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AHR Forum
Crisis: A Useful Category of Post–Social
Scientific Historical Analysis?
J. B. SHANK
IN 1971, AS THE ORIGINATING DEBATES about the “general crisis of the seventeenth
century” were reaching their twilight, Randolph Starn stepped into the role of Minerva’s owl to offer a set of reflections on the category at the center of these fecund
historical exchanges. In “Historians and ‘Crisis,’ ” published in Past and Present, the
journal that originated and sustained the discussion of the “general crisis” during its
classic phase, Starn did not so much intervene in the debates as step back from them
so as to consider the category, “crisis,” that sat at their center.1 His intervention,
therefore, served as an invitation to historians to reflect critically and dispassionately
upon the category that was then generating so much historiographical heat. From
a position almost four decades further removed from these originating disputes, we
have now undertaken in this forum to reflect upon the continuing relevance of the
general crisis framework to historians today. In the spirit of Starn, then, this contribution is offered as an invitation to further interrogate the conceptual nature and
value of the category “crisis” as a tool of historical analysis.
There is no need to recapitulate the comprehensive history of “crisis” as a historiographical category that Starn offered. Instead, two guiding questions will be
pursued: (1) Upon what conceptual and historiographical bases did the notion of
“crisis” at the center of the “general crisis of the seventeenth century” argument
rest? and (2) Of what analytical value is this particular notion of crisis to historians
today? Viewed in hindsight, the striking feature of the “general crisis” debate as it
evolved after 1954 is the way that it served as a crystallization of and catalyst for social
scientific history as it had developed since the eighteenth century.2 This is especially
true with respect to the category “crisis,” for the term was used in these debates in
the way it had evolved within social scientific history over the preceding two centuries. A brief history of the term can illustrate this development.
Etymologists trace the origin of the word “crisis” back to the Greek word kpisis,
meaning discrimination or decision. Starn notes this origin, and also that the word
passed into modern historical writing with the founder of the genre himself, ThucyRandolph Starn, “Historians and ‘Crisis,’ ” Past and Present 52 (August 1971): 3–22.
Useful surveys of the “general crisis” debate are found in ibid., 18–20; Theodore K. Rabb, The
Struggle for Stability in Early Modern Europe (New York, 1975), 3–34; Philip Benedict, “Introduction,”
in Philip Benedict and Myron P. Gutmann, eds., Early Modern Europe: From Crisis to Stability (Newark,
Del., 2005), 11–30; and J. H. Elliott, “The General Crisis in Retrospect: A Debate without End,” ibid.,
31- 51.
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2
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dides, who used the word kpisis six times in his History of the Peloponnesian War. Starn
also notes, however, that Thucydides’ most developed use of the term occurs in his
discussion of the plague in Athens, an account that drew heavily on Greek medical
discourse. By the fourth century B.C.E., Greek physicians such as Hippocrates had
already developed a scientific notion of crisis rooted in theories of bodily stability
and disruption and the empirical study of disease. It was largely this technical, scientific notion of crisis that Thucydides imported into his writing. Over the subsequent centuries, moreover, medical writing sustained the vitality of the term, most
notably in the canonization of Hippocratic medicine by Galen in the second century
C.E. By contrast, the concept of crisis had little presence in classical or medieval
historical writing. Accordingly, “crisis” entered the European vernaculars largely
after 1400 as a term associated with medical terminology and connected to the revival
of antique medicine that was a characteristic feature of the European Renaissance.3
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) dates the first occurrence of “crisis” in English to the 1543 works of the “Famous Chirugion Maister Iohn Vigo,” who wrote that
the word “sygnifeyeth iudgemente” and “a sodayne chaunge in a disease.”4 Throughout sixteenth-century Europe, “crisis” remained largely a term of medical jargon in
this way. An indicator of its early narrow and technical meaning is found in Jean
Nicot’s pioneering dictionary of the emerging French vernacular, Thresor de la langue
françoyse, published in 1606. This compendium of sixteenth-century French terms
contained no entry for crise even though entries for “illness” or “disease” (maladie)
and “doctor” (medecin) were included.5 The work of the twentieth-century etymologist Walther von Wartburg further confirms this understanding, since he connects
the birth and initial dissemination of the term “crisis” in early modern French to the
reception of the widely read books of the physician and surgeon Ambroise Paré
(1510–1590).6 Similarly, the Florentine Accademia della Crusca’s first-ever dictionary of Tuscan Italian, Il Vocabolario, published in 1612, contained no entry for crisi.7
“Crisis,” therefore, first appeared in the modern European vernaculars through
its importation from technical medical terminology. The conceptual understanding
of the term as a category of historical analysis also carried with it this history. The
OED gives the technical medical understanding of “crisis” as its primary definition,
denoting it as “the point in the progress of a disease when an important development
or change takes place which is decisive of recovery or death; the turning-point of a
disease for better or worse; [or] . . . any marked or sudden variation occurring in the
progress of a disease.”8 French and Italian dictionaries reveal a similar understanding. Yet historical dictionaries of all three languages also reveal that by the seventeenth century, a figurative usage of the word had developed, denoting “a vitally
important or decisive stage in the progress of anything; a turning point; and . . . a
state of affairs in which a decisive change for better or worse is imminent.”9 The first
edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française of 1694 speaks of “Une affaire
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
Starn, “Historians and ‘Crisis,’ ” 3–5.
“Crisis,” Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (New York, 1989).
Jean Nicot, Thresor de la langue françoyse, tant ancienne que moderne (Paris, 1606).
“Crise,” in Walther von Wartburg, Französisches etymologisches Wörterbuch (Basel, 1946).
Il Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca (Venice, 1612).
“Crisis,” OED.
Ibid.
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dans sa crise,” for example, and Salvatore Battaglia’s Grande dizionario della lingua
italiana cites texts from the seventeenth century that speak of spiritual crises among
individuals and crises of the public and political collectivity.10
The presence of these figurative meanings reveals that by 1600, new understandings of the self, community, and the dynamics of the res publica were forged in Europe through the deployment of scientific terminology drawn from the new empirical
natural sciences of the period. The historical use of the notion of crisis to describe
a moment of intense disruption that precedes a decisive transformation came to life
in this nexus. The term also acquired its characteristic modern and Western character at the same time as it came to be deployed in the new discourses of the human
sciences born of the eighteenth century, discourses that made explicit use of new
scientific terminologies and conceptualizations to frame new understandings of human experience. The OED entry for “crisis” charts this shift nicely, since it notes a
change in the figurative meaning of the term from a 1603 medical-astrological usage
to denote a conjunction of stars that prefigures a decisive change in the human condition, to B. Rudyard’s 1659 musings about the “chrysis of Parliaments” that will
show whether “they will live or die,” and then M. Davies’s 1715 discussion of the
“great crisises in Church and State.”11 In these three cases, the explicit importation
of the medical notion of crisis into general discussions of collective historical change
is apparent, along with the scientization of the term into its modern form.
The FRANTEXT database of the Project for American and French Research on
the Treasury of the French Language (ARTFL) reveals a similar transformation.12
While it notes more than 4,000 uses of the word “crisis” in its corpus of over 2,600
French texts sampled broadly between 1600 and the present, almost 90 percent of
those usages come in works published after 1820. Only 23 occurrences are found in
the entire corpus of seventeenth-century texts, and since FRANTEXT does not contain technical medical treatises, these are examples of the early figurative use of the
term. The prevalence of this usage begins to spike upward after 1700, with 36 occurrences found during the first third of the eighteenth century (1700–1729), 54
during the second third (1730–1759), and 106 during the final third (1760–1789). The
database notes a further increase to 149 usages during the revolutionary years of
1790–1820. The cited authors revealed by the ARTFL search engine also attest to
the connection between this increasing usage and the creation of the new human
sciences of society, politics, and economy in the eighteenth century.13 While far less
precise in its documentation of these changes, the Dizionario etimilogico italiano
produced by Carlo Battisti and Giovanni Alessio confirms a similar transformation
10 “Crise,” in Dictionnaire de l’Académie française (Paris, 1694); “Crisi,” in Salvatore Battaglia,
Grande dizionario della lingua italiana (Turin, 1970).
11 “Crisis,” OED.
12 This text database is housed at the University of Chicago, and is accessible, by subscription, at
http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/ARTFL/databases/TLF/.
13 The first spike after 1700, for example, is connected to the presence of the Duc de Saint-Simon’s
memoirs of the court of Louis XIV in the corpus along with Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, while the
second is connected to the presence in the database of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, Mirabeau’s
physiocratic treatise L’Ami des hommes, and historical works by Mably and Voltaire. The last increase
is connected to the further addition of Rousseau’s collected works into the textual sample, while texts
by Marat, Robespierre, and Condorcet contribute to the continued expansion of “historical crisis discourse” during the revolutionary era.
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within the Italian language. Battisti and Alessio note the arrival of crisi in the fifteenth century as a medical term, and then trace its acquisition of a moral signification in the seventeenth century and a new usage within the discourses of politics
and economics in the nineteenth century.14
In sum, this lexicographic data documents the simultaneous birth in the seventeenth century of a new scientific conception of state, society, and politics, and a new
terminological understanding of crisis as a technical concept within this new social
scientific framework. Further evidence for this genealogy is found in the lexicographic history of specific kinds of crisis, such as “ministerial crisis” or “dynastic
crisis.”15 Only in Emile Littré’s historical Dictionnaire de la langue française of 1872–
1877 are precise phrases such as crise ministerielle and crise politique registered for
the first time in a French dictionary.16 The eighth edition of the Dictionnaire de
l’Académie française, published in 1932–1935 (the seventh edition appeared in 1877),
records crise industrielle and crise commerciale for the first time in a French dictionary, yet Littré’s Italian counterpart Battaglia found uses of the term crisi economica
in the mid-nineteenth-century works of the Lombard economist Carlo Cattaneo.17
The OED likewise cites John Stuart Mill’s Treatise on Political Economy of 1848 as
pioneering in its definition of a “commercial crisis” as that moment when “a great
number of merchants and traders, at once, either have, or apprehend that they shall
have, a difficulty in meeting their engagements.”18
Karl Marx was another of these mid-nineteenth-century pioneers of social scientific crisis discourse, and it is through his work that this longue durée history of the
historical concept of crisis finds its precise connection to the “general crisis of the
seventeenth century.”19 When E. J. Hobsbawm published the article in Past and
Present in 1954 that all parties agree was the inaugural event of the “general crisis”
discussions of the postwar years, he was at one level merely advancing what was by
then a century-old project in social scientific historical analysis.20 Marxist historiography, of which Hobsbawm was (and is) a distinguished practitioner, had developed by this date a fully formed understanding of the perceived economic and social
14 “Crisi,” in Carlo Battisti and Giovanni Alessio, eds., Dizionario etimologico italiano (Florence,
1951).
15 ARTFL suggests that the earliest precise social scientific pairing in French was crise d’Etat, which
dates from the early eighteenth century and was used by the Duc de Saint-Simon and then Rousseau.
Auguste Comte is the first author in the FRANTEXT database to use the term crise sociale in 1830,
although Alexis de Tocqueville used the same term in his Democracy in America, published in 1835. Emile
Durkheim gets credit for the first use of the phrase crise économique in the FRANTEXT database in
1893.
16 “Crise,” in Emile Littré, Dictionnaire de la langue française (Paris, 1863–1877). The entry also traces
a history of this term that goes back to pioneering social scientists such as Montesquieu and Rousseau
as the originators of these social scientific usages.
17 “Crise,” in Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, 8th ed. (Paris, 1932–1935); “Crisi,” in Battaglia,
Grande dizionario.
18 “Crisis,” OED.
19 On Marx and “crisis theory,” see Karl Marx, Capital, trans. Ben Fowkes and David Fernbach (New
York, 1976), pt. 2, chaps. 7–9, 13–21, and pt. 3, chap. 30; Julian Borchardt, “The Theory of Crises,” in
Karl Marx, Capital, The Communist Manifesto, and Other Writings, ed. Max Eastman (New York, 1932),
302–314; and Michael Hardt, “The Violence of Capital,” New Left Review 48 (November–December
2007): 153–160.
20 E. J. Hobsbawm, “The General Crisis of the European Economy in the 17th Century,” Past and
Present 5 (1954): 33–53. It should be remembered as well that in its early years, Past and Present carried
a subtitle: “A Journal of Scientific History.”
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crises attendant to the passage from medieval feudalism to modern capitalism.21
Hobsbawm added a new precision to this well-developed framework by arguing in
largely economic terms for a general crisis of the seventeenth century, and when
figures such as Hugh Trevor-Roper and later Theodore Rabb built on Hobsbawm’s
precise socio-economic analysis to build arguments for a general political and cultural crisis of the seventeenth century as well, they were further confirming the general applicability of social scientific conceptualizations to historiography as a
whole.22 The quick ascent of the “general crisis of the seventeenth century” framework to paradigm status within writing about European history further proved the
widespread influence and acceptance of these social scientific approaches within
history writ large. For rather than questioning the nature of the concept itself, or
debating its value as an analytical category, the discussion that Hobsbawm triggered
quickly became centered on exactly what kind of crisis it was, what its proper chronological and geographical scope might be, and what empirical tests best measured
its impact and legacy.
In short, the rapid consensus that solidified after 1954—that a general crisis of
some sort did occur in the seventeenth century, even if its precise nature was unclear—derived in large part from an equally general consensus that the social scientific methodologies that had created this conceptual framework in the first place
were valid, and that historical crises such as this one were real things that historians
could and should study. Few before Starn thought to reflect upon the conceptual
substance of this category, or to question the epistemological status of “crises” as
objects of historical analysis. This was because the assumptions that had generated
the terminology were by this point so naturalized and internalized that they could
be taken for granted.
Among those assumptions was the idea that historical entities akin to the human
body existed in the past (in this case an entity called “seventeenth-century society”),
and that these entities could be objects of scientific historical analysis. Also assumed
was the applicability of the conceptual tools used by medical science to understand
health in human bodies (in this case “crisis theory”) when trying to understand the
cognate objects of historical science (in this case “seventeenth-century society”).
Everything rested, therefore, on the conceptual tie that assumed the body-like existence of a thing called “society” in the seventeenth century that could be studied
scientifically in the way that other natural bodies could. And while the contingent
artificiality of this conceptual analogy is now evident to us, its validity remained an
unquestioned assumption throughout the early emergence of the general crisis debate.
Recent shifts of intellectual perspective, however, have made clear the tenuous
nature of these assumptions. Viewed from this newly detached vantage point, the
general crisis debate now appears as a classic product of Enlightenment social scientific history, and something that cannot be evaluated without evaluating the social
scientific frameworks that overdetermined its creation. Two recent trends in thought
21 This context can be sampled by reading the issues of the Marxist journal Science and Society published between 1950 and 1953.
22 Hugh Trevor-Roper, “The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century,” Past and Present 16 (1959):
31–64; Rabb, The Struggle for Stability. A useful compendium of the classic initial phase of the debate
is Trevor Aston, ed., Crisis in Europe, 1560–1660: Essays from “Past and Present” (London, 1965).
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have especially put us into a more critical relationship with this conceptual framework. One is critical science studies, which has taught us to question the alleged
naturalness of the positivist gaze upon a supposedly detached and objectified nature.
Critical science studies has also taught us to see the ways that the supposedly
detached objects of positive science and their allegedly neutral and objective representations are in fact jointly made through processes of human instrumental inscription. What this perspective points to is the way that the “seventeenth-century
crisis” was not a detached object “out there” awaiting discovery by rigorous empirical
historians, but a conceptual frame that led empirical details to be joined together
with theoretical assumptions in the production of both an object of study (seventeenth-century society) and its characteristic attributes (crisis dynamics) at the same
time.
Bruno Latour has been especially prolific in arguing that society is not a natural
object out there awaiting discovery by our detached scientific gaze. Rather, like the
human body produced by medical science, society is a category of inscription that
allows observed empirical effects to be wedded with culturally mediated rationalities
in the co-production of an understanding of nature and its allegedly natural representation simultaneously.23 Latour has used the name “The Modern Constitution
of Truth” for the approach to knowing that first begins by dividing things between
a detached knowing subject, on the one hand, and a detached and objective “world
out there,” on the other. Modernist science for Latour begins with the acceptance
of this constitution as the fundamental feature of knowing, and modernist social
science likewise begins once an entity called “society” is posited as an extant object
out there in the world and then allegedly detached, disinterested historian-subjects
make claims to know the behavior of this body through the study of the objective
empirical effects it is said to produce.
Latour’s work centers on deconstructing the naturalness of this modernist conception of science, including its use to pursue the social scientific study of science
itself. His efforts also dovetail with the historical analysis of Keith Baker and others,
who, following the lead of Michel Foucault’s Collège de France lectures of the 1970s,
offer us something like a historical account of the making of the modernist constitution with respect to the social sciences.24 These historians talk of the seventeenth-century invention of society as a product of a new scientific conception of the
self and community within the European res publica. Society was invented in this
context, they argue, when the concepts and languages of the new natural sciences
23 Perhaps the best short introduction to Latour’s thinking in this area is found in his review essay
“Postmodern? No, Simply Amodern! Steps towards an Anthropology of Science,” Studies in the History
and Philosophy of Science 21, no. 1 (1990): 145–171. See also Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to
Follow Engineers and Scientists through Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1988); Latour, We Have Never Been
Modern (Cambridge, Mass., 1993).
24 See especially Keith Michael Baker, “Enlightenment and the Institution of Society: Notes for a
Conceptual History,” in W. F. B. Melching and W. R. E. Velema, eds., Main Trends in Cultural History
(Amsterdam, 1994), 95–120. Also Baker, “The Early History of the Term ‘Social Science,’ ” Annals of
Science 20 (1964 –1965): 211–226; Baker, “Science and the Social Order in the Old Regime,” Minerva
10 (1972): 502–508; and Baker, “A Foucauldian Account of the French Revolution?” in Jan Goldstein,
ed., Foucault and the Writing of History (Oxford, 1994), 187–205. The relevant lectures of Michel Foucault
have now been collected in English translation. See Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures
at the Collège de France (New York, 2007) and “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de
France, 1975–1976 (New York, 2003).
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of the seventeenth century were deployed toward re-imagining fundamental categories such as sovereignty, publicness, and the political commonweal. Viewed in this
way, the history of crisis as a category of social scientific historical analysis becomes
one piece of the larger history of the human sciences. Our recognition of this historicity, moreover, puts those attuned to it into a new relationship with the concept
itself.
In particular, how, in the wake of this historical self-consciousness, is it possible
to accept without scrutiny the alleged naturalness of the notion of crisis assumed in
the general crisis discussions? What, for example, is the precise site of this crisis once
one questions the organic reality of a society existing “out there” and operating
according to natural and regular laws? And even if one accepts that an entity called
society does exist, that it has natural and lawful patterns of behavior, and that it can
thus be likened in its activities to a human body, is the medical notion of crisis an
appropriate category for examining this particular “natural body”? In crisis medicine, doctors confront a body that is fixed and finite in its spatial and physical dimensions, and then focus on the decisive moment when this finite body hinges on
the brink of life or death. But does society ever admit of such spatial and temporal
finitude? What, for example, are the finite boundaries of society? In the case of
seventeenth-century Europe, society extends around the world, yet analysis of the
general crisis of the seventeenth century is restricted to events in Europe. To be
coherent, should not society be either a global entity, in which case its specific analytical value for European history is lost, or a local (or in this case European) entity,
in which case its coherence as a natural system is undermined? These conceptual
problems are hard to remove, and to them must be added the physical problem of
treating as a crisis-prone organism an entity that does not have any clear physiological existence. How, for example, can society have crises when it is not a physical
being subject to mortality in the biological sense? And given the difficulties involved
in conceiving of society as passing from the infinitude of life to the finitude of death,
how can historical crises be “out there” awaiting our discovery, and why are they not
better understood as conceptual creations of analysts who deploy this terminology
to bring order to an otherwise scattered array of empirical facts?
Skepticism about the reifications at the center of the general crisis debates makes
it hard to argue for salvaging this framework from out of the historiographical dustbin. Nevertheless, approaching historical change through the notion of crisis is not
wholly misguided. Starn once again offers the right perspective on these complexities, and toward this end he notes two ways in which the preceding analysis can be
justly criticized. One involves the supposed rigor or lack thereof of the notion of crisis
as an analytical historical category. Clearly one cannot help but be skeptical, for all
the reasons explained above, of the social scientific understanding of historical crisis
that was indeed central to the general crisis of the seventeenth-century rubric from
its inception. Yet if it is the scientism of this category that is suspect, one must
accordingly be self-conscious about avoiding scientism when questioning the concept. This entails recognizing that the problem is not an absence of appropriate rigor
in this case, and the need to shore it up, but the claim that history depends upon
scientific rigor at all. Starn asks, for example, whether historians ever use categories
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in rigorous, scientific ways, and whether it is a problem that they do not.25 Historical
analysis does not in fact suffer when it lacks scientific rigor, and following Starn, the
message here is not a call for more rigor in the use of the concept of crisis by historians, but rather an appeal to question the urge toward rigorous scientism within
historical analysis.
Accepting that historians are not empirical natural scientists but practitioners of
a particular kind of hermeneutical science, one with deep connections to storytelling,
the question, then, is not whether they are warranted in deploying the concept of
crisis at all, but rather the kind of deployment that is appropriate. Starn notes, and
this is his second point, that in bringing the concept of crisis into modern historical
discourse, Thucydides was drawing upon not only medical discourse, but also the
rhetorical tools of Greek drama. Kpisis in ancient Greek meant “decisive moment
of decision,” and Thucydides gave the term a rhetorical function in his history by
using it to frame events in terms of the structures of classical drama. The crisis
framework, writes Starn, “functioned to stage events with the tragic irony that
[Thucydides] shared with Aeschylus and Sophocles . . . As much as key moments in
a process of change, crisis situations became moments of truth where the significance
of men and events were brought to light.”26
For Starn, Thucydides’ double use of crisis as a medical concept and a vehicle
for dramatic rhetoric points to the wider history of the category within historical
discourse, one where the two faces of Clio, science and rhetoric, harmonize. The
notion of crisis deployed within discussions of the general crisis of the seventeenth
century, however, was not so synergistic. These discussions largely deployed “crisis”
in the scientific sense while deriving whatever rhetorical force the term carried from
this scientific basis. Correcting this imbalance might, therefore, be a fruitful step
forward, and Frederic Jameson charts a course in this direction in his book A Singular
Modernity.27 Wrestling from within a basically Marxist framework with the contemporary trends of a still-dynamic historical modernity, Jameson ultimately comes to
question the material and ontological reality of the decisive ruptures and breaks that
modernist social science makes foundational to developmental stories of historical
change. The “general crisis” framework is one such decisive moment of modernitymaking change, and since for Jameson “modernity is not a concept, philosophical
or otherwise, but a narrative category,”28 his work invites us to rethink modern historical development through an invitation to critically scrutinize our categories of
historical narration.
Pulling Starn and Jameson together, what would it mean to think of crisis as a
category within a rhetorical understanding of historical development, one engaged
in Jameson’s project of understanding modernity through its narration, not its scientific analysis? An illustration is offered by another contemporary Marxoid thinker,
Antonio Negri, in his 1970 book on the bourgeois philosophy of René Descartes.29
Starn, “Historians and ‘Crisis,’ ” 20–22.
Ibid., 4.
27 Frederic Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London, 2002).
28 Ibid., 39– 40.
29 Antonio Negri, Descartes politico, o Della ragionevole ideologia (Milan, 1970); translated as Political
Descartes: Reason Ideology and the Bourgeois Project, trans. Matteo Mandarini and Alberto Toscano
(London, 2006). My citations will be to the translated edition.
25
26
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Negri treats the early development of Descartes’s philosophy through its connection
to the general crisis of the seventeenth century, going so far as to date the crisis
precisely to the years 1619–1622 and citing the key articles by Hobsbawm and TrevorRoper, and the seminal 1965 compendium edited by Trevor Aston, to support his
claims.30 This usage smacks of the literal and untenable scientism criticized above.
It also points, at first blush, at least, to the worst kind of reductive materialist intellectual history. Yet Negri is too much the neo-Hegelian historicist philosopher
and non-dialectical historian of modern thought to fall fully into these social scientific traps. As his account of the seventeenth-century crisis that shapes Descartes’s
philosophy unfolds, therefore, it gets more richly insightful as it departs from a literal
social scientism. In the end, “crisis” comes to function as a rhetorical category in
Negri’s work, since his analysis ultimately avoids reducing Descartes to a set of
underlying determinants and instead situates him within a field of anxious historical dilemmas that force Descartes to respond in powerful and creative ways.
As such, the seventeenth-century crisis becomes in Negri’s usage a decisive moment of change, one without inherent causal logics, but one productive of instaurative innovation nevertheless. In this way, the book recommends crisis as a useful
category of historical analysis despite its oblique relation to the general crisis framework.
Viewed metaphorically, and treated as a rhetorical term of art rather than as a
literal term of scientific and deterministic objectivity, the concept of crisis becomes
a powerful tool in Negri’s historical analysis of Descartes. This success confirms both
the value of escaping from scientific rigor when thinking about this historical concept, and the need to remain flexible when evaluating its use today. The time has
passed when scientific debates about the precise ontological nature of the seventeenth-century crisis will occupy the attention of historians. But this does not mean
that the framework itself should be discarded forever. Rabb’s 1975 contribution to
the classic discussion still stands, in fact, as a model for how we might approach the
seventeenth century through the framework of the general crisis rubric.31 Rabb begins by reflecting on the debate itself, and by carefully considering what the category
of crisis will mean as he deploys it. Yet his is no literal crisis in the social body of
the seventeenth century that determines other empirical outcomes in its vicinity. It
is rather a metamorphic understanding rooted in a pervasive sense of uncertainty
that prefigures an equally pervasive assertion of control in an attempt to resolve these
anxieties. As a metaphor and analytical-narrative device that works to show similarities between a range of different yet synchronous areas (his analysis ranges from
Baroque painting to absolutist politics), Rabb’s use of the crisis idea works to open
interpretive perspectives, not to shut them down in the name of causal determinism.
He also allows the notion of crisis to remain evocative more than determinative, thus
using the category as a hermeneutic lens and not as a scientific variable. In short,
Rabb uses the crisis concept to pose the problem of modernity’s emergence, not to
explain it away scientifically, and this is the virtue of his approach. Negri’s use is
similar, and together these very different historians show us that the general crisis
30
31
Negri, Political Descartes, 114 –118. See also n. 21 above.
Rabb, The Struggle for Authority.
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of the seventeenth century remains a powerful and productive framework for future
historical work so long as its value is properly perceived.
J. B. Shank is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Minnesota, where he has taught since 2000. His book The Newton Wars
and the Beginning of the French Enlightenment has just been published by the
University of Chicago Press, and he has a second, related book under review,
titled Before Voltaire: Newton and the Making of Mathematical Physics in France,
1680–1715. His recent work is organized around the title “Science before the
Arts and Sciences” and centers on the making of the modern mathematical sciences within the unfamiliar disciplinary world of early modern Europe.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
OCTOBER 2008