The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts

by Reinhart Koselleck, Todd Samuel Presner (Translator), Hayden White (Foreword)

Reinhart Koselleck is one of the most important theorists of history and historiography of the last half century. His work has implications for contemporary cultural studies that extend far beyond discussions of the practical problems of historical method. He is the foremost exponent and practitioner of Begriffsgeschichte , a methodology of historical studies that focuses on the invention and development of the fundamental concepts underlying and informing a distinctively historical manner of being in the world. The eighteen essays in this volume illustrate the four theses of Koselleck's concept of history. First, historical process is marked by a distinctive kind of temporality different from that found in nature. This temporality is multileveled and subject to different rates of acceleration and deceleration, and functions not only as a matrix within which historical events happen but also as a causal force in the determination of social reality in its own right. Second, historical reality is social reality, an internally differentiated structure of functional relationships in which the rights and interests of one group collide with those of other groups, and lead to the kinds of conflict in which defeat is experienced as an ethical failure requiring reflection on "what went wrong" to determine the historical significance of the conflict itself. Third, the history of historiography is a history of the evolution of the language of historians. In this respect, Koselleck's work converges with that of Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida, all of whom stress the status of historiography as discourse rather than as discipline, and feature the constitutive nature of historical discourse as against its claim to literal truthfulness. Finally, the fourth aspect of Koselleck's notion of the concept of history is that a properly historicist concept of history is informed by the realization that what we call modernity is nothing more than an aspect of the discovery of history's concept in our age. The aporias of modernism―in arts and letters as well as in the human and natural sciences―are a function of the discovery of the historicity of both society and knowledge.

Genres: History, Philosophy, Theory, Academic, Nonfiction, Politics, Essays

384 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Reinhart Koselleck was a German historian, considered as one of the most important historians of the twentieth century. He held an original position in the historical discipline and was not part of any historical 'school', working in such varied fields as Conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte), the epistemology of history, linguistics, the foundations of an anthropology of history and social history, the history of law and the history of government.

Reviews

[Charlie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Rarely does a book incite in me such contradictory thoughts. Positively, Kosseleck is a wealth both of concrete details and profound generalizations. His reputation as a leading historical theorist is well deserved. Negatively, often these are embedded in a meandering, knotty form that makes it anything but simple to see how ideas connect to each other.

As with most books of collected material, some pieces seem more intrinsically valuable than others. This particular collection varies even more by having several different translators, not all of which seem equally capable of rendering clear English. The saving grace of this work is Hayden White's introduction, which clarifies just enough of Koselleck's major themes as to make them identifiable in the often excruciating following pages.

[Andrew · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm not sure if it is the translators or Koselleck's own turgid prose, but I found this book a real chore to get through.
Fortunately, much of the ground the essays cover (especially the essays from the first half of the book) is also dealt with in Futures Past and in the introduction and prefaces to the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, both of which I found much more readable than this, suggesting the lack of legibility is due to the translations after all.

There's a handful of important essays in here, such as the ones on Bildung, Crisis, Emancipation, etc. (I didn't read the one on war memorials). I guess if you are concerned with those specific concepts, this book is worth picking up. But as an overall introduction to Koselleck's method, "the practice of conceptual history", I found Futures Past or Niklas Olsen's History in the Plural much more helpful.