Zwischen Sprache und Geschichte

During the past fifty years, no scholar has had a more significant impact on debates in historical theory than Reinhart Koselleck. Historical theory remains a relatively small field within the historical profession. Observers outside our discipline must be surprised at how little some historians think about historical time—the medium of history—which is at the centre of Koselleck’s work. Theory does not mean method. In British debates, Koselleck’s achievements are often reduced to a distorted version of his Begriffsgeschichte, or History of Concepts, understood as a specific approach to intellectual history. This view ignores Koslleck’s very considerable contribution to the semantics of historical time, his second and closely-related field of intellectual activity. Conceptual history, for Koselleck, described a method to get behind the socio-cultural structures of historical experiences, requiring the careful empirical analysis of semantic fields in their historical context and their social and political function. With the exception of scholars such as the political theorist Michael Freeden, Begriffsgeschichte still plays a rather marginal role among British historians of ideas, contrasting with the situation for instance in Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Spain and both Americas, where impressive research projects on the history of social and political language have taken Koselleck’s monumental Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe as a model. Going beyond the method of conceptual history, in Europe, Latin America and the United States, Koselleck’s ideas on the temporality of history have provided a major impetus for new approaches to the cultural sciences, where he is read alongside the works of Benjamin, Cassirer, Croce, Löwith, Momigliano and Warburg. Language barriers among British scholars are one of the reasons for the surprising discrepancies between different national approaches to intellectual history. While many of Koselleck’s theoretical articles have been translated into English, the entries to the multi-authored dictionary of concepts remain accessible only to readers of German, with the only exceptions being the introduction and translation of Koselleck’s entry on ‘Crisis’ in the Journal of the History of Ideas (2006)

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