Crise

Abstract

In the “crisis” entry of his Basic Concepts in History, Reinhard Koselleck offers an archaeology of the notion and its uses, from Greek and Roman antiquity to the 20th century. Attentive to the sometimes staggered temporalities of social and linguistic change, Koselleck meticulously analyzes, chronologically, the multiple uses of the notion, the discordances and concordances in its meanings, based on a corpus mainly printed in medicine, lexicons and dictionaries, publicistics and philosophy. Analyzed as a “basic historical concept”, crisis unfolds both in time and in its multiple, competing and contradictory uses.

Keywords

• crisis
• conceptual history
• eschatology
• historical change