Crisis: A useful category of post-social scientific historical analysis?

American Historical Review

Volumn 113, Issue 4, 2008, Pages 1090-1099

  Shank, J B ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 54349103536     PISSN: 00028762     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/ahr.113.4.1090     Document Type: Review

References (49)

1. Randolph Starn, "Historians and 'Crisis,' " Past and Present 52 (August 1971): 3-22.
2. Useful surveys of the "general crisis" debate are found in ibid., 18-20;
3. Theodore K. Rabb, The Struggle for Stability in Early Modern Europe (New York, 1975), 3-34;
4. Philip Benedict, "Introduction," in Philip Benedict and Myron P. Gutmann, eds., Early Modern Europe: From Crisis to Stability (Newark, Del., 2005), 11-30;
5. and J. H. Elliott, "The General Crisis in Retrospect: A Debate without End," ibid., 31-51.
6. Starn, "Historians and 'Crisis,' " 3-5.
7. "Crisis," Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (New York, 1989).
8. Jean Nicot, Thresor de la langue françoyse, tant ancienne que moderne (Paris, 1606).
9. "Crise," in Walther von Wartburg, Französisches etymologisches Wörterbuch (Basel, 1946).
10. Il Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca (Venice, 1612).
11. "Crisis," OED.
12. Ibid.
13. "Crise," in Dictionnaire de l'Académie française (Paris, 1694);
14. "Crisi," in Salvatore Battaglia, Grande dizionario della lingua italiana (Turin, 1970).
15. "Crisis," OED.
16. 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/.
17. 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.
18. "Crisi," in Carlo Battisti and Giovanni Alessio, eds., Dizionario etimologico italiano (Florence, 1951).
19. 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.
20. "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.
21. "Crise," in Dictionnaire de l'Académie française, 8th ed. (Paris, 1932-1935);
22. "Crisi," in Battaglia, Grande dizionario.
23. "Crisis," OED.
24. 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;
25. Julian Borchardt, "The Theory of Crises," in Karl Marx, Capital, The Communist Manifesto, and Other Writings, ed. Max Eastman (New York, 1932), 302-314;
26. and Michael Hardt, "The Violence of Capital," New Left Review 48 (November-December 2007): 153-160.
27. E. J. Hobsbawm, "The General Crisis of the European Economy in the 17th Century," Past and Present 5 (1954): 33-53.
28. It should be remembered as well that in its early years, Past and Present carried a subtitle: "A Journal of Scientific History."
29. This context can be sampled by reading the issues of the Marxist journal Science and Society published between 1950 and 1953.
30. Hugh Trevor-Roper, "The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century," Past and Present 16 (1959): 31-64;
31. Rabb, The Struggle for Stability.
32. 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).
33. 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.
34. See also Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Engineers and Scientists through Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1988);
35. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, Mass., 1993).
36. 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.
37. Also Baker, "The Early History of the Term 'Social Science,' " Annals of Science 20 (1964-1965): 211-226;
38. Baker, "Science and the Social Order in the Old Regime," Minerva 10 (1972): 502-508;
39. and Baker, "A Foucauldian Account of the French Revolution?" in Jan Goldstein, ed., Foucault and the Writing of History (Oxford, 1994), 187-205.
40. 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)
41. and "Society Must Be Defended": Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976 (New York, 2003).
42. Starn, "Historians and 'Crisis,' " 20-22.
43. Ibid., 4.
44. Frederic Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London, 2002).
45. Ibid., 39-40.
46. Antonio Negri, Descartes politico, o Della ragionevole ideologia (Milan, 1970);
47. 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.
48. Negri, Political Descartes, 114-118. See also n. 21 above.
49. Rabb, The Struggle for Authority.