Abstract

The Global Crisis as an Interregnum of Modernity SAGE Publications, Inc.1984DOI: 10.1177/002071528402500109 Edward A. Tiryakian Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, USA IT IS TEMPTING TO VIEW the global crisis as an economic instance of what the mathematician Rene Thom termed "morphogenesis," i.e. a cascade of catastrophe events in economic structures (Fararo, 1978: 312), which may be said to have begun with the oil embargo attending the Yom Kip- pur war ten years ago. In this vein, there has been a continuing series of shocks and fractures in the world economy that have hit both developed, developing, and underdeveloped countries: inflation, double-digit unemployment, stagflation, high interest rates, and the like. Obviously, this vast complex of malignant economic changes has had nefarious social consequences of immense proportions, and has at the same time led to soul-searching among economists as to the adequacy of economic theories of growth and development (e.g., Thurow, 1983). This paper, while granting that the multi-faceted brake if not break-down of world economic development is a major parameter of the global crisis, adopts the perspective that there are other "deep structures" operative: political, moral, cultural, and cognitive ones which intertwine with the economic to produce a state