The Practice of Conceptual History. Timing History: Spacing Concepts.

The Practice of Conceptual History. Timing History: Spacing Concepts. By Reinhart Koselleck (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. xiv + 363 pp.).

Reinhart Koselleck, as Hayden White points out in the foreword to this volume, is "one of the most important theorists of history and historiography of the last half-century." His fame rests on the seven-volume Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland (1972-1992), which established him as the foremost practitioner of conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte). The handbook, which he originally co-edited with Otto Brunner and Werner Conze, analyses fundamental concepts in history. But Koselleck, who celebrated his eightieth birthday in 2003, is also the author of numerous articles on conceptual history, and this translation of some his important work is therefore entirely welcome. The volume comprises of eighteen essays, many of which analyse specific fundamental historical concepts, such as 'crisis', 'civil society', 'progress' and 'decline', 'emancipation' and 'Bildung'. In each case he masterfully explores the different meanings of the terms and asks when and how they were employed. Time and again he traces them back to their ancient Greek and Roman meanings and explores ways in which that meaning changed over time and space.

It is mildly annoying that the reader is not in all cases informed about the exact origins of the pieces assembled in this collection, but in what must be one of the oldest articles translated, Koselleck pleads for a theoretically oriented history which would develop in particular a theory of periodisation. The article (from 1969) originated in the debates surrounding an alleged crisis of history as a discipline which were virulent in the FRG in the late 1960s, but what remains interesting today is, first of all, Koselleck's attempt to introduce a theory of periodisation. Developing Otto Brunner's idea of a 'saddle period' between 1750 and 1850, he has argued pervasively and consistently to view this century as the vital break between a pre-modern and a modern period. It was, he argued, characterised by politicisation, democratisation, ideologisation and an overall greater sense of historical time in which concepts became more dynamic.

The second interesting bit about this article is how closely related history as a discipline is, according to Koselleck, to the social sciences. A history without proper reference to society is as unthinkable to Koselleck as a history without proper recourse to language. Several other pieces in this collection emphasise this close relationship between social and conceptual history. For Koselleck the Annalistes' idea of a 'histoire totale' is impossible to achieve. Instead his emphasis is on how history is represented through language. This tight linking of social and conceptual history is intriguing if one considers another biographical detail: Koselleck was, for most of his professional life, a professor of history at Bielefeld university, the stronghold of German 'societal history' (Gesellschaftsgeschichte) from the 1970s onwards.

It is not easy to read Koselleck in German. His writing style is difficult and his prose often extremely dense. It is a tribute to the translators of this volume that they managed to bring his articles into fine English. However, it is still virtually impossible to skim-read Koselleck. But every reader who is willing to invest the time will come away from the book with a plethora of insights and intriguing new ideas. Just one example is his marvellous refutation that history always is the history of the victors. Koselleck argues compellingly that in the long term the vanquished, if they survive, are bound to have a greater impact on history than the victors, because it is they who demonstrate that intentions in history rarely coincide with what actually happened in the past.

Koselleck's appreciation of semantics is something that he has in common with Hayden White, and hence it is no surprise that we also find in this book an appreciation of White's Tropics of Discourse. One other piece included in the collection also comments on another book, Charlotte Beradt's The Third Reich of Dreams. Koselleck in particular discusses the different levels on which dreams can be methodologically useful for the historian. Here, as elsewhere in the book, it is method which is of primary importance. An entire article is devoted to the precise relationship between experience and method in the writing of history. Koselleck asks how experience is acquired and how this in turn impacts on the diverse ways in which history is being recorded, continued and rewritten.

Another article looks at the relationship between time and history. Exploring the differences between historical time and natural time, Koselleck comments on the ever shorter temporal rythms from the eighteenth century onwards. Time being one of the central themes in Koselleck's work, it seems appropriate that we have another essay on the relationship between historical time and social history where he explores the different dimensions of time in events and structures. These articles on time are closely related to two other pieces which reflect on the concept of 'new time' (Neue Zeit) and its relationship to the historical concept of 'modern age' or 'modernity' (Neuzeit). Koselleck demonstrates how the introduction of a new calendar in the French revolution was indeed the clearest sign of the breakthrough of the idea that one could actually begin history anew. The late eighteenth century and the Enlightenment appear in Koselleck's writings as the true 'epochal threshold' (Epochenschwelle), when the standard bearers of a genuinely 'new time' proceeded through historical theory to co-ordinate the various elements which made up the concept of modernity.

Another theme of Koselleck's work is represented by two further articles which deal with the future. In one piece he looks at the temporalisation of utopia in the writings of Louis-Sebastian Mercier and Carl Schmitt, while, in the other, he strongly argues that it is the formal structures in history which allow the historian to make prognoses about the future.

Finally, the most recent aspect of Koselleck's work is represented by two articles which deal with visual representations of the past. There is a gem of an article which analyses the representation of death in Daumier's caricatures. Furthermore, the penultimate piece in the collection deals with war memorials as important markers of identy formation among the survivors of war. Koselleck traces the individualisation and democratisation of the memorialisation of death over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and comments perceptively on the wide-ranging formal commonalities of war memorials. But he also points to some intriguing differences. Thus, for example, the androgynous qualities of a Jean d'Arc find no equivalent east of the Rhine, and French depictions of private family grief on war memorials were also relatively rare in Germany.

Overall, anyone who writes history should read Koselleck; one can confidently predict that those who have done will not write history in the same way that they have done before reading him. This collection will allow for the further spread of his ideas in the English-speaking world, and although it seems silly to end on a critical note, it is a pity that the volume does not make any attempt to justify the choice of texts or to introduce Koselleck's work in a more systematic and comprehensive way. (1)

ENDNOTE 

1. Anyone interested in this should turn to Iain Hampsher-Monk, Karin Tilmans and Frank van Vree (eds), History of Concepts. Comparative Perspectives (Amsterdam, 1998), and Melvin Richter, The History of Political and Social Concepts: A Critical Introduction (Oxford, 1995), both of which are not exclusively on Koselleck, but contain a great deal about him.

Stefan Berger

University of Glamorgan