ABSTRACT
The chapter begins by addressing the political aspects of the crisis theory, which has shifted its base to the conservative camp, and turns to a presentation and critique of its analytic content. It also returns to the relationship between crisis and capitalist development. A number of structural similarities exist between neo-conservative theories of the 'ungovernability' of the state and society and the socialist critique of late-capitalist social formations. Scientific rationality and the welfare state are seen to destroy the agencies of social control and the bearers of traditional values. Crisis theories can be constructed either in an objectivist or subjectivist manner; in other words, they can apply either to the being or to the consciousness of a social formation. Hence any crisis theory based on the limited conceptual model of constantly increasing problems of valorization or of the growth of consciousness that is critical of the system, or of the interplay between the two, no longer seems very defensible.
