Koselleck and the Concept of History

Abstract

A major theme in Reinhart Koselleck's oeuvre is the polysemy inherent in key concepts underpinning modern Western thought, experience, and practices. Among these is the concept of history, to whose genealogy and Wirkungsgeschichte he devoted a great amount of interpretive effort throughout his career. As a practitioner of conceptual history, Koselleck addressed notions of history in several of his inquiries, talks, and texts. Yet it should not pass unnoticed that such notions are present in his works not only at the content level, i.e. not only as subjects under study. More or less articulated assumptions about history can be found as key elements among the conceptual paraphernalia that structures his theoretical and historical arguments on ‘history’, as well as on almost everything else. This operational concept of history departs in many crucial respects from the past ideas conceptual-historically surveyed by him, especially from the modern speculative philosophies of history. My paper will explore the circumstance that Koselleck was not only an influential interpreter of political modernity, but also a highly original historical theorist. I intend show that he did not embrace a primarily epistemological or representational conception of the historical, in contrast to the intellectual instincts that prevailed among theorists after the Second World War. My main thesis is that Koselleck, despite his critique of earlier conceptions regarding laws, the meaning, or the end of history, relaunched a substantive concept of history, one grounded, so to speak, in reality itself.