Crisis Under Critique: How People Assess, Transform, and Respond to Critical Situations (New Directions in Critical Theory, 78)

Product Description The word “crisis” denotes a break, a discontinuity, a rupture―a moment after which the normal order can continue no longer. Yet our political vocabulary today is suffused with the rhetoric of crisis, to the point that supposed abnormalities have been normalized. How can the notion of crisis be rethought in order to take stock of―and challenge―our understanding of the many predicaments in which we find ourselves?Instead of diagnosing emergencies, Didier Fassin, Axel Honneth, and an assembly of leading thinkers examine how people experience, interpret, and contribute to the making of and the response to critical situations. Contributors inquire into the social production of crisis, evaluating a wide range of cases on five continents through the lenses of philosophy, sociology, anthropology, political science, history, and economics. Considering social movements, intellectual engagements, affected communities, and reflexive perspectives, the book foregrounds the perspectives of those most closely involved, bringing out the immediacy of crisis. Featuring analysis from below as well as above, from the inside as well as the outside, Crisis Under Critique is a singular intervention that utterly recasts one of today’s most crucial―yet most ambiguous―concepts. Review Neither crisis nor critique can be treated wholly theoretically, abstracted from particular political and economic conditions. The approach of this book, with its highly structured, formal-intellectual organization and its insistent attention to grounded material experience, is thus admirably suited to its aims. There is constant attention to both the theoretical and the empirical. That rich specificity makes each chapter a pleasure to read, for it enables each author to capture the immediacy of crisis and the purpose that animates critique. -- Anne Norton, author of Leo Strauss and the Politics of American EmpireRich in originality, this collection revisits the classic tropes of critique and crisis, but reorients our relationship to them. In taking the apprehension of crisis and the generation of critique as a topic to be explored, it opens up valuable new horizons of inquiry. -- David Owen, author of What Do We Owe to Refugees? About the Author Didier Fassin is the James Wolfensohn Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, a director of studies at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, and former chair in public health at the Collège de France. He is coeditor of A Time for Critique (Columbia, 2019), among many other books.Axel Honneth is Jack C. Weinstein Professor for the Humanities in the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University and was formerly professor of social philosophy at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, where he also was the director of the Institute for Social Research. He is the author of numerous books, including Freedom’s Right: The Social Foundations of Democratic Life (Columbia, 2014).