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Coal heavers wear sandwich boards to protest against low wages in 1921. Hulton Archive/Getty Images

No word is invoked more to characterize the current era than crisis. The term has been wielded incessantly in 2020already the most tumultuous year since 1968 and still only half overto designate a series of new and ongoing plights. It has named the impeachment crisis and the constitutional crisis many thought it revealed, themselves signs of the crisis of polarization in U.S. politics. Crisis nearly always describes the coronavirus pandemic and the economic turmoil it has unleashed. Journalists speak of a crisis of police violence against Black people in the United States, a slow-burn tragedy that sparked a crisis of civil unrest after the killing of George Floyd. And Americans move nervously toward a presidential election whose results, regardless of the outcome, will be thrown into doubt by accusations of foreign meddling or partisan hijacking. A crisis of legitimacy, perhaps even a crisis of emergency powers, looms on the horizon.

Yet these problems, as awful and intractable as they are, add layers to an already familiar crisis atmosphere: There is also the environmental crisis, the health care crisis, the energy crisis, the housing crisis, the drug crisis, the debt crisis, the migrant crisis, the education crisis, and the marriage crisis. There is even a loneliness crisis.

None of these problems can be isolated; each extends into other domains embroiled in their own dysfunction, with the result that the world feels entangled in overlapping and intersecting crises.

How is it, then, that the term crisis should apply across so many fieldsforeign affairs, domestic politics, climate, culture, economics, to name only a few? Does crisis have any meaning, beyond just a catch-all term for trouble? Is there any logic, or novelty, to the constant proclamations of crisis?

Historians are well suited to address such questions, given their training in alertness to context, eye for continuity and change, and ornery eagerness to question the terms of debate. Perhaps no part of the historians guild is better placed to ponder the meaning of crisis than historians of Germany, a nation whose atrocities and traumas, and willingness to grapple with their meaning, are unsurpassed in modern times. Above all, it is Weimar Germanypoised between the catastrophe of World War I and the even greater calamity of Nazism and the Holocaustthat has been portrayed as the quintessential society in crisis.

Weimar is much invoked nowadays, by pundits and experts alike. This commonly involves the search for parallels between that time and today, as though such correspondences might predict humanitys future. Will democracy collapse? Will fascism return? Are protesters toppling statues a totalitarian political movement, as Tucker Carlson claimed? Is Trumpism?

What research by historians of Germany suggests, however, is that the deepest similarity between Weimar and today is not in any particular danger; rather, it is in the outsized role that fear, apocalyptic expectation, and longings for salvation play in the populations political imagination.

Research on Weimar Germany also illuminates the role of ideology and activism within this crisis-consciousness. In a 2009 article on Suicide and Crisis in Weimar Berlin, the historian Moritz Fllmer explored how political actors at the time cited cases of suicide to support their partisan agendas. For the Nazis, suicides highlighted how ordinary Germans suffered from the nations humiliation under the punitive Treaty of Versailles. Communists invoked suicides as proof of capitalisms dehumanizing impact on workers. According to liberals and Social Democrats, suicides attested to the deleterious effect of an authoritarian school system. And traditional conservatives appealed to suicides as a sign of the breakdown of religion and family life. The only consensus was that suicides confirmed the corruptions of a system that forced its inhabitants to kill themselves.

How could suicides supply proof for such disparate conclusions? Because all sides cherry-picked cases and shoehorned them into pet views about what Weimars crisis was and what it demanded. As Fllmer put it, Right-wing authors emphasized the need for decision in an existential, all-or-nothing situation; Communists predicted the imminent downfall of capitalism as the prerequisite for a proletarian revolution; Social Democrats and liberals used the notion of crisis to opt for reform in a spirit of democratic humanism. For all these voices, the present was dire but the future yielded many opportunities, provided it was ushered in soon.

Such ideological crisis-consciousness, spun from panic about the present and the call to save the future from certain doom, is the strongest link joining todays world to the Weimar pastand not just to that past but to several centuries of modern life marked by convulsive change. The world has truly been here before.

A comparative history of crisis offers not a crystal ball into the future but a powerful lens into both the concepts meaning and its function today. There are three lessons in particular that ought to be learned.

The preeminent scholar of crisis is Reinhart Koselleck, one of the great historians of the past century, who died in 2006. Kosellecks first book was a blockbuster 1959 work on the 18th-century Republic of Letters called Critique and Crisis, which rebuked Enlightenment thinkers for criticizing the absolutist state based on unrealistic expectations of what politics could accomplish.

The Enlightenments Utopian constructs of the future, Koselleck argued, damned the present to the trash heap of history; in so doing, they destabilized European society and provoked the political crisis that led to the French Revolutiona cataclysm driven by idealistic demands for virtue and unspoiled democracy whose unfulfilled, and perhaps unfulfillable, promise has been shaping political events ever since.

The fingerprints of Kosellecks Weimar youth are all over the book. His first political experience, he once recalled, was watching partisans of the radical left and right bash each other in the schoolyard during Germanys 1932 presidential election. In Kosellecks view, the utopianism of communists and Nazi Brownshirts was traceable to the rigid moralization of politics of 18th-century critics like Jean-Jacques Rousseau: the belief that today is rotten, that history can be engineered for the better, that the unmerry facts of political lifecompeting interests, plural perspectives, shady compromisesmight pass away as a pure society is created on Earth.

Kosellecks most ambitious project was a collaborative, multivolume lexicon mapping the conceptual shifts that took place with the advent of modernity. He dubbed this the Sattelzeit (saddle age), a bridging period, from roughly 1750 to 1850, when words like revolution and citizen took on new, complex meanings in line with the enormous social and political changes underway in the West.

Koselleck wrote the entry on crisis himself. He began with the words Greek originsfrom a verb meaning to judge or decide, it had long implied stark choices, including a medical usage, enshrined by the ancient physician Galen, for the decisive moment in an illness that determines if the patient will live or die. But Koselleck went beyond the etymology of crisis to trace its birth as modernitys fundamental mode of interpreting historical time.

For Koselleck, the turning point came in the years around 1770, when the concepts residual meaning from Galen combined with a post-theological notion of history as the stage for final judgment. If society is sick, it must be healed and savedor else. Rousseaus Emile (1762) was the first text to deploy crisis in the fully modern sense, joining a diagnosis of current ills and a prognosis for the future within a philosophy of history that views the present as a moment pregnant with change and ripe for action.

Crisis in this sense fires the imagination. It takes hold of old experiences, Koselleck wrote, and transforms them metaphorically in ways that create altogether new expectations. We are reaching a crisis that will culminate in either slavery or liberty, Rousseaus fellow Enlightenment philosophe Denis Diderot declared in 1771. These are the times that try mens souls, proclaimed Thomas Paine a few years later, in a pamphlet series urging American independence aptly titled The Crisis.

In the 19th century, crisis became a key term in economics. For liberals, it named the trough in capitalisms boom-and-bust cycles; shorn of its eschatological dimensions, crisis became an agent of creative destructiona bringer of progress.

For Marxists, on the other hand, economic crises were not bumps on the road to innovation; rather, they were the inevitable journey to a terminal crisis, following intensifying busts, that would bury capitalism forever and usher in a socialist utopia. But the reliance on the idea of crisis remained, despite the terms semantic wobble between acute circumstance and epochal shift.

In the 20th century, crisis-talk sprawled everywhere. So haphazard was invocation of crisis, so omnipresent was its appearance in headlines and novel compounds (crisis of self-confidence, crisis expert, mini-crisis, etc.), that it threatened to lose even the modicum of meaning it once had as imposing an unavoidable choice between alternatives. In an age of crisis, Koselleck suggested, crisis itself had ended up in crisishollowed out to fit the exigencies of whatever perturbs people at a particular moment.

The dark side of modernity, its propensity to produce seismic fractures, was taken up by the German historian Detlev Peukert in his influential 1987 book, The Weimar Republic. For Peukert, Weimar was an extreme casea society in which successive upheavals generated a deep-seated sense of unease and disorientation, an awareness that the conditions underlying everyday life and experience were in flux. Nazism was merely a drastic answer to an all-embracing crisis that refused to yield to conventional remedies.

What Adolf Hitlers Germany demonstrates, Peukert argued, is how cascading turmoil can tip over into catastrophe when coupled with the modern states technological and bureaucratic powers to intervene. The Great Depression, parliamentary gridlock, the traumatic legacies of World War I, and meteoric social and cultural change fueled a crisis-ridden popular mood that swung between enthusiasm and anxiety, hopes of national reawakening and fears of national extinction.

Though Peukert presented Weimars crisis as an objective condition, his emotional languagehis talk of unease, anxiety, fear, and hopehelps readers see that it was more than just an external fact. Crisis also lives in peoples heads, bounded by the horizons of dream and dread.

In 2010, Rdiger Graf, another historian of Weimar Germany working in the wake of Koselleck and Peukert, argued that no one can ever construct a necessary causal chain linking external events to the experience of those events as a crisis.

No economic indicator, for example, decides how a society or government will respond. What steers the imagination are normative ideals about politics and society, a vision of history, and expectations and desires. What demands explanation is the feeling of crisis itself.

Most people naturally resist this idea: Declaring a crisis, they think, is the only reasonable response to facts they decry. But even a pandemic is first and foremost a crisis at the level of interpretation, not blunt fact. A disease becomes a crisis not because it kills widely but because it seizes the mind in a certain way.

Adam Gopnik captured the interpretive dimension of the coronavirus crisis in a moving account of New Yorks recent lockdown. Plagues happen only to people, Gopnik observed in the New Yorker. Animals can suffer from mass infections, of course, but they experience them as one more bad blow from an unpredictable and predatory natural environment. Only people put mental brackets around a phenomenon like the coronavirus pandemic and attempt to give it a name and some historical perspective, some sense of precedence and possibility.

It is not that hardship does not really exist; it surely doesand just as surely can it wax and wane. Crisis, however, is the product of a narrative that exceeds any particular data point of pain. No matter how bad, disorderly, and turbulent events and processes at a certain time are, Graf argued, they become a crisis only by relating them to a past development and projecting two different paths into the future, thereby defining the present as the critical moment of decision. In other words, crisis springs from the story that tells you what the pain means, what can be done, and what (or who) is responsible.

Talk of crisis can be a justifiable reaction to grave conditions. But because there is no narrative-free way to relate the present to past and future, crisis should be seen in narrative terms, as a strategy to cope with present trouble by imagining that trouble within a story leading to plausibleyet morally or existentially contrastingfutures. Crisis stories are always speculative interpretations of lived experience, inextricably interwoven with the storytellers principles and purposes.

Because crisis in its true sense is a stage in a dramatic plot, in which the present teeters on the brink of ruin, the identification is not neutral. Human agency is implied in the proclamation of crisis; it presumes that something still can and must be done. As Graf noted, it is difficult to find any prominent author, politician, intellectual, or journalist in Weimar Germany who publicly used the notion of crisis in a pessimistic or even fatalistic sense.

This is the true meaning of the clich never let a crisis go to waste. It is not that crises happen and then must be exploited. Rather, it is that a sense of the cure is already built into the determination of the disease. With timely activism, the looming catastrophe that opens up the present as a time of decision can be averted. Crisis does not paralyzeit empowers.

This is also why railing against those who would politicize a crisis misses the point. It is only because people are already politicized that they can assess the moment and declare it critical. The darker ones view of the present and the more exalted ones hopes for the future, the more justifiable radicalism seems. Clucking at opponents politicization of a crisis often means only that you cast the crisis in different terms and demand different solutions. Sometimes it means you do not share their sense of emergency to begin with.

The coronavirus pandemic has loosed a flood of calls to openly politicize it or to at least recognize the political choices entailed by the diseases uneven impact on societies and demographics. COVID-19, we are told, has exposed myriad needsfor expertise in government, for better public health infrastructure, for sovereignty and borders, for tough measures against China, for more democratic government, for racial justiceneeds that the current emergency can finally awaken humanity to address.

Such calls are almost honest. Crisis does have a revelatory power. What it reveals, however, are not just societal needs but the speakers ideology too, which constructs the crisis as an opportunity for change.

As Fllmer observed, Weimar Berlins suicides were deciphered through an ideological lens that linked those deaths to crisis in order to advance solutions that were no less ideological. While suicides were real enough, the crisis remained an imaginative construct. Fllmer pointed out that, from 1929 to 1932, as unemployment soared and the gears of government ground to a halt, the suicide rate rose by only 11.9 percent. A definite uptick but certainly not enough to serve as dramatic evidence for a desperate state of mind.

Then as now, the utility of crisis lies in the dramatization of the present for those with an agenda to change it. Its significance is in the stories we tell to mobilize ourselves and others.

Can grasping the meaning of crisis inform political thinking today, at a time when crisis has literally gone viral? For Koselleck, the problem with crisis, in particular for academics, was its growing imprecision. When we assess its role in public discourse, however, the trouble is not so much the terms vagueness as its reliable function as a catalyst of action, an accelerant of fear and expectationanother log on the fire.

The law of crisis is that crisis-talk fuels itself: Every time a choice is pitched as life-or-death, or an institution is pronounced in crisis, panic and partisanship and zero-sum thinking gain ground. Use of crisis mirrors your ideological commitments. If you want to raise the temperature, then breathlessly framing your cause as a crisis will do the trick. Crisis-talk is the gas pedal, not the brakes.

If you want to lower the temperature, then resist the impulse to reflexively label every problem a crisis. Keeping crisis-talk in check preserves the words potency for the time when the true watershed arrives. The difficulty faced by those who would declare 2020, with much justification, a year of crisis is that the word has been overused for generations. Not just COVID-19 but a host of deadly maladiesAlzheimers, malaria, AIDS, diabetes, tuberculosis, heart disease, cancerare regularly cast in crisis terms. Every election is declared the most important in our lifetime. When everything is a crisis, nothing can be.

Using crisis with care may also make solving some problems easier, since avoiding the term helps enlarge the middle ground and with it the room for political maneuver. Crisis can create unrealistic expectations of unity while, ironically, hindering a societys ability to work together. Often enough, it invites demagoguery and makes people impatient with pluralism and dissent and the necessary but sometimes sordid deal-making of party politics. Compromise and cooperation work best in non-crisis mode.

But there is a trade-off to swearing off crisis-talk: Doing so also means surrendering power to enrage voters and open wallets. And sometimes rage and mobilization are appropriate; sometimes societies do stand at the crossroads.

Crisis, when understood as a state of emergency, can even pose a threat to liberty and representative government because of the perceived need it creates to curtail rights and centralize power. The Roman Republic enacted a temporary dictatorship during times of military danger. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the American Civil War. Hitler and Benito Mussolini came to power in an atmosphere of crisis and used emergency powers to further dismantle constitutional government. Franklin D. Roosevelt interned Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor. Restricting freedoms in moments of extremis may save open societiesbut the decision itself is a political one and prone to abuse.

More recently, authoritarians on the left and rightincluding Venezuelas Nicols Maduro and Turkeys Recep Tayyip Erdoganhave declared crises in order to seize greater power and silence critics. In March, as coronavirus cases surged elsewhere in Europe, Hungarys Viktor Orban pushed through an emergency law that would permit him to rule by decree. In Brazil, the coronavirus is sowing instability that critics fear the nations scandal-plagued president, Jair Bolsonaro, could use as a pretext for a military takeover.

Crisis bends in an illiberal direction for a more insidious reason as well. David Moshfegh, another historian of Germany, assigns Koselleck to his students. I ask them whether they think crisis is a positive or a negative word, Moshfegh told me. More than 90 percent each year say it is negative and explain it as meaning something stressful and abnormal.

In Moshfeghs view, crisis is nowadays approached in the spirit of crisis management, which aims to go through a crisis and re-create stability and normality without having to make any big fundamental changes. To be sure, there are still people for whom crisis offers hope for fundamental change. Black Lives Matter, which seeks to channel rage against police violence into a broad crusade against systemic oppression, comes to mind. But Moshfegh is correct that rampant use of crisis also gives voice to a pervasive unease, a deep sense that a great many things are not as they should be, a craving not for apocalypse or utopia but for things to be normal.

In this sense, authoritarian reaction is crisis management writ largethe urge, in a time of chaos, to re-create a bygone stability and normality while avoiding big social change. Fascism in the Hitlerian sense was revolutionary, promising a heroic thousand-year empire for the Nordic Man. But the garden-variety authoritarianisms of today promise something more prosaic: security, predictability, order, traditionin short, normalityin a topsy-turvy world.

In a 2017 Hungarian Review essay on the crisis of Europe, Orban pointed to a generalized restlessness, anxiety, and tension that, he claimed, testified to [l]arge masses of people [who] want something radically different than what is being proposed and done by the traditional elites. Orban offered himself as a tribune of this populist discontent. His response has been to create an overtly illiberal Hungary shielded from the disruptions of free elections, a free press, and open bordersa new normal.

Today, crisis risks priming populations, in the United States and around the world, for authoritarian temptation, though what lures most people is less fascist revolution than autocratic stabilization. Faced with the anxiety of total crisis, it is easy to embrace, even normalize, those who promise to manage, by authoritarian means, the volatility and bewilderment of modern life.

It is worth remembering that what killed the Weimar Republic, Germanys first liberal democracy, was not an objective predicament but the fear and desperation of runaway crisis-consciousness, which led a majority of Germans to abandon the democratic center for illiberal ideologies of the radical right and left. Those who would again destroy democracy must first ride the mood of crisis. Every time you abstain from loose crisis-talk, you take a bit of wind out of their sails.

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When Everything Is a Crisis, Nothing Is - Foreign Policy