Critique and Crisis Today. Koselleck, Enlightenment and the Concept of Politics

Critique and Crisis Today: Koselleck,Enlightenment and the Concept of Politics

Jason EdwardsSchool of Politics and Sociology, Birkbeck College, London, UK.

E-mail: [email protected]

Over the last 20 years, Reinhart Koselleck has become familiar to an Anglophoneaudience as the foremost practitioner of Begriffsgeschichte (conceptual history).Yet, an early work of his, Critique and Crisis: the Pathogenesis of Modern Society, istoday largely overlooked by political theorists. In this paper, I argue that the bookis an important resource for contemporary political theory. Not only does it outlinea highly cogent approach to the relationship between political theory and practice,but its substantive argument concerning Enlightenment provides insights into thecharacter of political concepts, and the concept of politics itself, that are relevantfor thinking about political theory and discourse in the present.Contemporary Political Theory (2006) 5, 428–446. doi:10.1057/palgrave.cpt.9300247

Keywords: Koselleck; Critique and Crisis; Begriffsgeschichte (conceptual history);Enlightenment; politics

Introduction

Reinhart Koselleck is best known as the foremost practitioner of an approachto the history of ideas called Begriffsgeschichte (conceptual history). Alongwith Werner Conze and Otto Brunner, he was responsible for overseeing thecompilation of a massive lexicon — the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe — whichattempted to map the links between thought and practice over a crucial period(what Koselleck calls the Sattelzeit of the mid-18th to mid-19th century) whenthe meaning of social and political concepts was fundamentally transformed(Tribe, 1989). This work, undertaken primarily in the 1960s and 1970s, is mostfamiliar to English readers via translations of two volumes of Koselleck’sessays, Futures Past (2004) and The Practice of Conceptual History (2002).However, an earlier work of Koselleck’s — Critique and Crisis: Enlightenmentand the Pathogenesis of Modern Society — has received less attention in theAnglophone world. It has been considered by historians of the Enlightenment,who have portrayed it as a work of intellectual history offering many insights,particularly methodological ones, but its substantive argument has been

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criticized by them (La Vopa, 1992). However, the book is not widely known orreferred to in Anglophone political theory.

This paper will argue that the hallmark strength of Koselleck’s ‘mature’work — the recognition of the intimate link between contestation at the socio-political and the conceptual levels — was already present in Critique and Crisis,and that on this ground alone it is worthwhile revisiting. However, it alsocontends that the substantive argument of Critique and Crisis remainsimportant because of the light it sheds on the character of social and politicalconcepts generally, and the concept of politics in particular. The mainargument of Critique and Crisis is that Enlightenment thought is anti-politicaland utopian, and that as such it was central to the formation of moderntotalitarianism. According to Koselleck, during the 18th century the notionarose within important sectors of the bourgeois public that they themselvesconstituted society, a space that was separate from the realm of politics, and inwhich lay the future of a universal mankind. This self-understanding of thebourgeois public involved a form of anti-politics, which, when the ‘crisis’ of thelate 18th century emerged, led to a dangerous belief in the real possibility ofutopia — that is, a society free from social and political antagonism. Thisutopianism, for Koselleck, lay at the foundation of modern totalitarianism andthe ideological stand-off of the Cold War.

The notion that the Enlightenment as an historical movement led tototalitarianism is highly questionable, and insofar as Koselleck makes thisclaim his argument is open to criticism. However, Koselleck’s analysis inCritique and Crisis contains an important insight that continues to be ofrelevance for thinking about contemporary politics: that the Enlightenmentmarks the emergence of a modern attitude to politics that is anti-political incharacter. According to this attitude, social change is a function of shifts inmoral outlook, a matter of public education and persuasion. The identificationof the state with absolutism, and the understanding of politics as the means bywhich the interests of monarchy, aristocracy and clergy were upheld, removedthe possibility that the institutions and practices of the established state andpolitics could be conceived as means for achieving social change. Nonetheless,those who opposed absolutism were ultimately forced to employ theinstitutions and practices of the absolutist state in order to meet their goals— a paradox that continued to characterize political thought and practice inthe 19th and 20th centuries. From this perspective, Koselleck was right toargue that Enlightenment anti-politics and utopianism continued to inform therival ideologies of the Cold War. However, even after the end of the Cold War,much political thought today still bears the mark of this anti-political andutopian attitude announced in the Enlightenment.

In the first two sections of the paper, the context and substance ofKoselleck’s argument is spelt out. The third section rejects the claim that

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Critique and Crisis is redundant because Koselleck mistakenly views theEnlightenment as a unified ‘movement’. A close reading of the textdemonstrates that he was more concerned with considering Enlightenmentthought in order to understand the character of a distinctly modern ‘attitude’,one which continues to inform political thought and practice in the present. Inthe concluding section, the paper argues that Critique and Crisis deliversimportant insights into the character of social and political concepts, and theconcept of politics, that remain of much relevance today.

The Context of Critique and Crisis

Critique and Crisis started out as Koselleck’s doctoral dissertation, which hesubmitted to the University of Heidelberg in 1954 (Tribe, 2004, ix). Publishedin German as a monograph in 1959, it appeared as part of a growing literaturecharting the connections between the Enlightenment and 20th centurytotalitarianism. Some of these works were written by German emigres inorder to explain the intellectual and sociological foundations of the Nazidictatorship. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Theodor Adorno and MaxHorkheimer did this by tracing the tension between the emancipatory resolveof the Enlightenment and its desire to dominate nature through instrumentalreason (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1997).1 Hannah Arendt located theantecedents of modern totalitarianism in attitudes that emerged in and as aconsequence of Enlightenment thought. Thus, for example, the anti-semitismof National Socialism recapitulated the view that was held by manyEnlightenment thinkers of the Jews as outsiders, barbarians and agents ofthe ancient regime (Arendt, 1968, 46). However, while this strand of theliterature sought to discover the elementary forms of contemporarytotalitarianism in Enlightenment thought, there was no desire to repudiate itas a totality. Rather, in an important sense these authors were attempting toradicalize the Enlightenment, to emphasize the liberating functions of reasonand truth. Yet, there also appeared in the literature of the time a conservativetendency, hostile to the Enlightenment conceived of as a movement, whichbegan to flourish as the term ‘totalitarianism’ came to be more readilyassociated with the Soviet Union during the 1950s. In much of Westernintellectual consciousness, ‘totalitarianism’ came to represent a type of politicalregime that was exemplified by the Nazi and other fascist dictatorships, as wellas various forms of Stalinist regime (see Friedrich and Brzezinski, 1965).This turn towards a more generic understanding of totalitarianism led to thesearch for its philosophical foundation in those moments of the history ofpolitical thought that had culminated in the Enlightenment, an exercise to befound, for example, in Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies,


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and JL Talmon’s The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (Popper, 1952;Talmon, 1960).Critique and Crisis can be seen as part of this literature on the Enlightenment

and totalitarianism, but it does not fit comfortably into either of the categoriesjust outlined. Its principal object, at least originally, was the Nazi dictatorship.In the Preface to the English edition of 1988, Koselleck wrote:

This study is a product of the early postwar period. It represented anattempt to examine the historical preconditions of German NationalSocialism, whose loss of reality and Utopian self-exaltation had resulted inhitherto unprecedented crimes.

However,

There was also the context of the cold war. Here, too, I was trying to enquireinto its Utopian roots which, it seemed, prevented the two superpowersfrom simply recognising each other as opponents y It was in theEnlightenment, to which both liberal-democratic America and socialistRussia rightly retraced themselves, that I began to look for the commonroots of their claim to exclusiveness with its moral and philosophicallegitimations (Koselleck, 1988, 1).

While Koselleck’s argument was very different to that of Adorno andHorkheimer, their work did share something in common: a distinctly negativeappreciation of the present in East and West alike. At the same time, thisglobal scepticism distinguished Koselleck from those writers on totalitarianismwho were engaged in a barely veiled effort to justify liberal democracy anddemonstrate the moral and political flaws of socialism. However, whereas forHorkheimer and Adorno both capitalist and communist societies had come toexperience domination as a result of the triumph of the instrumental–rationallogic of the Enlightenment over its emancipatory dimension, for Koselleck theproblems of the present were to be explained as the subordination of politics toutopian ideologies rooted in Enlightenment thought. The substantiation of thisargument required a careful analysis of the way in which central ideologicalconcepts had been constructed in the Enlightenment and came to be (in a waythat could not have been foreseen by those who originally articulated them) themain terms of social and political conflict in the modern world.Critique and Crisis should be seen, at one level, as a response to inter-war

German debates on the historiography, philosophy and political thought of theEnlightenment. Ernst Cassirer’s famous book, The Philosophy of theEnlightenment (1955) was, broadly speaking, a neo-Kantian defence ofEnlightenment thinking. Cassirer wrote the book partly in response to adebate he had with Martin Heidegger in 1929. Drawing on his ideas in Beingand Time (1967), Heidegger had criticized Cassirer’s Kantian transcendental


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idealism (Ward, 1995, 59–62). Heidegger’s radical historicization ofmeaning, and his implicit criticism of the kind of approach towards theEnlightenment adopted by Cassirer, undoubtedly influenced Koselleck.2

However, the most important intellectual imprint on Critique and Crisis wasmade by the work of the German jurist and political theorist Carl Schmitt.Like Heidegger, Schmitt was banned from teaching in Germany after theSecond World War because of his support for the Nazi dictatorship, butKoselleck knew him personally and was clearly influenced by his argumentsabout the concepts of politics, the state and sovereignty. In particular,it was Schmitt’s view of politics as centred on the friend–enemy distinction(Schmitt, 1996a), and of sovereignty as the power to decide the exception(Schmitt, 1985), that informed Koselleck’s view of the emerging Enlightenmentpublic.

For both Schmitt and Koselleck, Hobbes is the key thinker for under-standing the modern sovereign state as it emerged in early modern Europe(Schmitt, 1996b). Other German social and political theorists, such asFerdinand Tonnies (1910) and Leo Strauss (1952), had also emphasized theimportance of Hobbes for the advent of modern political thought. Thesignificance attributed to Hobbes in German historiography says much aboutthe trajectory of Germany from the Reformation to the Second World War: amovement towards and increasing aspiration for national political unity in theface of the threat of perpetual civil war. Hobbes’s theory of absolutism wasconstructed at a time, in the wake of the Reformation and the wars of religion,when the sovereign state was becoming the dominant form of politicalorganization in the West. For Hobbes, sovereign power was justified because itguarantees social peace. In this condition, men are free to pursue theirmanifold interests and desires under a single temporal authority (Koselleck,1988, 24). There were no religious grounds on which the sovereign could belegitimately resisted ‘because Beleef, and Unbeleef never follow mensCommands. Faith is a gift of God, which Man can neither give, nor takeaway by promise of rewards, or menances or torture’ (Hobbes, 1985, 527).Koselleck claims that having lived through religious conflict and civil war,Hobbes believed that, ‘[t]he need to found a State transforms the moralalternative of good and evil into the political alternative of peace and war’(Koselleck, 1988, 25). There are clear overtones here of Schmitt’s theory ofpolitical theology: that is, modern political discourse is founded on thepoliticization of theological concepts. It is a view that is particularly important,as will be seen, for Koselleck’s analysis of the dualistic terms in which theEnlightenment art of judgement is performed, and the way this impacts on itsanti-political world-view. Yet, perhaps of greater significance for Koselleck isHobbes’s articulation of the triumph of politics and the state over confessionalallegiance and civil war.


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For Koselleck, the Enlightenment ultimately sought to overturn the triumphof the political by adopting an anti-political stance. What Koselleck under-stood by ‘the political’ and ‘anti-political’ followed on from a Schmittianconception of politics and sovereignty. For Schmitt, Hobbes was an exemplarypolitical thinker because he recognized that enmity is an irreducible feature ofhuman life. Politics is the realm in which some men, ultimately by means offorce, determine what the law is to be. Sovereignty, on this account, cannot beviewed as a universal property of man in general, but rather, for Hobbes, ‘thesovereignty of law means only the sovereignty of men who draw up andadminister this law’ (Schmitt, 1996a, 67). In Critique and Crisis, the concepts ofthe political and of sovereignty, so conceived, were to perform a dual role. Onthe one hand, Koselleck argued that it was precisely this understanding ofpolitics that informed the Enlightenment critique of the state. The enlightenersviewed the political as the enemy: an amoral realm in which decisions weremade and enforced in the interests of those who occupied the offices of theabsolutist state. In other words, the absolutist state came to be identified as therealm of the political, and just as enlightened criticism came to oppose thestate, so it came to oppose the political.

On the other hand, in a critical application of this concept of the political,Koselleck sees the Enlightenment’s error as its anti-politics, the belief that thechanges it desired in human relations could be brought about outside of and inopposition to the state and politics. For the enlighteners, what guaranteed thetriumph of reason and truth over the absolutist state was a conception of moralprogress tied to a teleological philosophy of history:

That politics is fate, that it is not fate in the sense of blind fatality, this iswhat the enlighteners fail to understand. Their attempts to allow thephilosophy of history to negate historical factuality, to ‘repress’ the politicalrealm, are Utopian in origin and character. The crisis caused by morality’sproceeding against history will be a permanent crisis as long as history isalienated in terms of its philosophy (Koselleck, 1988, 11–12).

The Enlightenment, for Koselleck, becomes ‘hypocritical’ when in the late18th century it attempts to portray a political crisis, in which the absolutiststate is challenged for its failure to recognize the interests of the emergingbourgeois public, as the logical outcome of historical and moral progress. Infact, the ‘crisis’ of the late 18th century was a product of long-term social andpolitical conflict that resulted in a set of events, the French Revolution, thatwere without question centred on a struggle over the exercise of power and wasthus ‘political’ in character. For Koselleck, the Revolution was instrumental inshaping the form of political discourse over the next two hundred years:utopian and incapable of accommodating the contingencies and conflicts thatare the outcome of the irreducible enmity of the political.


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The critical tone that Critique and Crisis adopts towards the Enlightenmentmight lead to the conclusion that Koselleck’s approach puts him in the‘conservative’ camp.3 This is particularly the case when one considers theunquestioned influence of Schmitt on Koselleck’s project. While to beassociated with Schmitt’s thought in the Federal Republic in the 1950s wasnot to declare ones allegiance to Nazism, it was widely held that those (few)young scholars who engaged with Schmitt’s ideas were on the conservative, ifnot reactionary, right.4 Yet as Jan-Werner Muller has demonstrated at length,interest in Schmitt’s work has been roused for many different reasons, andcomes from many different political standpoints: Marxist and liberal as muchas conservative (Muller, 2003). As will be seen below, there are certainlymoments in Critique and Crisis in which Koselleck seems to be endorsingSchmitt’s sweeping repudiation of liberalism and modernity. A close reading ofthe text, however, reveals that this was not Koselleck’s main intention. Rather,Koselleck sought to provide a means of understanding the current situation ofworld politics (the Cold War and the threat of permanent global civil war)through a historical understanding of the Enlightenment that focuses on theimportance of conceptual contestation and change. Koselleck’s ‘politics’, bothat this time and later, are, if anything, liberal and reformist in character(Muller, 2003, 112; Tribe, 2004, x). In contrast to Hobbes and Schmitt, then,Koselleck’s aim in Critique and Crisis should not viewed as the legitimation of aLeviathan state that is undemocratic and justified in exercising arbitrary powerover its subjects. Koselleck finds the anti-political Enlightenment dangerousbecause it ultimately came to see civil war as a historically licensed necessity ifthe sphere of morality was to triumph over that of politics and the state. In asimilar vein, the potentially catastrophic outcome of the Cold War, had itturned hot, was a product of the same kind of thinking: that war could bejustified in the service of ideology, whether of a liberal–democratic or acommunist variant.

From Absolutism to Crisis

Koselleck’s analysis of Enlightenment proceeds from what he considers to beits inception in early modern justifications of absolutism. In this respect, asnoted above, Hobbes is treated as a seminal thinker because his theory ofabsolutism registers the triumph of politics and the state over religion in earlymodern Europe. This victory was necessary if the destructive civil wars of the16th and 17th centuries were to be brought to a close and civil peace secured.The individual, under the laws of a sovereign power, is both free yet obligednot to act in such a way as to impede the freedom of another. For Koselleck,what allowed Hobbes to sustain this seemingly paradoxical claim was his belief


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that the distinction between morals and politics is meaningless in a situationwhere men are forced, on pain of death, to prioritize the achievement of a stateof peace. However desirable such a state, it cannot be the outcome of an act ofwill alone. Men are obliged to create it by agreeing to forge artificial bonds tothe Leviathan — bonds that may be broken, but only at the cost of a return tothe bellum omnium contra omnes. The highest moral good — for peace —therefore has a necessarily political character, and any distinction betweenmorality and politics in these circumstances is, for all practical purposes,arbitrary. At the same time, Koselleck argued, Hobbes’s theorization of theabsolutist state involves a re-introduction of the morals–politics dichotomy.Civil war was, for Hobbes, the product of a clash of wills thrown up by theReformation. While Christians had good intentions, they had come to pursuethese in such radically different fashions that all kinds of evil were sanctioned.This represented a fatal subordination of action to conscience, which Hobbesunderstood in terms of private, subjective opinion (Koselleck, 1988, 26). Aclash of private wills, even where those wills were motivated by the highestgood of peace, resulted in civil war. The solution appeared to be to create asovereign who is not subject to conscience or opinion. In a Commonwealth,private interest would remain in the province of private will, but ‘publicinterest, about which the sovereign alone has the right to decide, no longer liesin the jurisdiction of conscience. Conscience, which becomes alienated from theState, turns into private morality’ (Koselleck, 1988, 31).

Thus, for Koselleck, while Hobbes recognizes the specificity and necessity ofpolitics for peace, he surreptitiously places the distinction between privateconscience and the state at the centre of the constitution of absolutism. Fromthe late 17th century, this distinction is problematized and set at the heart ofthe critique of absolutism developed by the emerging bourgeoisie. In animportant sense, the absolutist state created the very grounds on which it wasbe opposed and eventually overthrown:

The bourgeois intelligentsia set out from the private inner space withinwhich the State had been confining its subjects. Each outward step was astep towards the light, an act of enlightenment. The movement whichblithely called itself ‘the Enlightenment’ continued its triumphal march atthe same pace which its private interior expanded into the public domain,while the public, without surrendering its private nature, became the forumof society that permeated the entire State. In the end society would knock onthe doors of the political powers, calling for attention there, too, anddemanding admission. (Koselleck, 1988, 53).

Koselleck sees John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding asan important moment in the transformation of private opinion into bourgeoispublic opinion. The Essay outlines three kinds of law: the divine, the civil


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(i.e. the laws of the state) and the moral. The latter is referred to as ‘the law ofopinion or reputation’ (Locke, 1997, 317). Locke departed from Hobbes bytransferring the character of this law from the private conscience of theindividual to the public realm. Moral law is discussed and determinedintersubjectively, in the context of ‘societies, tribes and clubs’ and comes to actas the standard by which citizens judge their own and others’ actions: ‘Thecitizens no longer defer to the State power alone; jointly, they form a societythat develops its own moral laws, laws which take their place besides those ofthe State’ (Koselleck, 1988, 55). Constant attention to and discussion of one’sactions, in the court of public opinion, gives rise to moral laws that bear theweight of ‘society’ and are of equal standing to those of the state. ‘What Lockehad thus put into words was the decisive breach in the Absolutist order, theorder expressed in the relationship of protection and obedience. Morality wasno longer a formal matter of obedience, was not subordinated to the politics ofAbsolutism, but confronted the laws of the State’ (Koselleck, 1988, 58).

However, the distinction between morals and politics did not only appear inthe works of philosophers. For Koselleck, it came to inform the practice of twokinds of social structure that were instrumental in the eventual destruction ofabsolutism: the Republic of Letters and the Masonic lodges. These ‘indirectcountervailing powers’ would first establish themselves in distinction from thestate, eschewing the notion that they were political entities while actuallyconstituting major sites in the contestation of absolutist political power. Thenew public that was emerging at this time was made up of various components.In France, it was the fusion of the anti-absolutist elements of the nobility, themerchants, financiers and businessmen who made up the rising bourgeoisieand, most importantly, the hommes des lettres of the Enlightenment (Koselleck,1988, 64–65). This public, excluded from the absolutist state, would find ‘non-political’ contexts in which to gather and discuss common interests: theexchanges, coffee-houses, academies, salons, libraries and literary societies.5

These institutions, at their birth, were inherently ‘social’ and only indirectlypolitical. At the same time, the more exclusively bourgeois institution of theMasonic lodges represented another dimension in which elements of the newpublic were free from the gaze of the absolutist state. The lodges were secretiveand autonomous institutions, committed to upholding the moral law and,according to Article VI of the Masonic constitution, ‘resolw’d against allPoliticks’ (Koselleck, 1988, 74). This secret space within the absolutist stateallowed for the flourishing of the new public’s sense of civil liberty: ‘Freedomin secret became the secret of freedom’ (Koselleck, 1988, 75).

The Republic of Letters and the lodges would increasingly take on politicalfunctions at the same time as they professed to occupy the non-political sphereof morality. Koselleck draws our attention here to the dramaturgical aspect ofthe critique practised by Enlightenment thinkers. The dramatic criticism of


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Pope, Diderot, Lessing and, most strikingly, Schiller, saw in the stage a forumfor the exploration of the moral character of man, independent from thesecular laws of the state. For Schiller, the ‘jurisdiction of the stage’ was meantto operate not simply when the state strayed from a moral line, but constitutedthe opposite of the entire apparatus of secular law. Of course, the stage’sjurisdiction had no immediate political effects — it was designed entirely as acritique of politics and the state as they existed. However, once again, theoutcome was to strengthen the Enlightenment’s claim that the sphere of‘society’, represented here by public performance and art, and being theexclusive site of the moral law, is distinct from and opposed to the absolutiststate. Thus, ‘the jurisdiction of the secular law does in fact obtain, but unjustlyso, whereas the jurisdiction of the stage does not, although it has right on itsside’ (Koselleck, 1988, 100). The moral judgements presented on the stage werestarkly binary: vice/virtue; foolishness/wisdom; happiness/misery; and beauty/ugliness. The state always found itself as the negative term of the couple, and inthis way ‘the dualistic world-view serves and is a function of political criticism’(Koselleck, 1988, 101).

The concepts of ‘critique’, and the cognate concept of ‘crisis’ are at the heartof Koselleck’s argument. His analysis of these two concepts anticipates hislater, more systematic approach of conceptual history. In itself, and as will beseen below, this represents an important development in contemporary socialand political theory. However, for Koselleck the specific historical significanceof the concept of critique, as it is widely employed in the 18th century, is that itsmeaning emerges in the tension between society and state, morals and politics.To a 17th century thinker such as Pierre Bayle, the critic relied on reason forhis judgement. Reason stood outside of theology and, in a claim that renderedBayle a radical in his context, the latter is subordinate to the former (Israel,2001, 336). The critic must be both a defender and a prosecutor in the pursuitof the truth. What was essential to criticism was the liberty of the critic to thinkwithout obligation to others. For Koselleck, Bayle’s Republic of Letters is on apar with Hobbes’s state of nature; the battle is between critics to establish whatis true in a perpetual war of ideas. While Bayle himself was not an overtlypolitical critic, he did perform a conscious separation of critique and the state.Critique remains in the realm of the Republic of Letters, protected from thepower of the state.

In those that follow Bayle, we begin to see the emergence of a critique of thestate, not in the sense of criticisms of this or that policy of a king, nor even ofparticular kings, but rather a critique of the very institution of kingship and theabsolutist conception of sovereignty. At first, in the work of Voltaire forexample, this critique appears spasmodically and primarily in the form ofliterary and historical criticism, where the church and state are occasionaltargets (Koselleck, 1988, 113). However, at the waning of Enlightenment,


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‘[c]riticism gave birth to hypocrisy’ (Koselleck, 1988, 117). What Koselleckmeant by this striking claim was that critique was increasingly used as auniversal standard of judgement. It came to judge all men, and as kings weremen they too were eventually to fall under its gaze. In this respect, it was reasonthat became sovereign, and everything that stood against it, including thepower of the state, came to be regarded as an enemy to be destroyed. WhileBayle had placed a barrier between critique and the state, the enlightenersultimately breached it, subjecting the state to the rational, moral law. It isexactly in this sense, for Koselleck, that the Enlightenment becamehypocritical: it became a critique of all power yet what it sought was thepower to judge all mankind (Koselleck, 1988, 119).

In the final part of Critique and Crisis, Koselleck was concerned to show howlate Enlightenment critique was instrumental in giving rise to a historical senseof ‘crisis’. The notion of crisis was tied to a philosophy of history that wasdualistic and anti-political. The moral and the political realm stood asopposites, and history developed towards the annihilation of the latter.However, the normative aspect of Koselleck’s critique of critique was thatmorals and politics cannot be easily separated, nor that either realm can beovercome. Morals and politics relate to one another dialectically, and withrespect to Enlightenment critique this meant that what was a moral critique ofpolitics should have been recognized, at the same time, as a political critique ofthe morality of absolutism. However, in fact, ‘the process of unmasking causedpolitical blindness’ (Koselleck, 1988, 183). The Republic of Letters failed to seethe political character of its own critique, and by doing so licensed an anti-political view of the future, in which any means of constructing a moral utopiacould be legitimized. The perverse conclusion that followed from this was thatcivil war, on a global scale, was something that could be justified on moralgrounds. Just because it failed to recognize the nature of power, ‘it took refugein naked force’ (Koselleck, 1988, 184). The consequences of this failure were tobecome clear over the course of the next two centuries.

Contesting the Enlightenment: Historical Movement or Attitude?

In Critique and Crisis, Koselleck claimed to have demonstrated the unity ofEnlightenment thought, culminating in Kant, in its anti-political and utopiancharacter. An obvious retort, from a historical perspective, is that no suchunitary Enlightenment existed. According to La Vopa, Koselleck provides arange of ‘quite conventional, not to say old-fashioned thinkers’ who arepresented as the principal exemplars of this unified phenomenon (La Vopa,1992, 86). Indeed, Koselleck himself pointed to this limitation of his study inhis English Preface to Critique and Crisis of 1988 (Koselleck, 1988, 3). In


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particular, the lack of coverage of the Enlightenment in non-absolutist contexts— that is, to say in the Netherlands, England, Scotland and, at the end of the18th century, America — ignored a significant source of Enlightenmentthinking that was neither anti-political nor utopian in the sense employed inCritique and Crisis. The work of historians of political thought, such as JGAPocock, has shown that there was an important and self-aware dialectic ofmorals and politics unfolding in aspects of Enlightenment thought (Pocock,1975, 1985).

As Koselleck himself recognized, after 1688 the relative lack of tensionbetween state and society in England (then Britain) had created the conditionsin which a pragmatic reformism could develop. In Britain, ‘there neveremerged, as some think there did in France, un petit troupeau des philosophesy [t]he British avant-garde was not a network of persecuted rebels orunderground samizdat authors, destined to hand down the torch of liberaldemocracy’ (Porter, 2001, xviii). ‘National’ Enlightenments, as Porterillustrates in his book on the British Enlightenment, had their ownpeculiarities. The British enlighteners spoke to many different ideas andproblems and ‘their register was ironic rather than dogmatic’ (Porter, 2001,xxi). The same pluralism applied in other settings, not just in terms of thedisparity of thought to be found between individual thinkers in differentcontexts, but in the diverse times and rhythms of the Enlightenment that wereexperienced in various national and cultural conditions. Even where recenthistorians have been concerned to portray ‘the European Enlightenment as asingle highly integrated intellectual and cultural movement’ (Israel, 2001, v),they have argued that distinct political and social consequences emerge fromdifferent philosophical positions taken up within that movement. Thus,Jonathan Israel has recently distinguished between a ‘moderate’ Enlightenmentthat lent itself to the support of enlightened absolutism and piecemeal reform,and a ‘radical’ Enlightenment that had revolutionary social and politicalintentions.

In Critique and Crisis, then, Koselleck seemed in danger of reducing thecomplexity of Enlightenment thought to identity under the conceptualdistinction between morality and politics. The normative implication seemsobvious: that Koselleck was condemning Enlightenment thought because, initself, it leads to the legitimation of perpetual civil war, terror andtotalitarianism. The error of this kind of argument is clear: not only is itintellectually vulgar, but it rests on a teleological view of historicaldevelopment. Francois Furet made a similar point in condemning Marxistinterpretations of the French Revolution: the specific course of the revolutioncould not be explained by long-term social and economic ‘contradictions’because it turned around a dialectic between ideological and political eventsthat cannot be understood in simple causal terms (Furet, 1981). In the same


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vein, the apparent elevation of the morality–politics dichotomy to the keyexplanatory concept of the Enlightenment, as a ‘bourgeois movement’, wouldseem to overlook the contingent character of historical events. The FrenchRevolution and its aftermath was no more a product of the logical progressionof the morality–politics dichotomy than was the Cold War. Each was theoutcome of a certain playing out of ideologies and politics in specific historicalcontexts. Revolution, terror and totalitarianism were not the inevitablehistorical outcomes of the Enlightenment, and where they did occur ascontingent historical phenomena, they did so under specific social and politicalconditions that were not solely or even mainly determined by the logic of‘Enlightenment thought’.

Furet also argued, however, that there was something radically new aboutthe concept of revolution that emerges in the French Revolution, that is, ‘theappearance on the stage of history of a practical and ideological mode of socialaction totally unrelated to anything that came before. A specific type ofpolitical crisis made it possible but not inevitable; and revolt was not its model,since revolt was by definition a part of the old political and cultural system’(Furet, 1981, 23). The relevant distinction between revolt and revolution thatFuret refers to relates to the way in which the latter conceives of a utopianfuture not as a return to an idealized past (a notion involved with the conceptof ‘revolt’), but rather as a break with the past and the creation of a new‘political and cultural system’. It does so in respect of its ‘practical andideological mode of social action’. In fact, Critique and Crisis shares a verysimilar view of what is new about the Enlightenment conception of revolutionand the mode of social action it entails. Indeed, this is in an important respectKoselleck’s key argument. He was attempting to demonstrate that theEnlightenment marks the emergence of a modern way of conceiving of andacting on the relationship between theory and practice.

In an important respect, Koselleck here anticipates Michel Foucault’sdescription of modernity as:

an attitude rather than a period of history. And by ‘attitude,’ I mean a moderelating to contemporary reality; a voluntary choice made by certain people;in the end a way of thinking and feeling; a way too of acting and behavingthat at one and the same time marks a relation of belonging and presentsitself as a task (Foucault, 2000, 309).

In ‘What is Enlightenment?’, Foucault presents this modern attitude as aconstant concern for and challenge to the self, consciously measured against apast that is over, but which has nevertheless left its indelible trace on thesubject in the present. Koselleck’s aim in Critique and Crisis was not dissimilar.Enlightenment gives rise to the notion of perpetual critique of oneself and theworld against the standard of reason, combined with an understanding of the


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present as a permanent crisis. The only way out of this crisis was to envisagethe future as an irreversible break with the past, a destination foreseen inphilosophies of history that predicted the triumph of morality over power andthe state. However, that future is realizable only given a prior understanding ofthe relationship of the present to the past, which is precisely the function of thephilosophy of history.

While in Critique and Crisis, then, Koselleck occasionally referredto the Enlightenment as a ‘movement’ (Koselleck, 1988, 53), it is evidentfrom a close reading of the text that what he had in mind was not a movementeither in a purely intellectual sense, nor in the sense of a unified social andpolitical organization. Rather the unity of the Enlightenment lay in a certainattitude or ethos, which while not fully formed by the time of theFrench Revolution, had the same broad character that it was to exhibitthough the 19th and 20th centuries. This attitude was moulded around keysocial and political concepts that were, or were becoming, common currency bythe end of the 18th century: the distinction between state and society; betweenpolitics and morality; the notion that critique according to the standard ofreason was and should be applied to all areas of life, including the state andpolitics; and the beginnings of a temporalization and acceleration of history, towhich the concept of ‘crisis’, with its eschatological overtones, was crucial.While, and certainly under the influence of Schmitt, Koselleck at times seemedto want to condemn the ‘movement’ of the liberal bourgeoisie, it is clear thatnothing in his analysis can lead to the conclusion that ‘Enlightenment’ itselfwas responsible for civil war, terror and totalitarianism. Rather, thecontemporary world, and here Koselleck was clearly thinking about theideological utopias of the Cold War both in the form of American capitalismand Soviet communism, had taken on the anti-political attitude of theEnlightenment as a means of justifying a state of perpetual global civil war.Koselleck’s analysis of the Enlightenment is not primarily concerned, there-fore, to portray it as a cause of the modern world. Rather, the analysis of thepolitical and social vocabulary of Enlightenment acts as a means by which wecan decode the political concepts and ideologies of the modern world. As isargued in the last section, despite the end of the Cold War, Koselleck’sargument is as important for understanding political theory and discoursetoday as it was when first published.

Conclusion: Critique and Crisis Today

With hindsight, we might see Critique and Crisis as an important staging-postin the development of a distinctive approach to the history of political thought.Under the influence of hermeneutic philosophers like Heidegger and Gadamer


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(Tribe, 2004, xvi), Koselleck’s later work expands on the importance attributedin Critique and Crisis to conceptions of historical time in the constitution of thepresent. Modernity sees a temporalization and acceleration of history, suchthat the chronologically recent, when understood as an element of a different‘age’, comes to be seen as very distant (Koselleck, 2004, Chapter 1). Thisconception of historical time is, for Koselleck, characteristic of a modernattitude towards the world, one which has its foundation in the period that wasin focus in Critique and Crisis. Yet, the formulation of this conception was notsimply an intellectual event. What Critique and Crisis attempted to make clearwas the intimate connection between social and political thought and practicein the 17th and 18th centuries. To be more precise, what is evident in the text,with its careful consideration of the etymology of key concepts, and the way inwhich their meaning remains stable or is transformed in different contexts, isthe importance of conceptual structures in relation to social and politicalpractices.

This relationship between concepts and social history is central to theapproach developed by Koselleck and his colleagues from the 1960s onwards:Begriffsgeschichte. From the perspective of Begriffsgeschichte, there can be nosimple distinction between social history, that is the comprehension of long-term social structures and processes, and conceptual history, understood as thestudy of the meaning given to social and political life in specific contexts (seeKoselleck, 2002, Chapter 2; 2004, Chapter 5). Critique and Crisis is itselfalready an example of this approach. Koselleck traces the way in which keyconcepts developed in (and indeed prior to) the Enlightenment are not simply areflection or representation of social structures and interests, but arethemselves instrumental in providing for the self-understanding of social andpolitical actors. As such, Critique and Crisis might be seen as part of thelinguistic turn in social and political theory. Indeed, Begriffsgeschichte sharesmuch in common with the work of thinkers like Michel Foucault and QuentinSkinner, who have attempted to chart the impact of conceptual and discursivepractices on social and political life.6 However, as Tribe argues, it isappropriate to see Begriffsgeschichte not so much as a method, but as a‘contribution to our historical self-understanding’, even if it has its ownparticular — and specifically German — origins and concerns (Tribe, 2004,xix–xx).

Central to the description of this historical self-understanding is the mannerin which social and political concepts are themselves open to contestation. Theforms of such contestation, and the way they change over time, are key forunderstanding the character of political conflict in the modern world. Suchconflict cannot be reduced to socio-structural substrata, or be comprehendedas the misinterpretation of essential meanings. Consonant with Gadamer’shermeneutic approach (Gadamer, 2004), for Koselleck the meaning of


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concepts is inescapably historical, the result of the fusion of the horizon of theinterpreter and the horizon of his historical object (Freeden, 1996, 118). WhileCritique and Crisis does not explicitly spell out the character of this process, itis clear from the text that Koselleck rejects the idea that the contestation ofconceptual meaning in the Enlightenment is determined by a social andpolitical ‘outside’. The very grounds on which this contestation takes place arethose of concepts, their meaning and what kinds of action follow from them ina given social and political context.

Outstanding and important as Koselleck’s contribution to Begriffsgeschichteand the broader field of the history of ideas has been, it would be anachronisticto view Critique and Crisis simply as a moment in his intellectual development.Critique and Crisis articulates a notion of politics that is inextricably tied toKoselleck’s view of the political character of conceptual contestation, onewhich remains of great value for contemporary political theory. WhileKoselleck draws on Schmitt’s view of politics as the act of distinguishingbetween friend and enemy, Critique and Crisis sees the very process ofdetermining what constitutes politics — and, importantly, the depoliticizationof politics that occurs in the Enlightenment — as political in character. Thelimitation of the realm of politics, and its gradual subordination in theEnlightenment to society and morality, is a process that has a political, ratherthan social or moral imperative. The enlighteners’ distinctions between politicsand society, politics and morality had the function of identifying the friendsand enemies of absolutism. To a large extent, political theory has continued tobe shaped by this problematic, which for all intents and purposes is that ofmodern liberalism.

While this problematic has had many critics, it continues to pose the centralproblems around which much of political theory, and social and politicaldiscourse more generally, are organized. The concept of the political has cometo represent a distinct sphere of activity whose objective is two-fold: torepresent and negotiate between different social interests; and to reign itself in,so that it remains distinct from, and subordinate to the apolitical realms of thesocial and moral. As Koselleck demonstrated in Critique and Crisis, thisconcept of the political formed part of the armoury of an attitude towardsmodernity and the future that was characteristic of the social and politicaldiscourse of the Enlightenment. We continue to live with its legacy. Withrespect to political theory and political philosophy, this can be seen inpreponderant concerns with liberal conceptions of justice and of human naturethat are much indebted to (a liberal reading of) Kant. This is most obviouslythe case in the field of ‘normative’ political and legal theory that has formedaround the work of Rawls (1971) and Habermas (1987). Critique and Crisis,with its implicit criticism of this kind of Kantianism, poses a serious questionto this enterprise by reminding us that social and political concepts are


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historical in character, and that their meaning is given in a process ofcontestation that does not operate on discrete grounds, whether philosophical,moral, political or social.Critique and Crisis also provides resources for a critical understanding of the

vocabulary of political discourse in the present. For example, a certainunderstanding of ‘global civil society’, as a possibility produced by a ‘crisis’ ofsovereignty, is widespread (Kaldor, 2003). Among advocates of global civilsociety, there is a commonly held view that new political, social and economicarrangements are necessitated by the perceived crisis of the sovereign territorialstate. A continuity might be seen here between contemporary advocates ofglobal civil society and Enlightenment thinkers, the latter who perceived acrisis in the sovereignty of the absolutist state. The understanding of a post-national global civil society embodies the Kantian desire for a world ordergoverned according to moral imperatives that operate above and indepen-dently of the political relations between states and interest groups. Yet, the ideathat this is a possible or even desirable state of affairs is grounded in amisunderstanding of the deeply rooted conflicts that exist in the world,conflicts that have become all the more acute since the reputed unravelling ofnational sovereignty. As Critique and Crisis reminds us, the end of absolutismdid not herald the cessation of political conflict and sovereignty, but rather sawtheir intensification. Similarly, if we are indeed witnessing the decline of an oldorder based on the sovereignty of nations, we should expect to see — and areperhaps seeing — the deepening of current conflicts and the generation of newones. It is utopian indeed to believe that such conflicts can be overcome by theadoption of universal precepts of justice, however ‘thin’ these might appear. Asin the past, if these conflicts are to be resolved they will be so in a politicalmanner: that is, either through the achievement of agreement throughnegotiation and compromise, or through the vanquishing of enemies, soconceived. The idea of constraining political power by universal law and justiceis a humane aspiration. However, as Critique and Crisis brilliantly demon-strated, this — modern — attitude was only possible given an equally humaneaspiration that arose in early modern history: to end the killing and chaos thathad resulted from the subordination of politics to various notions of divine lawand justice.

We should read Critique and Crisis today not just because it provides acogent account of the relationship between social and political concepts,discourses and practices. It also provides a timely reminder that politicalconflict today, as in the Enlightenment, is as much as anything a conflict aboutthe very meaning of politics.

Date submitted: 22 April 2005Date accepted: 2 August 2005


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Notes

1 The more sociological of the Frankfurt School’s accounts of Nazism can be found in Neumann

(1966).

2 Koselleck had contact with Heidegger’s thought through Hans-Georg Gadamer’s seminar at

Heidelberg (Tribe, 2004, xvi).

3 A suggestion made by Jurgen Habermas (1973) in his review of Critique and Crisis.

4 As well as Koselleck, two other young, prominent historians studying at Heidelberg at the same

time were associated with Schmitt’s ideas about Enlightenment and modernity: Nicolaus

Sombart and Hanno Kesting (Muller, 2003, 104–5).

5 This important sociological thesis was to be taken up and expanded by Jurgen Habermas, in his

Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989). While the argument of that book is very

different to Critique and Crisis, it is motivated by the same concern with the character and

contemporary importance of the modern public sphere.

6 For important differences between Begriffsgeschichte and the ‘Cambridge School’ of Skinner

and JGA Pocock, see Richter (1990).

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Documents

Critique and Crisis Today. Koselleck, Enlightenment and the Concept of Politics