Progress and Actuality: Koselleck’s Begriffsgeschichte and Benjamin’s Historical Materialism

Abstract

Reinhardt Koselleck can be seen at once as both an outsider to conventional circles of historical investigation and a key figure in the examination of history itself, as an object of philosophical inquiry, in the 20^th century. In his theorizing of modern history, and what it means to engage in the practice of studying history, Koselleck developed what he termed “Begriffsgeschichte”, a conceptual history. Through his understanding of both the temporal and linguistic boundaries of human experience, Koselleck develops a meta-historical basis for the experience of modern history. By so doing, he outlines a break which while not occurring simultaneously across all areas of human life, definitively identifies a gulf between a modern and pre-modern understanding of history and as such a transition in human experience writ large, politically, socially and culturally. In his work Futures Past, a collection of essays on the subject, Koselleck attempts to describe the historical ground from which the term history (as Geschichte) first rose to prominence and assumed new meaning. His Begriffsgeschichte was an attempt to illuminate the structure of this new historical mode, through which history itself becomes an object of understanding and study and to discuss the implications of such an understanding for the discipline of history.