Crisis

Karl Marx and Jacob Burckhardt brought out alternative emphases in their benchmark reflections on crisis. Marx (Das Kapital) developed a theory of economic crisis centered on the economics of overproduction, specifically on the chronic dis-equilibrium between production and consumption under capitalism; each crisis, he believed, would be more severe than the last until a "general crisis" occurred wherein the working class would rise against their exploiters. Burckhardt took politics and culture as a starting point for his pronouncements on crisis in one of his lectures on world history, first delivered in the 1860s. Historical crises typically begin with a "negative, accusing aspect," then peak in utopian visions before giving way to reactions and restorations; the permanent results are "astonishingly meagre in comparison with the great efforts and passions which rise to the surface during the crisis." The typology, based on the French Revolution and the European revolutions of 1848, is clear enough, but it dissolves in a rush of historical examples underwritten by the patrician conservative's anxieties over modernization and not a little Schadenfreude in praise of crisis (Burckhardt, pp. 289–290).

More specialized—if less demanding—usage was widespread by the later nineteenth century and is still current, for example in political or diplomatic crisis, financial or commercial crisis, or crise de conscience. However, until as late as 1960, the fields of economics and economic history produced the only relatively systematic theories of crisis. Marx's views were developed, debated, and projected back in time for a crisis of European feudalism variously dated between the fourteenth and the seventeenth centuries. Non-Marxist versions concentrated on cyclical fluctuations in price data or on the "checks" of famine, disease, and war to surplus population in Malthusian demographic cycles of preindustrial society. The thesis of a general crisis of the seventeenth century (as the transition from feudalism to capitalism) was advanced in 1954 by the British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm (Aston, pp. 5–58) and became a debating point in a long-running controversy over the timing and extra-economic dimensions of what was alleged to be the formative crisis of the modern world.

By the 1960s, crisis had become a broad and expanding catchword—an alternative to the more potent idea of revolution—for practically any challenge-and-response situation or scenario. The tumultuous events of midcentury, from World War II, the collapse of colonial empires, and the Cold War to the traumas of the 1960s, were cast as symptomatic of the crisis not only of Western civilization but of established orders everywhere.

Field-specific crisis literature depended on the discourse or discipline but shared a preoccupation with breakdown or breakthrough in an established system of behavior or belief. A neoorthodox Protestant theology of crisis, a psychology of identity crisis following Erik Erikson (1902–1994), and an epistemology of crisis in "paradigm shifts" during scientific revolutions as analyzed by Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996), had their own extensive literatures. The crises of the Italian Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, and the seventeenth-century English aristocracy were major topics for historians of early modern Europe, and a U.S. textbook series on major crises in history, including the crisis of August 1914 and the Great Depression of 1929, appeared in 1962. The Cuban missile crisis of that year became the exemplary real-world case of international diplomatic crisis at a time when crisis management, based on game theory, had become a political science specialty recognized by U.S. government research contracts.