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Introduction
Reinhart Koselleck is best known as the foremost practitioner of an approach to the history of ideas called Begriffsgeschichte (conceptual history). Along with Werner Conze and Otto Brunner, he was responsible for overseeing the compilation of a massive lexicon -- the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe -- which attempted 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) when the meaning of social and political concepts was fundamentally transformed (Tribe, 1989). This work, undertaken primarily in the 1960s and 1970s, is most familiar to English readers via translations of two volumes of Koselleck's essays, Futures Past (2004) and The Practice of Conceptual History (2002). However, an earlier work of Koselleck's -- Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society -- has received less attention in the Anglophone 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 criticized by them (La Vopa, 1992). However, the book is not widely known or referred 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 also contends that the substantive argument of Critique and Crisis remains important because of the light it sheds on the character of social and political concepts generally, and the concept of politics in particular. The main argument of Critique and Crisis is that Enlightenment thought is anti-political and utopian, and that as such it was central to the formation of modern totalitarianism. According to Koselleck, during the 18th century the notion arose within important sectors of the bourgeois public that they themselves constituted society, a space that was separate from the realm of politics, and in which lay the future of a universal mankind. This self-understanding of the bourgeois public involved a form of anti-politics, which, when the 'crisis' of the late 18th century emerged, led to a dangerous belief in the...