Reinhart Koselleck

Works

• 1959Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society

  Dissertation of 1954: the absolutist state ended the religious civil wars by separating politics from private conscience; there the Enlightenment developed a moral criticism of the state that hid its political aim and issued in revolution and utopian philosophy of history.

• 1979Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time

  Essays on the modern experience of time: history ceases to be the teacher of life, the future becomes open and plannable, “history” becomes a collective singular, and “space of experience” and “horizon of expectation” name the poles of historical time.

Position

Koselleck is on the map as a founder of conceptual history and as a theorist of historical time. His dissertation “Critique and Crisis” (1959) argued that the Enlightenment, sheltered in the private sphere of the absolutist state, developed a moral criticism that denied its own political character and ended in revolution and in utopian philosophies of history; he regarded Carl Schmitt as a mentor of the work, and Habermas criticised it in 1960. With Otto Brunner and Werner Conze he edited the “Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe” (1972–97), a lexicon of political and social language in Germany built on the hypothesis of a “saddle period” around 1750–1850, in which concepts were temporalised, democratised, ideologised and politicised. The essays of “Futures Past” (1979) describe the modern age by the growing distance between the “space of experience” and the “horizon of expectation”, categories that Ricœur took up in “Time and Narrative”. In “Historik und Hermeneutik” (1987) he started from Heidegger’s “Being and Time” to name pre-linguistic conditions of possible histories – having to die and being able to kill, friend and enemy, inside and outside – and Gadamer replied. Later essays (“Zeitschichten”, 2000) set out a theory of layers of time, and he wrote on war memorials and the politics of remembrance. How far Schmitt’s thought shapes “Critique and Crisis” is discussed under “Context & critique”.

Life & context

Reinhart Koselleck was born on 23 April 1923 in Görlitz; his father was a historian and educational reformer. A war volunteer, he served from 1941 as an artilleryman on the Eastern Front and later in a Luftwaffe signals unit; in April 1945 he was taken prisoner by the Red Army, held for some weeks in Auschwitz and then for about a year and a half in a camp near Karaganda in Kazakhstan. From 1947 he studied history, philosophy, sociology and constitutional law in Heidelberg, where he heard Jaspers, Alfred Weber, Gadamer and Löwith, and in 1954 took his doctorate under Johannes Kühn and Löwith. After teaching German at the University of Bristol (1953–55) he took his habilitation in Heidelberg in 1965 with a study of Prussia between reform and revolution. He held chairs in Bochum (1966), Heidelberg (1968) and, from 1973 to 1988, the new University of Bielefeld. In 1999 he received the Sigmund Freud Prize for scholarly prose. He died in Bad Oeynhausen on 3 February 2006.

Further main works

• Kritik und Krise (1959)
• Preußen zwischen Reform und Revolution (1967)
• Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (ed. with O. Brunner and W. Conze, 1972–97)
• Vergangene Zukunft (1979)
• Zeitschichten (2000)