7/23/2019 Burke - Review of Vergangene Zukunft by R. Koselleck

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Book Reviews

Futures Past: o

th

Semantics ofHistoricalTime, R. Koselleck, trans. Keith Tribe, Studies

in Contemporary German Social Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985),

xxvi + 330 pp., H.C. 28.75.

Reinhart Koselleck is one of the leading intellectual historians in Europe today, yet he

remains little known in the English-speaking world. Like the scholars of his favourite

period, the Enlightenment, he may be described as a philosophical historian. Not only in

the sense that he has spent much of his time working on the history of ideas or more

exactly the History of Concepts

(Begriffsgeschichte),

and especially on the collective six-

volume work

Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe.

Koselleck is also a philosophical historian in

the sense of a historian who takes philosophy seriously, whose work is indeed

impregnated by philosophy, notably that of Martin Heidegger and his follower Hans-

Georg Gadamer. Like his fellow-student at Heidelberg, Hans Robert Jauss, Koselleck has

taken Heideggers idea of a horizon of expectation

(Erw artungshorizont)

and made it the

basis for his empirical work. Implicit in the

Grundbegriff

this notion is made explicit in

the volume under review, fourteen essays of the 1960s and 1970s the majority of which

deal with the changing relationship between past and future in European historical

thought.

The essays overlap, interweave and echo one another to such an extent that they can be

discussed together. Their range is wide-from classical Athens to the Third Reich-but

they focus on one period, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which

Koselleck knows best and which he sees as a decisive turning-point (Sartelzeit). They also

concentrate on one region, Germany (especially Prussia), from Frederick the Great to

Lorenz von Stein; Koselleck is in fact the author of a large and important monograph on

the political and social history of Prussia in the early nineteenth century. Most of the

examples discussed in detail in this volume are German, including relatively minor figures

such as J.C. Chladenius or J.W. von Archenholtz (Koselleck has curiously little to say

about Ranke).

The central argument, however, deals with the West in general. It is essentially that a

major shift in perceptions of the past and future alike took place after the French

Revolution. There was an inversion in the horizon of expectations. The end of the world

appeared to recede, and prophecy declined, to be replaced by political prognosis and a

sense of living in a new age, indeed the new age, Modernity (Neuzeit). The examples of the

past no longer seemed relevant; the future was coming to seem more open, though also

subject to control and planning.

These profound changes were registered by significant shifts in the meaning of a

number of concepts. Revolution, for example, a term which had originally implied an

analogy between the world of history and the world of nature (with events moving in

cycles like the stars and perhaps under their influence), was now associated with the sense

of an unknown future. The term

Histoire

was replaced by

Geschi cht e,

the plural form

helping to indicate what Koselleck calls the convergence between the process of events

and their apprehension in consciousness. Written history was seen to depend on a

selection made from a particular point of view

(Sehepunkt),

while events themselves, past

and future, came to be seen as constructible (verfiigbar). t will be noted that Koselleck,

like Foucault, sees the years around 1800 as a kind of

coupure epi stemologique

in Western

thought, but also that he argues his case, in his chosen field, with considerably more rigour

than Foucault d&l.

Kosellecks essays do not make easy reading. He has a gift for the essay form, as he has

for the selection of telling examples, quotations and anecdotes. He expresses himself

lucidly, economically and elegantly. The elegance, however, has evaporated in the

translation, which is not infrequently clumsy and infelicitous (particularly unfortunate is

the essay title On the Disposability of History, which may well suggest to the reader that

the place of the past is in the wastepaper basket). In any case, readers in the English-

7/23/2019 Burke - Review of Vergangene Zukunft by R. Koselleck

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speaking world are likely to have difficulties when they encounter a conceptual universe,

which is still at least half-alien. Kosellecks own Grundbegrzyfe, such as planes of

historicity, space of experience and so on, are not all naturahsed in English.

The real problem

however, lies in rebus. The essays are difficult because they tackle a

difficult subject; and that is why they are worth making an effort to read. Fortunately, the

first two essays are among the most important in the whole collection. The one thing the

author could have done and probably should have done to make things easier for his

readers was to turn the essays into a book, eliminating repetitions and expanding passages

which are difficult because they are elliptical and allusive.

The important question, however, is whether these essays carry conviction. The

argument of almost every piece is powerful, if not compelling, and they work on the

reader more strongly together than any of them can do separately. All the same, I do have

some reservations, or at any rate some questions. For example, although the author has

himself written social history, he sometimes discusses major changes in ideas without

making it clear whose ideas are under consideration. This omission may not be a necessary

result of the method of

Begrzffsgeschjchte

(whose complex relationship to social history is

analysed in an important essay in this collection), but it is at least a danger associated with

this semantic approach.

Again, the concept of the Suttelzeit is not as clear as it may look. At times Koselleck

places great emphasis on the French Revolution, whether as cause or symptom of other

changes. It may be the case that in Germany the shifts in perception with which he is

concerned happened more or less together at that time (or a little earlier, in the age of

Chladenius and Frederick the Great). Elsewhere in Europe, however, some of them go

back further, to the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century or, in Italy at least, to

the political calculations of Machiavelli. There is a paradox of which Koselleck is aware

but which plays perhaps too little part in his discussion and that is that his moderns

themselves date the beginning of modernity to the years around 1500, to the Renaissance

and the Reformation. There are times, as in the essay on the dissolution of the Ciceronian

topos histori a mag~st a vi tae, when the author seems to view European thought before

1789 as that great student of topoi E.R. Curtius regarded the Middle Ages, as a more or

less static intellectual

anci en r.kgime.

With the consequent peri of failing to notice that the

same topos is different when its intellectual and social context changes. Among the

dangers inherent in the method of Begriffsgeschichte is hat of failing to notice that new

wine is sometimes poured into old bottles as well as the other way round.

Emmanuel College Cambridge

Peter Burke

Ihe Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas About Probability

Induction and Statistical Inference

Ian Hacking (Cambridge University Press,

1985) 203 pp., P.B. E6.95.

Hackings book, when first published in the mid-1970s tokened a new

rapprochement

between Anglo-Saxon anafytical philosophy and the history of ideas. Analytical

philosophy with its positivist canon and cartographical approach to language has

traditionally been somewhat dismissive of the history of ideas as a properly philosophical

activity.

Hacking brings to the study of the historical development of the concepts

o prob bility

and inductive inference a refined knowledge of contemporary philosophic concerns with

these areas. However the major task he sets hims lf in this book is a historical one. How,

he asks, was it possible that such a fundamental concept as probability could emerge so

suddenly in European thought. Before 1660 and the deliberations of Pascal and the

Logicians of Port Royal there was, he insists, no coherent concept of probability either