See

discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/306373902

The temporalization of critique and the open

riddle of history: On Reinhart Koselleck’s
contributions to critical theory

Article in Thesis Eleven · January 2017

DOI: 10.1177/0725513616674400

CITATIONS READS

2 41

1 author:

Rodrigo Cordero
Universidad Diego Portales
23 PUBLICATIONS 50 CITATIONS

SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

Núcleo Milenio Modelos de Crisis (NS130017) View project

All content following this page was uploaded by Rodrigo Cordero on 17 November 2017.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

The Temporalization of Critique and the Open Riddle of History:
On Reinhart Koselleck’s Contributions to Critical Theory

Rodrigo Cordero
Universidad Diego Portales, Chile
rodrigo.cordero@udp.cl

This is a pre-print version. To be published in Thesis Eleven.

1
The Temporalization of Critique and the Open Riddle of History:
On Reinhart Koselleck’s Contributions to Critical Theory

Abstract

The main goal of this paper is to offer a reading of Reinhart Koselleck’s work as an ally

of critical theory. My contention is that, despite customary accusations of Koselleck

being an anti-Enlightenment historian detrimental to social criticism and emancipatory

politics, his investigations on the semantic fabric of modern society may actually

expand our resources for the critique of domination. In order to make this argument

plausible, I reconstruct some antinomies that are at the basis of Koselleck’s work

(state/society, language/reality, experience/expectation) and discuss their critical

potential. This analysis shows that, rather than a rejection of the spirit of critique,

Koselleck contributes to the temporalization of the practice critique as such: namely, a

clarification of the contradictions and potentials of a reflexive practice imbued in the

struggle between the need to comprehend the world as it is and the right to

experiment with other forms of life.

Keywords

Reinhart Koselleck, conceptual history, critical theory, domination, conceptual

abstractions.

2
Introduction

The work of German historian Reinhart Koselleck is not well-known within sociology

and remains underrated among critical theorists, mainly due to the alleged

conservative and anti-Enlightenment footing of his early work. Since Habermas’s

critical review of Koselleck’s 1959 book Critique and Crisis (Habermas 1987), a number

of interpreters have emphasized that this book is a rendition of Carl Schmitt’s fascist

conspiracy theory of indirect powers and a total assault on the modern idea of critique

(Brunkhorst 2014, Scheuerman 2002, Strydom 2000). Since Koselleck focuses on the

political perplexities and self-destructive utopianism of the Enlightenment critique of

sovereign power that emerged with the French Revolution, his book is declared

sociologically guilty of ignoring the rich dynamics of bourgeois sociability and the

institutionalization of the liberal public sphere of rational argument (Habermas 1992,

Hohendahl 1995, Cohen and Arato 1992; Norberg, 2014). But it is also considered

normatively deceptive as it underestimates not only the importance of social criticism

in modern democratic politics, but also the need to provide normative foundations for

political action. This may explain why, even if Koselleck’s later contributions to the field

of conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte) are widely recognized, his work is still seen in

antithetical terms to critical theory’s emancipatory interests (Olson 2012).

Despite the apparent distance between Koselleck’s historical research and

critical social theory (expressed in the works of Marx, Adorno, and Habermas, among

others), there is a growing sense of the need to reconsider the possible dialog between

both approaches (Gilbert 2015; cf. Bustamante 2015). Hauke Brunkhorst’s Critical

Theory of Legal Revolutions (2014: 257), for instance, argues that Koselleck’s

observations on the differentiation between state and society are ‘very useful for

3
evolutionary purposes’, insofar as they demonstrate that this structural division is a

historical achievement that plays a key part in the ‘normative constrains’ of modern

society. On the other hand, Peter Wagner (2008) and Kari Palonen (2002) have

respectively suggested that Koselleck’s work on modern political lexicon helps us to

explore the semantic fabric that weaves the plurality of discourses that shape

collective interpretations and actions, and thus it offers a methodological path to a

‘non-normativist style’ of political and social theorizing. Last but not least, María Pía

Lara’s most recent book Disclosure of Politics (2013) draws directly on Koselleck’s

approach to concepts as spaces of struggles in order to reconsider the ‘conceptually

disclosive’ character of political action, that is, the concrete capacity of agents to open

new territories of meaning in history and imagine other forms of life in common.

Drawing on these considerations, I hereby offer a reading of Koselleck’s work as

an ally for critical theory’s lasting concerns. Specifically, I intend to rescue the

elements that in his account of the ‘dialectics’ of political modernity contribute to

enrich and possibly expand critical theory’s struggle against the logic of closure of

meaning and action that drives forms of social domination. To substantiate this

reading, I shall focus on some fundamental antinomies that are at the core of

Koselleck’s historical reconstruction of the semantic fabric of modern society and his

attempt to unpack the fictions this fabric actually brings about. First, the dialectics

between state/society that Koselleck conceptualizes as a structural signature of the

modern world and as an enabling condition of both the practice of critique and the

utopian excesses that haunt political life. Second, the distinction between

language/reality that underpins Koselleck’s methodological defense of studying the

movement of concepts as a means to decipher the power-imbued experiences of

4
conflict that define the political anatomy of modernity. Third, the gap between

experience/expectation that underpins modern structures of temporality and which

Koselleck formulates as the anthropological basis for a normative defense of the

constitutive openness and plurality of human history.

Based on the reconstruction and discussion of these antinomies, I suggest that

Koselleck’s work brings back a strong sense of the perplexities of social critique as an

observer and participant in political life. This entails, first and foremost, a recognition

that whenever critique elevates itself as a force that claims independence from social-

historical conditions, it closes off politics as a realm of human action and imagination.

Koselleck’s warning runs as follows: the subjective freedom of critique is not free of

the illusions of wholeness that haunt the discourses to which it opposes and seeks to

debunk. Rather than an assault on critique, we should read this proposition as a

powerful reminder of critique’s struggle between the need to comprehend the world

as it is and the right to experiment with other forms of life in common. Koselleck’s

work does not claim to answer this difficult problem. Crucially, it does contribute to

the temporalization of the practice of critique, as a normative orientation towards

keeping the riddle of history open, without closure, by depriving concepts of their

claim of completion and by widening the horizons of expectation without divorcing

them from actual experience.

The Dialectics of Critique: Between the Social and the Political

Koselleck belongs to a generation of scholars who, after the events of 1914 and 1945,

were struggling to comprehend the cultural and intellectual preconditions for the

societal rupture that led European societies to the political catastrophe of war,

5
violence and totalitarianism. The book Critique and Crisis: On the Pathogenesis of

Bourgeois Society is Koselleck’s first and foremost attempt to investigate ‘why the

world had collapsed before their eyes’ (Olsen 2012: 19). The book was initially planned

to be a study of the political influence of Kant’s philosophy in the French Revolution.

However, it turned into an explanation of the origins and fate of Enlightenment

criticism and its relation with the political crisis of the Ancien Régime. Koselleck’s basic

intuition was that by examining ‘the presupposed connection of critique and crisis’

that underlies the revolutionary process that unfolded in Europe from 1789, we could

comprehend the lasting antinomies and constitutive fissures of political modernity

(Koselleck 1989: 9). The key to understanding this ‘dialectic’ entails a historical

explanation that connects: the structural conditions that led to the separation between

state and society, on the one hand, and the semantic formations that shaped the self-

understanding of bourgeois criticism as a non-political practice, on the other.

The thesis of the separation of state and society, or politics and morality, is a

structural condition and achievement of modernity. It consists in the division between

a domain of public interest governed by the law of the sovereign and a private domain

governed by the jurisdiction of a conscience alienated from and yet protected by the

state. This doctrine is the historical solution that secured the expansion and legitimacy

of the European Absolutist State after the religious warfare of the sixteenth century.

The exclusion of private consciousness from state power not only allowed politics to

work regardless of moral considerations but also, Koselleck argues in a clear Hobbesian

fashion, ‘created the premise for the unfolding of a moral world’, securing a space of

autonomous opinion and critique (Koselleck 1989: 11). What is crucial about this

separation is that Enlightenment criticism ‘expanded into that same gap which the

6
Absolutist State had left unoccupied in order to end the civil war in the first place’

(Koselleck 1989: 38). In other words, the conditions that engendered the space of

social criticism were the same that ended up threatening the state’s historical

existence.

Along the rise of the bourgeoisie as an influential social class but one without

any real political power, critique acquired practical-political significance in the

emerging domains of bourgeois civil society such as clubs, salons, and literary

societies. The institutionalization of these ‘social’ spaces granted citizens the freedom

to pass rational judgments ‘in an alternation between moral censure and intellectual

critique’ (Koselleck 1989: 58). The activity of literary, aesthetic, and historical criticism

cultivated in these circles existed in parallel to the jurisdiction of the state, but soon

surpassed its boundaries and became an implicit challenge to the legitimacy of

sovereign power. From this region of deliberation and discussion, bourgeois society

came to perceive itself in strong opposition to the state because, from the

universalistic viewpoint of man as a ‘human being’, the monarch and those in power

appeared as immoral ‘usurpers’ of their natural rights. Thus it was almost equally

natural for bourgeois critics to arrive at the conclusion that society’s ‘protection by the

state’ should be reversed into society’s ‘protection from the state’ (Koselleck 1989:

73). This was the Enlightenment’s ‘political’ choice and the actual basis of the ‘non-

political’ understanding of the critique they practiced.

According to Koselleck, the non-political conception of critique prevalent within

Enlightenment intelligentsia —i.e., the art of arriving at proper insights about the truth

of things— presupposed two claims. First, the critic as a neutral authority that

rationally stands above the parties and, second, the relentless movement of reason as

7
a compulsion to unravel the legitimacy of everything: from aesthetic beauty and

scientific truth to political authority and moral norms. 1 Thus, if nothing escapes the

gaze of the critic, and every moment of critique is a step toward ‘the yet-to-be-

discovered truth’, the social world necessarily enters into an ‘infinite process of

renewal that sucked out the present from under the feet of the critic’ (Koselleck 1989:

109). Without solid grounds upon which to justify the practice of critique, the

Enlightenment had to take ‘the pledge of a tomorrow in whose name today could in

good conscience be allowed to perish’ (Koselleck 1989: 10). This pledge means, in

essence, that the bourgeois critical indictment of the State had no other option than to

adhere to ideas of progress as a necessary step to compensate for the miseries of the

present. This rationalization of actual experience into conceptions of a better future is,

in Koselleck’s account, the source of the utopian surplus that nurtured the ‘chain of

critiques’ of modern society and the philosophies of progress inaugurated by the

Enlightenment (Koselleck 1989: 183; 2002a: 87-9; see Lowith 1995).

According to this interpretation, the dialectic in which critique based ‘the

process of unmasking, simultaneously caused political blindness’ (Koselleck 1989: 183).

Koselleck’s main contention is that the reality of the growing conflict between state

and society remained hidden in ‘historico-philosophical’ images of the future and the

universalistic claim of rational judgment. Without recognizing its partisan character

and active role in the political crisis, ‘critique became the victim of its neutrality; it

turned into hypocrisy’ (Koselleck 1989: 98). The hypocrisy consisted in claiming ‘the

political anonymity of reason’ while transforming this ‘moral distancing from politics

[…] into the ostensibly non-political basis of the fight against Absolutism’ (Koselleck

1989: 183). Essentially, the certainty of the State’s collapse was interpreted in terms of

8
a moral trial (the advance of the right to subjective freedom over State despotism),

while the concrete reality of the revolutionary politics emerging from the crisis

(violence, social disintegration, and civil war) was concealed. In so doing, the utopian

element in this philosophy of history proved its capacity to relieve the practice of

critique of any ‘political responsibility’ in the unfolding of the political crisis (Koselleck

1989: 134).

Koselleck’s most radical indictment is that the self-glorification of

Enlightenment critique as an emancipatory social force was unable to recognize that

the overthrow of state power was not the fulfillment of the moral laws of history.

Rather, it was a contingent political process of real confrontation whose outcome

could not be secured favorably by elevating the moral point of view as a justification of

critique or as a new principle of rule (Koselleck 1989: 146). According to this

interpretation, social critique is not free of the illusions of wholeness that haunt the

religious, social and political discourses to which it opposes and seeks to debunk in the

name of human freedom and dignity. It ultimately lies in the lack of self-reflexivity

about its political position in public life and normative involvement in society’s open-

ended processes of self-transformation.

Koselleck finds the seeds of this potentially conflicting element in the

Enlightenment attitude that elevates subjective freedom to an abstract moral principle

and historical force detached from the objective configuration of the social and

political conflicts of the day. This attitude is problematic not only because it naturalizes

the right to critique as an absolute value and empty ideal, but also because it mystifies

state power as the essential albeit hidden object of critique: notably, Enlightenment

criticism is not able to recognize that the state is not the source of moral evil but a

9
contradictory subsystem of modern society. As critique totalizes one moment of the

complex configuration of modern social life (i.e., the sphere of individual right and

moral freedom) and grants it normative primacy over others (i.e., the sphere of the

constitutional state and politics), it mirrors the conceptual mystification that the

Absolutist State had created of itself in order to justify its worldly existence (Fine 1997:

18-21). In so doing, it ends up mystifying the certainties of reason as well as

devaluating the contingencies of history.

From the perspective of critical theory, there are at least two important

objections that may be raised against Koselleck’s reconstruction of the dialectics of

Enlightenment critique. The first is the one-dimensional conceptualization of “the”

Enlightenment as a homogeneous project overridden by a non-confessed resentment

to politics, which then places the Absolutist State as the passive victim of forces

working behind the scenes and portrays the loss of political authority as catastrophic.

As Habermas’ account of the emergence of the bourgeois public sphere convincingly

shows, Enlightenment criticism was never an intellectually coherent movement, but a

multifaceted and cosmopolitan constellation of thinkers, arguments, practices,

institutions and ideas (Habermas 1989). The issue is that even if we accept Koselleck’s

view that the Enlightenment critique of power, in its most anti-state forms, had a

propensity to moral self-righteousness, we can neither ignore the plural, often

conflicting, social/political impulses that underlie the Enlightenment’s intellectual

pursuit of truth and knowledge (Fillafer 2007: 328-329), nor deny the normative

innovations introduced by the Enlightenment’s egalitarian struggles to assert universal

rights and emancipation in the structure of modern societies (Brunkhorst 2014).

10
 A second objection is the methodological assumption of the structural

distinction between the social and the political as a fixed opposition. As I showed,

Koselleck draws on this fundamental dualism to account for the institutional

conditions that nurtured Enlightenment critique and its utopian excesses. His

interpretation of the ‘pathogenesis’ of modernity though relies on the assimilation of

the social with private morality, and the political with state power, which is

problematic because it fails to acknowledge that a substantive part of the

revolutionary struggle against despotism involved the historical redefinition of the

meanings and boundaries of these spheres (Arato and Cohen 1992; Pankakoski 2010).

The issue at stake here is the teleological generalization to which Koselleck’s argument

leads us to: namely, the idea that the social-moral formation of eighteenth-century

emancipatory thought is a forerunner of the destructive logic of twentieth-century

political ideologies (Koselleck 1989: 1-6). For many readers, this interpretation of the

dialectic of Enlightenment can only result in a dead end and is incompatible with

critical social theory. Insofar as it regards ‘criticism as the real crisis of modern times’

(Brunkhorst 2003: 131), it misrecognizes the conceptually disclosive potential of

criticism in the space of politics (Lara 2013: 135-138).

My contention, however, is that Koselleck’s critique of critique, despite its

parochialism and conservative associations, offers important insights for thinking

through the perplexities of the all-embracing capacity for critique that characterizes

the modern spirit. As his analysis unpacks the ambivalence between the social

foundations and political implications of intellectual critique, it problematizes the

idealization of morality as a means to construct a legitimate horizon for questioning,

and eventually overcoming, state authoritarianism and domination. The basic problem

11
Koselleck sees within the Enlightenment is not the historical emergence of critique as

such but the ‘hypertrophy of subjectivity’ that justifies contempt for state politics in

the name of the subjective freedom of individuals, regardless of its objective

determinations. The paradox which we should not overlook is that ‘what starts life as a

principle of critical thought becomes in the course of its own development a new

source of superstition and subjection’ (Fine 2001: 34). For this is precisely what triggers

all sorts of fantasies that promise future redemption from the evils of the present,

while precluding our capacity to comprehend the world as it is, as well as our will to

engage with the uncertainties and contradictions implied in sustaining a political form

of life.

To be sure, it is difficult to strike a balance between morality and politics, but

one may say with Koselleck that modern politics is not the place for critique to play out

the role of moral hero. Although the very separation between ‘morality’ and ‘politics’

is the source from which modern political ideologies draw evidence for their utopian

energies, for Koselleck the fundamental question is not how to reconcile this tension in

order to dispel illusions. Since the differentiation of these spheres is a distinctive

achievement and a necessary feature of the modern world, we need to learn how to

move through its ambivalent impulses as to recognize that moral ideas are disastrous

when turned into political programs but indispensable as guiding signs for critical

thought and common action (Kolakowski 1990: 144).

According to this reading, Koselleck’s work should not be read as a rejection of

utopia per se but as a critique of utopianism as a conceptual model of political action.

Utopias are imaginative visions of a better life whose power lies in that their normative

content may actually orient human action and thus contribute to disclosing

12
alternatives to the existing order of the world; without this horizon of expectations,

politics would be reduced to a domain of ‘specialists without spirit’, as Max Weber

once put it. The problem for Koselleck, however, consists in the distortions to which

utopian thought leads to when it proceeds independently from historical experience

and social conditions. For it creates an abstract image of the future upon which the

actor, like a ‘sensualist without heart’, liberates himself from responsibility as the

course of things is already decided. In Koselleck’s view, utopian excesses in political life

should be confronted by recovering a strong sense of the contingency and plurality of

historical times, which often ‘run differently than how we are retrospectively and

anticipatively generally forced to interpret them. Actual history is always

simultaneously more or less, and seen ex post fact, it is also always different than we

are capable of imagining’ (Koselleck 2002a: 99).

The Movement of Concepts: Between Language and Social Reality

For critical theorists it is not easy to accept the critique of critique that derives from

Koselleck’s account of the utopian impulses of Enlightenment thought. A key to bridge

this gap lies in accepting the immanent contestability and unattainability of all utopias

rather than doing away with utopian thought altogether (Cooke 2004). To do so, it is

not enough to inquire how the objective conditions that produce social domination are

related to the subjective wish to break free from those conditions; it is also necessary

to comprehend the conceptual armor through which the existing constellation of social

relations has developed and assert their justification. This is important not only for

deconstructing the political myths that work over people’s heads with the authority of

facts without question, but also for depriving critique of any claim to final

13
reconciliation.

While reflecting on the political vicissitudes of the practice of critique, Koselleck

sought to draw the path through which language becomes a moral-ideological

battleground and concepts acquire descriptive value and normative force over social

life. Methodologically, the book Critique and Crisis reconstructs and examines the

semantic innovations and inner aporias that the language of Enlightenment brings

about in the self-understanding of modern society. The reason is rather simple: in

order to understand the revolutionary process, we need to be able to track the history

of how the dissolution of the old society and the emergence of the modern world were

conceptually registered (Koselleck 2011: 8). In a somewhat Weberian fashion,

Koselleck entertains the idea of a sociology of concepts which follows the movement of

concepts, ‘only far enough for their political accent to come into view’ in social reality,

and clarifies the social structure of historical situations, only far enough to decode the

conceptual forms that concrete actors forge to make sense of the world and give

direction to history (Koselleck 1989: 8-9; Olsen 2012: 188).

Within this framework, Koselleck traces the emergence of a consciousness of

epochal uniqueness and new time (Neuzeit) whose linguistic incarnation is the

transformation of a series of concepts into ‘categories of movement’ (Koselleck 1997).

The years from roughly 1750 to 1850 epitomize a period in which the main concepts of

political theory and programs of social transformation ‘contain a coefficient of

temporal change’ (Koselleck 2004a: 248). In this regard, one of the performative

effects of the philosophical and literary practice of the Enlightenment lies precisely in

having transformed a series of notions —like crisis, revolution, and progress— into

‘basic concepts’ (Grundbegriffe) of Western social and political vocabulary.

14
 The notion of Grundbegriffe entails a particular stance on the relations

between language and social-historical reality. Koselleck uses this term when referring

to all those notions that ‘combine manifold experiences and expectations in such a

way that they become indispensable to any formulation of the most urgent issues of a

given time;’ thus, he contends, ‘basic concepts are highly complex; they are always

both controversial and contested’ (Koselleck 1996: 62). This brief but insightful

formulation suggests that basic concepts configure a distinctive province within

language as ‘they register those minima commonalities without which no experience is

possible, without which there could be neither conflict nor consensus’ (Koselleck 2011:

32).

In essence, it implies that a concept is not a mere subjective invention of the

intellect, a coherent and stable unity of meaning, or a classificatory tool that helps us

measure social regularities externally according to pre-constituted ideas. Rather, a

concept is a constellation of apparently disperse elements in society, a crystallization

of the ways in which actors make sense of the world and social relations are

historically organized. Therefore, a concept is a hermeneutically embedded object of

experience, which is unconceivable without the extra-linguistic elements of social and

historical reality. Although concepts are essential for the linguistic articulation of

knowledge and experience of the social world in a given time, this does not mean that

they are epiphenomena of social reality, or that social reality can be fully grasped by its

linguistic representation. As Koselleck argues, a ‘society and its concepts exist in a

relation of tension’ insofar as ‘there is always certain hiatus between social contents

(or referents) and the linguistic usage that seeks to fix this content’ (Koselleck 2004b:

76, 86-7; see also Koselleck 2002b).

15
 Seeing in the light of Koselleck’s political genealogy of modernity, this

formulation of ‘basic concepts’ conveys a double methodological meaning that is

central for the examination and deconstruction of the dominant concepts that modern

society produces and applies to itself. Namely, that concepts have the semantic

capacity to ‘register’ the historical traces of power-imbued experiences of social

conflict as much as the performative capacity to ‘participate’ in the direction of social-

political transformations. This twofold premise suggests that insofar as we consider

that concepts are capable of storing entire historical processes, the experiences that

define the anatomy of an epoch can be deciphered through its central concepts. On

the other hand, it also implies that concepts are practical factors of the reality they

seek to describe, as agents creatively use concepts to shape social reality and conduct

the course of history.

This leads us to acknowledge that concepts work as organizing principles and

forms of vision of the world in which we live. As concepts articulate relations between

a multiplicity of elements, semantic contents, meanings and temporal experiences,

they delimit a region of objects and possible actions, as well as ‘a particular horizon for

potential experience and conceivable theory’ (Koselleck 2004b: 86). In doing so, they

acquire descriptive power and regulative force over concrete social reality. To be sure,

concepts may stabilize and appear as hermetic black-boxes that hide this complex web

of significations, but they are never fixed codes or neutral unities of meaning. Here

Koselleck directly appeals to a key proposition Nietzsche elaborates in the Genealogy

of Morals: namely, that those concepts in which entire social processes and historical

experiences are ‘semiotically concentrated’, defy any attempt to formulate exact

16
definitions, because ‘only that which does not have history can be defined’ (Nietzsche

2007: 53). So Koselleck writes:

A basic concept thus comes into its own at the precise point when different

strata and parties must interpret it, in order to provide insight into their

respective conditions, and to achieve the capacity for action. For this reason,

the semantics of what we conceptualize (Begrifflichkeit) is neither “subjective”

nor “objective”, neither “idealistic” nor “materialistic”. In the medium of

language it is always both at the same time (Koselleck 2011: 32).

Given the extraordinary capacity to organize experience and structure expectations,

basic concepts, in Koselleckian terms, are not mere casing of ideological

representations or shortcuts to understanding. They operate as surfaces of contact

with the world and therefore we should treat them as documents of the human

struggles to make sense of the conflicting relations between past, present and future.

Thus, we could argue that ‘basic concepts’ attain their mode of existence as material

embodiments of discursive activity, which disclose ‘not a piece of information about

the world, [but] something about themselves, and their own relation to the world’

(Foster 2007: 50). Ultimately, this is the reason why basic concepts cannot be actually

defined but can only be ‘objects of interpretation’, since they are always open to

dispute and to be occupied by actors in their endless efforts to define social positions

and the meanings of historical-political events. From this perspective, a concept —and

the work of conceptualization through which it unfolds in time—is almost by definition

an open and relational field of struggles between what is real and what is possible, and

17
therefore a site where potential for disobedience and critique, as well as for

domination and exclusion, are both inscribed right from the beginning.

The combination of these two levels of analysis (i.e., concepts as sites of

inscription and objects of interpretation) opens a methodological window to follow the

movement of concepts as crystallizations of social transformations and historical

experiences. By tracing the complex semantic fabric of heterogeneous meanings that

weaves in the present use of a concept, Koselleck seeks to explore and bring into sight

‘the “contemporaneity of the noncontemporaneous” that can be contained within a

concept’ (Koselleck 2004b: 90). That is, the diverse strata of sedimented meanings that

actors can have recourse to make sense of a particular situation and enact in a

generalized manner to order experience, make comparisons, and disclose possibilities.

Here it emerges a ‘productive tension’ between the social-historical immanence of a

concept and ‘its capacity to transcend its primitive context and project itself in time’

(Palti 2011: 7), which is essential to uncover the principle of non-identity between

language and actuality that constitutes every conceptual regime. It is precisely this

disjunction that is relevant for conceptual history to break ‘the naive circular

movement from word to thing and back’ (Koselleck 2004b: 86) and devise the

impossibility of closure of meaning. Put differently, it is the generative space in which

concepts may achieve the discursive potential to construct as much as the material

capacity to destroy.

Based on this reading, I shall suggest that Koselleck’s investigation into the

history of modernity’s ‘basic concepts’ offers itself as a critique of the mystification of

concepts and the logic closure of conceptual formations that justify social domination.

Indeed, my claim is that Koselleck’s invitation to immerse ourselves into the marks,

18
nuances, genesis and paradoxes of historical language is an invitation to comprehend

the constellation that gives form to the present, to question the tacit universality of

dominant meanings, and to explore the horizon that establishes the margins of what is

accepted and what is possible. Put in these terms, Koselleck’s work on conceptual

history, regardless of its intellectual roots and original intentions, configures a critical

hermeneutics2 that brings a new impetus to one of critical theory’s central claims:

namely, that the critique of society cannot do without an empirically grounded critique

of concepts. It does so through the concrete analysis of how the abstractions that rule

social relations become historically valid and practically true as principles of vision and

division of the world, not to mention the plurality of struggles for conceptual definition

in which social actors become involved when coping with problems (Cordero 2017:

153-154). Conceptual history thus contributes to challenge the temptation, customary

among social scientists, to see the social world as a transparent empirical object (for

empirical reality itself is conceptually mediated and constituted) and to use concepts

as mere external representations (for social life produces its own forms of abstraction

and self-understanding).

Conceptual history, in essence, may become a kind of ‘antidote’ to what

Adorno calls the ‘autarky of the concept’, that is, the intellectual semblance of ‘being

in itself’ like a self-sufficient and transparent unit of meaning exempted from empirical

reality. A concept is a concept insofar as ‘it is entwined with a non-conceptual whole’,

which means that it becomes a moment of the empirical world but which can never be

identical with this immediate space of experience (Adorno 2006: 12). This is so

because concepts have an inner ‘compulsion to abstraction’ and become ‘catchwords’,

as they aim ‘to speak simultaneously to people of most different living spaces’

19
regardless of their particular experiences (Koselleck 1997: 23). Such abstractions are

relevant objects of investigation insomuch as they set ‘the preconditions for making

politics’ and for the ‘criticism of ideologies’ (Koselleck 1997: 23). Accordingly, what

dissolves conceptual fetishism that fixes meaning is not the work of terminological

clarification, as it were, but the insight that concepts have attained their existence

under certain conditions and that the social process of ‘their becoming fades and

dwells within things’ themselves (Adorno 2006: 52). Hence, if society cannot be known

independently from its concepts, critical theory cannot but proceed as conceptual

history: by localizing and historicizing the contradictions immanent to the conceptual

frameworks that shape and legitimize our present forms of life.

The Non-closure of History: Between Experience and Expectations

The insistence on following the movement of concepts through social life is what

allows conceptual history to unlock the moment of non-identity between conceptual

forms and social reality. The critical potential here lies in the possibility of revealing the

genesis and paradoxes of modern concepts, which in turn may serve as ferment for

transformative instances of criticism where actors can ‘learn to do things with

concepts’ and dare to open new territories of political agency (Lara 2013: 23). In so

doing, conceptual history not only contributes to deprive concepts of their claim to

completion but also reminds us of the impossibility of closure of history. After all, the

world is a human place to inhabit precisely because it lacks a single foundation and,

therefore, it is not immune to question.

This is relevant for the purposes of thinking about Koselleck’s dialog with

critical theory insofar as it presupposes that the method of conceptual history also

20
involves a tacit normative orientation. This could be described in terms of the attempt

to develop and work with a concept of history that becomes an alternative to

philosophies of history that reduce the plurality of temporal regimes and historical

processes to a singular ought, determinate cause or final reconciliation (Olsen 2012:

42-52). As it is well-known, this is a lasting concern in the post-Hegelian tradition of

critical theory. In particular, one may suggest that Koselleck shares the main diagnosis

of Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, regarding the self-destruction

of reason and of the world it wishes to disclose through the belief in progress. As for

them, the uncritical belief in the progress of reason means that ‘for Enlightenment the

process [of history] is always decided from the start’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 1997:

24).

It is true that Koselleck’s early work offered a reductionist appraisal of the

formation of eighteenth-century utopianism as an explanatory factor of the

‘pathogenesis’ of modernity, and therefore as a factor from which one could deduce

the role of twentieth-century political ideologies (e.g. Nazism and those in the Cold

War) as part of a singular historical process. Such claim resorts to a concept of history

that obstructs the plurality of human action, removing contingency from politics and

the unpredictable from historical experience. Yet Koselleck himself took distance from

this position by introducing in his work the anthropological presupposition that

‘language and history, discourse and action, do not fully coincide’ (Koselleck 2001: 75;

my translation), and by theorizing the structures of temporality and the plurality of

possible justifications of historical experience beyond any form of historical necessity.

Koselleck’s most distinctive contribution in this regard is the elaboration of the

formal distinction between ‘space of experience’ and ‘horizon of expectation’ as a

21
means to grasp both the constitutive openness of history and the political conflicts

that therein emerge. The increasing separation between these domains of temporality

is the unequivocal evidence of a broader process of transformation of historical

experience in modern societies, which is not merely subjective but ‘has left its

[objective] mark on our political and social language to this day’ (Koselleck 2002c:

129). The fact that the space of experience and the horizon of expectation actually

split apart in modernity, even to a point in which the difference is no longer

recognizable for individuals, is the underlying motif that connects both Koselleck’s

early critique of the Enlightenment and his mature project of conceptual history

(Hoffmann 2010).

Still, the distinction between experience and expectation is not simply

significant because they split apart at a certain moment in European modernity. My

contention is that Koselleck takes the separation itself as a normative point of

reference upon which forms of ideological closure of meaning and action may be

contested. For him, experience and expectation are two metahistorical categories,

anthropological conditions that make temporal experience and understanding possible

(Koselleck 2004d). This quasi-transcendental nature, though, does not mean that these

categories are fixed; on the contrary, the relationship between experience and

expectation is a varying one, which is why they serve as indicators of changes in

temporal experience.

Furthermore, the structural difference between experience and expectation is

also what makes it possible for us to identify different temporal layers in which the

novelty of unique events coexists with the persistence of structures of repetition. So

Koselleck writes:

22
 The unity of a series of events lies empirically there where a surprise is

experienced. Experiencing a surprise means that something happens differently

than previously thought. Suddenly you are faced with a novum, that is, a

minimum temporal generated between before and after. The continuum linking

past experience and future expectation is broken and must be constituted

again. It is this irreversible minimum temporal between before and after which

introduces surprises in us. So we try again and again to interpret it (Koselleck

2001b: 39; my translation).

Precisely because there is a hiatus between past experience and future expectation,

history appears not as a mere succession of events in a chain of lineal progress but as

the space where something new can emerge; and yet it is for the same reason that the

discontinuity of the new cannot be meaningfully articulated without the continuity of a

common memory or being affected by the past. To be sure, we may wish to guide our

present actions toward the future without any anchorage in prior experience (utopia),

and we may too try to seek security from the contingencies of the future in images of a

frozen past (tradition). However, both alternatives misrecognize the crucial fact that

these two poles are not simply opposed; they configure a structural difference and a

relation of mutual mediation without which thinking about history as an open, plural

phenomenon is practically impossible.

In other words, historical time is not a smooth topography. The very gap

between experience and expectation is the condition that creates unavoidable

frictions in the concrete processes of self-understanding of modern society. In so

doing, it actually works as a clause that defies, albeit does not prevent, attempts at

23
giving normative closure to the social world as a solid unity founded around one

principle. The issue at stake in Koselleck’s formulation is that although the space

between experience and expectation can expand or contract in specific social-

historical situations —as it happens in revolutions and crises—, we should not let the

tension between them become a ‘schism’ between unrelated identities. That is, ‘we

have to keep our horizon of expectation from running away from us. We have to

connect it to the present by means of a series of intermediary projects that we may act

upon’ (Ricoeur, 1990: 215-6). After all, without the preservation of this in-between

space there would be no standpoint for a meaningful description of the world, no

perspective for a compelling critique of society.

Consequently, if the practice of critique is actually entangled in this moving and

conflictive terrain, it has to face up to the aporetic task of seeking to lose anchorage in

existing forms of life that produce domination (logic of negation), while intending to

outline the prospects of transcending the current state of affairs and finding new

forms of living together (logic of disclosure). The aporia consists in that the struggle to

dissolve given concepts and norms becomes empty and lost without projects that we

may act upon; and the task of disclosing new meanings and practices becomes blind

and even tyrannical without past experiences. Standing in this ‘broken middle’, to use

Gillian Rose’s expression (Rose 1992), the attitude of critique rather consists in

recognizing that without any form of duration there would be no truth, and that

without any hope of transcendence there would be no justice. To strike a precarious

balance between these contradictory impulses is perhaps one of the most challenging

issues for the practice of critique.

24
Closing Remarks

The main goal of this paper is to offer a reading of Koselleck’s work as an ally of critical

theory. My contention is that, despite customary accusations of being an anti-

Enlightenment historian detrimental to social criticism and emancipatory politics,

Koselleck’s investigations on the semantic fabric of modern society may actually

contribute to expand our resources for the critique of domination. In order to make

this argument plausible, I have explored some antinomies (i.e., state/society,

language/reality, experience/expectation) that are constitutive of Koselleck’s attempt

to unpack the conditions of emergence of social critique and the pervasive

dependence of emancipatory politics on the conceptual wisdom of ideologies. The

result of this analysis is not an assault on the idea of critique, but the temporalization

of the practice critique as such: namely, a clarification of the contradictions and

potential of a reflexive practice imbued in the struggle between the need to

comprehend the world as it is and the right to experiment with other forms of life.

This temporalization makes it impossible to conceive the practice critique as

external to the vicissitudes of the crisis-ridden processes it seeks to comprehend and

helps to unfold, and therefore as external to the political struggles for interpretation

and action that critical situations open and intensify. This claim can be further

unpacked in terms of my reconstructive reading of Koselleck’s work. Sociologically, it

means that the subjective right to interrogate the normativity currently in place

depends on a conceptualization of society as a domain of relations that reproduces

itself on condition of the impossibility of achieving a definite state of harmony through

a coherent or stable principle. In this way, critique is interlocked with this whole but

cannot claim autonomy to define this whole under its own terms; whenever it does, it

25
elevates itself as an intellectual force independent from the structural divisions (e.g.,

state/society) in modern societies, which create conditions for domination and

exclusion as well as for critique and disobedience.

Methodologically, this translates into placing more importance to the empirical

observation of the conceptual regimes that shape institutions and the concepts that

actors mobilize in social struggles and political conflicts. It is not an issue of performing

linguistic or philological analyses, though, but of distilling the material force and

normative power that concepts exert over social life. Therefore, an important part of

the work of critical theory consists in the art of undoing the rigid concepts that seem

to hold social relations together, so as to untie the knots of their process of becoming

“abstract” things with a life of their own. The point of this exercise is not to declare

concepts inadequate but to use concepts in order to go beyond concepts.

The normative challenge that comes from these considerations does not

consist, at least not primarily, in the imperative to provide normative foundations for

critical theory. Against the logic of closure of meaning and action that drives forms of

social domination, the actualization of ‘our normative commitment to freedom’

cannot but begin by ‘opening up [these very] normative commitments to radical

questioning’ (Allen 2015: 205). This work of problematization, I suggest, is our best

option to challenge the reduction of social life to a fixed foundation or historical telos.

Put in Koselleckean fashion, the temporalization of critique ultimately means to accept

that one must work hard to keep the riddle of history open, without closure, by

constantly widening the horizons of expectation but without divorcing them from

experience. For to abolish the distance between experience and expectation is to

abolish the disclosure of the possible in what is given. All in all, the real crisis would be

26
the absence of critique at all, the imposition of the belief that society is a solid concept

without question.

Funding

The completion of this article was possible thanks to financial support from the Chilean

Council for Science and Technology, Fondecyt Iniciación [Grant No. 11121346] and the

Millennium Nucleus “Models of Crisis” [Grant NS130017]

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to Robert Fine, Daniel Chernilo and Aldo Mascareño for valuable

comments and suggestions. Criticisms from three anonymous reviewers were essential

to improve some sections of the paper. Last but not least, I also thank María Pía Lara

for inviting me to present an earlier version of the paper at the Philosophy and Social

Sciences colloquium in Prague.

References

Adorno T (2006) Negative Dialectics. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.

Adorno T and Horkheimer M (1997) The Dialectic of the Enlightenment. London: Verso.

Allen A (2015) The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical

Theory. New York: Columbia University Press.

Brunkhorst H (2014) Critical Theory of Legal Revolutions: Evolutionary Perspectives.

New York and London: Bloomsbury.

27
Brunkhorst H (2003) Crisis. In: Outhwaite W (ed.) The Blackwell Dictionary of Modern

Social Thought. London: Blackwell, 130-133.

Bustamante Kuschel G (2015) Duso's Critique of Political Philosophy: From

Methodology to a Postmodern Retrieval of Democracy. Constellations.

doi: 10.1111/1467-8675.12187

Cohen J and Arato A (1992) Civil Society and Political Theory, Cambridge,

Massachusetts: MIT Press.

Cooke M (2004) Redeeming redemption: The utopian dimension of critical social

theory. Philosophy and Social Criticism 30(4): 413-429.

Cordero R (2017) Crisis and Critique: On the Fragile Foundations of Social Life. New

York and London: Routledge.

Fillafer F L (2007) The Enlightenment on Trial: Reinhart Koselleck’s Interpretation of

Aufklärung. In: Wang Q E and Fillafer F L (eds.) The Many Faces of Clio: Cross-

cultural Approaches to Historiography, Essays in Honor of Georg G. Iggers. New

York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 322-345.

Fine R (2001) Political Investigations: Hegel, Marx, Arendt. London: Routledge.

Fine R (1997) Civil society, enlightenment and critique. Democratization 4(1): 7-28.

Foster R (2007) Adorno: The Recovery of Experience. New York: SUNY Press.

Gilbert A (2016) Conceptual histories and critical theories. Thesis Eleven 132(1): 87-

101.

Habermas J (1992) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge:

Polity Press.

Habermas J (1987) Zur Kritik an der Geschichtsphilosophie. In: Habermas J

Philosophisch-politische Profile. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 435-444.

28
Hoffmann, S (2010) Koselleck, Arendt, and the Anthropology of Historical Experience.

History and Theory 49: 212-236.

Hohendahl P (1995) Recasting the public sphere. October 73: 27-54.

Kolakowski L (1990) The Dead of Utopia Reconsidered. In: Kolakowski L Modernity on

Endless Trial. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 131-145.

Koselleck R (2011) Introduction and Prefaces to the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe.

Contributions to the History of Concepts 6(1): 1-37.

Koselleck R (2004a) Neuzeit: Remarks on the semantics of modern concepts of

movement’. In: Koselleck R Futures pasts. On the semantics of historical time,

New York: Columbia University Press, 222-254.

Koselleck R (2004b) Begriffsgeschichte and social history. In: Koselleck R Futures pasts.

On the semantics of historical time, New York: Columbia University Press, 75-

92.

Koselleck R (2004c) “Space of experience” and “horizon of expectation”: Two historical

categories. In: Koselleck R Futures pasts. On the semantics of historical time,

New York: Columbia University Press, 255-275.

Koselleck R (2002a) The Temporalization of Utopia. In: Koselleck R The Practice of

Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts. Stanford, CA: Stanford

University Press, 84-99.

Koselleck R (2002b) Social history and conceptual history. In: Koselleck R The Practice

of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts. Stanford, CA: Stanford

University Press, 20-37.

29
Koselleck R (2002c) Concepts of Historical Time and Social History. In: Koselleck R The

Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts. Stanford, CA:

Stanford University Press, 114-130.

Koselleck R (2001a) Cambio de experiencia y cambio de método. Un apunte histórico-

antropológico [Change of experience and change of method. Historical-

anthropological notes]. In: Koselleck R Los estratos del tiempo: estudios sobre la

historia. Barcelona: Paidós, 43-92.

Koselleck R (2001b) Estratos del tiempo [Time strata]. In: Koselleck R Los estratos del

tiempo: estudios sobre la historia. Barcelona: Paidós, 35-42.

Koselleck R (1997) Temporalization of Concepts. Redescriptions. Finnish Yearbook of

Political Thought 1: 16-24.

Koselleck R (1996) A response to comments on the Geschichtliche Grundbergriffe’. In:

Lehmann H and Richter M (eds.) The meanings of historical terms and concepts.

New studies on begriffsgeschichte. Washington DC: German Historical Institute,

59-70.

Koselleck R (1989) Critique and Crisis. Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern

Society. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Lara M P (2013) The Disclosure of Politics. Struggles over the Semantics of

Secularization. New York: Columbia University Press.

Löwith K (1995) From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth-Century

Thought. New York: Columbia University Press.

Nietzsche F (2007) On the Genealogy of Morality. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.

30
Norberg, J (2014) Sociability and its Enemies: German Political Theory After 1945.

Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press.

Olsen N (2012) History in the Plural: An Introduction to the Work of Reinhart Koselleck.

New York: Berghahn Books.

Palonen K (2002) The History of Concepts as a Style of Political Theorizing: Quentin

Skinner's and Reinhart Koselleck's Subversion of Normative Political Theory.

European Journal of Political Theory 1(1): 91-106.

Palti E J (2011) Reinhart Koselleck: His concept of the Concept and neo-Kantism.

Contributions to the History of Concepts 6(2): 1-20.

Pankakoski T (2010) Conflicts, Context, Concreteness: Koselleck and Schmitt on

Concepts. Political Theory 38(6): 749-779.

Ricoeur P (1990) Time and Narrative, Vol. 3. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Roberge J (2011) What is critical hermeneutics? Thesis Eleven 106(1): 5-22.

Rose G (1992) The Broken Middle: Out of our Ancient Society. Oxford and Cambridge,

Mass.: Blackwell.

Scheuerman W (2002) Unsolved Paradoxes: Conservative Political Thought in

Adenauer’s Germany. In: McCormick J (ed.) Confronting Mass Democracy and

Industrial Technology: Political and Social from Nietzsche to Habermas.

Durham: Duke University Press, 221-244.

Strydom, P (2000) Discourse and Knowledge. The Making of the Enlightenment

Sociology. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

Tonelli G (1978) “Critique” and related terms prior to Kant: A historical survey. Kant-

Studien 69(2): 119-148.

31
Wagner P (2008) Modernity as Experience and Interpretation: A New Sociology of

Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Author biography

Rodrigo Cordero (PhD, University of Warwick, UK) is Associate Professor in Sociology

at Universidad Diego Portales, and Associate Researcher of the Millennium Nucleus

“Models of Crises”. He is author of Crisis and Critique: On the Fragile Foundations of

Social Life (Routledge) and editor of the journal Cuadernos de Teoría Social.

32
 Notes
1
The notion of critique was already in use before the eighteenth century in Europe, but it only acquired

a generalized meaning with the expansion of literary circles, like the Republic of Letters in France, and

societies for the discussion of philosophy and the arts, like the Masonic Lodge in Germany. Until the

eighteenth century, critique was predominantly associated with the practice of making distinctions in

the search for truth in the field of art, philosophy, and literature. With the expansion of bourgeois liberal

culture and emergence of the sphere of society from the French Revolution onwards, the term also

acquired a more prominent position within political language as a way to describe ‘controversy’ and

‘opposition’ (Tonelli 1978). In this context, critique experiences a decisive transformation: it takes the

more generalized meaning of the ‘art of judgment’ and becomes the signature of the condition of being

modern, a reflexive attitude of relentless movement.

2
The use I make here of ‘critical hermeneutics’ draws directly from Ricoeur (1990: 208-126). For a

recent elaboration of critical hermeneutics as a method and philosophical approach in the human

sciences, see Roberge (2011).

33

View publication stats