The Decisive Turning Point: Seven Books on Crisis by James Cairns

There is a boom in books about crisis. No big surprise why. Fascism is ascendent. Decades-old global alliances and trade systems are in tatters. The planet burns while the US president moans Drill Baby, Drill….

Some crisis theorists braid these strands of disaster together and call them, collectively, “the polycrisis,” or “a permacrisis.” The political scientist Thea Riofrancas describes our time as one of “interlocking crises” of politics, economics, and the environment. Whatever your preferred label, crisis talk is everywhere. But just what do we mean by that term, crisis, and what do crises mean to us?

In my recently published book, In Crisis, On Crisis: Essays in Troubled Times (Wolsak & Wynn), I describe becoming fascinated by crisis-talk near the midpoint of Trump’s first presidency. At the time, journalists and academics talked ceaselessly about how Trump’s norm-squashing style and authoritarian fantasies had thrown liberal democracy into crisis. I most certainly agreed about the odiousness of Trump’s thuggishness, his sexism and racism, and his disdain for checks on executive power; but I was skeptical that either his bigotry or his administration’s policy achievements made Trump qualitatively different than your typical US president. (The record of Trump 2.0 is a different, and open-ended matter, as I wrote in Active History a few months ago.) More than a year before anyone had said the words “covid pandemic,” my curiosity about what people were talking about when they talked about crisis led me to read widely into the history of the concept.

The word is rooted in the Ancient Greek verb krino, meaning to choose, to judge, to decide. For the Greeks, the term was used strictly within the field of medicine. Crisis was the decisive turning point in the life-chances of a gravely ill patient. The moment of crisis was a period of extreme danger and instability: either the patient begins to recover or dies. Something of this fleetingness, this transformational character, inheres in the Daoist conception of the term. In Daoism, writes the philosopher Tangjia Wang, “crisis, as the possibility of catastrophe, is pregnant with the possibility of fortune.” The historian Robin DG Kelley (channelling Walter Benjamin) acknowledges that crises rarely benefit oppressed people; yet, Kelley maintains, that the ultimate hope of left radicals is to “create a real state of emergency” for the ruling order.

My deep dive into all-things crisis – philosophically, historically, and social media-feedy – led me to a striking realization, one that did not register at the level of conscious thought when I started researching the so-called crisis of democracy under Trump One. It happened after I’d put my kids to bed one evening in late spring 2019. I was reading an article about the difficulty of locating precisely when crises begin and end, when it suddenly hit me that my newfound interest in crisis, both as a concept and as an experience, was in no small part driven by my lifelong struggle with alcoholism. I know that things can suddenly fall apart because for more than twenty years, I’ve lived through cycles of sobriety, delusion, collapse, recovery, the new normal of sobriety, relapse, and repeat.

I’d arrived at a decisive turning point in the research process. I could continue with my scholarly inquiry into the so-called crisis of democracy and broader theoretical questions about the concept of crisis, bracketing my personal stake in the project. Or, I could pursue a different type of project, one I hadn’t undertaken before, writing more honestly about my complex interests in these questions, which operate on multiple registers simultaneously – both social and personal, cultural and autobiographical. I chose the latter option. The result is In Crisis: On Crisis.

The seven titles below, spanning several different genres, became something like earworms while I wrote essays about the eco-crisis, pandemic moves, apocalyptic literature, blackout drinking, fatalism, “the-worse-the-better” politics, and yes, the crisis of democracy. What I mean is that the core insights of these books have for years replayed on a loop in my mind, either because they’ve become essential to my thinking about crisis, or because they keep testing my essential beliefs. Each title is an excellent opportunity to advance your own thinking about our troubled times.

the world keeps ending, and the world goes on

by franny choi

harper collins canada

There’s an image in Franny Choi’s poem “Doom” that I think of as the motivating scene for my crisis book: “For years, you’ve kept one eye on the shadows / swilling above the door, waiting for the arrival / of the God of Doom. What to do now / that he’s here, sipping coffee in our kitchen?” If this is it – the world is on fire, the fascists are back in power, genocide upon genocide, a nuclear cocktail of violence and disease and consumerism and suffering without end – what now? But, Choi’s collection brilliantly reminds us, only the most privileged by empire’s centuries of killing and plunder would see the doom of our time as unprecedented. The genius of Choi’s poems is in their ability to represent the terrors of our end-of-the-world moment alongside the apocalypses endured by people persecuted at the centre of empire and across the Global South “every day for a century or two.”

against the crisis: economy and ecology in a burning world

by ståle Holgersen (trans. steven cuzner and ståle holgersen)

verso books

I am far from being the only commie guilty of hoping in moments of economic crisis (in 2008, in 2020, in 2025…) that this will be the event to bring the ruling class to its knees. Holgersen is having none of it. No, he writes in the opening pages: “Crises are the enemy.” It’s true that capitalism is crisis-prone, and the system can look fragile when global profits crash. But under the reigning political-economic order, dominant responses to crisis will ultimately be geared toward protecting or restarting processes of profit accumulation. Sometimes this involves letting some businesses fail, sometimes it involves modest concessions to workers. In any case, Holgersen’s recurring point is that, while capitalism produces crises, crises reproduce capitalism.

anti-crisis

by janet roitman

duke university press

Roitman’s book has become the touchstone for a type of writing about crisis that’s primarily interested in the way language and stories are used to establish the understanding that a crisis has occurred. In fact, Roitman challenges the commonsense assumption that crises exist in the world, that there are events so sudden, dangerous, and unstable, that they achieve the status of crisis in and of themselves. That’s not it, argues Roitman. While journalists, academics, all of us, tend to treat crisis as “a starting point for narration,” that is, we assume that the label we’re using is self-evident, and that we all understand what we mean by the term, in truth, it’s never obvious nor objectively provable just what is a crisis and what isn’t. I’m resistant to Roitman’s ultimate conclusion (and I think she undercuts her own position through her case study of the 2007-08 economic crisis), but her emphasis on the power of crisis-talk as a way of framing the world is essential reading.

“dispatches: writing in/during crisis”

by pamela mulloy and vinh nguyen, editors

the new quarterly

I realize that this title is a cheat, by which I mean, not a book. But this special feature published by TNQ in January 2024 is so important, its essays move me so profoundly, that it has to be included here. Seven essays respond to the question: “What does it mean to be a writer in times of political and moral crisis?” The question is not abstract, however. It is framed in the context of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, in the aftermath of the violent attack by Hamas on October 7, 2023. Saeed Teebi describes Palestinian writing as “an act of faith because Palestinianness itself is so threatened.” Ifran Ali writes about being “broken open” by writing from Gaza. Gary Barwin roots his particular sense of obligation to write against genocide in Gaza in his identity as a Jewish writer with family killed in the Holocaust, living on land secured by the Canadian state through genocide against Indigenous peoples in North America. Madeliene Thein writes about her struggle with “wordlessness, which comes not from fear but from pain,” and the duty to speak, to intervene, to write against genocide and for Palestinian liberation, not as writers but as human beings.

generation dread: finding purpose in an age of eco-anxiety

by britt wray

vintage canada

Britt Wray somehow managed to write a book exploring the anxiety people feel in the face of the environmental crisis without prioritizing the problem of people’s fear of the future above the problem of climate catastrophe itself. She does this in two ways. The first is by understanding eco-anxiety as part of a “broader planetary health crisis” that includes the material destruction of the environment, and the economic and social forces driving it. Secondly, she accepts that eco-anxiety is not something to be overcome by practicing gratitude, or CBT, or anything else. Eco-anxiety emerges from terrifying and brutally real conditions. The question is not how to stop thinking about those conditions, blithely hoping for the best, or turning inward. It’s a matter of learning to live with loss, fear, anger, and uncertainty as part of making eco-activism psychically possible.

the confidence trap: a history of democracy in crisis from world war I to the present

by david runciman

princeton university press

The thesis of Runciman’s book is straightforward: Because democracy is a uniquely adaptable political system, it is good at surviving crises. The book’s seven case studies of liberal democracy managing crises of war and financial collapse by temporarily employing technocratic and autocratic methods (in 1918, 1933, 1947, 1962, 1974, 1989, and 2008) make for fascinating reading. But neither the book’s theoretical argument, nor its take on history explain why I can’t get it out of my head. The reason the book sticks with me today is that reading it in 2025 begs one question with every turn of the page: What about this time? Has Trump’s attack on constitutional rights and the limits of executive power crossed a point of no return? Did the pre-Trump 2.0 global rise in authoritarianism (in China, in Israel, in Russia, in India, in Hungary, in Poland, in Bolsonaro’s Brazil, in Italy…) signal the coming collapse of democracy worldwide, regardless of who sits in the White House or 10 Downing Street? Unlike Runciman’s historical crises that were managed through temporary periods of anti-democratic rule, this time the call to abandon liberal democracy is coming from inside the house.

doppelganger: a trip into the mirror world

by naomi klein

vintage canada

This is likely the best-known title on this list, not only because of Klein’s high public profile as an activist and voice on the left, but because Doppelganger won the 2024 Women’s Prize for Nonfiction. That said, there must be at least some people out there who haven’t read the book yet. Well, I’m here to say: READ THIS BOOK! For its fresh and compassionate explanation of the attraction of conspiracy theories and far-right politics, for its movement between social analysis and personal reflection, for the insight of its case studies (of covid anti-vaxxers, of neoliberal unreality, of the right-wing podcastverse, of Israel/Palestine), this book is singularly captivating and important. It’s not a theory of crisis as such, but rather, what Klein understands as a study of society at a decisive turning point, a study of a society so deeply divided, pulled so powerfully by fascistic forces that Klein feels as though it could “flip fascist” before we know it. Wild that it was written before Trumpism returned to state power.

James Cairns lives with his family in Paris, Ontario, on territory that the Haldimand Treaty of 1784 recognizes as belonging to the Six Nations of the Grand River in perpetuity. He is a professor in the Department of Indigenous Studies, Law and Social Justice at Wilfrid Laurier University, where his courses and research focus on political theory and social movements. James is a staff writer at the Hamilton Review of Books, and the community relations director for the Paris-based Riverside Reading Series. James has published three books with the University of Toronto Press, most recently, The Myth of the Age of Entitlement: Millennials, Austerity, and Hope (2017), as well as numerous essays in periodicals such as Canadian Notes & Queries, the Montreal Review of Books, Briarpatch, TOPIA, Rethinking Marxism, and the Journal of Canadian Studies. James’ essay “My Struggle and My Struggle,” originally published in CNQ, appeared in Biblioasis’ Best Canadian Essays, 2025 anthology.