Crisis and Future in Contemporary Sociological Discourse: Theoretical Approaches, Limitations and Potentialities

The present work addresses narratives of crisis diagnosis in contemporary social sciences with a focus on their discourse on the future. It starts from the understanding that, through the production of interpretations of the present, sociological narrative is continuously involved in articulating claims about the past and future of societies, thus being able to outline the most diverse aspirations and anticipations within social groups. This allows one to think of sociology itself as a future-oriented practice, which in contexts of crisis seems to gain an increased relevance. Though “crisis” appears as a disputed concept in the field of social sciences, there seems to be no doubt that we are currently living in troublesome times. At least since the events of 2007-2008 in the financial markets, the idea of a present in crisis has spread across diagnoses of different spheres of social life, appearing in such readings both in specific (e.g., “economic crisis”, “environmental crisis”, “democracy crisis”, etc.) and in all-encompassing terms (e.g., “multiple crises”, “entangled crises”, “global crises”, etc.). But what futures can emerge out of a crisis diagnosis? This is the question on which this work concentrates, and it does so through the discussion of the interrelation between both concepts within different traditions of thought in contemporary social theory. In order to substantiate the debate, the Brazilian case is presented as an example, as diverse sociological readings of a democracy crisis have produced different images of the future and ways of relating to it as well.