Reinhart Koselleck. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (NY: Columbia University Press, 2004)
Reinhart Koselleck was a pioneer of conceptual history in the way that he was one of the first scholars to see—or, at least, to right about it explicitly and profoundly—that concepts, first, play a key role in human societies by organizing them and, second, shape the understanding of history in any given time period. In a way, he offered a new subject field for historical studies: past conceptions of the future, or futures past, as this collection of his paper was named. Working within a larger German tradition of conceptual studies (Otto Brunner and Werne Konze), he is, still, regarded as the most influential representative of this school.
Begriffsgeschichte as it was formed by the work of the German school of conceptual history places an emphasis on “the objectification of states of consciousness, that is, it concerns the relationship of situational and structural language use in the past.”[1] As such, it does not offer an exact method, but rather a number of procedures to implement (formulated by Koselleck in the form of questions to the contributors to Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe). Consequently, Begriffsgeschichte “is intended not as an end in itself but rather as a means of emphasizing the importance of linguistic and semantic analysis for the practice of social and economic history.”[2] This main point is that “the conceptual is the social, it is a means of conceiving our place within a social world.”[3]
Preface (p. 1-5)
Koselleck starts by arguing that there are multiple historical times, which are based on different social and political institutions, organizations and practices. Moreover, different social and political groups have different historical times, even if they co-exist geographically and chronologically.[4] Units of measurements and metaphors of measure are, still, borrowed from natural time.
His thesis is that with the coming of modernity (through the Enlightenment), a new notion of history came, as social and political expectations grew. Earlier, without the idea of progress, the humanity knew nothing of these expectations. He makes an interesting observations, almost in passing: “In differentiating past and future, or (in anthropological terms) experience and expectation, it is possible to grasp something like historical time.”[5] This is why any historian should be a little bit anthropologist: for any analysis of the past involves not only our categories of time (if we want to understand and explain historical phenomena), but also those of people living at that time, and this is better to do through categories of experience and expectation.
Koselleck then moves on to give a definition of modernity which is based on the change in historical time: “the more a particular time is experienced as a new temporality, as “modernity,” the more that demands made of the future increase.”[6] Modernity, in this sense, means a human desire to control—as much as possible—the future.
The research agenda of this book is to look at specific concepts as they organize the production and consumption of historical time: it “seek out the linguistic organization of temporal experience wherever this surfaces in past reality.” [7] “Consequently, these studies continually reach out and take up the sociohistorical context ; trace the impulse in the pragmatic or political language of author or speaker; or, on the basis of conceptual semantics, draw conclusions concerning the historico-anthropological dimension present in every act of conceptualization and linguistic performance.”[8]
[1] Keith Tribe, “Translator’s introduction,” in Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past. On the Semantics of Historical Time (NY: Columbia University Press, 2004), p. xv.
[2] Ibid, p. xvi.
[3] Ibid, p. xix.
[4] Reinhart Koselleck, “Author’s Preface,” in Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past. On the Semantics of Historical Time (NY: Columbia University Press, 2004), p. 2.
[5] Ibid, p. 3.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid, p. 4.
[8] Ibid.
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