prolific philosophical project. In fact, claimed
Koselleck, the concept of crisis linked the two major intellectual and political oeuvres of
Enlightenment the Philosophy of History and the French Revolution. The political crisis was
veiled by the utopian discourse about the momentum of History, anticipating the political events.
The political prognosis of revolution and its historic-philosophical concealment, wrote
Koselleck (1988: 137), are two aspects of a single phenomenon: crisis. Kosellecks meticulous
study of salient occurrences of crisis, crise and Krise in 18th-century writings (2006)
inspired a generation of scholars, who recognized in the term its political potential.
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With Michel Foucaults work in the 1970s, the political signification of crisis transcended
the realm of verbal action, and entered the sphere of governmentality the devices and practices
of organized political power. For Foucault, the term crisis outlined a problem that preoccupied
sovereignty in 18th-century France: how to administer the oscillation between scarcity and
affluence? This difficulty concerned many aspects of life in the city: from the circulation of
grains to the changing rates of mortality caused by epidemics (Foucault 2004: 5968). The largescale management of urban populations demanded the regulation of flux, and gradually
fashioned security devices for measuring and monitoring the dynamics of fluctuation. Some of
these devices took the shape of statistics and graphs, and formed disciplines of knowledge
preoccupied with the regulation of populations and resources. In fact, to this day, sine/cosine
graphs (with their peaks and valleys) serve as an iconic representation of crisis, and represent
these technologies of control.
Understood by Foucault as an array of political practices, the concept of crisis turned into
the modern modality par excellence, not only of temporality, but also of the control of life. While
Koselleck saw in crisis the conceptual artifice of the governed, following Foucault, the word
became identified with the instruments of sovereign power. This shift may be noticed in recent
analyses, such as Naomi Kleins Shock Doctrine (2007), portraying crisis as an apparatus of
economic governance on a global scale.

3.

The trouble with crisis

The general sense of crisis striking the spiritual, cultural and political aspects of European life
transformed throughout the 20th century into an inquiry about the term itself. Now that crisis had
been recognized as the sign of the times for more than a century, it was time for theorists to ask
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what the word crisis meant, and why there were so many of it. The present section examines
the semantic problems raised by the term with reference to the relevant literature on crisis. Is
crisis simply worn out with use, or does it present specific semantic difficulties related to its
signified?

3.1

Worn out with use?

A renowned Swiss linguist may well have been among the first to observe the problematic
inflationary use of the term. In 1930, Charles Bally, a professor of general linguistics at the
University of Geneva, was invited to give a series of talks on the crisis of the French language
(Chiss & Puech 2004). The theme of the crisis of language had drawn the attention of several
French linguists before (Chiss 2006). By the late 1920s, it preoccupied the French-speaking
minority in Switzerland, expressing concerns about the preservation of the Suisse romande
French and the quality of the local linguistic education. The public debate was passionate. Bally,
however, chose to open his lecture series with an ironic reference to the ubiquity of the term:
One does not need to take too tragically these little dramas, he commented, in Geneva we
brushed off five crises in thirty years; here is the sixth, I await the next one (2004: 18).2
But Bally was not the only one to observe the problem. From the 1930s onwards, discourse
on crisis increasingly expressed scepticism of the word and its meaningfulness. It seems that
whenever one turns ones gaze upon it, crisis provokes discomfort: crisis is over-used; it is
either over-dramatic, sensational for the sake of it, simply vague, or maybe even void; it is used
to achieve other ends than the ones avowed by its enunciator; crisis is everywhere, and the
more we hear of it, the less we are able to determine what it means.
2. On ne doit pas prendre trop au tragique ces petit drames ; Genve, nous avons essuy cinq crises en
trente ans ; voici la sixime, jattends la suivante.

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The objections against crisis often revolve around four semantic features: (1) the
commonness of the words occurrence; (2) the wide range of semantic fields in which it appears;
(3) the polysemous nature of the noun; and (4) the vagueness of the signified. Some of the
writings on crisis recognize the interrelatedness of these phenomena, and see in the
pervasiveness of the term a central problem, affecting the power of the term to signify. Richter
and Richter (2006: 354) mention Antoine Meillets observations on the relation between
repetition and loss of expressivity.3 Reiteration certainly wears down the denotational value of
expressions: the more we repeat a phrase and use it freely in different contexts, the less it means
(Meillet 1905/1906, 1913). However, this phenomenon which primarily concerns compounds of
words (e.g. starfish or for a change) does not usually affect independent units of the lexicon;
the widespread use of star, fish or change on their own did not lead to their semantic
attrition (Lehmann 1985).
It is yet unclear under what conditions high frequency of use may lead to semantic attrition
of simple lexical units such as crisis. We can infer from Ballys remark that the word crisis
cannot be reiterated indefinitely: had the 1930s crisis of French been a true crisis, a crisis in
the real sense of the word, it would not have recurred that often. In other words, for a change to
genuinely qualify as a crisis, it must be singular, or if not, at least fairly exceptional or unusual.
Hence, the trouble with crisis is probably not a mere accidental malfunction, automatically
generated by the rate of occurrence, but a semantic problem related to the meaning of this
specific word.

3. On the contribution of Meillet to general linguistics and the relevance of his work to contemporary research,
see Bat-Zeev Shyldkrot (2008, 2013).

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3.2

Defying analysis

In fact, the correlation between loose use, recurrence, and dilution of meaning seems particularly
relevant to a term which is coupled with disruption or discontinuity: the idea of disruption
presupposes established duration, and similarly, there is no discontinuity without a prior sense of
continuity. Crisis is expected to denote an unusual experience of time, an intervention within
permanence. If it is applied to all things all the time, (which is largely the impression), crisis is
no longer opposed to normal continuity. Observing this problem, Starn (1971) pointed out that
the indiscriminate application of crisis to different intervals of time, varying from moments to
centuries, had eroded its specific sense of temporality. Holton went as far as demanding
proactive intervention to halt the semantic demise of the term, and called for the reinstatement of
the distinction between crisis and normality in the social sciences (1987: 502).
The occurrence of crisis in a range of academic disciplines led to several attempts to
characterize the term and classify its different uses. Yet, since the boundary between crisis and
non-crisis is indecisive at best, the concept does not provide researchers with a reliable analytical
category. Subsequently, the literature on crisis often wonders whether crisis is a conceptual
category, a professional term, or simply a catchword, selling newspapers and adding drama to
political speeches (Bally 2004 [1930]; Starn 1971; Koselleck 2006 [1982], 2002; Holton 1987;
Hirdman 2002; Richter & Richter 2006; Hauser 2009, among others).
However, the exceptional dissemination of the term did not leave theorists indifferent. The
word spread phenomenally since the end of the 18th century and became highly common in the
20th century. This semantic trend drew specifically the attention of historians. Reinhart
Koselleck maintained convincingly that the propagation of crisis is a symptom of a larger
cultural phenomenon: the emergence of the modern conception of time. Koselleck was
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preoccupied with the conceptual role of crisis all along his career; yet, his work kept running
into the same obstacle: crisis conveys converse metaphors of time and is used differently in
various fields. Moreover, neither the polysemous nature of the noun nor its uses in different
domains are strictly modern phenomena. If the evolution of the concept sketched the history of
time itself, what exactly was the new idea of time designated by crisis since the 18th century?
Koselleck was particularly interested in showing that crisis was the concept by which
Western Europe devised the idea of historical time. The idea of History as an abstract force,
intervening in human actions and steering it, could be portrayed in several ways. While it was
clear that since the 18th century crisis had to do with time, change and history,
occurrences of the term did not illustrate a distinctive idea of time progression. Since the analysis
of both the diachronic lineage of crisis and its synchronic usages hardly drafted a clear
conceptual picture, Koselleck sought to establish a typology of the metaphors suggested by the
term (Koselleck 2006 [1982], 2002; Richter & Richter 2006: 355356). However, these efforts to
salvage the concepts coherence did not prove successful: not only is the imagery suggested by
crisis inconsistent, contradictory images of time may be found in exemplary instances of Crisis
Thought. The writings of Marx and Engels are a case in point. On the one hand, crises constitute
a recurrent phenomenon that characterizes the circular progress of capitalism. On the other hand,
at one point the system must succumb to its own historical dynamics, and this final necessary
crisis will then produce a revolution, i.e. a political crisis (Koselleck 2006: 393397). The notion
of crisis indicates here both circular repetitive motion and a unique event heralding the
predestined end of history.
As Koselleck himself admitted, crisis does not make it easy on researchers: it does not
evoke a standard set of images (2006: 370). During different periods, in various political

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contexts, from the mouths and pens of the most diverse figures, crisis has indicated both
repetitive and singular change; momentary and epochal turning points; final conclusions and new
beginnings; history as a whole and the end of history. In fact, crisis still depicts exclusive
turning points and recurring transformations alike, and may evoke both the image of linear time
progression and circular repetitive one. While different critics have adopted diverse approaches
towards the semantic phenomena presented by crisis, they all seem to be united in the view that
the obscurity of the noun is a puzzle which calls for a solution. But what if vagueness were not
the absence of signification, but a proper semantic quality, deserving scholarly attention?

4.

The meanders of abstraction

A careful look at the history of crisis shows that the trouble with crisis is not a mere regretful
contingency, but important evidence of the semantic functions of the noun. As a matter of fact,
the attractiveness of the term and its broad semiotic spectrum, perceived as vagueness, are two
aspects of the same historical process that I will hereby characterize as abstraction. Abstraction is
a common semantic phenomenon, involving both expansion of use, verifiable through growth in
frequency, and attrition in the signifying power of the word. In order to generalize, we extract
certain properties of the abstracted notion and discard the rest of them (Langacker 1999; Talmy
2000). The rejection of composite properties enables simplification, and as a result facilitates
semantic transfer to different domains. In other words, an abstracted lexical item can appear in
different contexts, gain more general use, and consequently becomes more common. At the same

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time, since the word no longer carries the rich signification that tied it to its original context, it
becomes more vague, or abstract.4
Crisis has gone through consecutive processes of abstraction since the 18th century. While
these processes diminished the terms precision and reduced its power to signify, they allowed it
to expand into new semantic domains. However, the diachronic trajectory of crisis shows that
abstraction is not necessarily a mere technical process, and it may engage discursive phenomena
rendering semantics and politics inseparable. When and how these processes of abstraction had
started to register in the use of crisis? And what was their motivation? This section attends to
these questions in two parts. The first part will briefly summarize a few historical moments in the
rich pre-modern diachronic semantics of the term, necessary for the understanding of its modern
evolution. The second part will analyse the particular processes of abstraction that crisis went
through in modernity. Using typical examples, it aims to demonstrate how the two facets of
abstraction, generalization and subtraction, created out of crisis a powerful schema modelling
the modern experience of change.

4. It is important to distinguish between different processes of loss of signifying power, and specifically
differentiate between abstraction and desemanticization, also known as semantic bleaching. Abstraction involves
separation from context, subtraction of semantic properties and generalization. It usually concerns nouns or nominal
and prepositional compounds, and may involve operations such as metaphoric extension and metonymy. Van de
Velde (1995), for instance, uses the term in a similar way when she critically defies the traditional divide between
concrete and abstract nouns. Desemanticization, however, is the gradual loss of semantic substance related to
grammaticalization, i.e. the processes of linguistic change by which lexical and grammatical items become more and
more grammatical (Lehmann 1985: 4). The term would well describe the way in which the verb have in the
sentence You already have a red dress loses its semantic substance in a sentence such as You have already read
it. While both abstraction and desemanticization describe processes of semantic attrition, each of them produces
different effects and relates to different phenomena engaged in different levels of linguistic change.

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4.1

How classical crisis turned modern

The history of crisis is amply documented and enjoys wide agreement in numerous studies (e.g.
compare Starn (1971) and Koselleck 2006 [1982], 2002). The story of the word ordinarily
commences in Ancient Greece. The Greek noun

(krisis) derives from the verbal radical

meaning to distinguish, sift, decide or judge. The word was neither monosemous nor

constrained to one specific field (Starn 1971; Koselleck 2006). In general descriptions, it often
related to a crucial development, such as a decision point in battle, or an abrupt change in nature,
bearing imperative outcomes for humans. In the legal domain, it designated judgement, ruling or
verdict. Once the term had become a general title for the legal code, its political significance was
enhanced: krisis could refer to a variety of deliberations vital for the good of the polis, ranging
from electoral decisions to government resolutions. As a medical term, krisis described any
turning point in the course of a disease whether it was critically intensifying, transforming into
another malady, or reaching its end.
In his quest for the origin of the modern notion of crisis, Koselleck took particular interest
in a later twist of the Greek word: in the Christian biblical cannon, written between the 1st and
3rd centuries, the word

stood for the Last Judgment (2006: 359). Apparently, the first

Christians loaded the original Hebrew notion of divine judgment with the concept of apocalyptic
expectation, and expressed it in Koine Greek, the lingua franca of the Eastern Mediterranean
basin at the time. Koselleck argued that the word blended the classical idea of judgment with the
novel Christian concept of anticipation for salvation, and thus created a new conceptualization of
time. The theological notion of

brought the end of time together with true justice. By

guaranteeing deliverance from biological time at an undefined future time, krisis shaped the

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present as a permanent trial. A horizon of expectation, directed at the apocalyptic gateway of
eternity, krisis designed the worlds general framework of temporality.
Of all the different meanings present in classical Antiquity, medical crisis proved the most
successful in crossing the centuries (Starn 1971; Koselleck 2006; Shank 2008). The term
entrenched in 2nd century Latin following the work of the prominent physician Galen, who
elaborated the notion of classic Hippocratic medicine into a comprehensive crisis theory.
Signalling a decisive stage in the course of a disease, crisis could be qualified as good, bad,
or imperfect, that is, failing to lead to definitive recovery. These attributes attached to the noun
indicate that the classic medical world understood crisis as a modality of the development of a
disease. Crisis was a type of progression which was critical, and could lead to either good or
bad consequences for the patients health. Thus, the medical krisis remained in full agreement
with the Greek use of the term, which saw in crisis an aspect of change: a specific impression of
time, related to the experience of decisive change. This signification of krisis, stressing the way
we sense this specific modality of change, subsisted in the medical traditions of Western Europe
for centuries to come (see for instance the 1st edition of the Dictionnaire de lAcadmie
franaise, 1694,5 or Quesnay 1753/1767).
The national languages of Western Europe gradually adopted the Latin word between the
14th and the 16th centuries (Koselleck 2006). By the 17th century, the medical signification had
started to appear in the political field, with celebrated occurrences such as Sir Benjamin
Rudyards exclamation in the House of Commons: This is the Crisis of Parliaments; we shall
know by this if Parliaments live or die [...] (1627, in Frankland 1681: 244)6. With this
statement, Sir Rudyard had hoped to persuade Parliament to reconcile with Charles I, the then
5. See Crise, p. 286: http://artfl.atilf.fr/dictionnaires/ACADEMIE/PREMIERE/premiere.fr.html
6. According to the OED (The Oxford English Dictionary), the earliest appearance of the citation in writing dates
to 1659. See Crisis, n., OED online, www.oed.com

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King of England, for the sake of the Commonwealth. However, neither the addresser nor the
addressees (who were both members of Parliament) come out in the sentence as active agents.
What crisis enabled here was to forge a powerful rhetorical instrument rendering the partakers
passive. This type of medical metaphor referring to the body politic is most probably the
precursor of the modern use of crisis. The application of crisis to a general collective entity
turned the body politic into a definite entity, an organism seen from the outside. The conception
of the political community as a living unit, systematically designed and observable from the
exterior, was to play a significant role in the emergence of the social sciences.7 Employed this
way, crisis was bound to abstract the experience of decisive change from the realm of human
action, and transform it into an objective, quasi-natural phenomenon.

7. Whereas the body politic metaphor is an old-timer in the Indo-European societies gallery of political images,
its role in shaping the modern idea of the Social was decisive. As the elaboration of this important question exceeds
the scope of the present chapter, I will only suggest here further useful readings. In his incisive critique of
democracy, Jacques Rancire (1992) analyses the contemporary functions of such Classical and early Christian
models of the Political, involving images of the body politic. As stressed by Hanna F. Pitkin (1967), in the 17th
century, Hobbes contributed to political science a particularly elaborate image of the body politic via the figure of
the Leviathan, the representative of the multitudes political will. Since they were dependent on such totalizing
images of the body politic, medical metaphors such as crisis heralded new types of knowledge about society. In his
lectures in the Collge de France, Foucault (1997 [19751976], 2004 [19771978]) circumscribes a field of relations
and affinities tying together practices of power and the emerging forms of scientific knowledge about society. Such
ties are particularly visible through the concept of crisis, binding together the political authorities specific need to
address the plague in the modern city and the introduction of the statistic form of demographic knowledge (see
Section 2). However, the Society we have in mind today an object of scientific inquiry detached from our
experience of social practices required the advent of an explicit discursive regime of scientific knowledge. K. M.
Baker (1964), among others, indicates the role of Condorcet (17431794) in the creation of the concept of a social
science. While comparing the new projected scientific endeavour to the physical science, Condorcet demanded fine
observation and precision in politics as we would expect to find in physics. Hence, Bruno Latour (1993 [1991])
points out that the construction of the social sciences in modernity was in fact paradoxical, since it had consisted on
the one hand in the reification of social relationships and in the net separation between Society and Nature, and on
the other hand in the hybridization of the two categories. Relying on Latour, J. B. Shank (2008) insists on the role of
the concept of crisis in these developments, and specifically on the function of the medical metaphor of crisis in the
construction of society as an extant object out there in the world, allegedly pre-existent to the attempts to study
the objective empirical effects it is said to produce (Shank 2008: 1095).

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4.2

The crises of modernity

The accelerated phenomena of abstraction which crisis displays from the 18th century on are
directly related to the extension of the medical metaphor into the social and political domains.
However, the abstraction commencing with the medical metaphor constituted a long and multilayered semantic process. In order to distinguish its different modes of operation, I will refer in
the following to three complementary levels of analysis, viz. the semiotic, cognitive and
epistemic levels:

(a) The semiotic level: Following the dissemination of the medical metaphor in political and
social contexts, the lexical item crisis was subject to abstraction on the semiotic level: the
signified was generalized, and certain semiotic properties of the sign, related to its previous
contextual environment, faded away. The more visible effects of this level of abstraction
include the disappearance of the attributes signaling the effect of the crisis (e.g. good,
bad, imperfect). With crisis being detached from its medical diagnostic context, these
adjuncts became superfluous.
(b) The cognitive level: Crisis originally related to an aspect of change the term aspect here
referring, as it does in grammar, to the temporal quality of the experience. The aspect of
change crisis denoted was a decisive, often salutary, abrupt mode of development. This
very specific modality of temporal cognition was subjected to radical abstraction: decisive
change was extracted from the immediate experience of action in time and isolated from its
concrete tangible sense. With crisis being dissociated from the intimate experience tying
cause and effect in time, decisive change was transformed into an objective event that could
be split from its experiential record and observed externally. Nevertheless, the specific
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aspectual properties of the noun the temporal constituency of the critical event (Comrie
1976) did not vanish, and experiential features such as decisiveness and abruptness
remained active in descriptions of objective events.
(c) The epistemic level: Knowing meant different things to people living in different historical
eras. While the concept of knowledge went through important changes in modernity, the
knowledge of and about time transformed dramatically (Poulet 1949). Hence, whereas
crisis formerly represented acute awareness of the temporal quality of decisive change, with
the growing demand for measurable knowledge, the experiential intuition of time was
stripped from its epistemic status. As the 20th century progressed, crisis endured
intensifying epistemic pressure: in order to know what critical change was, enunciators were
expected to be able to count it and represent it visually.

Diachronic analysis of occurrences of crisis since the mid-18th century demonstrates the nexus
of successive momentums of abstraction, revolving around interdependent cultural trends.
Among the trends motivating abstraction, we should specifically notice (1) the idea of History,
(2) the emergence of the scientific theory of change, and (3) the analogy between time and space.
In what follows, I will discuss a few exemplary cases of each of these semantic dynamics, and
consider their interactions, while relating to the semiotic, cognitive and epistemic analytic levels
of abstraction detailed above.

4.2.1

The Historical trend of abstraction

The emergence of the idea of History during the 18th century played an important part in the
abstraction of crisis. On the semiotic level, this development is particularly clear from the
association of the terms crisis and revolution and their application to the political realm. As
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was observed by Arendt (1990: 42), up until the French Revolution the term revolution
preserved its Latin denotation indicating the circular motion of celestial bodies. Accordingly, in
human affairs, it could more generally designate an alteration, a dramatic change, similar in its
scale to the motion of stars and planets (see also the OED). When it was used metaphorically in
politics, revolution often referred to the restoration of sovereign power subsequent to social
unrest and political upheavals, as it did in the phrase The Glorious Revolution (Koselleck 1988:
160161 note 6, 2004: 4357). Hence, crisis and revolution designated two somewhat
different aspects of decisive change: (i) abrupt and unexpected transformation, and (ii) cyclic
repetitive alteration.8 Both terms signalled a significant and vital kind of change; when used
metaphorically, both terms designated dynamics affecting human activity in the same manner
they sway nature and the universe.
[W]e are approaching a state of crises and a century of revolutions (1817: 181),9 wrote
Jean-Jacques Rousseau in 1762, and commentators such as Koselleck (1988: 159) read into this
oft-cited phrase a self-fulfilling prophecy, anticipating the French Revolution. Diachronic
analysis renders this reading doubtful: there is no evidence that Rousseau had meant anything
more than remarking that a decisive social change was in the air (for a similar view, see Bernardi
2008). Obviously, before the American and French revolutions, neither revolution nor crisis
could provoke the images and connotations that they would convey after these events had taken
place. Even so, we can assume that the semantic change was not abrupt, and that the two terms
gradually started to take new meanings as early as the mid-18th century.

8. The British historian Christopher Hill argued that the linear conception of the term revolution had started to
emerge in English as early as the mid-17th century. The historiographical debate on the matter concerns the
legitimacy of using Marxist terminology (and specifically the term revolution in the Marxist sense) when relating
to the events of 16401660, which before Hill were usually referred to as The English Civil War. For a detailed
discussion of this debate, see Rachum (1999).
9. Nous approchons de ltat de crises et du sicle des rvolutions.

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The association of crisis and revolution and their projection onto an anticipated political
change indicate a new stage in the functions of these metaphors. All the same, if the two terms
denoted different aspects of change, why did Rousseau put them together in what seems like a
parallel construction [a state of crises a century of revolutions]? Specifically revealing is the
fact that crisis and revolution serve here as attributes of the nouns state and century. The
quadruple juxtaposition [tatcrises / siclervolutions], subjugating the dynamic aspects of
change to a general terminology of time, generated an abstract sense of objective temporality that
was governed by History. Detached from a specific body experiencing the various modalities of
change, crisis turned into a historical phenomenon whose abstract nature was enhanced by the
association with revolution.
On the cognitive level, we attest here a transposition of the bodily experience of decisive
change onto an objective realm, exterior to the experiencing body and independent of it. While
medical metaphors such as the Crisis of Parliaments generalized the experience of critical
change, they retained the collective experience within the scene of enunciation the Parliament,
in the case of Sir Rudyards phrase. The Historical abstraction took this procedure one step
further: it extracted the political diagnosis from the experience of the participants, and projected
it onto an objective, larger-than-life scale. History thus became a transcendent power that
directed the dynamics of human affairs regardless of peoples decisions and actions. Similar uses
of crisis spread in English, French and German in the late 18th century (Koselleck 2006).
Facilitated by the idea of History, abstract change became one of the central semantic properties
of crisis.

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4.2.2

The scientific trend of abstraction.

Innumerable occurrences of crisis during the 19th century in both popular and scholarly
literature show that with History modelled as an objective force of temporality, agency started to
wither away and a strong sense of necessity started to take its place. Allegedly, objective
necessity arbitrated the affairs of humans in the same way it altered the physical world. This idea
had a reciprocal effect on both spheres of scientific thought: on the one hand, it devised the
systematic thought in the Humanities as a natural investigation (e.g. economics, linguistics); on
the other hand, it conceptualized the study of nature as History (e.g. geology, evolution). By the
mid-19th century, producing scientific knowledge often consisted in presenting a convincing
account explaining how things change. Scientific scholarship in many fields took the shape of
a methodical study of empirical evidence, aimed at developing a comprehensive theory of the
laws of change. Where the object of enquiry involved human actions, change could not be easily
quantified or encoded in algebraic expressions, as it was in thermodynamics for instance. Here,
crisis turned out to be an extremely useful instrument. As a general term for objective decisive
change, crisis could express abstract knowledge about the modalities of change. Soon, the word
was granted a place of honour in the nascent social sciences.
Several influential works published in the long 19th century demonstrate the evolution of
crisis and its role in scientific theory. In 1798 Thomas Robert Malthus published the Essay on
the principle of population, a treatise in economics that had a magisterial effect on the way we
understand the concept of population. The term crisis was absent from the first edition, but the
1826 sixth revised edition, which became the canonical form of the Essay, contained two
occurrences of crisis in an economic context. In one of these passages, crisis is used in
connection with the distress of the labouring classes. It describes the malaise as

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irremediable and natural, and instructs the poor to bear unavoidable pressure with patience
(Bk. IV, Ch. VII, 6). Malthus Essay expresses genuine concern about the impact of population
growth on poverty. However, aimed at articulating a general theory of the regularities of
economic change, the idea of objective necessity had depoliticized the role of particular policies
and specific actions.
The Essays concept of crisis tied together a sense of want, measurable shortage and natural
inevitability. Later on, however, the more processual or aspectual properties of the noun were
accentuated (i.e. in the grammatical sense of the word aspect, see the beginning of Section 4.2).
Charles Lyells Principles of geology (1830) was dedicated to a vigorous defence of the constant
principles of geological change. Crisis hence marked an exceptional event in the otherwise
continuous dynamic of physical transformation. In a passage describing the volcanic activity of
Mount Vesuvius for instance, crisis refers to the eruption that destroyed Pompeii, defying
expectations and enabling Man to briefly witness the history of Earth (1837: 66). The scientific
preoccupation with the modalities of objective change brought a certain trend of cognitive
specialization. Here, crisis no longer meant plain decisive change, but emphasized a particular
type of dramatic episode: inescapable disruption, a dangerous and unexpected event, set against
the backdrop of the imperceptible, normal course of change. As we have seen earlier (see Section
2), the modern experience of History as it was registered in Crisis Thought motivated this
specialization: crisis ineluctably separated the present from the past, and with the growing
expression of Crisis Thought, the aspectual specialization of the noun increased.
On the whole, Lyells general framework of uniform change was indifferent to the
extraordinary instances of sudden events, and crisis did not take up a substantial part in Lyells
Principles of geological change (Gould 1987). The transformation of crisis into distinct

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knowledge about change was significantly enhanced toward the mid-19th century. It was with
Karl Marx that the phenomenon of crisis explicitly became the impetus of historical necessity. In
Marxian thought, crisis appears as an epistemic category: a specific mode of change explaining
the historical dynamics of European civilization and the regularities that they obeyed. Following
Marx and Engels (Koselleck 2006: 393397), and from the 1860s on, crisis would often be
connected with an irremediable change which only an additional far more dramatic disruption
could possibly cure.

4.2.3

The spatial trend of abstraction

After it had integrated the idea of History and been incorporated by scientific theory, crisis was
further transformed by a growing trend of spatial abstraction that first showed in the second half
of the 19th century. Around that time, crisis became the mark of a phenomenology of change: a
specific awareness of the effects of decisive change on our world (see Section 2). The abstraction
of this awareness from the intimate experience of transformation permitted the construction of
crisis as a cross-disciplinary category of scientific knowledge. The cognitive procedure of
abstraction consists in isolation: certain ingredients of the critical experience, such as abruptness,
unexpectedness, disruption, irremediableness, uncertainty, were carved out of the experiential
context and preserved, while others, such as decision making and judgement were eclipsed. On
the epistemic level, this cognitive split allowed reification: crisis became a thing, an epistemic
unit transposable from one domain to another, representing in each of them the scientific
discourse about change. And crisis was not just any change: crisis said something about
modernity; it expressed the temporality of a world in progress.
The scientific theory of change was singled out by its capacity to extrapolate lucid
regularities of progression. In those fields where numbers did not serve well the systemization of
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empirical data, verbal accounts aimed at providing images of change. Up till the end of the 19th
century, Positivism in particular stressed the value of general laws of change, based on empirical
observation.10 Auguste Comte, founder of the positivist doctrine, and his followers saw in crisis
an effective tool for modern science to construct an image of development (see Comte 1842,
inter alia). Inspired by his mentor Comte, lexicographer mile Littr devised a positivist history
of the French language. Since all things change by history, wrote Littr in 1862, it is
impossible that by that same history languages do not change as well (Littr 1886: 7).11 The
conceptual framework of historical necessity, common to Natural History and the Humanities,
enabled Littr to draft a scientific theory of linguistic change. Languages are organisms, argued
Littr, and therefore their history proceeds by crises. Hence, Modern French is the product of two
major crises: the one which made it emerge from Ancient French, and an earlier crisis,
generating Romance languages from Latin (1886: 5153). Littrs mechanism of major and
minor crises drafted a linear timeline, motivated by consecutive organic disruptions. Crisis,
understood as the product of tension between conflicting forces (such as tradition and novelty),
was construed as the principle of linguistic evolution. While languages were normally ruled by
grammatical traditions, crisis was what pushed them to change (1886: 54).
As in Marxian thought, crisis did not only allow Littr to describe change, but also to
explain how things change and to sketch a graphic image of their trajectory. Only, crisis was
not perfectly tailored to its new role: since it originally conveyed experiential intuitive
knowledge, it could not illustrate the same visual image each time. Moreover, the way it was
used by Marx and Engels and many others, it could confer several images of progression

10. For a mid-19th century account in English of Positivism and its principles, see Mill (1865/1866). His
description of Comtes Science of Society (pp. 8386), particularly stresses laws of historical change.
11. Il est impossible, toute chose changeant par lhistoire, que, par cette mme histoire, les langues ne changent
pas aussi.

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throughout the same passage. In Marshall and Marshalls economic theory, for instance, crisis
relates the contraction of credit to the fall in the price of gold (1879: 151152). The term is used
to analyse the course of economic fluctuations over time, and the description ends with the
statement that the prices are now (1879) as low as they were in 1850 (1879: 152). This
discursive construction of crisis invokes the image of a graph oscillating between glut and
depression, but crisis also refers to the depression itself. For several decades economic theory
used crisis both as a violent phenomenon to be diagnosed (1879: 136) and an objective outlook
on the variability of the economic system, delineating its cyclical regularities (Besomi 2011).
Crisis was never fully detached from the medical metaphor, and was never entirely
abstracted from the immediate experience of change. The metaphorical shift embedded in the
political use of crisis, along with its rich cultural baggage, constructed it as an inherently
blended experience. By the turn of the 20th century, the resistance of crisis to clear-cut
spatialization eventually undermined its usefulness as an analytical category. With its built-in
metaphor and its intuitive awareness of decisive change crisis seemed like naive knowledge,
unbefitting the scientific promise of precise calculation. As the pressure on scientific theory
increased, the term itself was no longer able to meet the demands of maximal abstraction. By the
first decades of the 20th century, economic theory had gradually abandoned the discourse about
crises and replaced it with the more attractive theories of business cycles (Besomi 2011: 105).
Its loss of epistemic usefulness in the realm of science was well compensated for by the
growing popularity of crisis in the socio-political and cultural domains. Apparently, the
aspectual knowledge carried by crisis was perfectly compatible with the mentalits of the first
half of the 20th century. By the eve of the Second World War, following the Great War and the

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worldwide economic depression, the term reached a pinnacle of unprecedented popularity.12
While crisis captured well the modern sentiment of change, it was also under continuous
epistemic pressure. With the vulgarization of modern physical theory, the abstract discourse
about time crossed the confines of scientific scholarship. Expressions such as Times arrow,
popularized by astronomer Arthur S. Eddington (1928), impregnated everyday language with the
idea that time could be thought of as an abstract dimension, analogous to space, and detached
from the experience of human action. In the four-dimensional world of physicists, explained
Eddington, the events past and future lie spread out before us as in a map (1929: 68). For
scientific disciplines preoccupied with human-scale phenomena of change, this was wonderful
news, as spatialized time abstracted the most troubling feature of the experience of action in
time: its resistance to prediction.
By the mid-20th century, spatial representation was conceived of as the ultimate response to
the scientific requirement for accuracy. In their rush to consolidate their epistemic status,
disciplines such as linguistics enthusiastically adopted spatial-like analyses of the linguistic
system. By the time linguistic theory turned to exploring cognition in the late 1950s, the analogy
between time and space was already well-established in the scientific imagery, and had also
become accessible to the general public. It hence seemed only natural that research into temporal
cognition should rely on the timespace analogy (Wierzbicka 1973; Traugott 1978). Since the
late 1980s, the cognitive sciences have taken a salient spatial turn, and today they tend to base
their program of research on a specifically non-critical version of the analogy between action in
time, on the one hand, and space, on the other (e.g. Langacker 1987/1991, 1999, 2009; Lakoff
1993; Picoche & Honeste 1993; Boroditsky 2000; Richardson et al. 2001, among others; cf.
12. There are minor differences between English (American and British), German and French in that respect, but
NGram Google Books search in the three languages suggests that between 19321939 crisis enjoyed a peak of
occurrence.

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Walsh 2003). Paradoxically, this program, though aimed at advancing the scientific knowledge
about time cognition, impedes the research of those aspects of our cognition that are specifically
temporal (Chalozin-Dovrat 2010). Consequently, present-day semantics would have difficulty in
explaining the polysemy of crisis. If temporality was to be described in spatial terms only, then,
what could crisis possibly mean?

5.

What does crisis mean?

The way in which we understand crisis today is the temporary endpoint of an infinite number of
cultural intersections. Diachronic evidence of the evolution of crisis shows that since antiquity
to the present day the notion of decisive change has remained a stable signified. However, our
concept of decisive change has surely changed significantly since classical times. What can we
learn from the information presented so far about the meaning of crisis today? This section will
attempt to draw from the diachronic account useful conclusions for the understanding of the
functions of contemporary crisis. For that sake, I will reorganize the historical narrative in a
synchronic manner, around five semantic clusters which are still active in contemporary uses of
the term: decisive change, evenementiality (i.e. the sense of event), abnormality, inevitability and
potential irreversibility.
More generally, the synchronic overview highlights that the loss of signifying power
associated with abstraction is positively compensated for: abstraction might not add to the term
new meanings in the traditional sense of the word, but it does generate new layers of
signification. In other words, it is true, as its detractors claim, that the term crisis is attributed
today to a spectacular range of events and situations and that its loose use renders it abstract.
However, when we use crisis to mean that irreversible consequences might be underway in no
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matter what aspect of our life, we may simply use it differently from the way people used it
before.
Finally, I will argue that these semantic transformations signal a noteworthy change in the
experience of time that accommodated new political patterns. From both a diachronic and a
synchronic points of view, the semantic path leading crisis from decisive change to potential
irreversibility has important political implications that will be briefly discussed in the last
subsection.

5.1

From decisive change to potential irreversibility

In order to understand what crisis means and what information it can give us about the
utterances in which it currently appears, let us reconsider some of the central attributes of the
word in regard of the diachronic processes described above.

Decisive change
With its acute awareness of momentous conclusion and its sense of vital transformation, the
English expression decisive change has well captured the aspect of crisis and the experience
of critical temporality. In fact, the adjective decisive combines the two central ideas ingrained
in the classical term

: conclusion and deliberation. These two significations emanated

from the Greek verb

(to distinguish, sift, decide, judge), which gave us through Latin

both crisis and critical (see also Section 4.1). Yet, whereas the adjectives decisive and
critical still tie together conclusion and deliberation, the modern notion of crisis lost the idea of
decision or judgment. Modern Greek preserved this sense of the classical verb through nominal
derivatives such as the noun

(kritis), meaning a judge (in a contest), as English did


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with critic and the adjective critical in the sense of expressing critique. However, it seems
that the semantic relation between crisis and critique is no longer evident to contemporary
speakers of Western European languages. Hence, while we nowadays think of crisis as a critical
change or decisive transformation, we do not intuitively associate it any longer with a human
decision or judgment.13
In that sense, contemporary occurrences of crisis record the responses of the sign to the
semantic pressures it was subject to over time. The three trends of abstraction we examined
previously took part in turning crisis into a more and more objective notion. Accordingly, the
idea we currently have of crisis as a decisive change often evokes historical or natural
necessity. As the abstraction of the term progressed, decisive change took on the image of a point
in a time dimension which is external to the actions and the events referred to.14 Spatial
metaphors of objective turning points and decision points then gradually transformed the
prevailing imagery from one based on participation to one of observation, recasting social actors
as spectators, and effectively relieving the notions of change and crisis from the weight of
subjective resolve (see also Section 5.2 below).

13. The OED hence expressly signals denotations involving judgment and decision as obsolete. See Crisis, n.,
OED online, www.oed.com.
14. The idea of a point in time and the expression turning-point are often related to crisis and mentioned by
dictionary entries of the term in English. The word point first appear in Middle English in the early 13th century
(see Point, n., OED online). When related to time, it designated a unit of measurement: a small portion or division
of time, a moment or instant. Probably by derivation, point could also refer to a moment before or during action, or
to the awareness of a critical moment in the developments. The pre-modern and early modern examples provided by
the OED all show that the use of point in relation to time used to be inseparable from the experience of action in
time, unlike its later modern uses that often evoke a distinct image of an objective time-line. The image of a point in
time (where time is considered to be analogous to a spatial dimension) is most probably modern. In pre-modern
and early modern occurrences, point was often used with no complements (e.g. at point; in this point, as in in
this moment) or followed by the preposition of (rather than in, e.g. at point of dede). Nevertheless, the OED
uses the expression a location in time in order to describe some of the temporal uses of point, including many
pre-modern and early modern ones.

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Evenementiality
Following its historization and scientification, crisis seemingly conceded to the trend of spatial
abstraction. However, it did not surrender to any exclusive spatial representation: an isolated
point in time; a repetitive cycle; a linear progression with breaking tips; oscillating graphs and
unidirectional arrows since the mid-19th century, crisis could evoke all these and more (see
Section 3). As a matter of fact, with increasing epistemic pressures across a range of new
scientific disciplines, crisis soon embraced virtually any conceptual or visual image that could
communicate the experience of decisive change.
The modern occurrences of the term seem to indicate that since the medical metaphor was
implemented in political affairs, crisis was motivated to schematize evenementiality the
perception of time connected with the sense of event and it shaped and reshaped the experience
of criticalness according to the changing demands. Hence, analytical efforts such as Kosellecks
were doomed to fail (Koselleck 2002, 2006 [1982]; Richter & Richter 2006). Relying on a
geometric-like logic of time, Koselleck tried to sort out the different images conveyed by the
term and to establish a nomenclature of crises. Frustratingly enough, crisis seemed indifferent
to the contradictory features of some of the images it selected (see Section 3). However, if we
follow Kosellecks own accounts, and bear in mind that the medical metaphor was primarily
selected in order to express a certain experience of time, i.e. the evenementiality of decisive
change, then its different distributions make perfect sense. The way we sense the texture of time
before and after the critical event was the element which crisis sought to convey. Simply, the
experiential content of aspect is that specific quality of change which is profoundly temporal,
and cannot be reduced to graphic representations.

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Abnormality
The aspect of critical transformation connected crisis with notions such as abruptness,
disruption, discontinuity, unexpectedness, suddenness, urgency, and at times even patent danger.
To a certain extent, this was already the case in many of the strictly medical occurrences of the
term in early modern Western European languages.15 When crisis was torn from the medical
context and applied to the body politic, the medical metaphor lost the adjuncts qualifying it as
good, bad or imperfect (see Section 4.1). Political crisis no longer referred to either positive
or negative developments; rather, crisis became a general sign of precariousness.
With the propagation of the idea of a medical norm (Canguilhem 1966) and its introduction
into the thought about the social, the term also came to signify the deviation from the normal
state of affairs. Consequently, the unexpected, unusual, and extraordinary features of decisive
change received during the 19th century a new diagnostic articulation: social and economic
crises were considered abnormal.16 However, from the 1910s on, occurrences of crisis became
more and more common, and by the late 1950s the interest in the term itself was already starting
to register in scholarly literature (see Section 2). Thus, the trouble with crisis the critical
discourse on the value of the term and its meaningfulness should also be understood as a
reaction to the phenomenal growth in frequency and its inevitable effects on the terms sense of
abnormality (see Section 3). Critical comments on the use of crisis have been specifically made
by historians and social scientists concerned about either the analytic value of the term (Starn
1971; Holton 1987; Shank 2008) or the political effects of its inflationary use (Bally 2004
[1930]; Koselleck 1988 [1959], 2006 [1982], 2002; Hirdman 2002; Hauser 2009; Surya 2009).
By the 1970s we can attest a very different reaction to the commonness of the term: the
15. In English, see for instance: Crisis sygnifyeth iudgemente, and in thys case, it is vsed for a sodayne chaunge
in a disease (B. Traheron tr. of J. de Vigo, 1543, In Crisis, n. OED online).
16. On the pathological qualities attributed to the concept of crisis in 19th century economics, see Besomi (2011).

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emergence of the concept of crisis management (or crises management in the plural).17 With the
abnormality of crisis being diluted by high frequency and loose use, social scientists also started
to overtly normalize it.

Inevitability
Early political uses of the medical metaphor, such a Sir Rudyards or even Rousseaus (see
Section 4), show that its meaning of anticipation or presentiment already had an admonishing
ring to it before the American and French revolutions. Crisis was that unfortunate development
which was about to occur, but since it was yet imminent it could be warned about. In the 19th
century, however, this sense of premonition took a more concrete turn: its co-occurrence with
revolution connected crisis more closely to the specific political events of the French
Revolution. Hence, in the post-revolutionary era, crisis was even more evidently perilous, but
since it had already happened it was also deemed inexorable.18 Dictated by History and quasinatural necessity, decisive change was more and more understood as inevitable or inescapable.
As a result of these semantic developments, the notion was caught in a determinist limbo: on the
one hand, decisive change became a natural law of History; on the other hand, crisis was
dangerous and had to be prevented. In other words, the social and political upheavals of the long
19th century forged a conception of crisis that locked societies into a paradox of having to
prevent the unpreventable.

17. According to NGram Google Books, significant frequency of the term crisis/crises management started to
show as early as the 1970s.
18. Although they do not provide explicit semantic analysis of this type, the works of both Lowth (1995) and
Koselleck (2006) indicate a similar semantic evolution.

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Potential irreversibility
Whether social or economic crises could truly be prevented, was and still is a matter of debate.
Dedicated to calculation, what scientific theory could contribute to this question was the power
of prediction. With the development of statistics and the rise of its epistemic authority,
evenementiality could be thought of as a matter of probability. The potentiality of the
unexpected disruption of time was at stake: crisis might bear hazardous, irreparable
implications, but the actuality of the event could now be anticipated.
This paradigm of prediction and prevention of crises, already ostensible in the late 19th
century, continued well into the 20th century. Yet, in the aftermath of World War II, when manmade global catastrophe beyond repair turned into a most probable scenario, the scientific
optimism of prediction was greatly shattered (Arendt 1969). Moreover, the involvement of
scientific inertia in the production of crises cast a dark shadow over its capacity to prevent them.
The rising trend of spatial abstraction, finally, replaced the ideal of prevention by the ideal of
crises management.19 With crisis represented as a dynamic graph, scientific rationality could be
applied to it (see also Foucault 2004, in Section 2). It is the wisdom of our era that if the
temporal modality of crisis cannot be barred from our lives, at least it may be controlled and
managed.
The potentiality of crisis, the conceptually awkward co-existence of necessity and
premonition, is not the only paradox in which contemporary crisis seems to be caught. Around
the turn of the 20th century, irreversibility became an accessible spatial articulation for the
19. The relations between the notions of prevention and management are complex, and the net distinction between
the two probably developed over time. During the late 1960s and the early 1970s, when the paradigm of crisis
management emerged, the two terms, crisis prevention and crisis management, were not yet fully distinguished
(see for example: Only thus, in a period of tension between East and West, can Crisis Management, or as
President Nixon recently and more accurately described it Crisis Prevention, be exercised by the North Atlantic
Council in the interest of peace. [NATO letter, 1971, Vol. 1922, p. 14]). A more specific historical study, devoted
particularly to the discourse of crisis management, is required in order to determine the precise relation between the
two notions and its particular political signification.

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notion of decisive change, in both English and French.20 Over time, the trend of spatial
abstraction transformed the necessary and the irremediable into the irreversible. Qualifying what
cannot be reversed, or moved backwards, irreversibility was the image selected by theories of
change for describing human temporality. Since physicists have thought of physical time as a
dimension comparable to space, it seemed only reasonable to apply the spatial metaphor to the
corporal and psychological experience of time as well. Hence, proceeding with the spatial
metaphor, one could logically maintain that unlike physical time, our experience of time is
unidirectional (Savitt 1995). Crisis could then be pictured as a breach amidst the continuity of a
time-line, an image that corresponds well to the historical experience of crisis communicated by
Crisis Thought (see Section 2).21
Semantically speaking, however, the notion is expressly paradoxical. As a metaphor,
irreversibility spatializes the one feature of time which is not compatible with space: our
experience of it as an inescapable, tragic limitation. In other words, when understood as a plain
spatial metaphor, irreversibility is an image of this very specific human experience of time that
by definition is not analogous to space, and hence cannot be subject to our visual perception.
It seems that the puzzling nature of the notion of irreversibility stems from the basic
incompatibility between our cognition of change and the scientific demand to express our

20. There are, however, notable differences in the history of these words in French and in English. In French,
rversible had been used in the domain of jurisprudence since the 18th century, and designated a decree or a court
decision that could be undone. Irrversible and irrversibilit was probably only admitted in the late 19th century
through the scientific discourse, and denoted a spatial reference to an external time dimension (see FRANTEXT,
and the dictionaries of the Acadmie franaise). In English, the diachronic data is more complex: irreversibility,
reversibility and the respective adjectives irreversible and reversible entered English as early as the 17th
century and served in various contexts. When they appeared in the legal domain their use was similar to the French
one, i.e. a legal act that can or cannot be revoked. However, they could also be used more loosely, in relation to Fate
that could be sensed as either mutable or immutable (see OED online).
21. Interestingly enough, Modern Hebrew chose to express the modern concept of crisis by the noun MASHBER
(
), a modern derivative of the verbal radical SHAVAR, meaning to break. Severed from the medical metaphor
and the intricate history of the Western European lexicons, MASHBER intends to evoke the visual image of a
rupture or crack.

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experiential knowledge in spatial terms. However, the frequency of irreversibility since the
mid-20th century demonstrates to which extent spatialization was successful. Currently,
irreversible is interchangeable with medical metaphors such as incurable, as well as with
adjectives from other conceptual domains: irremediable (economics); irrevocable (the law);
irreparable (craft, mechanics); irretrievable (hunting, sports), and others. By the second half
of the 20th century, most if not all types of occurrences of crisis could be summed up by the
concept of potential irreversibility, encapsulating both the series of radical abstractions crisis
was subject to, and the avowed cognitive limitations of these semantic processes.

5.2

The political utility of crisis

The way we conceptualize temporality affects the way we understand our political reality.
Temporal patterns govern the way we experience events, the arrangement of cause and effect in
discourse and the narrative that would thenceforth set up the experience in collective memory for
years to come. The trends of abstraction crisis was subject to generated specific political
effects, some of them mentioned in the previous sections. In this subsection I would like to
recapitulate these effects in view of the semiotic, cognitive and epistemic processes involved.
On the sheer semiotic level, the abstraction of crisis led Western European languages to
schematize change by selecting certain aspects of decisive change, like conclusion and necessity,
while disregarding others, such as deliberation and judgement. These semantic changes also
fashioned the inter-subjective realm of critical temporality: when the lexicon does not allow
speakers to ascribe causality to the events discussed, or to relate them to specific actors,
decisions and actions, the discursive exchange becomes inexplicit and ill-defined. The
application of the medical term to the body politic was bound to enhance this effect on the
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cognitive level: conceived as a malaise of the organic system, crisis tends to obscure agency,
release actors from their individual responsibility and blur the accountability of the political
agents involved (see Section 4). Henceforth, crisis renders the narrative about situations and
developments more and more nebulous.
The political value of crisis thus primarily lies in the potential of the term for
depolitization. Whereas this effective potential was ingrained in crisis early on, the extensive
procedures of abstraction the noun was to undergo during the 19th century greatly enhanced its
capacity to eliminate agency. Above all, once crisis became an epistemic unit explicating the
impetus of change, its capacity to depoliticize increased. With the historization, scientification
and spatialization of time, crisis could now describe decisive change as independent of human
decisions and actions but also, and more importantly, it could explain in what ways humans were
not responsible for that change. Hence, the incorporation of the term in scientific theories of
change endowed the effect of depolitization with the power of scientific knowledge: if the social,
economic and political systems as a whole were governed by natural law and obeyed mechanical
regularities, then it was not only possible, but also justified, to construct a plausible narrative of
change that no longer allocated a significant role to human agency.
Whether it was formerly used by the governed (Koselleck 1988 [1959]), or by sovereign
power (Foucault 2004), from the mid-19th century on, crisis could bestow on the discursive
agents employing it the authority of scientific certainty (see Section 4.2). What turned crisis
into a powerful tool of de-responsibilization was the split it created between subjectivity and
objectivity (Latour 1993). While decisive change was classified as an objective natural fact, a
serious matter involving graphs and figures, the intuitive awareness of crisis was the subjects
own worry. In this way, crisis became a valuable artifice in the modern regime of truth: to put it

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bluntly, the objective truth was that crises just happen; the subjective sense of distress
associated with crisis merely concerned isolated subjects, and as such, did not belong into the
domain of social facts. By putting up such a barrier between politics and subjectivity, the
modern concept of crisis often had the effect of lifting the burden of responsibility for social
change from the agents involved. The downside of these semantic shifts was the loss of agency,
still relevant today: with subjectivity severed from collective change, individuals cannot easily
acquire faith in their power to bring about social change, or even imagine that social change is
possible.
While it consecrated an objective domain of political phenomena, suitable for scientific
investigation, the term itself kept on carrying the immediate awareness of the modern experience
of time. It is possibly this undisclosed duality, between dissociation and fusion (Latour 1993),
severing and then tying together the scientific empirical evidence of crisis and the intimate sense
of critical temporality, that endowed crisis with such an expressive force. These political traits
of crisis may also explain its appeal in modernity, as they demonstrate the strong connection
between the proliferation of the term and the processes of abstraction it has undergone. The irony
of modern abstraction is that it pushed the objectification of crisis to the limit of the cognition
of time. Understood as potential irreversibility, crisis presents us with a double paradox: on the
one hand, we are forced to try and reconcile necessity with prevention, and on the other hand, to
spatialize the non-spatiable sense of decisive change. This double paradox neatly demonstrates
the durable resistance of the aspectual knowledge of decisive change to the semantic pressures of
modernity. The concrete material of the awareness of critical temporality is still there, deeply
rooted in the sign of crisis.

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6.

Concluding remarks

The story of crisis is not straightforward but one that is closely intertwined with the way in
which temporal cognition has developed in modernity. As such, it demonstrates the intricate and
subtle intersections of history, politics, science, culture and language, and offers a complex
picture of the relations between the biological constraints of our time perception, the exploits of
political culture, and the interests of the production of knowledge. The trouble with crisis the
peculiar vagueness of the term, its resistance to analysis and its allegedly disproportionate
popularity exposes some of the key traits of the modern semantics of Western European
languages.
As a final point, the centrality of crisis in the modern conception of time is curious: crisis
treasures the arcane knowledge of decisive change and unfolds the procedures of modern
abstraction. Despite its political and epistemic effectiveness, crisis discloses one of the secrets
of modern science: we currently know very little about our cognition of change, maybe not much
more than people did in ancient times. Nonetheless, crisis is still with us, not only as an isolated
lexical item but also as a phenomenon that shapes discourse, and is shaped by it.
Though this chapter was restricted to the discussion of 'crisis' and the studies of its specific
history, the theoretical problems that it poses are of a larger nature, and concern the
correspondence between linguistic and conceptual categories; the relation between semantic
theory and the history of ideas (in semantics as well as in many other fields); and the interface
between mental imagery and visual perception. It is inevitable that such a general and broad
analysis cannot properly address all the questions that arise or support all details in the
argumentation with suitable empirical substantiation. Nonetheless, it is hoped that the present

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introductory discussion will help contextualize the more narrowly focused analyses of crisis and
discourse that make up the bulk of this volume.

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