CUisis AuthoU(s): ReinhaUt Koselleck and Michaela W ... - iSites

Koselleck + Crisis
spiritual warfare, all the power structures of the old order will be blown
sky high" and there will be "wars like never before on earth.""'19
3. Extensions of the Concept of Crisis into Economics
Surely our concept would never have become a central concept had it not
acquired an additional interpretive content that reflected an experience increasingly
common in daily life: economic crises. In Germany these were
initially due to the costs of the wars against the French, to agrarian surpluses,
as in 1825, or to failed harvests, as in 1847. But from 1857 on,
economic crises were increasingly viewed as global occurrences caused by
the capitalist system itself. The use of the concept of crisis reflects this development.
While "crisis" as an economic term was already common in
eighteenth-century English, it seems to have entered into the German language
only in the nineteenth century. Although the language of German
mercantilists made prominent use of such metaphors as circulatory problems
or imbalances in the body politic with respect to demand and supply,
such problems were not specifically conceptualized as "crisis"-in the sense
of an illness or imbalance-until the nineteenth century.
Instead, increasingly severe economic emergencies continued to be
redescribed almost exclusively in such medical terms as "relapse," "calamities,"
"convulsions," and, for an especially long time, "blockages." Correspondents
writing from England in 1825 warn of an "impending crisis"
that may already have befallen that country. In the following year the expression
is commonly used to describe its consequences in Germany, as well
as those resulting from a wave of bankruptcies. "The crisis" which has
befallen the commercial class in Frankfurt, "is terrible."'20 The domestication
of the expression can be seen in Perthes's correspondence. He saw
in England a "monetary crisis"-which, linking it to the "stock market
mob,"--he condemned in moral and social as well as in economic terms.121
This style remained common. Niebuhr at once put the crisis into a historical
perspective: "For the past 150 years, the history of commerce and monetary
119 Nietzsche, Ecce homo. Man wird was man ist. (1888). Werke, vol. 2 (1956), 1152f.
This translation is taken from Nietzsche, Ecce Homo and the AntiChrist, trans. Thomas
Wayne (New York, 2004), 90-91.
120 References in Jurgen Kuzcynski, Die Geschichte der Lage der Arbeiter unter dem Kapi-
talismus, Part 1, vol. 11, Studien zur Geschichte der zyklischen Uberproduktionskrisen
in Deutschland 1825-1866 (Berlin, 1961), 40ff., 43ff.
121 Perthes, Perthes' Leben (see footnote 86), vol. 3, 285.
389