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Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time

 

Reinhart Koselleck’s Vergangene Zukunft. Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten was published in 1979; translations of two essays from this collection were published in the English journal Economy and Society during the early 1980s,1 and in 1985 MIT Press brought out a complete translation of the book under the title Futures Past.2 Reviewers noted at the time the manner in which Koselleck played upon concepts of time and space in the construction of historical meaning. Moreover, his emphasis upon “conceptual history” struck a chord among scholars already familiar with the efforts of Quentin Skinner, John Pocock, and John Dunn to direct our attention to the use of political language as the proper object of the history of political thought. There are many important differences in both intellectual genesis and actual implementation of Koselleck’s project and that of the “Cambridge

School”; but the generally supposed existence of the latter3 certainly rendered Koselleck’s work more accessible to the Anglophone intellectual world. Nonetheless, that from this Anglophone perspective Koselleck’s writings appeared to follow on from the development by Skinner and Dunn of a new approach to political theory is evidence merely that Anglophone has too often meant Anglocentric.

Skinner and Dunn could be said to have drafted the manifesto of this “Cambridge School” in the late 1960s; 4 but Koselleck’s characteristic emphasis on the importance of historical concepts in the reconstruction of meaning predated these two essays by many years. In fact, the essay included below on von Stein and historical prognosis first appeared in 1965, the year that Koselleck’s Habilitation dissertation, Preußen zwischen Reform und Revolution, was accepted. Furthermore, Koselleck’s original proposal to develop a new kind of conceptual history is much older, drafted in the later 1950s. He had first conceived the construction of a comprehensive, one-volume dictionary of historico-political concepts, reaching from antiquity to the present, while working on his Habil, as Assistent to Werner Conze in Heidelberg.

 

This understanding of modernity and historicity was transposed into the physical representation of former pasts by Koselleck’s project on war memorials, the first manifestation of which was an article published among essays directed to the issue of identity in 1979-the same year that Vergangene Zukunft originally appeared.34 Koselleck here drew attention to the range of simultaneous functions performed by the systematic commemoration of those who met a violent death: the memory of the death of soldiers is transmuted into political and social meanings for the future of survivors, while the dedication of such memorials to all who died, first in general terms, later by individual name, is both secular and egalitarian.35 This practice developed from the time of the French Revolution and the ensuing Napoleonic Wars, replacing the tombs of military leaders with monuments to the sacrifices of the led. Associated with this was the idea that fallen soldiers should have individual graves close to the site of their death, a sentiment most extensively represented by the British and French Great War cemeteries marking out for all time its Western Front. The associated conception of the “unknown soldier” developed from the practice of giving each dead soldier an individual grave. First developed during the war between the United States and Mexico, the increasing number of “missing” during the American Civil War promoted the creation of cenotaphs in Baltimore and Arlington.36 The line of argument to be found below-that the conceptual is the social, it is a means of conceiving our place within a social world-is thus extended into its physical manifestation as a modern cult of the dead.

 

Koselleck’s work should therefore be understood as a contribution to our historical self-understanding, and not primarily as a “method” of historical analysis to be replicated, applied, or compared. As an instrument in efforts to transform intellectual history into the history of discourse it certainly provides a powerful stimulus, especially as manifested in the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe project, as Melvin Richter has shown.37 But ultimately that project can be read against a German philological tradition reaching back to the Brothers Grimm and their Deutsches Wörterbuch. That it is occasionally suggested that the English speaking world does not need the GG because we already have the Oxford English Dictionary38 merely confirms a lack of familiarity with the very different scope of these two projects. Koselleck did not invent the history of concepts; when he published his “guidelines” for the GG project in 1967 it appeared in the Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte, a journal founded in the late 1950s quite independently of the new social history being developed in Heidelberg. Besides the overall design of the GG project, the fact that it was ever brought to completion depended vitally upon a shared understanding of the existence of this tradition among German historians, a circumstance not open to replication elsewhere. It is what Koselleck has done with this tradition that deserves our attention, and which is elaborated in the essays that follow.




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Tags: history, witnesses, texts, historical, philosophers, language, Koselleck