Crisis

From its inception, social theory has made significant efforts to conceptualize and understand major global crises of modern society that have shaped its history and define its present and future situation. In the past two centuries, social theory identified at least four substantial crises with global repercussions: the crisis of capitalist production, the crisis of totalitarianism, the legitimacy crisis, and the climate crisis. In this entry, we argue that these conceptualizations of global crises have shaped our understanding of modern society as an interrelated and interdependent world. The entry concludes that through the focus on crises, social theory offers a cognitive framework for deciphering the complexity of world society and overcoming its global crises.