Three Centuries of Despair. In Krytyka, No. 9 (11), 1998, pp. 20–25.

The article analyses the discourse on the crisis of European civilisation from the Enlightenment to the end of the twentieth century. Jedlicki traces the genealogy of "crisological" thinking, beginning with Vico and Rousseau, and shows how scepticism towards civilisational progress crystalized into an independent intellectual tradition. The author examines the key arguments of the critics of modernity: religious, moral, personalist, sociological, political, national-cultural, aesthetic and ecological. Particular attention is paid to how the experience of two world wars and totalitarianism sharpened the question of the relationship between civilisation and barbarism. The author argues that the concept of "crisis" is less an objective diagnosis than a living interpretive framework inseparable from the very idea of progress.