Reinhart Koselleck

Critique and Crisis

Argument

From Absolutism to Enlightenment

In his dissertation and 1959 book, Koselleck argues that contemporary understandings of politics have become dangerously depoliticized by Enlightenment utopianism: A reaction against absolutism (the Hobbesian state), which was itself a reaction against the religious wars of the Reformation period in Europe.

Koselleck closely follows Carl Schmitt's argument from The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes by arguing that the absolutist state had made morality a matter of strictly private and individual judgement, disallowing moral conscience any role in political decision-making. This overcame religious civil war and gave rise to the early modern, centralized state, which had a clear, narrow and authoritarian conception of politics as the monopolization of legitimate violence and the guaranteeing of obedience, security and order.

Consequently, within the absolutist state, the private realm grew in power, enabled by the degree of civil liberalism afforded by the regime toward private life. This private moral sphere was nurtured by the Enlightenment (especially, claims Koselleck, in the Republic of Letters and in "non-political" bourgeois secret societies such as the Illuminati and the Freemasons), consolidating itself around a self-conception as an emergent bourgeois "Society" during the 18th century. "Society" constituted a countervailing power which, by upholding the legitimacy of "critique" against existing political authoritarianism, eventually challenged the state, but in an apolitical, utopian way.

Permanent crisis and re-politicization of politics

"In the process," writes Victor Gourevitch in his foreword to Critique and Crisis, "existing political societies came to be judged by standards which take little or no account of the constraints which political men must inevitably take into account, standards which for all political intents and purposes are therefore Utopian." The problem, according to Koselleck, is that the moralism and utopianism of modern ideologies is purely speculative and can offer no viable alternatives to prevailing institutions and practices. Hence, Enlightenment's anti-statism creates a "permanent crisis", a relapse into a kind of ideological civil war, which had culminated in enduring political instability and particularly in the 20th-century phenomena of Soviet and Nazi totalitarianism and the ideological conflict of the Cold War.

Koselleck argues that politics is better understood from the point of view of public servants, politicians, and statesmen who are embedded within political institutions and immanently aware of their constraints and limitations, rather than from the supposedly disinterested perspective of philosophers and other social critics. His aim is to re-politicize contemporary discussions of politics and infuse them with a sense that conflict is an inevitable part of public life and an unavoidable factor in all political decision making, an argument reminiscent of Carl Schmitt, Koselleck's most important mentor.

Reception

Koselleck's portrayal of the Enlightenment public sphere in Critique and Crisis has often been criticized as reactionary and anti-modernist. His emphasis on the "secrecy" and "hypocrisy" of the 18th-century German Enlightenment, and his preoccupation with Enlightenment as a source of conflict and crisis, has been read as an overly pessimistic account of the origins of modern world-views. It sits in stark contrast to the work of Jürgen Habermas, whose account of the 18th century Enlightenment holds it up as a model of democratic and deliberative politics.

Moreover, his claim in the introduction of Critique and Crisis that the 20th century was gripped by a catastrophic "world crisis," has been criticized as being guilty of the same sort of secular eschatology he warns against within the text itself. In fact, for Koselleck modern philosophies were a form of a secularized version of eschatology: that is, theological prophecies of future salvation, an interpretation he adopted from Karl Löwith, his teacher at Heidelberg University. Others insist that the accusations against Koselleck of reactionary pessimism are overstated, and that he is rather attempting to engender a more reflexive and realistic use of political and social concepts.

Works translated into English

Books

• Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988. ISBN 0262611570 | ISBN 978-0262611572
• The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts. Series: Cultural Memory in the Present. Translated by Todd Samuel Presner. Stanford: Stanford University Press; 2002. ISBN 0804743053 | ISBN 978-0804743051
• Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Series: Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought. Translated and with an introduction by Keith Tribe. New York, Columbia University Press; 2004. ISBN 0231127715 | ISBN 978-0231127714
• Sediments of Time: On Possible Histories. Series: Cultural Memory in the Present. Translated and edited by Sean Franzel and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press; 2018. ISBN 1503605965 | ISBN 978-1503605961

Articles

• "Linguistic Change and the History of Events", Journal of Modern History 61(4): 649–666 (1989)
• "Social History and Conceptual History", International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 2(3): 308–325 (1989)
• "Conceptual History, Memory and Identity", Contributions to the History of Concepts 2.1 (2006) A 2005 interview by Javier Fernandez-Sebastian.