Brian Milstein Thinking Politically about Crisis Page 1

Thinking Politically about Crisis:

A Pragmatist Perspective

Brian Milstein ([email protected])

Final version published in the

European Journal of Political Theory vol. 14 no. 2 (2015): 141-60
(http://ept.sagepub.com/content/14/2/141)

“Crisis” is a key concept in our political lexicon. Since the beginning of the modern age, it has arguably
been, as much as anything, the experience of crisis that has calibrated the aims of both politics and political
theory. But as central as crisis experiences have been for the shaping of our political imaginary, the
concept itself has proven difficult to incorporate into the political theory enterprise. In this article, I argue
that we can think politically about crisis by taking up a “pragmatist” perspective that focuses on how we
deploy crisis as a conceptual tool for guiding judgments and coordinating actions. I argue that crisis is a
fundamentally reflexive concept that bridges our traditional distinctions between objective phenomena and
normative experience, and whose very usage implies the active participation of those involved in it. Only by
examining these crucial aspects of the crisis concept can we begin to grasp its normative political content,
as well as how it may be deployed in the service of political action and social change.

“Crisis” is a prominent feature of our social and political reality. However, the
term “crisis,” pervasive as it is in discussions about politics, society, and history, is rarely
defined or grappled with explicitly. As the conceptual historian Reinhart Koselleck once
observed, “From the nineteenth century on, there has been an enormous quantitative
expansion in the variety of meanings attached to the concept of crisis, but few
corresponding gains in either clarity or precision.”1 Nearly a half-century after Koselleck
made this statement, very little has changed. We talk of particular crises; we talk of
things that are alleged to be “in crisis,” but there is comparatively little discussion about
“crisis” as such. This is especially the case in political theory, where the bulk of normative
energies tend to be expended on questions relating to ideal conditions in an otherwise

1
Reinhart Koselleck (2006) ‘Crisis,’ trans. Michaela W. Richter, Journal of the History of Ideas 67: 397-400. I
thank Rainer Forst, Regina Kreide, Rahel Jaeggi, and their colloquium participants, as well as Nancy
Fraser, Ethan Zane Miller, Katrin Flikschuh, Stefanie Wöhl, Ayelet Banai, Luce deLire, Bastian Ronge,
Petra Gümplová, Ardevan Yaghoubi, Kiran Banerjee, and Malte Frøslee Ibsen their feedback on earlier
versions of this article.
Brian Milstein Thinking Politically about Crisis Page 2

stable society. Yet however else we might think to characterize crisis—be it as a time of
radical disruption, a moment of epochal transition, the detonation of systemic societal
contradictions, or a state of emergency, and be it of the state, the economy, the
environment, or the international sphere—a crisis is always in the last instance a political
phenomenon.
My purpose here is to rethink the concept of crisis as a concept of political
theory. More specifically, I am interested in how the “grammar” of crisis might inform
the way we think about political action and social change. In doing so, I seek to broach a
number of foundational questions about the nature of the concept of crisis and the place
it occupies in our political repertoire: What are we doing when we say there is a crisis?
What function does the concept serve? What assumptions are we putting into play when
we use the term crisis?
Since the beginning of the modern age, crisis experiences have played a key role
in calibrating the aims of politics and the central questions of political theory. The
primary point of reference for modern political thought—the sovereign state—was
forged out of the manifold political crises of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Jon Elster observes that “new constitutions almost always are written in the wake of a
crisis or exceptional circumstance of some sort.”2 Many of our social welfare institutions
came into being in the wake of recurrent economic crises, and it is also out of these same
experiences that the idea of socioeconomic justice has found its way into the mainstream
of contemporary political thought. Many of our most important international
institutions, as well as the bulk of international humanitarian law, were forged out of
experiences of international and humanitarian crisis, and so, too, have our current
debates about human rights and international or global justice.
At the same time, crises are not exactly phenomena we welcome. They wreak
havoc on society, destroying lives and livelihoods, and they are just as likely to leave
society in a worse state instead of a better one. Moreover, crises harbor political dangers
as well as opportunities, and the opportunities they do present may just as well be

2
Jon Elster (1995) ‘Forces and Mechanisms in the Constitution-Making Process,’ Duke Law Review 45: 370-
1.
Brian Milstein Thinking Politically about Crisis Page 3

opportunities for exploitation by elites as for emancipatory movement by the masses. It

is no surprise that much of the recent literature dealing with crises, particularly in the
realm of legal and constitutional scholarship after 9/11, has put its emphasis on precisely
this potential for exploitation.3 But, as I will argue in what follows, even this potential
for elites or rulers to manipulate crises is parasitic on a more fundamental set of
functions that the concept of crisis fulfills in the modern social imaginary.
Philosophies of history, especially those influenced by the Hegelian and Marxist
traditions, often identify crisis not only with disruption and cataclysm but with
opportunities for transformation or even transcendence: crises can be indicative of
deeper pathologies in the structure of society, and they can bring into the open power
relations or conflicts that remained otherwise hidden. 4 To be sure, oversimplified
associations of crisis with revolutionary praxis have been rightly criticized on both
philosophical and empirical grounds as flawed, naïve, and even dangerous.5 But this need
not rule out the possibility of a more subtle, methodical, and pragmatic investigation
into the relation of crisis experiences to the creation of historical meaning,

3
For an overview of how this literature has played out in the US context, see William E. Scheuerman
(2006) ‘Emergency Powers and the Rule of Law after 9/11,’ Journal of Political Philosophy 14: 61-84, and
(2012) ‘Emergencies, Executive Power, and the Uncertain Future of US Presidential Democracy,’ Law &
Social Inquiry 37: 743-67. See also Ian Zuckerman (2006), “One Law for War And Peace? Judicial Review
and Emergency Powers between the Norm and the Exception,” Constellations 13: 522-45; Oren Gross and
Fionnuala Ní Aoláin (2006) Law in Times of Crisis: Emergency Powers in Theory and Practice, Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press; (2008) ‘A Skeptical View of Deference to the Executive in Times of Crisis,’
Israel Law Review 41(3): 545-61; Eric Posner and Adrian Vermeule (2009) ‘Crisis Governance in the
Administrative State,’ Chicago Law Review 76: 1613-81; (2010) The Executive Unbound: After the Madisonian
Republic, New York: Oxford University Press. The classic study of this problem in comparative
perspective remains that of Clinton L. Rossiter (1948) Constitutional Dictatorship: Crisis Government in
Modern Democracies, Princeton: Princeton University Press. For more general theoretical statements, see,
e.g., Giorgio Agamben (2005) State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell, Chicago: University of Chicago Press;
Luc Boltanski (2011) On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation, trans. Gregory Elliott, Cambridge: Polity: 129-
36.
4
Antonio Gramsci (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. and ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey
Nowell Smith, New York: International Publishers: esp. 210-8, 275-6; Jürgen Habermas (1971) Theory and
Practice, trans. John Viertel, Boston: Beacon: 212-35; (1976) Legitimation Crisis trans. Thomas McCarthy,
Boston: Beacon Press; Antonio Negri (1999) Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State, trans.
Maurizia Boscagli, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; Andreas Kalyvas (2008) Democracy and the
Politics of the Extraordinary, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008: 119.
5
Koselleck (1988) Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society, Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press; Habermas (1971, n. 4): 235-52; Seyla Benhabib (1986) Critique, Norm, and Utopia, New York:
Columbia University Press: 123-43; Axel Honneth (2007) Disrespect: The Normative Foundations of Critical
Theory, Cambridge: Polity: 3-48.
Brian Milstein Thinking Politically about Crisis Page 4

transformations of solidarity, and consciousness of justice and injustice. Even if we can

no longer abide a simple identification of crisis with emancipation, this does not negate
the possibility that crises can be occasions for contesting social structures, transforming
solidarities, and pursuing political change.
In this article I will offer a “pragmatist” approach to thinking about crisis. My
argument is, if we want to think about crisis as a political concept, we need to think
through how the concept is used in modern societies—that is, by thinking and speaking
actors who experience and act upon crises. Pragmatists from C.S. Peirce to Wittgenstein
to Jürgen Habermas and Robert Brandom have argued that, in order to grasp a concept,
we need first to examine how it serves the practice of reasoning, how it helps us make
inferences about the world, what prior understandings and judgments it presupposes,
how it fits in with other related concepts, and how it informs our repertoires of action.
In what follows, I will show that the concept of crisis indeed rests on some powerful
assumptions. Crisis belies the traditional distinctions between empirical science and
normative philosophy: it is an objective event, but it is one whose urgency demands a
normative commitment on the part of those involved in it. It is an inherently reflexive
concept, one that blurs the usual dichotomies between fact and value, observer and
participant, and theory and practice, and it presupposes our ability to critically observe
and take responsibility for our social world. As such, the modern concept of crisis is an
essentially participatory concept, whose very invocation calls not just for observation and
critical judgment but action.
I will begin with a look back at how the concept of crisis has emerged and
developed as a central concept in modernity, a reflexive concept participants use to
make sense of their increasingly complex relationship to their social world. In the
following section, I will show how the modern concept of crisis rests on certain
pragmatic assumptions, which will allow us to see how crises can be understood as a
function of the publicly discursive production of “crisis consciousness.” As we will see in
the third section, it is the public way in which actors speak about, act upon, and contest
each other’s consciousness of crisis that makes crisis into a thoroughly political
phenomenon, susceptible to contestation, struggle, and even resistance. I will conclude
Brian Milstein Thinking Politically about Crisis Page 5

by arguing that it is precisely this discursive and contested aspect of the crisis concept
that can make it appear fuzzy, diluted, or subject to abuse, but this is all the more reason
to strive to make the concept explicit in political theory.

Crisis in Modernity

The word “crisis” originates in antiquity. As Koselleck explains in his

encyclopedia of Historical Basic Concepts (Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe), “Κρίσις [krisis] has
its roots in the Greek verb κρίνω (krinō): to ‘separate’ (part, divorce), to ‘choose,’ to
‘judge,’ to ‘decide’; as a means of ‘measuring oneself,’ to ‘quarrel,’ or to ‘fight.’”6 The term
appears throughout Greek writings in a variety of contexts that involve some kind of
struggle, contest, judgment, or decision. In Aristotle’s Politics, the term appears mostly in
reference to the process of litigating a dispute or rendering a verdict. In The Hippocratic
Corpus, it means the high point of an illness “in which it is decided whether the self-
healing powers of the organism are sufficient for recovery.”7 Or, as one editor of an early
English translation of the Corpus put it, crisis is “the determination of the disease as by a
judicial verdict.”8 In drama, it referred to the internal struggle of the protagonist with
the powers of fate, and in early Christianity, it signified divine judgment—particularly
the Last Judgment at the end of days. 9 Several of these meanings have provided
metaphorical templates for how we think about social and political crisis today: it could
mean a moment of forced decision for the polity, the high point of a “disease” in the
social body, or a time of struggle or judgment in the face of history. None of these
metaphorical meanings would be possible, however, if crisis were not also endowed with
a set of distinctly modern conceptual assumptions that permit its extension from
individual instances of judgment (as we find in the Greek usage) to judgment about the
social world at large.

6
Koselleck (n. 1): 358.
7
Habermas (1973) ‘What Does a Crisis Mean Today? Legitimation Problems in Late Capitalism,’ Social
Research 40: 643.
8
E. Withington (1920) ‘The Meaning of ΚΡΙΣΙΣ as a Medical Term,’ The Classical Review 34: 65.
9
Habermas (n. 7): 644; Koselleck (n. 1): 360.
Brian Milstein Thinking Politically about Crisis Page 6

Koselleck records the first use of crisis in a political context in seventeenth-

century England, when tensions escalated between king and parliament. The poet-
politician Benjamin Rudyerd, using the medical meaning of the word, diagnosed the
situation by writing, “This is the Chrysis of Parliaments; we shal know by this if
Parliaments life or die.”10 The notion of a social “body” has its own history, for example,
in early and medieval Christendom, as the corpus mysticum embodied within the
community of true believers that takes part in the sacraments.11 But the entry of the
concept of crisis into the political lexicon, as a diagnosis no longer of the individual body
but of the body politic as a whole, correlates with a profound turning point in
seventeenth century society and its attitudes toward itself. Europe was transforming
from a politically decentered network of feudal, ecclesiastical, and trading associations
into increasingly distinct “societies,” within which a centralized state organ emerges as
an institution that is both representative of and distinct from the rest of the social
body.12 The representation of the state as the central organ of the body politic finds
perhaps no better expression than in the iconic frontspiece of Hobbes’s Leviathan, where
the multitude of individual citizens coalesce into the body of that “artificial man” who
wields sovereign power. Although Hobbes himself never uses the term “crisis” to
describe the decay of the commonwealth into a state of war, his attempt to formulate a
“science” of politics can still be read as the first modern crisis theory. The emergence of
the idea of a general political crisis serves to invest the imaginary of the body politic with
greater reality: no longer a mere metaphor, the body politic may be diagnosed a healthy
or sick body by a citizenry empowered collectively to play at once doctor and patient to
its own condition.
We already see in the Hobbesian paradigm the reflexivity that accompanies
modern crisis consciousness: crisis emerges alongside the problematic of a society whose

10
Quoted in Koselleck (n. 1): 362.
11
Sheldon Wolin (2004) Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought, exp. ed.,
Princeton: Princeton University Press: 118ff.
12
Henrdrik Spruyt (1994) The Sovereign State and Its Competitors: An Analysis of Systems Change, Princeton:
Princeton University Press; John Gerard Ruggie, ‘Continuity and Transformation in the World Polity:
Toward a Neorealist Synthesis,’ in Robert O. Keohane (ed.) (1986) Neorealism and Its Critics, New York:
Columbia University Press: 131-57.
Brian Milstein Thinking Politically about Crisis Page 7

internal order can no longer be exogenously guaranteed through appeals to sacred

doctrine or tradition, but which must be achieved in light of the “rules” which
participants must discover and to which they must bind themselves. It emerges in the
form we know it today around the same time, and to the same degree, that modern
society casts off its reliance on “traditional authority” and begins to take a reflexive
attitude toward itself and its social and political environment. 13 But the Hobbesian
critique of crisis is essentially “defensive”: restricted to the guideposts of a “healthy” or
“sick” commonwealth, the political imagination of the Leviathan remained limited to the
oppositions between peace and war, stability and chaos, perseverance and decay. It was
not until a century later that the concept of crisis took on a more radical tenor, one
suited to a self-conception of society as a historical community capable of achieving
continual progress. No simple moment of societal disorder or decomposition, crises come
to be viewed as moments of epochal transition: a moment of historical decision, a
tipping point, an imminent break, an apocalyptic coming to judgment.14 It is with this
set of connotations that crisis is sometimes linked with “revolution” and the possibility
of “emancipation,” as we find in writers such as Rousseau and Thomas Paine.15 By the
early nineteenth century, the term found its way into economics, as political economists
such as Simonde de Sismondi, Charles Dunoyer, and Karl Marx struggled to understand
the fluctuations and convulsions of the emerging capitalist system.16 While Dunoyer, a
disciple of Say’s classical liberalism, sought to “normalize” Sismondi’s thesis that
recurring economic crises were endemic to capitalist society, Marx fused it to the

13
See Habermas (1987) The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick G.
Lawrence, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press: ch. I; S.N. Eisenstandt (2000) ‘Multiple Modernities,’ Deadalus
129: 1-29. See also Max Weber, ‘The Social Psychology of the World Religions,’ in H.H. Gerth and C.
Wright Mills (trans and ed) (1946) From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, New York: Oxford University
Press: 267-301, esp. 295ff.
14
Koselleck (n. 1): 371-2.
15
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1979) Emile, or: On Education, trans. Allan Bloom, New York: Basic Books: 194;
Thomas Paine (1776) The Crisis (accessed online 11 April, 2013 at http://www.ushistory.org/paine/crisis/c-
01.htm).
16
Simonde de Sismondi (1847 [1819]) Political Economy and the Philosophy of Government, trans. and ed. M.
Mignet, London: John Chapman: 118-9, 242-4; Ross E. Stewart (1984) ‘Sismondi’s Forgotten Ethical
Critique of Early Capitalism,’ Journal of Business Ethics 3: 227-34; Rabah Benkemoune (2009) ‘Charles
Dunoyer and the Emergence of the Idea of an Economic Cycle,’ History of Political Economy 41: 271-95.
Brian Milstein Thinking Politically about Crisis Page 8

emancipatory conception of crisis, constructing a vision of deep contradictions in the

structure of capitalist society that will ultimately detonate into revolutionary upheaval.17
Unlike more defensive readings of crisis—which, in Clinton Rossiter’s words, aim
“to overcome the peril and restore normal conditions”—emancipatory readings seek not
to pull back from crises but to push through them to the next stage of historical progress.18
But if more defensive readings risk valorizing the imperatives of “order” and “necessity”
at the expense of normative aspiration, revolutionary readings risk a somewhat different
error of valorizing utopian possibilities over the realities of social cooperation and
organization. Precisely because it valorizes future change over present stability, the
revolutionary reading of crisis cannot find its bearings in principles of social order. It
must invest elsewhere, for example, by claiming epistemic access to the “authentic”
liberated being or, alternatively, to the overarching telos of world history. 19 It was
precisely this epistemic overconfidence that Koselleck castigated in his conceptual
history of the Enlightenment, Critique and Crisis. For Koselleck, the rise of a
revolutionary crisis consciousness during the eighteenth century was above all a tale of
tragedy, the tale of an overzealous Enlightenment too ensconced in its utopian sense of
self-purpose to appreciate the tensions that lay between the ideal of complete
emancipation and the messy realities of politics.20
Today, “crisis” is taken to signify many things in modern society—danger,
calamity, contradiction, struggle, revelation, opportunity—yet its significance as a
concept for political theory has proven difficult to pin down. It is simplistic to assume
that crises will, as a teleological matter of course, reveal hidden truths about the social
world or usher in new opportunities for progress. But it is no more adequate to reduce
crises to simple “times of peril” that are to be contrasted to some other condition that is
supposed to count as “normal.” Oren Gross and Fionnuala Ní Aoláin have stressed how
problematic it can be to distinguish what is normal from what is exceptional to begin

17
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1978) The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker, New York:
W.W. Norton & Company: 291-2, 443-65, 478ff; Sismondi (n. 16); see also Stewart (n. 16).
18
Rossiter (n. 3): 5.
19
Honneth (n. 5): 13-6, 37-9.
20
Koselleck (n. 5): esp. 158-86.
Brian Milstein Thinking Politically about Crisis Page 9

with.21 More fundamentally, however, such a view implicitly advantages the status quo
ante and narrows the theoretical space for forward-oriented reflection, let alone
“emancipatory” movement. It is from the purview of these kinds of ambiguities that it
would be worthwhile to reconsider the role the concept of crisis plays in modern social
and political consciousness and the function that it plays for modern, crisis-conscious
actors.
Crisis serves to reflect the ongoing tensions encountered by a society that strives
to be self-determining even as it finds itself subject to the fluctuations and upheavals of
historical contingency and social complexity. It points to the fundamentally dual
character of modern society: something that can be acted upon by its members, which can
be made transparent and shaped according to their own collective will and reason; yet
also something that acts upon them, that remains external and opaque to everyday life,
carrying its own objective force to which the self-understanding of participants must
bend. This dual character of modern society is familiar to sociological theory, which
various thinkers have tried to thematize through such distinctions as “labor” versus
“capital,” “social integration” versus “system integration,” or “agency” versus
“structure.”22
It is the location of crisis as a reflective point within the dual character of modern
society that gives it its likewise dual character as both an objective phenomenon and a
normative experience. It is long customary in modern thought to distinguish sharply
between theoretical and practical reason—between that which is objective, empirical, or
factual and that which is normative, prescriptive, or ideational—yet the concept of crisis
straddles both of these domains simultaneously. A crisis is, indeed, an event, with real
effects and real causality, lending itself to empirical analysis; at the same time, the status
of an event as a crisis is immanently and inextricably bound up with a variety of normative

21
Gross and Ní Aoláin (2006, n. 3): 171-243.
22
Marx (1976) Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes, London: Penguin Books; David Lockwood (1992) ‘Social
Integration and System Integration,’ in Solidarity and Schism: “The Problem of Disorder” in Durkheimian and
Marxist Sociology, Oxford: Oxford University Press: 399-412; Habermas (1984-7) The Theory of
Communicative Action, 2 vols., trans. Thomas McCarthy, Boston: Beacon; Anthony Giddens (1984) The
Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing; Ian Craib (1992)
Modern Social Theory: From Parsons to Habermas, New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Brian Milstein Thinking Politically about Crisis Page 10

presuppositions and expectations. To call something a “crisis” denotes a plea for

action—an urgency—which, if unheeded, would lead to something catastrophic. Crises
occur when the objective force of history comes crashing back the self-understanding of
its participants, pressing upon them to make a decision on their own fate; at stake is
nothing less than whether it will be we who “make” history or visa versa.
It follows from this constellation that the concept of crisis stands as more than a
referent for a certain state of affairs. Fashioned with a reflexive character that binds the
objective force of causality to a normatively charged urgency, the concept of crisis entails
a call for participation on the part of those who apply the term. It is in the course of
meeting this demand for participation that actors are enjoined to reflect on their
relation to the social whole: its structures, its purposes, and how it coheres as a totality.
Those called to participate can only do so on the basis of their own self-understood
relations to society, their expectations of how society is supposed to function, and what
society should be. Thus the participatory aspect of crisis consists in more than the
necessity to intervene in or “fix” the crisis, but in a call to take responsibility for the crisis
as if the crisis itself were somehow of their own making. Only through participation does
it become possible to bring the objective causes and effects of crisis reflexively back into
the realm of possible normative control, and so to bring about a reconciliation between
the idea of society as external reality and the idea of society as a product of collective
will. But if crisis is a participatory process, and if it is as normative in its stakes as it is
objectively real in its consequences, then it also has a politics.

The Pragmatic Logic of Crisis

To say that crisis is a modern concept is not to say that there were no crises
before the modern period. The modernity of the concept consists in that, despite the
fact that any particular crisis tends to catch us off-guard or unprepared, the general
phenomenon of crisis is sufficiently entrenched in our worldview that it has become part
of our conceptual repertoire: we have in a certain way “standardized” the notion of crises
by assigning them a general term. But more than a general referent for a certain state of
Brian Milstein Thinking Politically about Crisis Page 11

affairs, the invocation of the term “crisis” invokes a certain range of actions that are
understood to correspond to it. What we might call the “pragmatic force” of the
concept of crisis consists not merely in the notion that something in the social world has
gone urgently and inexplicably awry, but that some kind of action can and must be taken
in response to this situation. This is what distinguishes crises from other phenomena
(e.g., “disasters,” “tragedies”) that we can only passively adapt to or cope with. The
attempt to act may of course fail, but it is a crucial feature of the reflexive character of
crisis that those caught up in a crisis act on the presupposition that it is possible (even if
only in principle) to regain some level of reflexive control over the process. But if this is
the case, then it means that the participants in a crisis—those who would be acting—
constitute a key part of the definition of a crisis as a crisis. The concept of crisis in
modern society is dependent on a certain capacity for crisis consciousness, i.e., a capacity to
identify a crisis and take action.
Crises are generally defined to describe situations of profound urgency and
uncertainty that threaten to outstrip existing resources for solving problems.23 The
concept of crisis, however, becomes effective only when it is used by crisis-conscious
actors as a conceptual tool for making judgments about one’s relationship to one’s social
environment. To declare a crisis is to bring into discursive play a range of claims,
commitments, and attitudes regarding our relation as a collective “us” to a “not-us
around us” upon which our everyday life depends—things like the state, the economy, or
the natural environment—and over which we feel we should have some control.24 Our
task here is to make explicit what those claims, commitments, and attitudes entail—to
think through the question, “What are we doing when we name something as being in
crisis?”25
23
See, for example, Habermas (1976, n. 4): 2-5; Wesley W. Widmaier, Mark Blyth, and Leonard Seabrooke
(2007) ‘Exogenous Shocks or Endogenous Constructions? The Meanings of Wars and Crises,’ International
Studies Quarterly 51: 748; Arjen Boin and Mark Rhinard (2008) ‘Managing Transboundary Crises: What
Role for the European Union?,’ International Studies Review 10: 1-25; Jakob Norberg (2011) ‘Arendt in Crisis:
Political Thought between Past and Future,’ College Literature 38: 131-49.
24
Robert Brandom (1994) Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment, Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press: xii, 46, 168-72.
25
See Brandom (n. 24): 172-3; (2001) Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism, Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press: 173; Thomas Fossen (2013) ‘Taking Stances, Contesting Commitments: Political
Legitimacy and the Pragmatic Turn,’ Journal of Political Philosophy 21: 428.
Brian Milstein Thinking Politically about Crisis Page 12

(1) To begin, if applying the concept of crisis requires one to make a judgment about
the social world, or at least a part of it, it follows that one can only speak of a crisis of
something; there is no such thing as a crisis that simply exists “of itself.” The speaker
must assume that there exists something in the world that may be taken as an object, an
object that can be made explicit, represented, thought about, and reflected upon, to
which the judgment of being in crisis may be attributed. Second, and more important,
the speaker making the claim that said object is in crisis must assume addressees. She must
implicitly assume participatory membership in a community of sorts, and she must assume
that the other members of this community share a concern for this object and therewith
a stake in the outcome of the crisis. It is from here that crisis derives its political
character: crisis is first and foremost a public concept, spoken by members of a public to
other members of a public about a publicly constituted object. “Crisis” enters the
definition of a situation when a speaker declares and her addressees affirm the existence
of an object that is in crisis, and, in so doing, they accept a mutual commitment to
recognize the crisis and take (or possibly delegate) action in response to it.26
To be sure, similar claims can be made about other matters in the social world:
one of the implications of pragmatist approaches is that anything and everything is in
principle open to discursive problematization.27 What makes the declaration of crisis
distinctive is the way it brings the inherently problematic and contested character of
social practices to the surface of actors’ consciousness. Crisis language can most
immediately be distinguished from other normative as well as descriptive language in
that the very declaration of crisis evokes a demand for immediate action in its very
description of the situation. In this respect, a crisis can be understood as a kind of
“emergency.” But, as Arjen Boin and Mark Rhinard have noted, crises can be
distinguished further, since one who is subject to an emergency can often at least
provisionally trust in the existence of more or less standard routines aimed to resolve it.
Droughts, floods, shortages, mild economic downturns, disputed elections, terrorist

26
Habermas (n. 22): 1:278; (1996) Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and
Democracy, trans. William Rehg, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press: 119-20, 147. See also Brandom (n. 24): 159-66.
27
Fossen (2011) ‘Politicizing Brandom’s Pragmatism: Normativity and the Agonal Character of Social
Practice,’ European Journal Of Philosophy doi:10.1111/j.1468-0378.2011.00504.x.
Brian Milstein Thinking Politically about Crisis Page 13

attacks, and the like are sure to bring their own measures of contingency, but modern
societies generally have some routinized capacity to deal with them.28 One can always
criticize the way a routine is handled, or even the routines themselves, but the
assumption that they exist provides a base level of epistemic security that is lacking in a
full-blown crisis. What makes a crisis a crisis is precisely the consciousness that the
known means for doing things will no longer do, that whatever is to be tried must be
tried experimentally (At best, the participant can trust in authority, in the possibility
that somebody else “knows what they are doing” simply by virtue of their status as an
official or expert). Put another way, while strategies for a addressing a standard
emergency are potentially contested—that is, one could question them if one so
chooses—strategies for addressing a crisis are presumptively contested—that is, actions
are attempted with the understanding that their justifications and potential effectiveness
are controversial.
We can say that a situation is more amenable to being diagnosed a “crisis” the
more the practical urgency of the dysfunction is accompanied by a kind of radical doubt:
the urgency for action at the practical level is coupled to a loss of foundation at the
doxastic level. 29 This is why a pragmatist take is well suited to thinking about the
political logic of crisis: pragmatism in general permits that most anything can be made
explicit for reflection and thereby problematized; applying the judgment of crisis entails
a call to actually do so and take action. Hence the speaker who declares and the
addressees who affirm the existence of a crisis are granting each other “license” to a
certain degree of freedom from the established social order. This is wherein crisis
consciousness acquires its potential for creative action and even “emancipatory”
thinking; but it is also where crisis consciousness can prove dangerous. Charismatic
28
Boin and Rhinard, (n. 23): 3; cf. Sanford Levinson and Jack M. Balkin (2009) ‘Constitutional Crises,’
University of Pennsylvania Law Review 157: 707-53.
29
It is not uncommon to hear of crises spoken about using “existential” language. In Legitimation Crisis, for
example, Habermas describes crises in terms “when members of a society experience structural alterations
as critical for continued existence and feel their social identity threatened” (1976, n. 4: 3). While crises
certainly contain an existential dimension, it is the practical-epistemic dimension, conceived in pragmatist
terms, that is decisive for action—not so much “What is our society?” as “How does it work?,” for it is the
latter that more directly assists the question, “What are we to do?” It is also for this reason that features of
society said to be in crisis may be better defined functionally, by what they do, rather than ontologically, by
what they are (see below).
Brian Milstein Thinking Politically about Crisis Page 14

figures, self-interested parties, and other strategically-oriented actors can and often do
attempt to exploit the license of crisis language to circumvent established procedures to
pursue ambitious ends, either by conjuring an idea of a crisis outright or manipulating
the public’s perceptions of the options available (for example, by appealing to so-called
“TINA” logic).

(2) Let us assume however that a crisis claim has, as it were, “objective” standing.
The community must be able to designate an object, an aspect of social life that is
functioning radically out of synch with the community’s expectations. The crisis object
is a socially constructed object—such as the state, the economy, or the environment—
which represents to the community the fulcrum of the crisis. Now, to say that the object
is “socially constructed” does not mean that it lacks reality. 30 On the contrary, its
salience as an object arises precisely out of the objective reality of the crisis itself: if the
crisis can be said to produce real effects, then the successful critique of crisis must be
able to address those effects. In short, the crisis object is “real” insofar as it guides our
ability to form a coherent understanding of the crisis and develop effective responses to
it.31
At the same time, crisis objects tend to be abstract: social entities like states and
economies have no “appearance” or presence like a physical object. We know officials,
we read laws, and we locate offices, but no one can “see” the state as such; we see goods,
bills, transactions, and so on, but no one has ever “seen” an economy; we perceive trees,
water, animals, and air, but no one can “see” the natural environment. The object is
defined not in the first instance ontologically—in terms of what it is—but functionally,
in terms of what it does in relation to everyday social life. It falls on participants to
ascertain the “rules” by which the effects of the crisis are propagated and to give an
account of how such effects may be managed. The satisfactory resolution to the crisis

30
See E. Diaz-Leon (2013) ‘What Is Social Construction?,’ European Journal of Philosophy
doi:10.1111/ejop.12033.
31
This specific point can be justified further by means of Brandom’s highly complex and detailed argument
for a “social route from reasoning to representing” which occupies the bulk of Part Two (esp. Chapter 8)
of Brandom (n. 24) and can be found in summary form in Brandom (n. 24): 123-83.
Brian Milstein Thinking Politically about Crisis Page 15

effectively becomes a question of how to constitute (or re-constitute) the object in a way
that better accords with the expectations of those whose lives are involved with it.
C.S. Peirce’s conception of “Secondness” still offers a vivid account of objectivity
from a pragmatist point of view.32 Standing between “Firstness,” or the mere “suchness”
of things, and “Thirdness,” the attribution of substantive rules and concepts to describe
things, “Secondness” refers to the moment of raw struggle, resistance, and constraint
that runs head-on against what we already think we know. The direct experience of crisis
emulates just this kind of raw constraint: the schemes, practices, and rules through
which we collectively navigated everyday life are no longer operative; what was once
taken for granted is now radically problematic. It is at this level that crises can be said to
test our capacities to achieve reflexive control over our social world, on pain of being
wholly at its mercy. Peirce likens the moment of struggle to the act of pushing against a
half-open door.33 So long as the person pushing and the door resisting are of equal force,
there is no pragmatic difference between agent and patient. Who is the agent acting and
who is the patient acted upon is only decided when one of the parties succeeds.
In the process of addressing particular symptoms of crisis, participants often
come to understand their social world in a new way by redefining and reconstituting the
objects composing it. The religious and civil wars of the seventeenth century led to the
reconstitution of monarchies as “sovereign states”; the Great Depression led to the idea
of a “macroeconomy”; the horrors of the Second World War facilitated the institution
of an idea of “humanity” as an international legal concept. But even though these
constructed objects were constructed to address real experiences of social shock and
resistance, there is little in the objective experience of crisis as such that reveals any
particular epistemic content. As Richard Bernstein notes, there is nothing in the sheer
brute constraint of the event that points directly to any particular epistemic warrant.

32
See Richard Bernstein (2010) The Pragmatic Turn, Cambridge: Polity: 46-52, 129-36; Cheryl Misak (2004)
Truth and the End of Inquiry: A Peircean Account of Truth, Oxford: Oxford University Press: 70-9.
33
Charles Sanders Peirce, ‘The Categories’ in Susan Haack and Robert Lane (eds) (2006) Pragmatism, Old &
New: Selected Writings, Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books: 181.
Brian Milstein Thinking Politically about Crisis Page 16

That something has happened can be understood objectively; what that something is
must be addressed discursively.34

(3) In its simplest terms, the objective success of critique depends on the
“satisfactory” resolution of the crisis. This does not necessarily mean learning the “truth”
of the crisis, but only that its causes have been discovered and rectified to a satisfactory
degree. But this is a complex issue. For insofar as the crisis object is a social object, one
that is construed on the basis of how it relates to the everyday lives of those affected by
it, it is defined not merely by its causal mechanics but by what it is expected to do. The
successful critique of crisis rest as much on normative as objective criteria.
A number of theories of crisis, particularly those descended from the Marxist
tradition, emphasize the logic of “systemic contradiction” as a means of anchoring the
social reality of crisis tendencies. Hence Marx’s famous thesis on the “tendential fall in
the rate of profit” is meant to highlight a contradiction in the capitalist mode of
production itself, whereby the profit-driven need to reinvest surplus-value in strategies
for greater productivity alters the organic composition of capital in such a way that
paradoxically reduces the long-term creation of surplus-value in proportion to total capital
investment.35 In Legitimation Crisis, Habermas argues that increasing regulatory needs of
the state create an accompanying demand for greater levels of legitimation, but the very
expansion of bureaucratic regulation into more and more domains of social life erodes
the resources of social and cultural meaning necessary for society to generate
legitimation in the first place.36 Yet, as Brandom points out, even contradictions rest in
the end on normative concepts, not causal ones. Contradictions do not exist in nature;
they are an idea we bring to the world on the basis of our own judgments and the rules of
reason we employ to sort and evaluate these judgments.37 Marx and Habermas can
diagnose the capitalist economy and the democratic welfare state as contradictory only

34
Bernstein (n. 32), 135-6.
35
Marx (1991) Capital, vol. 3, trans. David Fernbach, London: Penguin Books: 317-38, 349-76; ‘Crisis Theory’
in Marx and Engels (n. 17): 443-65.
36
Habermas (1976, n. 4): 68-75.
37
Brandom (n. 24): 12.
Brian Milstein Thinking Politically about Crisis Page 17

because we place normative expectations on capital investment to foster profits and the
state to remain legitimate—and to do so indefinitely. 38 Contradictions are features
exclusive to social systems, and they obtain only by virtue of the normative expectations
we place on them. When we say there is a “contradiction” in a public object, we mean
that it is objectively unable to fulfill a set of normative expectations except at the
expense of other normative expectations that have equal or higher priority.
The objectivity through which the crisis object is engaged is thus never a
disinterested objectivity. The experience of crisis begins with real effects, and with the
attribution of these effects to the idea that something in the social world is functioning
radically out of synch with expectations. But how these effects are understood, and the
necessary courses of action, depend heavily on what those expectations are, and the
normative orientations that motivate them. The upshot is that neither a crisis, an object
of crisis, nor a successful response to crisis can be made intelligible without reference to
expectations and understandings of those for whom the crisis is pressing.

(4) As already mentioned, judgments about crises require not only that there be an
object in the social world that is said to be in crisis, but also a community. The crisis
concept, insofar as it can be applied and channeled into action, is dependent on crisis
consciousness, and crisis consciousness depends on the ability of people to make claims
about the crisis and having those claims mutually recognized by others involved in the
process of diagnosing and responding to the crisis. We can speak here—at first in a
somewhat idealized, counterfactual sense—of a crisis community, which comprises those
people who experience the effects of the crisis and who therefore might claim a stake in
its outcome.
A distinguishing feature of the crisis community is it does not necessarily
correspond to any already existing community, nor can it be reliably be derived directly
from existing forms of social and political organization. To be sure, already existing
communities may already have officers and experts charged with handling crisis

38
I owe this point to Rahel Jaeggi (2012) ‘Was (wenn überhaupt etwas) ist falsch am Kapitalismus? Drei Wege der
Kapitalismuskritik’ (working paper presented at ‘Crisis, Critique, Capitalism: A Workshop with Nancy
Fraser and the Jena Kolleg “Postwachstumsgesellschaften,”’ Humboldt-Universität Berlin, 24 November).
Brian Milstein Thinking Politically about Crisis Page 18

situations, but there is no guarantee that the reach of the crisis will correspond to any
predetermined jurisdiction or even that the authorities of such a jurisdiction would be
adequately equipped to handle it; these determinations can only be made in the course of
responding to crisis. As we saw above, the defining characteristic of crises is the way they
disrupt and throw into question the assumed procedures for organizing social life. Crises
may cross any number of conventional divides and boundaries that structure social
relations, including social classes, status differences, roles, groups, and (increasingly)
national borders. Because no one can tell in advance who will be affected by a crisis, the
constitution of the crisis community depends on the ability and willingness of affected
persons to reciprocally recognize each other and their claims. The crisis community is a
self-generating, self-selecting community.
This self-generating quality stems from the fact that crisis is a conceptual tool,
not only of judgment, but of action. The composition of the crisis community arises on
the basis of the claims that participants make to recognize one another and be
recognized as agents with a stake in the crisis. In ideal terms, we can describe it as an
exercise in what Habermas and Klaus Günther have called “communicative freedom,”
which “exists only between actors who, adopting a performative attitude, want to reach
an understanding with one another about something and expect one another to take
positions on reciprocally raised validity claims.”39 In the course of declaring the crisis and
entitling each other to commitments about the nature of the crisis—the participants are
implicitly making and reciprocally acknowledging a claim that they themselves have a
certain authority to speak about and intervene in the crisis object. This authority
corresponds to the “license” mentioned above, whereby actors asserting the existence of
crisis attribute to each other a certain degree of freedom from the established order.
In a way, this basis for a crisis community echoes some of the ideas proposed by
John Dewey in The Public and Its Problems. While not discussing crises per se, Dewey
argued that we should not reduce democratic politics to any given institutional order;
instead, we should begin with the formation of “publics” that self-generate around the

39
Habermas (n. 26): 119.
Brian Milstein Thinking Politically about Crisis Page 19

axes of new issues as they arise on the social horizon. 40 On this view, public
consciousness does not restrict itself to any set of predrawn community boundaries but
may coalesce around any matter that may “affect large numbers outside of itself,” and
this may encompass any number of possibilities within and across localities and even
across national boundaries.41 But Dewey is not very clear on how the scope of such a
public is to be determined, who is to be included, and on what basis.42 He does not really
explain how such “new” publics interact with or run up against already existing
institutional arrangements. Most importantly, he does not consider the potentials for
conflict that may arise between the new publics and the old or even within the publics
themselves. As I will show, the composition of the crisis community and its relation to
existing communities is necessarily problematic, and it is on this point that crises may
become sources of political controversy and contestation.

The Politics of the Crisis Community

One of the central themes of Habermas’s Legitimation Crisis, recently picked up

on by John Thompson, is how crises that originate in one sphere of social life can spill
over into other spheres.43 Of particular interest are crises that begin as economic crises
or administrative crises but which transform or “metamorphose” into overtly political
crises.44 While Habermas originally outlined this process using a systems-functionalist
logic of explanation, we can give it a more normative-political reading by looking more
closely into the model sketched above.
We saw early on that crisis is an inherently reflexive concept, native to modernity,
which presupposes the ability of those who deploy it to look upon their own social

40
Dewey (1954 [1927]) The Public and Its Problems, Athens, OH: Swallow Press: 15-6, 30-1.
41
Dewey (n. 40): 27-8, 126-31.
42
Cf. Robert B. Westbrook (1991) John Dewey and American Democracy, Ithaca: Cornell University Press:
305-6, 315-6; Honneth (n. 5): 230.
43
Habermas (1976, n. 4); John B. Thompson (2012) ‘The Metamorphosis of a Crisis,’ in Manuel Castells,
João Caraça, and Gustavo Cardoso (eds) (2012) Aftermath: The Cultures of the Economic Crisis, Oxford:
Oxford University Press: 59-81.
44
Thompson (n. 43): 64-5.
Brian Milstein Thinking Politically about Crisis Page 20

environment as something over which they should be in principle able to (re)gain some
level of control. As such, crisis consciousness presupposes not only an urgent need but
also the capacity (however fallible) to take action in response to a crisis that is perceived
to in some way outstrip the existing capacities of the normal order. The act of declaring
and affirming crisis claims thus amounts to a discursive deployment of crisis
consciousness that consists in the reciprocal recognition of participating actors’
respective stakes in the crisis and commitments to taking action. The concept of a crisis
community introduced above can function here as a regulative model that links the
successful response to crisis to the general and reciprocal recognition of actors’ claims to
a stake in the object of crisis.45 These claims often cut across existing social categories
and divides, just as the crisis itself cuts across existing categories and divides. But the
crisis community harbors as much potential for conflict as for cooperation. Being a self-
generating, self-selecting community that often cuts across social categories, divides, and
other basic structures of society, the effectiveness of the crisis community’s response to
the crisis depends on how actors navigate these structures, exploit them, or endeavor to
work across them.
The regulative role of crisis community is simultaneously epistemic and
normative. Epistemically, it invokes something like Peirce’s “community of inquirers,”
tasked with investigating the causes of crisis and bringing their various experiences of
the crisis to bear in negotiating what satisfactory resolution would look like. 46
Normatively, the pragmatic assumptions upon which the crisis community comes
together hint at a “democratic” structure that rests on reciprocal and general recognition
of each other’s stakes in the object of crisis and authority to make claims and take action.
But full and formal democratic decision-making is often difficult in actual crises,
particularly in ones that require fast action. In addition, crisis experiences, precisely
because they disrupt the normal societal order, can strain the existing social bonds

45
For this criterion of “reciprocal and general” forms of justification, see Rainer Forst (2012) Right to
Justification: Elements of a Constructivist Theory of Justice, trans. Jeffrey Flynn, New York: Columbia
University Press.
46
See C.S. Peirce, ‘Some Consequences of the Four Incapacities’ and ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear,’ in
Haack and Lane (n. 33): 99-101, 146-8; Misak (n. 32).
Brian Milstein Thinking Politically about Crisis Page 21

between actors at the very time when solidarity is needed. In this light, the immediate
capacity of a crisis community to “act in concert” can be quite weak in the near-term.
Instead, actual action is often taken by those institutions and segments of society best
able to function in the midst of the crisis—often the executive of a government, military
leaders, an elite social class, or (if the crisis is transnational in scope) one or a couple of
major powers. In other words, while the effects of a crisis may be experienced across any
number of divides and boundaries that structure social relations, including social classes,
status differences, roles, groups, and state borders, how decisions are actually made in
response to the crisis is still constrained by the basic structure of social relations as it
already exists.
This problem is exacerbated by the self-selecting character of the would-be crisis
community itself, as claims to inclusion can quickly run up hard against structures,
boundaries, institutions, and rules that tend to slow or inhibit opportunities for general
and reciprocal participation. 47 A simple third-person application of an “all-affected
principle” will not necessarily do, as the questions of who is significantly affected and by
what are precisely what is at issue in formulating a response to crisis that is effective at
both the objective and normative levels.48 Thus the constitution of the crisis community
relies, in the end, on the first- and second-person claims and affirmations of the
participants themselves. Participants must contend urgently with restrictive features of
the social landscape that may have previously been viewed as tacitly bearable (e.g, “mild”
prejudices), acceptable (e.g., some forms of inequality), or even welcome (e.g., national
boundaries).
One can certainly imagine a situation in which participants reach across extant
social divides and boundaries to collectively reconstruct the object of crisis in a way that
reflects the required expanded iteration of community. After about 150 years of
recurrent economic crises that wreaked havoc on the less advantaged classes of industrial
societies, the “welfare state compromise” reflected a view of economic reality that

47
Forst (n. 45): 209-10.
48
Nancy Fraser (2009) Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World, New York:
Columbia University Press.
Brian Milstein Thinking Politically about Crisis Page 22

accompanied just an expanded sense of community. Something similar can be said about
the restructuring of international relations after World War II, the creation of the
United Nations, and the passage of various genocide and human rights conventions.
But it is also possible, and indeed likely, for participants in the crisis community
to use extant divides and boundaries strategically to privilege the voices of some over
others, forcing the latter to experience the crisis through the lens of social domination.
For those who find themselves alienated by social divides and boundaries from the crisis
community, the denial of voice in the crisis becomes a constituent part of the crisis
experience itself. At best, those denied due voice or recognition are treated
paternalistically, becoming “objects of charity or benevolence” otherwise deprived of
agency.49 From their purview, the object of crisis is extended to include not just the
“original” source of crisis but also those very structures through which they are denied
inclusion. Recalling Peirce’s example, the divides that segment social life become so
many “jammed doors” that marginalized actors must push through to have their voices
heard. For them, the situation transforms into an altogether different kind of crisis, which be
might call a “secondary crisis,” which combines the consciousness of the primary crisis
with the consciousness of structures of marginalization that prevent them from
adequately addressing the source of the crisis. Accordingly, the marginalized group can
be said to constitute its own, “secondary” crisis community, wherein the public object
comprises the very structures responsible for their disempowerment. However “tolerable”
the social divides and boundaries in question may have been prior to the crisis, they now
assume the center of attention: the urgency of the crisis shifts the threshold of
acceptability and issues in a renewed demand for justification.50
It is here that we might still locate some of the “emancipatory” potential sought
from the crisis concept by the radical thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries: it points at least the possibility of a metamorphosis of a crisis, which, even if it
did not originate in the political sphere, transforms into critical questions about the
basic structure of society that produce new claims for legitimation, new standards of

49
Fraser (n. 48): 19-20; see also Forst (n. 45): 4.
50
Forst (n. 45): 209-10, 213-14.
Brian Milstein Thinking Politically about Crisis Page 23

justification, and even new conceptions of justice. Such a situation, of course, does not
by itself mean that there will be active resistance, only that the legitimacy of the
prevailing order of things now stands exposed relative to usual. Whether or not as well as
what kind of action secondary crisis communities pursue are empirical matters that
depend on additional factors, such as mobilization capacities and resources.51 Moreover,
it follows that secondary crisis communities face all the same issues as other crisis
communities.

Theorizing Crisis

Although crisis as we know it today is a thoroughly modern concept, there is at

least one sense in which it may still be worth noting its Greek heritage. As Koselleck
notes, the Greek word “krisis” is originally associated with the idea of judgment and
decision; in the ancient polis, it referred to the process of bringing to trial, litigating, or
deciding a verdict. According to Koselleck, crisis in this sense lay at the center of the
constitutional order of the ancient polis.52 It was the site of the practice of justice, as
Aristotle states in the Nicomachean Ethics: “justice decides [krisis] between the just and
the unjust” (“dikē krisis tou dikaiou kai tou adikou”).53 Aristotle associated krisis, as the
faculty of just judgment, with archē as a defining mark of political community. For him it
was the ability of one to participate in “judgment and office” (kriseos kai archēs) that
qualified an individual to be considered a true citizen.54 This suggests a meaning that is
not merely juridical but political, to the extent that archē, as a mark of citizenship,
signifies not simply “officialdom” or the right to make judgments as a ruler, but the right

51
See Sidney Tarrow (2011) Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics, 3rd ed., Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press; Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly (2001) Dynamics of
Contention, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
52
Koselleck (n. 1): 358-60.
53
Aristotle (n.d.) Nichomachean Ethics, ed. (in Greek) J. Bywater and trans. H. Rackham (accessed 14 March,
2012 at http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0086.tlg010.perseus-grc1): 1134a.
54
Aristotle (1998) The Politics, trans. C.D.C. Reeve, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company: 66
[1275a22].
Brian Milstein Thinking Politically about Crisis Page 24

to initiate actions.55 Crisis is not just something that incurs suddenly upon our everyday
normative experience; it is constituted within it. It is not just something we reference; it
is something we litigate.56 One who deploys the concept of crisis, in other words, is
already effectively assuming for oneself the role of a citizen authorized to participate in a
political public and lay claim to the public object of crisis.
We have argued that the concept of crisis is a conceptual tool for converting
reflexive consciousness of our social world into action, and it was via this route of
thinking that we sought a broadly pragmatist approach to thinking politically about
crisis and its underlying presuppositions. A key implication of the argument presented
here is that crisis, as a concept to be applied in modern society, is dependent on the
discursive deployment of crisis consciousness. This does not mean that the objective
conditions of a would-be crisis do not “exist” until someone names it a crisis; but it does
mean that they cannot be acted upon as a crisis until those affected by these conditions
achieve and express consciousness of it. In order for participants to interpret something
wrong in the world as a “crisis,” they must undertake certain assumptions about their
situation and the event facing them. Crisis presupposes that the dysfunction arises from
within a social environment over which participants suppose themselves to possess some
degree of reflexive control, and it is from this supposition that participants can diagnose
an event as a crisis on which they must and can take action. In the end, it is the
supposed ability to take action that distinguishes a crisis from some other misfortune
that actors must more or less passively weather; it is what distinguishes crisis from divine
punishment, random tragedy, or “stuff happens.” But this dependence of crisis on crisis
consciousness betrays a catch, in that the dependence of crisis on the discursive
production, attribution, and contestation of crisis consciousness also opens wide space
for controversial claims about crises, what they are, and how they should be handled. It
allows for the “false” declaration of crises, for the failure to recognize “real” crises, for

55
Patchen Markell (2006) ‘The Rule of the People: Arendt, Archê, and Democracy,’ the American Political
Science Review 100: 1-14; Kalyvas (n. 4): 247-9.
56
Cf. Habermas (1971, n. 4): 214.
Brian Milstein Thinking Politically about Crisis Page 25

the abuse and overuse of the crisis concept, and—as Koselleck feared—for the dilution
of its effectiveness as a concept.57
The point can be made with regard to the way crisis consciousness is exploited by
privileged parties interested in consolidating power.58 One common tactic is to claim a
need to curtail certain liberties, democratic procedures, and demands for legitimation in
the name of restoring order and security. This distinction between the demands of
stability and the demands of legitimacy has a long pedigree in modern political thought.
On this, broadly “Hobbesian” account, a good society is first and foremost an orderly and
stable society: normative aspirations toward a “good” or “just” society are dependent on
the prior acquisition of a certain level of order and stability that must be secured by
sovereign state institutions. This assumption, while it has some merit to it, can it can
also be misleading if it promotes the assumption that order and stability are not just
worthy values to be pursued in society but necessary preconditions for all other values.
This problem has been the focus of substantial debate over the prerogatives, legitimacy,
and legal limits of “emergency powers” in constitutional democracies.59 While there are
indeed crisis situations that require, on technical grounds, the delegation of decision-
making authority to an actor the resources and authority to act with agility, we must be
wary of reifying this requirement into a conceptual distinction between the
requirements of order and stability, on one hand, and those of justice, deliberation, and
legitimacy, on the other, wherein the latter must answer to the former.60 From here, it is
hardly a large step to the claim that the norms of democratic deliberation depend on
there being some extra-deliberative authority “who decides on the exception.”61

57
Koselleck (n. 1), 397-400.
58
Posner and Vermeule (2009, n. 3) and (2010, n. 3); Boltanski (n. 3), 129-36; Agamben (n. 3).
59
See note 3, above.
60
While many legal scholars use “crisis” and “emergency” interchangeably, Levinson and Balkin distinguish
the two on precisely this point in their analysis of “constitutional crises.” For them, an emergency is a
moment of urgency that may require extraordinary measures; only when there arises an actual conflict over
legitimate use of power does the situation become a crisis. See (n. 28): 714-7.
61
Carl Schmitt (1985 [1934]), Political Theology, trans. George Schwab, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press: 5;
Gross and Ní Aoláin (2006, n. 3): 162-70.
Brian Milstein Thinking Politically about Crisis Page 26

On the other hand, if it is the case that crisis consciousness develops through the
reciprocal claims and mutual recognition that are constitutive of a deliberating public,
then this order of prioritization cannot hold. To be fair, there are few political theorists
today who would outright endorse such a distinction. John Rawls, for example, stresses
that stability in society must always be “stability for the right reasons.”62 Yet the fact
that he says little about what is to be done when faced with stability for the “wrong”
reasons, let alone when stability is not even an option, lends a kind of quietist credence
to the idea that when stability is not already achieved, principles of justice and
deliberation are of secondary importance. As a basic concept (Grundbegriff) of modernity,
the power of the crisis concept consists precisely in the way it is used by communicative
actors to stimulate collective reflection and action with regard to the way we live
together in a society. This means crisis consciousness, as well as the doxastic and
practical commitments it undertakes, arises in the last instance from the bottom up, even at
those times when it must be provisionally administered from the top down. One who
posits that crisis is a time of necessity in contrast to a time of deliberative reflection is,
intentionally or not, concealing this foundation.
This provides all the more reason to make the concept of crisis explicit from the
point of view of political theory. Even if we can no longer abide a simple identification of
crisis with emancipation, this does not negate the possibility that crises can be occasions
for contesting social structures, transforming solidarities, and pursuing political change.
Crises challenge our assumptions about the social world and the premises upon which we
organize our lives in cooperation with one another, and our reflexive consciousness of
crises in general compels us to wonder about the ways in which our normative
conceptions of ourselves, as participants in political communities, are based on fallible
and incomplete knowledge of our evermore complex social environment. Our modern
political condition is defined by little if not the awareness that those things we take to
be given today may yet prove contingent and problematic, and it is this knowledge that
drives us as citizens, social scientists, and political theorists to reflect on the conditions
of social cooperation in the first place.
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John Rawls (1993) Political Liberalism, New York: Columbia University Press: 140-4, 390-2.