Crisis theory and the historical imagination

ABSTRACT

This article makes a theoretical contribution to the constructivist and cultural political economy literatures on crisis. While these new approaches have highlighted the imaginary dimensions of crisis, they have neglected the specifically historical forms of imagination through which events are construed and constructed as crises. In particular, they have yet to adequately theorise how the recollection of prior crises might interact with efforts to diagnose and resolve a crisis in some later present. I respond to this lacuna by developing a novel set of tools for analysing the meta-historical dimensions of crisis. These include a typology that identifies three distinct ways of recalling past crises, and a concept of ‘history-production’, which captures how different interpretive practices feed into the diagnosis and negotiation of crisis episodes. Taken together these tools help illuminate a complex interaction not only between historical analogies, narratives, and lessons, but also between these representational modes and the imaginary dimensions of crisis.

KEYWORDS:

• crisis
• constructivist political economy
• cultural political economy
• history
• ideas
• narrative

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This article has benefited from conversations with David Bailey, Nina Boy, André Broome, Christian de Cock, Marieke de Goede, Martijn Konings, Andreas Langenohl, Ronen Palan, Elke Schwarz and Ute Tellmann. I would like to thank them for their time and insight. I would also like to thank the RIPE editors and three anonymous reviewers for their challenging but constructive criticism.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Jacob Burckhardt provides a particularly clear illustration of this process in his 1868 lectures on The Crises of History (1979: 213–68).

2. With underconsumptionism, for example, scholars simply identify a different motor behind the tendency towards terminal crisis. On the varieties of underconsumptionism and their critics, see Bleaney (1976).

3. An ‘accumulation regime’ refers to a sustainable pattern of investment and consumption within a capitalist social formation (Aglietta, 1979: 68). A ‘mode of regulation’ refers to the ensemble of norms and institutions that stabilise this pattern and enable its reproduction (Lipietz, 1987: 14).

4. The most recent among these is a return to heterodox theories of money and finance (e.g. Lapavitsas, 2009; Lucarelli, 2011; Nesvetailova, 2010). There has also been a steady stream of further advances in the Regulation approach, both within and beyond the original Parisian school (cf. Boyer, 2013; Overbeek, 2004; Palan, 2006).

5. In his attempt at summary Howard Davies (2010) identifies some fifty different accounts of financial crisis post-2008.

6. I discuss this at length in a forthcoming article entitled ‘Conjuring the spirit of multilateralism: histories of crisis management during the great credit crash’.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Amin Samman

Amin Samman is Lecturer in International Political Economy at City University London, UK. His research concerns the temporal and historical dimensions of contemporary capitalism, with particular reference to global finance. He is a founding co-editor of Finance and Society, a new journal for the post-disciplinary study of money and finance.