Abstract
The traditional assumption of economists concerning the uniqueness of economic time is extremely prejudicial to the intelligibility of financial and economic crises. By contrast, taking into account the heterogeneity of temporalities that merge in the economic sphere illuminates the variety of crises that shape the evolution of modern societies. Both great and minor crises can then be interpreted as the expression of a conflict between at least two temporalities: that of finance versus that of the economy, between economic time and demography or that of the discovery and the exploitation of raw materials, not to mention the time of ecology. Financial crises also exhibit phenomena of memory, learning and forgetting, which may explain their recurrence and introduce another dimension of temporality. Lastly, great crises such as that of 1929 and the current crisis are also bifurcations, thus markers in the periodization of the long history of capitalism.