The Order of Crisis Time: A Temporal Revolution of Capitalism
Name of applicant
Lotte List
Title
Researcher
Institution
University of Bologna, Italy
Amount
DKK 1,100,000
Year
2023
Type of grant
Internationalisation Fellowships
What?
The project investigates the intellectual historical relationship between a notion of modernity as crisis time and the ordering of time during the transition to capitalist production. While crisis and order are seemingly opposites, I investigate their intertwinement in philosophies of history in classical liberal economics.
Why?
Our time is often characterized as a time of crisis. This crisis discourse has become predominant in contemporary political debate and sets the framework for how we think about politics and governance. In order to free political thought from the restraints of this framework, it is necessary to locate our present moment in a longer historical tradition of crisis narratives.
How?
Through a theoretical approach combining the conceptual history of crisis with critiques of capitalism’s restructuring of time, I analyze crisis theories in liberal economics as theories of modern historical time. This historical analysis forms the basis for a critique of contemporary crisis discourse as taking for granted the crisis structure of time.