Reinhart Koselleck on Critique and Crisis
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Wednesday 23 April 2025 is the 102nd anniversary of the birth of Reinhart Koselleck (23 April 1923 to 03 February 2006), who was born in Görlitz, Germany on this date one hundred two years ago.
In my episode on A. J. P Taylor I said that If I got around to producing a Koselleck episode this year I’d try to show some of the ways that the forces of history that produced the world wars of the twentieth century are the same historical forces that led to the French Revolution and which are the forces still playing out in the world today. Talking about the historical forces shaping the world today entails a certain risk for the philosopher. Ever since I started these Today in Philosophy of History episodes I’ve been acutely conscious of the fact that talking about the present can place one in the role of partisan in some ongoing conflict. For that reason I prefer to talk about ancient and medieval history, since most people feel much less of a personal connection to earlier history, but the closer we get to the present, and in particular when we arrive at the history of the modern world, we engage with conflicts that are intrinsic to our civilization and therefore always under discussion and frequently the source of conflict. As soon as one is perceived to be a partisan in a current conflict, if you’re also perceived to be on the other side of issue from your listener, your listener is likely to feel attacked. They immediately stop listening and they enter into the intellectual equivalent of the will to live. The fight or flight mechanism kicks in, and neither are conducive to rational discussion. There are exceptions to this, but they’re few and far between. In today’s episode I’m going to bump against some contemporary issues ever so gently by engaging with some of foundational conflicts of modern Western history.
In any case, when I said in my A. J. P. Taylor episodes that I would talk about the forces shaping current history when I next talked about Koselleck, I had in mind Koselleck’s book Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society, which is a detailed analytical history of the run up to the French Revolution. Koselleck is known in philosophy of history for conceptual history, but this book, Critique and Crisis, is more like a philosophical history than a philosophy of history, but it’s a philosophical history that puts philosophy of history front and center as part of the historical process. There are elements of conceptual history present in this book, but that aspect of the exposition isn’t as prominent as it becomes in Koselleck’s later work.
We can think of Critique and Crisis as a subtle conceptual history of the concepts of critique, crisis, utopia, and philosophy of history. But looking at this book as an early form of conceptual history doesn’t really get at the heart of the exposition. The subtitle—Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society—gives away one of the prominent themes of the book. Koselleck’s account of the origin of the French Revolution is about the development of a social disorder, or a social disease, distinctive to the modern period. Given Koselleck’s work on conceptual history we usually don’t think of him as the kind of philosopher who would diagnose a sick society, but that’s what he’s doing in Critique and Crisis. This task seems more suited for the philosophers of crisis, as in my 2024 episode on Husserl in which I characterized Husserl’s approach as philosophy of history as a crisis discipline, but note that “crisis” is in the title of Koselleck’s book and a good portion of the book is concerned with crisis. In fact, Koselleck opens with the book with crisis, and in fact it begins with the then-present crisis (at the time of Koselleck’s writing) of the Cold War:
“…the present tension between two superpowers, the USA and the USSR, is a result of European history. Europe’s history has broadened; it has become world history and will run its course as that, having allowed the whole world to drift into a state of permanent crisis. As bourgeois society was the first to cover the globe, the present crisis stems from a mainly Utopian self-conception on the part of the philosophers of history — Utopian because modern man is destined to be at home everywhere and nowhere. History has overflowed the banks of tradition and inundated all boundaries.”
Even though Koselleck begins with the bold statement that the Cold War is a result of European history, he pulls back from any sustained engagement with contemporary crises in favor of focusing on the crisis that led to the French Revolution. Koselleck mostly remains securely within his chosen periodization of pre-Revolutionary France, occasionally hinting at events before and after this period, but not systematically developing any implications of his reading of the French Revolution. The social disorder that Koselleck diagnoses in this period is the development of a rising bourgeois class that was cut off from political participation by the royal absolutism of pre-revolutionary France. He wrote:
“In the political order which it restored by pacifying the areas devastated by religious wars, the state created the premise for the unfolding of a moral world. However, just as soon as their religious bonds are outgrown, the politically powerless individuals will clash with the State: even though morally emancipating them, the State will deny them responsibility by restricting them to a private sphere.”
Royal absolutism excluded the bourgeoisie from political power at the very moment in history when they were gaining in economic power. Add to this the ideas of the Enlightenment, and it’s easy to see how it got out of hand. I’ve many times said that the Enlightenment was in part a response of revulsion toward the religious wars that culminated in the Thirty Years War. From 1517, when Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the castle church at Wittenberg, Europe was wracked by religious wars, with the century-long period from 1517 to 1618 being something of a preparation for the 30 years war from 1618 to 1648, which brought the violence to a peak and also to a head. Koselleck adds a step to process, arguing—but only briefly, since this isn’t the focus of the book—that the chaos of the religious wars led to royal absolutism, and royal absolutism effectively created the Enlightenment. In a further step, the Enlightenment effectively resulted in the French Revolution. Koselleck wrote:
“Absolutism necessitated the genesis of the Enlightenment, and the Enlightenment conditioned the genesis of the French Revolution. It is around these two theses that the action of this book takes place.”
When Koselleck does briefly address the origins of royal absolutism he adds a caution:
“The point of this retrospection is not to construe causalities; suggesting these could only take us back to prehistoric times and to the problems of any beginning — in short, to the questions of a philosophy of history that goes beyond ideology, that resorts to historic reality in order to lay the ground for an historical science which excludes precisely the pseudoexplanations of a regressus in infinitum. Such an historical regressus would be nothing but progress in reverse, the very thing we are obliged to question.”
This reminds me of Lord Acton, who said in his Lectures on Modern History:
“…Modern History is a subject to which neither beginning nor end can be assigned. No beginning, because the dense web of the fortunes of man is woven without a void; because, in society as in nature, the structure is continuous, and we can trace things back uninterruptedly, until we dimly descry the Declaration of Independence in the forests of Germany. No end, because, on the same principle, history made and history making are scientifically inseparable and separately unmeaning.”
You might find it to be a bit much to find anticipations of the Declaration of Independence in the forests of Germany, although I don’t find it to be too much, but that doesn’t mean we can’t significantly expand the scope of our history, and I believe this to be necessary so that we see human history in its proper context. This would be progress in reverse if we read the historical record in the true Whiggish style, as Herbert Butterfield warned us, seeing the whole of history culminate in ourselves, but it’s not progress in reverse if we find the various threads of contemporary history before they’ve been woven together into the world we know today. Koselleck is suggesting a slippery slope, where we can’t prevent ourselves from regressing into prehistory. I don’t agree at all with Koselleck on this, and I will return to my disagreement on this point when I later talk about the implications of Koselleck’s argument. In any case, Koselleck here is explicitly repudiating finding longer term causalities at work, presumably limiting himself to causalities within the revolutionary period.
The core of Koselleck’s argument is that the royal absolutism of the early modern period unwittingly transformed the rising bourgeoisie into a private sphere disjoint from political power, thereby ultimately undermining itself, and this royal absolutism was itself a reaction to the feudalism and the religious wars that preceded absolutism. Yet in the wake of the French Revolution, when we might have supposed royal absolutism to have been utterly defeated, we find France wracked by ongoing revolutions and the Bourbons returning to power, although as constitutional monarchs rather than absolute monarchs. So although the Enlightenment led to the French Revolution, the agitators for the revolution didn’t get their way all at once with the revolution, but rather the historical process continued to develop.
I touched on part of this in my episode on François Guizot, who played a major role in 19th century French political life when the country was trying to sort out its post-Revolutionary, post-Napoleonic political fortunes. But, as I said, Koselleck focuses on the run-up to revolution in Critique and Crisis, and I also said that Koselleck places philosophy of history front and center in his account of this run up to revolution. Koselleck argues that it was philosophy of history that was the justification and the tool of legitimacy that the private sphere of the rising bourgeoisie fixed upon in their effort to assert themselves in the absence political power. Koselleck calls this philosophy of history a modern philosophy of history, a utopian philosophy of history, a bourgeois philosophy of history, and even, in one place, “the philosophy of history of the presumptive elite.”
In several episodes I’ve mentioned a quote from Arthur Lovejoy in which he identified Lessing, Herder, Kant, and Schiller, as “progressivist philosophies of history.” These progressivist philosophies of history are what Koselleck has in mind, and they especially typify the period in the run up to the French Revolution. While I argue that philosophy of history begins with St. Augustine, Koselleck focuses on the new impetus given to philosophy of history both by Voltaire explicitly using the phrase “philosophy of history” for the first time, and the many progressivist philosophies of history that appear at this time. Philosophy of history might as well have been entirely new given this cluster of progressive ideas given philosophical garb during this period. This was the philosophy of history that became the effective rallying cry of the disenfranchised bourgeoisie. Koselleck wrote:
“Philosophers of history prepared and made available the concepts by which the rise and the role of the bourgeoisie of that time were justified.”
In this sentence we get a sense of the role of conceptual history in the book, since he mentions philosophers making concepts available, but there’s also a subtle allusion to Marx and his conception of the ideological superstructure. The concepts that philosophers of history introduced, Koselleck says, justified the rise and the role of the bourgeoisie. This is the function of an ideological superstructure according to Marx: the justification of a ruling class and its interests. Only, the bourgeoisie weren’t yet a ruling class when they seized on philosophy of history as their ideological superstructure.
However, it was philosophy of history, and the weapons of critique of the ancien régime made available by progressivist philosophies of history, that would fuel the crisis that would become the revolution that would end royal absolutism and place the bourgeoisie on a path of becoming the ruling class. This is the sense in which Koselleck referred to, “the philosophy of history of the presumptive elite.” It was the bourgeoisie who were the presumptive elite, not yet in power, but on the rise to power. Koselleck emphasizes how no one really understood what was going on at the time because the historical mechanisms in play hid the significance from all involved:
“The intensification of the crisis will become visible in stages — beginning with the comparatively peaceful situation in Germany and moving on to France and the change from reform to revolution. Yet throughout we will see that the intensification of the crisis corresponded dialectically to the concealing of its political significance. It fell to the bourgeois philosophy of history to obscure the political significance of this concealment.”
Concealment and hiddenness are a theme throughout the book. The concealment at times became explicit. Koselleck devotes a chapter to the role of lodges and secret societies in promoting the utopian philosophy of history that was employed to critique and ancien régime. Carroll Quigley has been criticized for his discussion of the role of secret societies in twentieth century history in his book Tragedy and Hope, but Koselleck’s period was apparently sufficiently distant in the past not to evoke this criticism.
As I said at the beginning of this episode, when events are at a sufficient distance, it’s easier to take them on without anyone feeling attacked or being perceived as a shill for one side in an ongoing conflict. And one way to keep one’s narrative “safe” is to keep it tightly compartmentalized. Koselleck does this by staying focused on pre-revolutionary France, and repudiating the finding of implications that connect the catastrophe of the French Revolution to that which preceded it and that which followed it. And certainly the pre-revolutionary milieu of France is distinctive and not to be conflated with any other place or period. The social milieu preceding the French Revolution was distinct from the social milieu of the revolution itself, and the social milieu of the present is in turn distinct from revolutionary France. But Western history today is a consequence of the French Revolution, as well as being a consequence of many other events and processes.
The conflict between declining royal absolutism that robs its most dynamic citizens of political influence and a rising bourgeoisie seeking a conception of history that will legitimate its coming to power still continues to resonate. This crisis hasn’t fully gone away, though it has taken on new and different forms. Koselleck writes, on the one hand, that,
“It is in the nature of crises that problems crying out for solution go unresolved. And it is also in the nature of crises that the solution, that which the future holds in store, is not predictable. The uncertainty of a critical situation contains one certainty only — its end. The only unknown quantity is when and how. The eventual solution is uncertain, but the end of the crisis, a change in the existing situation — threatening, feared and eagerly anticipated — is not.”
This implies that all crises are ultimately ended, which in turn implies that once a crisis comes to a head, its end is not only not in doubt, but near to hand. But Koselleck also writes:
“The crisis caused by morality’s proceeding against history will be a permanent crisis as long as history is alienated in terms of its philosophy.”
This implies that we are in a permanent state of crisis as long, as Koselleck says, “…as history is alienated in terms of its philosophy.” What does it mean for history to be alienated in terms of its philosophy? The progressivist philosophies of history were alienated from history in the sense of being utopian. Koselleck writes that this utopian philosophy of history negated historical factuality and repressed the political realm. This has since been turned on its head, and we’ve heard it said that the personal is the political, making everything political and, I would argue, repressing the personal and the private. And philosophers of history have clearly learned their lessons about negating historical factuality. It’s still a common charge to hear that a philosopher of history has selected out of history only what fits his schema, and often this charge is valid, but we can safely dismiss those philosophies and philosophers for whom the charge is fatal, and concern ourselves only with the remnant who have not obviously twisted history into a shape it doesn’t naturally assume.
But what shape does history naturally assume? Even here the remnant is ambiguous. Since history is perhaps the most complex process that human beings experience, it shouldn’t be any surprise that empirically equivalent theories are commonplace in history, and we probably learn the wrong lessons from history at least as often as we learn the right lesson. It is all-too-easy to find what seems to be a pattern, only for the next unprecedented historical event to give the lie to the apparent pattern. Pre-modern philosophies of history fed into the rise of royal absolutism, most obviously in claims of the divine right of kings. Progressivist philosophies of history fed into the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, and we are still living in the aftermath of this, still trying to discern progress in history, still trying to make ourselves believe in the promise that made progressivist philosophies of history a revolutionary idea. But the twentieth century was a body-blow to the idea of progress, and everyone who, like me, grew up in the second half of the twentieth century, experienced much more critique of the idea of progress than celebration of the idea of progress. The ideal is still there, and it still shapes the fates of nation-states, but it’s a tarnished ideal.
It’s easier for us to understand a film about an anti-hero than it is for us to understand a film about a genuine hero, but the second half of the twentieth century gave us both the anti-hero of the Dollars trilogy and the authentic hero of the Star Wars trilogy. The hero and the anti-hero are both vividly present for us, as progress and decline are equally vividly present for us. The historical forces that shape modern history don’t appear in pre-revolutionary France and then vanish after the revolution—they remain, they develop, and they evolve. Sometimes they go underground so that we scarcely notice them and believe them dead. It’s this kind of attitude that has played into claims of the end of history. But these forces regularly erupt into the open again, and, when they do, there are those who repudiate the end of history and claim that the return of history was and is inevitable. That’s why there’s nothing more modern than post-modernism and anti-modernism and meta-modernism, because it’s all the same debate over historical modernity, assuming new forms with each new twist of history.
If we like, we can reframe Koselleck’s analysis of pre-revolutionary France as the appearance of a private sphere disjoint from political life in contemporary terms, specifically in the terms of Peter Turchin, as the rise of a counter-elite. The role of elites in a society is a problem set that emerged in a particular form with modernity, and Koselleck treats it exclusively in terms of the dynamics of pre-Revolutionary France, while contemporary elite theory treats it in terms of contemporary institutions. In this sense, I believe it to be entirely legitimate, even necessary, to seek the larger causalities that Koselleck repudiated, and I believe it’s only the ancient horror infinitum that turns us away from the regressus in infinitum against which Koselleck warns us.
Video Presentation
https://odysee.com/@Geopolicraticus:7/Reinhart_Koselleck:0
https://rumble.com/v6si5ap-reinhart-koselleck-on-critique-and-crisis.html