Work · Science & Human Sciences
Critique 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.
Introduction
Koselleck submitted “Kritik und Krise” as his dissertation in Heidelberg in 1954 and published it in 1959. The book begins with Hobbes: the absolutist state ended the confessional civil wars by placing politics above conscience and leaving morality to the private sphere. In that sphere – the Republic of Letters, the Masonic lodges, the societies of the Enlightenment – a criticism of the state developed that claimed to be moral and unpolitical and so, in Koselleck’s account, concealed its own political character; the philosophy of history turned this criticism into a promise about the future, and the crisis it produced became revolution. Koselleck regarded Carl Schmitt as a mentor of the work; Habermas reviewed it critically in 1960. An English translation appeared in 1988.
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