Collapsologie
du latin collapsus, « qui est tombé en un seul bloc »
A term coined by Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens to name the transdisciplinary study of the potential collapse of industrial civilization, and what might follow. Neither a doomsday prophecy nor a survivalist manual, it is an attempt at clear-eyed knowledge—combining scientific data, reason, and intuition—to confront what lies ahead and calmly discuss what to do about it.
Ce sera tout l'objet de la collapsologie, que nous définissons donc comme l'exercice transdisciplinaire d'étude de l'effondrement de notre civilisation industrielle, et de ce qui pourrait lui succéder, en s'appuyant sur les deux modes cognitifs que sont la raison et l'intuition, et sur des travaux scientifiques reconnus.
The word is a confession of fabrication. Servigne and Stevens say they coined it “with a certain self-deprecation,” from the Latin collapsus, “that which has fallen in a single block.” What they find lacking in the debate on the end of a world isn’t imagination—there’s already too much of that—but discipline: “What’s missing is a true applied and transdisciplinary science of collapse.” Collapsology emerges to fill this void, gathering work that was previously “scattered” across archaeology, economics, ecology, and climatology, without being confined to any single field.
Two clarifications embedded in the term itself. Transdisciplinary: no single discipline can grasp the phenomenon, which is systemic. And of what might follow: the subject isn’t just the fall, but also the aftermath, the post-carbon world already taking shape. Hence the second unusual foundation for a science: reason and intuition. The authors reject neutrality—“collapsologists are directly affected by what they study”—and link intellectual work to the process of mourning, grieving a future once taken for granted.
The term sits alongside the intrusion of Gaia: the same refusal of Man standing above his fate, the same reminder of a dependence modernity believed it had overcome. But where Stengers names the force that irrupts, collapsology attempts to make it an object of study. It also extends the idea of complexity: a system of interdependencies where a single failure spreads, and no effect remains local.
Collapsology ≠ survivalism: the latter prepares the armed retreat of the individual—“how to craft your bow and arrows”—while the former seeks shared knowledge to “calmly discuss policies to implement.” It ≠ catastrophism that thrives on fear: “This book you hold is not meant to scare you.” Nor is it ≠ dated prediction: it speaks of probabilities, of “varying degrees of collapse,” of a temporality “neither linear nor uniform”—never a fixed date.