Crises shake our deep-rooted ideas and blur our vision of events. They also diminish our capacity to think of a common, collective future imagined beyond national and private expectations. This is particularly true right now, when history seems to reacquire for many its absolute contingency. We are, therefore, obliged to ask a preliminary question: are we really equipped to reliably weigh and forecast the issues that we are called upon to discuss? We find a number of obstacles standing in our way that are obvious, but not very well known in their interactions: the volatility of financial markets that seems to thrust the economy towards recession and provoke a lack of confidence among states, banks and individuals; the grave inequalities that are produced by the different growth-rates between those nations that are economically advanced and those that are lagging behind; the accelerated migration of entire power blocks at the global level; the bifurcation between centripetal processes of globalization and centrifugal processes of relatively closed-off localisms. Insecurity and threats have existed throughout human history, but today the perception of the risks (understood as a staging and anticipation of possible catastrophes) are greatly exacerbated in a globalized world whose parts are interconnected, but in which the comprehension of its processes has become more opaque, and where the dangers are not sufficiently calculable. In the long run, we have been accustomed to believe that conscious human intervention was able to shorten the time necessary to find inevitable solutions for many crises, to «accelerate the labor pains». But, as Keynes said, «The inevitable never happens. It is the unexpected always ». In the mechanisms of protection and guarantee of citizens’ lives something has broken down: it is as if a drop of the immune system had left more room for maneuver to wild powers, causing weakness of the policy and the disorientation of individuals. In the medium-to-long run, are we dealing with a crisis of growth, according to the cyclical phases of «creative destruction» that capitalism has endured or, instead, with a systemic crisis? In any case, it is evident that the time has come to rethink the relationship between the state and the market, since the state must now, more than ever, guarantee the vital needs of its citizens. Furthermore, this new role of the state changes the task of politics.