Reinhart Koselleck, “Modernity and the Planes of Historicity,” in Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (NY: Columbia University Press, 2004), 9—25.
Kosellecks starts the article by presenting his main thesis: “Stating my thesis simply, in these centuries [between 1500 and 1800] there occurs a temporalization [Verzeitlichung] of history.”[1] He argues that until the sixteenth century, historical time in Europe was based on the permanent anticipation of the End of the World aand, secondly, on its continual deferment.[2] Then comes the Renaissance, and the ideas of progress change the perception of historical time. Koselleck quotes Robespierre: “The time has come to call upon each to realize his own destiny. The progress of human Reason laid the basis for this great Revolution, and you shall now assume the particular duty of hastening its pace.”[3] The result of this change is “an inversion in the horizon of expectations.”[4]
According to Koselleck, the Reformation and the Thirty Years War were two events that liberated politics from religion, as they freed secular politics from religious constraints.[5] The consequence of the “new arrangement of politics and religion” was new forms of the “construction of the modern apprehension of time,” as well as “displacement of the future.” “The experience won in a century of bloody struggles was, above all, that the religious wars did not herald the Final Judgment, at least not in the direct manner hitherto envisaged. Peace became possible only when religious potential was used up or exhausted; that is, at the point where it was.”[6] As politics became able to neutralize religion, it opened a new future for the European civiliation.
In this sense, Jean Bodin, a French polymath, was, according to Koselleck, a pathbreaking historian who introduced the concept of sovereignty into history and, by separating “sacral, human, and natural history, <…> transformed the question of the End of the World into a problem of astronomical and mathematical calculation.<…> Human history, considered as such, had no goal, according to Bodin, but rather was a domain of probability.”[7] The future was now shaped not by religious beliefs, but political calculations.
As the result, in the second time of the seventeenth century, the triad of Antiquity, Middle Ages, and Modernity—introduced by the advent of Humanism—became complete. “Since then, one has lived in Modernity and been conscious of so doing.” (p. 17)
What came instead of the Biblical time were two types of historical time: rational prognosis and the philosophy of historical process (Geschichtsphilosophie). (p. 18) Political prognoses, or calculations, deal with the future as “a domain of finite possibilities, arranged according to their greater or lesser probability.” (p. 18). In this case, the the only remaining moral judgments were
(1) related to measuring the greater or lesser evil. (p. 18)
(2) The second consequence of such a position was preparedness for possible surprise, for it was generally not this or that possibility that would be realized, but a third, or fourth, and so on. (p. 18).
This was the new feeling of history: “It was the philosophy of historical process which first detached early modernity from its past and, with a new future, inaugurated our modernity.” (21)
And this is how it happened: Machiavelli introduced the ancient pattern of historical cycles back into the political philosophy, arguing that “experience of history, founded as it was on repeatability, bound prospective futures to the past.” (p. 21)
The fact that the future was now seen as originating in the past is important, as it significantly changed the nature of politics (particularly, on behalf of sovereign states of Europe): “Political prognostication also had a static temporal structure, insofar as it operated in terms of natural magnitudes whose potential repeatability formed the cyclical character of its history. The prognosis implies a diagnosis which introduces the past into the future. This always already guaranteed futurity of the past opened out yet bounded the sphere of action available to the state.” (p. 22)
And as a consequence of all this, the historical process ACCELERATES. (p. 22) The modern time, with its vicious circle of revolution and reaction, comes to the political arena.
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