Is the Crisis a Specifically Modern Phenomenon?

Abstract

While preparing this issue devoted to epistemology and assessment of the approaches and interaction of the humanities and social sciences to the Covid-19, attention was brought to the topic of Crisis, to which Edgar Moran devoted one of his last books. To enrich discussion and provide critical background, Omran has translated a famous early text by Paul Ricoeur from the mid-1980s, in which he sought to grasp the concept of crisis in all its “regional” ramifications and ask whether modernity had ushered in an era of what he called “generalized crisis”. With its all-encompassing comprehensiveness, the Covid-19 pandemic seems to have uncovered layers of crisis previously unknown in modernity’s practical experience.