From Crisology to Polycrisis: A Genealogy of the Concept of Polycrisis

Mikael Mesnil Duprat

No amwr5_v1, SocArXiv from Center for Open Science

Abstract: Since 2022, "polycrisis" has become a global category of analysis (ECB, IMF, UN, COP climate conferences, Davos, public-policy think tanks), yet this institutional success has been accompanied by an almost total effacement of its theoretical source. This article reconstructs fifty years of that genealogy (1976-2026). Edgar Morin laid the foundations as early as 1976 in "Pour une crisologie" (a return to the Greek krisis, a reflexive problematization of the "crisis of the concept of crisis"). The term and concept appear in 1993 in Terre-Patrie, are reformulated in 2011 (La Voie) and extended in 2014 (Enseigner à vivre). Method. Three cross-referenced corpora: four founding Morinian texts; 257 academic texts (1993-2024) manually coded on 51 variables; a multilingual bibliometric survey across five civilizational areas and fifteen linguistic variants. Triangulation across three sources of different natures is required. The coded corpus will be deposited as open supplementary data. Four results. (1) Explicit citation of Morin falls from 100% in 1993-2006 to 6% in 2022-2024; Google Scholar mentions rise from fewer than 100 to more than 7,600 annual occurrences between 2020 and 2025; the share of English rises from 40% to 83%. (2) Three multilingual anteriorities: "policrisis" in Spanish in Buenos Aires as early as 1993 (29 years before Davos-Tooze); two Chinese calques by Ma Shengli in 1997 (16 years before the Japanese use); continuous Hispanophone academic diffusion since 1995. (3) The Bakhtin-Morin filiation is philologically refuted: only three occurrences across 19 cardinal works, all in non-conceptual contexts; the lineage is named by Morin himself (1999 Chinese preface) without Bakhtin. (4) Three translational shifts in Homeland Earth (Hampton Press, 1999) contribute to the concept's invisibility in the pre-2022 Anglophone reception. Four analytical contributions: second-order crisis; a four-register typological grid (R1-R4); qualitative substitution characterizing the post-2022 paradigmatic relocation; a mapping in six contemporary prisms of polycrisis. Results are ranked across three levels of proof. The stance is explicitly claimed as a regulative ideal in the Kantian sense. Four external philological verifications remain open without affecting the main results. Résumé en français. Cet article retrace cinquante ans de généalogie du concept de polycrise (1976-2026). À partir de trois corpus triangulés couvrant quinze langues, il documente l'érosion de la citation explicite de Morin (100 % à 6 %), trois antériorités multilingues (espagnol 1993, chinois 1997, japonais 2013), l'infirmation philologique de la prétendue filiation Bakhtine-Morin, et trois glissements traductifs dans Homeland Earth (1999). Quatre outils analytiques sont proposés. Bilingual edition. French version of record: De la crisologie à polycrisis : Généalogie du concept de polycrise (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20369644). English version: DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20539381.

Date: 2026-06-03
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DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/amwr5_v1

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