Abstract
Recent works in sociology and social sciences show a renewed interest in the concept of crisis, as part of the efforts to understand developmental tendencies in time, usually connected to diagnoses of times. However, the concept of crisis sometimes is not completely clear. Its relation to functional and normative problems remains uncertain, as though its usefulness to qualify historical time. The article addresses these questions from a comparative reading of the works of Reinhart Koselleck and Jürgen Habermas, mobilizing it to think about the concept of crisis. I argue that this concept should be understood in the scope of social change and social processes theories, related to specific moments in time when normative and functional problems are linked, without dualist presupposes of instability and stability. I argue also that although the history of the concept shows the relations between crisis and critique, we should not conflate the concepts. Critique should be situated as one of the possible modes of reflexivity in times of crisis. This should be a vantage point to better understanding the possibilities of critical theory and social critique in these times.
Keywords
crisis; critique; reflexivity; diagnoses of times; social theory