Critique and Crisis Today: Koselleck, Enlightenment and the Concept of Politics
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Critique and Crisis Today: Koselleck, Enlightenment and the Concept of Politics Jason Edwards School of Politics and Sociology, Birkbeck College, London, UK. E-mail: [email protected]
Over the last 20 years, Reinhart Koselleck has become familiar to an Anglophone audience as the foremost practitioner of Begriffsgeschichte (conceptual history). Yet, an early work of his, Critique and Crisis: the Pathogenesis of Modern Society, is today largely overlooked by political theorists. In this paper, I argue that the book is an important resource for contemporary political theory. Not only does it outline a highly cogent approach to the relationship between political theory and practice, but its substantive argument concerning Enlightenment provides insights into the character of political concepts, and the concept of politics itself, that are relevant for thinking about political theory and discourse in the present. Contemporary Political Theory (2006) 5, 428–446. doi:10.1057/palgrave.cpt.9300247 Keywords: Koselleck; Critique and Crisis; Begriffsgeschichte (conceptual history); Enlightenment; politics
Introduction Reinhart Koselleck is best known as the foremost practitioner of an approach to the history of ideas called Begriffsgeschichte (conceptual history). Along with Werner Conze and Otto Brunner, he was responsible for overseeing the compilation of a massive lexicon — the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe — which attempted to map the links between thought and practice over a crucial period (what Koselleck calls the Sattelzeit of the mid-18th to mid-19th century) when the meaning of social and political concepts was fundamentally transformed (Tribe, 1989). This work, undertaken primarily in the 1960s and 1970s, is most familiar to English readers via translations of two volumes of Koselleck’s essays, Futures Past (2004) and The Practice of Conceptual History (2002). However, an earlier work of Koselleck’s — Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society — has received less attention in the Anglophone world. It has been considered by historians of the Enlightenment, who have portrayed it as a work of intellectual history offering many insights, particularly methodological ones, but its substantive argument has been
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criticized by them (La Vopa, 1992). However, the book is not widely known or referred to in Anglophone political theory. This paper will argue that the hallmark strength of Koselleck’s ‘mature’ work — the recognition of the intimate link between contestation at the sociopolitical and the conceptual levels — was already present in Critique and Crisis, and that on this ground alone it is worthwhile revisiting. However, it also contends that the substantive argument of Critique and Crisis remains important because of the light it sheds on the character of social and political concepts generally, and the concept of politics in particular. The main argument of Critique and Crisis is that Enlightenment thought is anti-political and utopian, and tha
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