What can Aristotle's 'Poetics' teach us about the Southern European Crisis?

The construction of political narratives has given rise to an important body of work relating the mechanisms of literary production with those of historiography. And indeed there are grounds to pursue such sort of enquiry: in the midst of a large amount of contingent phenomena that unfold especially in turbulent periods, political actors turn their efforts toward the construction of narratives that are able to assemble the events in a chain of necessity. Paul Ricoeur’s “Temps et Récit I” resorts to Aristotle’s “Poetics” to elaborate on the mechanisms through which the construction of fictional narratives (such as tragedies or epopees) can actually be seen as a general framework for the construction of historical and political narratives. In an attempt to bring this framework into an empirical study, this article aims at looking into how the “Poetics” can help one understand the making of the Southern European Crisis’s narrative. In doing so, it goes beyond the general case made by Ricoeur to argue that one can see elements of classical tragedy (hubris, recognition, and catharsis) in the way the crisis came to be understood. Ultimately, an investigation of the construction of the crisis’s narrative allows the social analyst to better understand the policy-making process that followed it.