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This is one of a set of three essays, exploring the current crisis in a Durkheimian perspective, and brought together with the first English translation of Durkheim’s own commentary on a world in upheaval, ‘The Politics of the Future’ (1917). In the opening essay, Steven Lukes suggests that a way to begin to reflect on the nature and long-term repercussions of the crisis is through Durkheim’s account of anomie. In the following essay, Mike Gane is concerned with an underlying paradox in which neo-liberalism is in practice a form of socialism and statism. In general, it reproduces the malaise that Durkheim analysed as a mass of individuals under the management of an overcentralized state, and in the absence of an effective democratic network of intermediate groups. In particular, it relies on a technique of power that involves a corrupted form of what Caillois analysed as the game, and that controls and manipulates the individuals constituting ‘human capital’ through a system of bureaucratically regulated game-like competitions. In the final essay, Edward Tiryakian asks ‘which crisis?’ Beyond the financial and economic upheavals, there is a wider, systemic, moral anomie. This shows up in various ways in trends, throughout western societies, in family life, education and citizenship – key interlinking institutions of the social fabric.