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Short abstract

This paper traces the emergence of “crisis” as a key category of modernity in the French Enlightenment. Through Rousseau, Diderot, and the Encyclopédie, it shows how crisis became a mode of interpreting the present, shaping modern political temporality and informing contemporary discourses.

Long abstract

This paper explores the emergence of “crisis” as a central category of modern historical and political experience through a genealogy grounded in the French Enlightenment. While Reinhart Koselleck identified the late eighteenth century as a Sattelzeit in which key political concepts were fundamentally reconfigured, the specific role played by Enlightenment debates in transforming crisis into a privileged mode of interpreting the present has received comparatively limited attention.

Focusing on Rousseau, Diderot, and the intellectual milieu of the Encyclopédie, the paper argues that crisis ceased to designate merely an exceptional moment of rupture and became instead a form of observation. Enlightenment diagnoses of moral corruption, political decay, transformations of sociability, and colonial violence increasingly framed the present as a decisive threshold requiring judgment and intervention. In this context, crisis emerged at the intersection of critique and temporality: it allowed thinkers to interpret historical change as both symptom and turning point, thereby reconfiguring the relationship between experience and expectation characteristic of modern historical time.

Drawing on conceptual history and STS approaches to performativity and epistemic infrastructures, the paper suggests that contemporary invocations of permanent crisis—economic, political, or cultural—should be understood not as unprecedented conditions but as the continuation of an epistemic regime consolidated during the Enlightenment. Recovering this genealogy enables a critical reassessment of crisis discourse today and invites reflection on what forms of political imagination become obscured when the present is primarily understood through narratives of emergency and resolution.