ABSTRACT
This book deals in different ways with how people confront the stark aftermath of smashed cultural and economic dreams and their modes of livelihood. In assessing experiences of recuperation, it focuses in particular on ways in which, as consequence, different people articulate in thought or practice a series of distinct responses: responses through which they can witness ‘how societies rebuild themselves’. An assessment of causal and linear economic progress, and a scalar understanding of the social, already frame what a crisis is and what response, then, might mean. Social-democratic readings tend to foreground centralised state-market infrastructures of protection, whereby it is the role of the state to sustain citizens, even at the expense of kinship or other forms of caring sociality (e.g. religious organisations). A reinvention that, in his eyes, should try to go beyond ‘social authoritarianism’ practices lingering in back of many of countries with decades-long fascist dictatorships, like Portugal (or Spain, Italy and Greece, for that matter).
