Chartbook 407: Polycrisis revisited: Are we beyond Neoliberal Order Breakdown Syndrome?

Back in 2022 I coined the phrase polycrisis as one with which to describe the conjuncture. The idea always had its critics, but it acquired a certain currency.

In many ways and in some places the situation today is more extreme. Polycrisis continues to be used and relevant in particular contexts. In 2025 the World Bank evokes something like polycrisis to describe “Fragile and Conflict-Affected Situations”.

In Chartbook over the years, I’ve surveyed a few of those “situations”:

West Asia - Chartbook 56 December 2021

South Asia - Chartbook 153 September 2022.

Africa’s debt crisis - Chartbook 181 December 2022

Haiti - Chartbook 167 November 2022

Myanmar - Chartbook 256 September 2023.

Europe - Chartbook 262 January 2024

Horn of Africa - Chartbook 281 May 2024

Sub-Saharan Africa - Chartbook 313 and 330 August & October 2024

South East Asia - Chartbook 333 November 2024

But, as a description of the general scene, “polycrisis” no longer seems so apt. This weekend my FT column revisits polycrisis and asks why.

The argument has two sides.

One are the drivers of crisis. The other is the vantage point from which the crisis is perceived.

#1 - the drivers

As for the drivers of crisis, I’ve been gnawing away at this in Chartbook for a while.

There are contexts in which crisis talk without clear specification of particular drivers and their relative weigh can be muddying and unhelpful, where it amounts to panicky arm-waving, which invites brute force populist responses. I was struck by this very forcibly amidst the diffuse, gloomy mood in Berlin in the summer of 2023.

There are other contexts - I think particularly of Gaza - where to use anonymous terms like “crisis”, rather than genocide or ethnic cleansing amounts to obscene euphemism.

Crisis is a term derived from Greek medical discourse. It is the turning point moment in the course of a fever. It implies an ailment, a malady with certain naturalized qualities, an anonymous, blind force, or combination of forces that tear at the integrity, coherence and survival of a body. The crisis is the moment when it could go either way, towards recovery or death.

Such naturalized descriptions can be apt. They have a long track record of useful service in capturing the incoherence of modernity. Naturalism is the basis for most social scientific depictions of the world. Marxism was pioneering in offering a meta theory of why and in what historical contexts such naturalized descriptions have purchase or at least appear to. It offered its own time-bound promise of being able to see around the blind spots of bourgeois philosophy and economics.

Naturalized development and naturalized crisis stories, always sit in a degree of tension with descriptions of the world that attribute intentionality and efficacy to particular agents. Such actor-centered stories derive their force from the way in which they break the framing in terms of anonymous social, political or cultural forces, to point to particular people, with particular ideas, identities, strategies and interests.

Agent-based theories have their limits too.

Personification is a naturalization too. Though it is seemingly obvious to say “Trump ordered x,y,z”, it is legitimate to ask: “What are you really saying by ascribing x,y,z to “Trump”? What is “Trump”? A man? His aged body? Or something else? His money? His connections? What he represents?” Those are questions that take us back to social forces and potentially back to polycrisis. Trump is the personified compression of America’s “polycrisis in one country”. Trump as a one-man polycrisis.

Alternatively, one might move from one agent to many - the entire MAGA crew and the dark forces that stand behind it. We then find ourselves in the world of networks, a new kind of collective actor, the kind of optic that is both hugely illuminating and can slide all too easily into conspiracy theory.

In this fallen world of ours, my own meta-theoretical position is that there isn’t one right method or approach, certainly not one accessible to us. Crises or crimes, agents-networks-social forces can all be helpful ways to think about problems. You have to pick your moment, your analytical weapons, provide reasons and be open to challenge. Doing this work, choosing, making intellectual wagers is what “working the ground of the conjuncture” entails. That ground may be stony, as in Stuart Hall’s famous phrase, or it may be slippery slick, as in Trump-world.

It seems reasonable to me to say that unlike 2022, ours is a moment when to talk in terms of abstractions and general forces rings hollow. Netanyahu is not a pandemic. Trump and MAGA are not of the same kind as the “animal spirits” that Keynes invoked to describe investor sentiment. What happens in the bizarre goings-on around the pool at Mar-a-Lago may matter.

This collapse of generality into people and networks can feel intolerable. As I argue in the FT piece, it would, for many of us, be a huge relief if we could just have a nice, big bond market sell-off. Then we could go back to talking in terms of anonymized naturalized terms about fiscal balances, bond market liquidity and balance sheets. But that is precisely the kind of moment when folks like us should check our analytical prejudices. Why would I rather talk about the Mar-a-Lago PLAN than the actual reality of Mar-a-Lago?

It was the sense of impatience in the financial commentariat - “Where is the Treasury market crisis to punish Trump?” - that inspired the latest FT piece.

Of course, a crash would be bad. But, at least we would know that we are still on earth. What if there is no longer any gravity? Where are we then? In outer space?

The sense of being in “outer space”, beyond gravity is what I was gesturing to with the idea of “hyper-agency”, in the Maeder Lecture back in November 2024.

As Gillian Tett points out in a recent piece on the silence of the business lobby, AI provides one powerful discourse that allows CEOs to look past the damage being done in the present to a future of hyper-growth.

By contrast, a good old bond market crisis would bring us back down to earth. It would reassert the logic of social forces and restore the sense of a coherent moment in history - even at the price of economic and financial stress.

#2 - the body

Coming from the Greek, the conception of crisis evokes a malady ravishing a once-coherent, or healthy body. If the current moment does not lend itself to thinking in terms of diseases or other naturalized afflictions what about the body itself? Does it make sense to imagine the world as a well-integrated body that may, perhaps with the help of a doctor or nurse, be restored to health?

Well, it depends. A sensible thing to ask is, who might think of the world that way?

One group who do tend to think of the world that way are confident social theorist - ranging from macroeconomists, to world system modelers to Marxist theorists - who believe that their master logic provides them with a fair grasp on the world in its totality. Why anyone would imagine that modernity provides the platform from which to formulate such a theory is a question for another day. They do and that has effects in the world.

The close cousins of the macro theorists are “social doctors” - managers, technocrats of hegemony, the sort of people who think the world needs managing, the Biden-team, the Professional Managerial Class. For them - for us - Trump and his ilk aren’t just “problems”, they are an existential challenge, disputing the most basic ways in which we/they understand the world.

With eerie, timing. Two days ago, my friends at AufhebungaBunga returned to this theme and diagnosed polycrisis talk as the optic of a managerial ideology suffering from Neoliberal Order Breakdown Syndrome.

I’ve always been sympathetic to this reading, with the caveat that an awareness of polycrisis signals that managerial ideology has become self-conscious of its own limits and is thereby irrevocably changed.

This is how I put it in February 2023 after a particularly telling encounter with Niall Ferguson.

“The polycrisis concept … registers that shock and thus offers a kind of dialectical “resolution" - admittedly of a weak kind.

Whereas the advocates of “business as usual” declare that it is still “the economy stupid” and the new Cold Warriors rally around the banner of “democracy versus autocracy”, the third position faces the reality of confusion, the kind of confusion registered by a term like polycrisis.

The concept of polycrisis serves as the third moment in the dialectic (thesis-antithesis-synthesis), not because it offers a strong concept of a new world, or a clean break with the past motivated by what is retrospectively reconstructed as a single dominant tension (autocracy v. democracy). Rather, the polycrisis concept offers a form of (weak) dialectical resolution precisely because it refuses to flatten the thirty-year switchback of optimism and disillusionment with the steamroller of “that’s just history” (Ferguson). Instead, it retains and makes explicit the sense that our present moment is overshadowed by disappointment and confusion.

Polycrisis, for me (AT in Feb 2023), does the work of Aufhebung (sublation). In fact, if you google the term Aufhebung, google turns up an image which, though twee, captures a further, for me, important feature of the polycrisis concept.

Not only does polycrisis describe a messy situation and register our surprise and dismay at the degree of the confusion. It is a concept that was itself found amongst the wreckage - in Jean Claude Juncker’s musings about the EU’s situation in 2015/6. It is a “found concept”, an idea “picked up” off the intellectual sidewalk and deposited in our conceptual carrier bag.

What does this found concept do?

Polycrisis has its critics and at Davos 2023 it risked becoming something of a cliché. But as a catchword it serves three purposes. It registers the unfamiliar diversity of the shocks that are assailing what had previously seemed a settled trajectory of global development. It insists that this coincidence of shocks, whether economic, geopolitical, climatic or epidemiological, is not accidental but cumulative and endogenously self-amplifying. And, by its currency, it indexes the moment at which bullish self-confidence about our ability to decipher either the future or recent history has begun to seem at the same time facile and passé.

Only if we stop reducing the radical and unprecedented situation facing us, either with rewarmed ideological polarities - autocracy v. democracy - or the intellectual bludgeon of “that’s just history”, do we have any hope of making sense of our circumstances and of actually thinking in medias res.”

That is what the piece in the FT this morning continues to try to do. To take a (relative) bearing. To register how far we have moved since 2022 by thinking about and explaining the sense of anachronism that now surrounds the idea of polycrisis.

If “Neoliberal Order Breakdown Syndrome” was one way of characterizing polycrisis back then, then the alarming thing is that things have moved on. After all, crises have two possible endings. In one, the patient recovers. In the other, the patient is dead.

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