Critical realism, symptomatology and the pedagogy of crisis

The concluding chapter reviews our arguments in Part One in the light of the other contributions to this volume. The general significance of these contributions was explored in Chapter 1 and, rather than repeat that exercise, we focus here on specific lessons. Likewise, we will not return to the important question posed by Jane Roitman regarding whether it is scientifically and practically appropriate to treat the modern period in general as crisis prone and/or to assume that specific events and processes can best be defined as (symptoms of) crisis to the neglect of alternative ways of interpreting them. For we are not interested in highlighting crisis as a description or self-description of modern times as if this captures the Zeitgeist (spirit of the times) nor do we consider crisis can be the taken-for-granted form of Zeitdiagnostik, an approach that privileges crisis as an explanandum and/or explanans for historical and contemporary analyses of the modern period. Similarly, we do not consider the conditions of possibility of a general theory of crisis. For, while accepting that there are real crisis tendencies and actual crises, we are not interested in developing a general theory of crises or identifying the features of crisis in general. Indeed, there is no crisis in general or general crisis: only particular crises in and/or of particular sets of social relations and the totality of crises in a given conjuncture.2 Thus, any serious approach to crises must define the specific mix of crisis tendencies that create the abstract conditions of possibility for a given type of crisis and the specific features that define the specificity of a particular crisis, whether considered as an event and/or as a process. This is illustrated by the diversity of the case studies in this volume.