To be sure, the concept of crisis has an interesting intellectual history that I think

illustrates its richness beyond the narrow definitions of political science. As Reinhart
Koselleck shows in his conceptual history of the term, aptly entitled Crisis, the
Greek origin of the term had various components. First, it essentially meant to
choose, to judge, to decide: as in a decision that would tip the scales at a crucial
point. In ancient Greece, crisis had a decidedly political and juridical meaning: a crisis
symbolized those key moments when the juridical-political decisions defined the
contours of the political order. Crisis also began to reflect a theological understanding
with the advent of Christianity: the crisis of the profane world would be finally
resolved with the Last Judgment and salvation. This eschatological reference to crisis,
along with the juridical-political notion actually remains quite present throughout
European history, indeed up to Marx and Engels own appropriation of crisis. Jacob
Burckhardt transposes the pathologies of late 19th century political and economic
crises with an immanent potential for salvation and redemption. Third, crisis was
understood in medical terms: crisis, as Koselleck writes, refers both to the
observable condition and to the judgment (judicium) about the course of the illness.
The medical definition of crisis proves likewise to be ubiquitous in the use of the
concept. Thus we have, for example, political diagnoses in terms reminiscent of how
doctors describe the phases of disease etiology and treatment or the juxtaposition with
epidemiology. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, discussions on crises center
around whether they are a permanent or transitory feature of modernity; whether they
are intrinsic to the modern system of domestic politics and economics; and whether
they are systemic features of the modern state-system as many called the period
after the French revolutionary wars: the age of crises. The term crisis was
inherently polyvalent in its usage and oftentimes conveying polemical meanings in
certain situations. Yet when we come to Marx and Engels, in particular, we arrive at a
level of theorization of crisis that is both system-immanent and system-exploding.
Crisis then becomes the very vector through which the pathologies of modern
capitalist society are finally redeemed again a quasi-eschatological vision.
Moreover, in the early part of the 20th century, notions of crisis take on epochal
proportions. One speaks here of the crisis of European civilization (Husserl), deeply
rooted in the crisis of science, knowledge and its relationship to the life-world of the
individual; or for Heidegger, the crisis of the West is characterized by the relentless
forgetfulness of Being as a result of modern technology.