Metacrisis: A Conceptual History

Abstract

The word “metacrisis” is not as new as it appears. This essay traces the concept across roughly six thousand years — from the Proto-Indo-European root krei (“to sieve, to distinguish”) and the Ancient Greek krisis, through Galen’s medical De Crisibus and its medieval Latin reception, to the term’s modern proliferation across philosophy, theology, systems theory, ecology, psychology, and contemporary polycrisis discourse. Told primarily through the word’s appearance in books — with theses and essays mixed in — it documents a long, slow semantic shift rather than a single coinage.

Building on the methods of conceptual history while arguing beyond them, Atlas proposes a fuller definition: a metacrisis is a complex system whose elements are crises, one that exhibits its own emergent behavior and is defined by a state-space of both actual and possible crises. He contends that this reading both includes and transcends the term’s earlier uses. The stakes are practical — as the number and complexity of interacting crises grow, interventions aimed at any single crisis increasingly generate unforeseen, system-wide effects, a social analogue of iatrogenesis. The essay is extensively illustrated with primary sources.