Niklas Olsen. History in the Plural

Befitting its subject, this book is a methodologically sound and theoretically sophisticated piece of scholarship. Niklas Olsen has done the English-speaking world a profound service by situating the work of Reinhart Koselleck—one of the most compelling theorists of history of recent memory—back into the many contexts out of which it emerged and which it eventually helped to transform over the course of a distinguished career. Ably utilizing insights from reception studies, disciplinary history, intellectual biography, and the sociology of knowledge, Olsen offers an exceptionally well-rounded portrait of Koselleck at work, from his student days in Heidelberg up through his tenure as the premiere advocate of Begriffsgeschichte (conceptual history) at Bielefeld University and his eventual emergence, near the end of his life, as a significant public intellectual who entered into contentious debates concerning the appropriate way to memorialize the tragedies of twentieth-century German history. Olsen is particularly interested in the “processes of reception” that shaped Koselleck's intellectual worldview as well as his legacy. His interest in Koselleck's professionalization, or what Olsen calls “the making of the historian,” sets up the book as an insider's account of German academia in the second half of the twentieth century (p. 7). If at times Olsen's narrative slows to a seminar-like crawl while covering some of this terrain, his insightful commentaries on everything from the crisis of historicism to the rise and fall of Gesellschaftsgeschichte—and how Koselleck situated himself in relation to each—more than make up for it. What emerges from this account is a rich analysis of a thoroughly interdisciplinary thinker, one who ranged widely from political philosophy and hermeneutics to ontology, sociology, and anthropology.

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