Keynote Lecture: The Notion of "Crisis" in Modern Greek Studies: The Snares of a Sisyphean Conception

This lecture provided a theoretical assessment of the term ‘crisis’ in Modern Greek Studies and proposed alternative ways of deploying the concept to explain not only the current, but also earlier Greek crises. In so doing, it focused on four objectives. First, it explored the different uses of the term ‘crisis’ in modern Greek History, Politics and Economics, through examining some major scholarly works in these three disciplines. Second, it developed an alternative approach to
the notion of ‘crisis’ premised on the historical/critical conceptions of Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault, Reinhart Koselleck and the Frankfurt School philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. Third, it showed how the chronicity of crisis in modern Greek history is connected to, but not determined
by the country’s semi-peripheral status in the modern world system. Fourth, it warned against two prevalent analytical fallacies in the current narratives of crisis in Modern Greek Studies, globalism and culturalism. In their place it proposed a more flexible understanding of Greece’s crisis-proneness that avoids the Sisyphean pitfalls of fatalism and determinism.