The Global Crisis as an Interregnum of Modernity.

The article characterizes the present global crisis as an interregnum of modernity. The paper, while granting that the multi-faceted brake if not break-down of world economic development is a major parameter of the global crisis, adopts the perspective that there are other deep structures operative--political, moral, cultural, and cognitive ones, which intertwine with the economic to produce a state of general disequilibrium, and not just a partial economic disequilibrium. The phrase "interregnum of modernity" has been used to propose that the world is in a global axial period of transition. This is paralleled in the interregnum of theoretical frameworks having paradigmatic status in American sociology, and probably in other social sciences. Japan has already shown remarkable technological and economic growth and even in the grim global economic climate of the past ten years, China and Korea have turned in above-average performances. In this interregnum, an innovative endeavor for sociologists is to study on a comparative, cross-national and cross-historical basis the nature of crises, societal as well as cognitive ones.