What a Crisis Is It?

The chapter is aimed at introducing a conceptual and operational definition of the crisis, in its most generality and abstractness, to fix the theoretical framework of the discussion. To this end, two models of knowledge are identified: rationality model and comprehension model, respectively, where the last introduces the significance as crisply different from the meaning in perceiving and deciding on the crisis issues, and then the sufficiency (and new necessary) predicates for a generic (societal) crisis are established and evaluated. The most important issue examined is the general typology of a generic societal crisis, by five classes (criteria), so an abstract conceptual “map” of the concept of crisis is obtained, which will ground, in the next chapters, the entire analysis of the crisis phenomenology. In its last part, the chapter provides a debate on the “law of movement” of the generic societal crisis, based on at least two “heresies”: replacing the clock-time with economic (internal, own) time and removing the crisis from the concept (and phenomenology) of the economic cycle, through a revision of the very causality in the economic cycle—such a way, the crisis and the economic cycle become two different “animals” which interact in the general dynamics of the societal system.