Avoiding the Major Crisis of the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

Crises, what crises? They will certainly occur, and no mistake. This view is not restricted to the economists. How is it possible not to think of the philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists and novelists who today, as they did yesterday, hold up to us the mirror of a modernity which, today as yesterday, has its share of shadow and evil? A violent modernity that is as destructive for the collective as it is for the individual. It is not by chance that Alain Touraine writes of ‘the end of societies’.¹ They will be unable to survive the end of social life and the destruction of their institutions, the result of a financial capitalism that has broken off all its links to the industrial economy, with institutional, political and even cultural control of its resources. Touraine seeks to know how to escape the ‘chasm’ that is opening up in front of us, in this ‘post-social and post-historic’ era. While Touraine does not stop there, with this terrible discovery of globalization that is out of control — far from it — he opens the way to a new paradigm, he even leads us into an improbable rapprochement with Arjun Appadurai, someone who does not hesitate to stress the intimate, and even incestuous, relationship between globalization and violence.² There are too many authors to list who are warning us against our contemporary deregulation, some speak of folly, such Ulrich Beck,³ who calls our societies ‘risk manufacturers’ in which fear predominates or Zygmunt Bauman who constantly lists the destruction of our ‘individualistic societies’ and many others.