Alain Touraine
FROM CRISIS TO CRITIQUE
EDITORS' NOTE:
Alain Touraine 's piece is part ofa continuing sen'es of
comments on the political and economic crisis in Amenca and Western
Europe .
Talking about crisis is usually a way of reassuring oneself.
We check the indicators : prices and unemployment are up . .. the
trade deficit is worse due to the increase in oil prices. But isn't all that
a matter of coincidence? We carefully avoid discussing the context for
these concerns and expectations-the nature of a particular kind of
society, The only permissible question is how long this particular
aberration will last. When will the indicators turn favorable again?
Questions about the kind of society we have and how to change it are
out of order.
We therefore have to stop talking about crisis and begin asking a
very different question : are our society and culture and international
power relationships changing so drastically that we have to learn to
live in a world as different from the one we've been familiar with as
the "black country" of the Industrial Revolution in England was
from the" green country" ?
It
is essential that we describe and understand how a new cul–
ture, a new society, a new politics comes into being, and that effort
requires that we reexamine not only the workings of political
economy but the very categories in which we organize our thought
and lives. I shall not be doing that here , but I cannot talk about crisis
without first remarking that crisis must be viewed not from the per–
spective of the past but in relation to the future . There isn't a crisis
just because the old system no longer functions as well as it once did ;
there is a crisis
if
we are incapable of entering into a new culture,
