Abstract
Taking as its starting-point the current experience of economic and political crises worldwide determined by elements seen as uncontrollable, this article resumes some of the main historiographical perspectives from the XIX-XXI century on the phenomenon. Theories of collapse and cyclical time are examined from a point of view that seeks to grasp not only the content of concepts but also their logical modality, i.e. how each theory explains the occurrence of the alternating phases in a cycle or of the debacle of a social system results from casual or necessary conditions.
Keywords:
Crisis; collapse; cycles ; fatality; relative necessity; chance