Constructions of the Crisis

The article is a social linguistic analysis that reconstructs and compares two interpretations of the 2008 global financial crisis, put forward by successive Hungarian prime ministers Gordon Bajnai and Viktor Orbán. By mapping their discursive procedures and strategies, it tries to show that both of them utilized the discursive resources of the political languages used by their respective political sides well before the crisis. To enrich the analysis, the article tries to interpret both crisis-constructions in an analogical way, using examples from the politics of antiquity as objects of comparison. The aspect-seeing remarks of the later Wittgenstein serve as the basis of this interpretive strategy.