Koselleck in America

Abstract

The recent upsurge of interest in Reinhart Koselleck's work across disciplines makes it even more conspicuous that his historical epistemology was rarely evoked—for example, in the excruciating debates about the linguistic turn in the 1980s and 1990s. Although there were repeated transatlantic encounters with Koselleck's work and briefly even with him as a teacher (in Chicago and New York around 1990), other German theoretical impulses were much more influential not only for Anglophone historians. Up until very recently, Koselleck was perceived either as a conservative historian and anti-utopian ideologue à la François Furet or, more narrowly, as a Begriffshistoriker, that is, historian of concepts à la John Pocock and Quentin Skinner, or as a metahistorian à la Hayden White. Of course, Koselleck repeatedly insisted that all these interests belong together. Yet only the essays published in three volumes in the years immediately before and after his death in 2006 make apparent how these different interests are laced together in his theory of possible histories, his Historik.