Contemporary Political Theory, 2006, 5, (428–446)

r 2006 Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 1470-8914/06 $30.00

www.palgrave-journals.com/cpt

Critique and Crisis Today: Koselleck,

Enlightenment and the Concept of Politics
Jason Edwards
School of Politics and Sociology, Birkbeck College, London, UK.
E-mail: j.edwards@bbk.ac.uk

Over the last 20 years, Reinhart Koselleck has become familiar to an Anglophone
audience as the foremost practitioner of Begriffsgeschichte (conceptual history).
Yet, an early work of his, Critique and Crisis: the Pathogenesis of Modern Society, is
today largely overlooked by political theorists. In this paper, I argue that the book
is an important resource for contemporary political theory. Not only does it outline
a highly cogent approach to the relationship between political theory and practice,
but its substantive argument concerning Enlightenment provides insights into the
character of political concepts, and the concept of politics itself, that are relevant
for 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 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
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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 real possibility of
utopia — that is, a society free from social and political antagonism. This
utopianism, for Koselleck, lay at the foundation of modern totalitarianism and
the ideological stand-off of the Cold War.
The notion that the Enlightenment as an historical movement led to
totalitarianism is highly questionable, and insofar as Koselleck makes this
claim his argument is open to criticism. However, Koselleck’s analysis in
Critique and Crisis contains an important insight that continues to be of
relevance for thinking about contemporary politics: that the Enlightenment
marks the emergence of a modern attitude to politics that is anti-political in
character. According to this attitude, social change is a function of shifts in
moral outlook, a matter of public education and persuasion. The identification
of the state with absolutism, and the understanding of politics as the means by
which the interests of monarchy, aristocracy and clergy were upheld, removed
the possibility that the institutions and practices of the established state and
politics could be conceived as means for achieving social change. Nonetheless,
those who opposed absolutism were ultimately forced to employ the
institutions and practices of the absolutist state in order to meet their goals
— a paradox that continued to characterize political thought and practice in
the 19th and 20th centuries. From this perspective, Koselleck was right to
argue that Enlightenment anti-politics and utopianism continued to inform the
rival 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 and
utopian attitude announced in the Enlightenment.
In the first two sections of the paper, the context and substance of
Koselleck’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 the

Enlightenment as a unified ‘movement’. A close reading of the text
demonstrates that he was more concerned with considering Enlightenment
thought in order to understand the character of a distinctly modern ‘attitude’,
one which continues to inform political thought and practice in the present. In
the concluding section, the paper argues that Critique and Crisis delivers
important insights into the character of social and political concepts, and the
concept 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 he
submitted to the University of Heidelberg in 1954 (Tribe, 2004, ix). Published
in German as a monograph in 1959, it appeared as part of a growing literature
charting the connections between the Enlightenment and 20th century
totalitarianism. Some of these works were written by German émigrés in
order to explain the intellectual and sociological foundations of the Nazi
dictatorship. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Theodor Adorno and Max
Horkheimer did this by tracing the tension between the emancipatory resolve
of the Enlightenment and its desire to dominate nature through instrumental
reason (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1997).1 Hannah Arendt located the
antecedents of modern totalitarianism in attitudes that emerged in and as a
consequence of Enlightenment thought. Thus, for example, the anti-semitism
of National Socialism recapitulated the view that was held by many
Enlightenment thinkers of the Jews as outsiders, barbarians and agents of
the ancient regime (Arendt, 1968, 46). However, while this strand of the
literature sought to discover the elementary forms of contemporary
totalitarianism in Enlightenment thought, there was no desire to repudiate it
as a totality. Rather, in an important sense these authors were attempting to
radicalize the Enlightenment, to emphasize the liberating functions of reason
and truth. Yet, there also appeared in the literature of the time a conservative
tendency, hostile to the Enlightenment conceived of as a movement, which
began to flourish as the term ‘totalitarianism’ came to be more readily
associated with the Soviet Union during the 1950s. In much of Western
intellectual consciousness, ‘totalitarianism’ came to represent a type of political
regime that was exemplified by the Nazi and other fascist dictatorships, as well
as various forms of Stalinist regime (see Friedrich and Brzezinski, 1965).
This turn towards a more generic understanding of totalitarianism led to the
search for its philosophical foundation in those moments of the history of
political thought that had culminated in the Enlightenment, an exercise to be
found, 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 categories
just 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 an
attempt to examine the historical preconditions of German National
Socialism, whose loss of reality and Utopian self-exaltation had resulted in
hitherto unprecedented crimes.
However,
There was also the context of the cold war. Here, too, I was trying to enquire
into its Utopian roots which, it seemed, prevented the two superpowers
from simply recognising each other as opponents y It was in the
Enlightenment, to which both liberal-democratic America and socialist
Russia rightly retraced themselves, that I began to look for the common
roots of their claim to exclusiveness with its moral and philosophical
legitimations (Koselleck, 1988, 1).
While Koselleck’s argument was very different to that of Adorno and
Horkheimer, their work did share something in common: a distinctly negative
appreciation of the present in East and West alike. At the same time, this
global scepticism distinguished Koselleck from those writers on totalitarianism
who were engaged in a barely veiled effort to justify liberal democracy and
demonstrate the moral and political flaws of socialism. However, whereas for
Horkheimer and Adorno both capitalist and communist societies had come to
experience domination as a result of the triumph of the instrumental–rational
logic of the Enlightenment over its emancipatory dimension, for Koselleck the
problems of the present were to be explained as the subordination of politics to
utopian ideologies rooted in Enlightenment thought. The substantiation of this
argument required a careful analysis of the way in which central ideological
concepts had been constructed in the Enlightenment and came to be (in a way
that could not have been foreseen by those who originally articulated them) the
main 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 the
Enlightenment. Ernst Cassirer’s famous book, The Philosophy of the
Enlightenment (1955) was, broadly speaking, a neo-Kantian defence of
Enlightenment thinking. Cassirer wrote the book partly in response to a
debate he had with Martin Heidegger in 1929. Drawing on his ideas in Being
and Time (1967), Heidegger had criticized Cassirer’s Kantian transcendental
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idealism (Ward, 1995, 59–62). Heidegger’s radical historicization of

meaning, and his implicit criticism of the kind of approach towards the
Enlightenment adopted by Cassirer, undoubtedly influenced Koselleck.2
However, the most important intellectual imprint on Critique and Crisis was
made by the work of the German jurist and political theorist Carl Schmitt.
Like Heidegger, Schmitt was banned from teaching in Germany after the
Second World War because of his support for the Nazi dictatorship, but
Koselleck knew him personally and was clearly influenced by his arguments
about 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 Enlightenment
public.
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 as
Ferdinand Tönnies (1910) and Leo Strauss (1952), had also emphasized the
importance of Hobbes for the advent of modern political thought. The
significance attributed to Hobbes in German historiography says much about
the trajectory of Germany from the Reformation to the Second World War: a
movement towards and increasing aspiration for national political unity in the
face of the threat of perpetual civil war. Hobbes’s theory of absolutism was
constructed at a time, in the wake of the Reformation and the wars of religion,
when the sovereign state was becoming the dominant form of political
organization in the West. For Hobbes, sovereign power was justified because it
guarantees social peace. In this condition, men are free to pursue their
manifold interests and desires under a single temporal authority (Koselleck,
1988, 24). There were no religious grounds on which the sovereign could be
legitimately resisted ‘because Beleef, and Unbeleef never follow mens
Commands. Faith is a gift of God, which Man can neither give, nor take
away 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 moral
alternative of good and evil into the political alternative of peace and war’
(Koselleck, 1988, 25). There are clear overtones here of Schmitt’s theory of
political theology: that is, modern political discourse is founded on the
politicization 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 the
Enlightenment art of judgement is performed, and the way this impacts on its
anti-political world-view. Yet, perhaps of greater significance for Koselleck is
Hobbes’s articulation of the triumph of politics and the state over confessional
allegiance and civil war.
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For Koselleck, the Enlightenment ultimately sought to overturn the triumph

of the political by adopting an anti-political stance. What Koselleck under-
stood by ‘the political’ and ‘anti-political’ followed on from a Schmittian
conception of politics and sovereignty. For Schmitt, Hobbes was an exemplary
political thinker because he recognized that enmity is an irreducible feature of
human life. Politics is the realm in which some men, ultimately by means of
force, determine what the law is to be. Sovereignty, on this account, cannot be
viewed as a universal property of man in general, but rather, for Hobbes, ‘the
sovereignty of law means only the sovereignty of men who draw up and
administer this law’ (Schmitt, 1996a, 67). In Critique and Crisis, the concepts of
the political and of sovereignty, so conceived, were to perform a dual role. On
the one hand, Koselleck argued that it was precisely this understanding of
politics that informed the Enlightenment critique of the state. The enlighteners
viewed the political as the enemy: an amoral realm in which decisions were
made and enforced in the interests of those who occupied the offices of the
absolutist state. In other words, the absolutist state came to be identified as the
realm of the political, and just as enlightened criticism came to oppose the
state, 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 the
changes it desired in human relations could be brought about outside of and in
opposition to the state and politics. For the enlighteners, what guaranteed the
triumph of reason and truth over the absolutist state was a conception of moral
progress tied to a teleological philosophy of history:
That politics is fate, that it is not fate in the sense of blind fatality, this is
what the enlighteners fail to understand. Their attempts to allow the
philosophy of history to negate historical factuality, to ‘repress’ the political
realm, are Utopian in origin and character. 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 (Koselleck, 1988, 11–12).
The Enlightenment, for Koselleck, becomes ‘hypocritical’ when in the late
18th century it attempts to portray a political crisis, in which the absolutist
state is challenged for its failure to recognize the interests of the emerging
bourgeois public, as the logical outcome of historical and moral progress. In
fact, the ‘crisis’ of the late 18th century was a product of long-term social and
political conflict that resulted in a set of events, the French Revolution, that
were without question centred on a struggle over the exercise of power and was
thus ‘political’ in character. For Koselleck, the Revolution was instrumental in
shaping the form of political discourse over the next two hundred years:
utopian and incapable of accommodating the contingencies and conflicts that
are the outcome of the irreducible enmity of the political.
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The critical tone that Critique and Crisis adopts towards the Enlightenment
might lead to the conclusion that Koselleck’s approach puts him in the
‘conservative’ camp.3 This is particularly the case when one considers the
unquestioned influence of Schmitt on Koselleck’s project. While to be
associated with Schmitt’s thought in the Federal Republic in the 1950s was
not 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, if
not reactionary, right.4 Yet as Jan-Werner Müller has demonstrated at length,
interest in Schmitt’s work has been roused for many different reasons, and
comes from many different political standpoints: Marxist and liberal as much
as conservative (Müller, 2003). As will be seen below, there are certainly
moments in Critique and Crisis in which Koselleck seems to be endorsing
Schmitt’s sweeping repudiation of liberalism and modernity. A close reading of
the text, however, reveals that this was not Koselleck’s main intention. Rather,
Koselleck sought to provide a means of understanding the current situation of
world politics (the Cold War and the threat of permanent global civil war)
through a historical understanding of the Enlightenment that focuses on the
importance of conceptual contestation and change. Koselleck’s ‘politics’, both
at this time and later, are, if anything, liberal and reformist in character
(Müller, 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 a
Leviathan state that is undemocratic and justified in exercising arbitrary power
over its subjects. Koselleck finds the anti-political Enlightenment dangerous
because it ultimately came to see civil war as a historically licensed necessity if
the sphere of morality was to triumph over that of politics and the state. In a
similar vein, the potentially catastrophic outcome of the Cold War, had it
turned hot, was a product of the same kind of thinking: that war could be
justified in the service of ideology, whether of a liberal–democratic or a
communist variant.

From Absolutism to Crisis

Koselleck’s analysis of Enlightenment proceeds from what he considers to be
its inception in early modern justifications of absolutism. In this respect, as
noted above, Hobbes is treated as a seminal thinker because his theory of
absolutism registers the triumph of politics and the state over religion in early
modern Europe. This victory was necessary if the destructive civil wars of the
16th 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 obliged
not 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 situation

where men are forced, on pain of death, to prioritize the achievement of a state
of peace. However desirable such a state, it cannot be the outcome of an act of
will alone. Men are obliged to create it by agreeing to forge artificial bonds to
the Leviathan — bonds that may be broken, but only at the cost of a return to
the bellum omnium contra omnes. The highest moral good — for peace —
therefore has a necessarily political character, and any distinction between
morality and politics in these circumstances is, for all practical purposes,
arbitrary. At the same time, Koselleck argued, Hobbes’s theorization of the
absolutist 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 the
Reformation. While Christians had good intentions, they had come to pursue
these in such radically different fashions that all kinds of evil were sanctioned.
This represented a fatal subordination of action to conscience, which Hobbes
understood in terms of private, subjective opinion (Koselleck, 1988, 26). A
clash of private wills, even where those wills were motivated by the highest
good of peace, resulted in civil war. The solution appeared to be to create a
sovereign who is not subject to conscience or opinion. In a Commonwealth,
private interest would remain in the province of private will, but ‘public
interest, about which the sovereign alone has the right to decide, no longer lies
in the jurisdiction of conscience. Conscience, which becomes alienated from the
State, turns into private morality’ (Koselleck, 1988, 31).
Thus, for Koselleck, while Hobbes recognizes the specificity and necessity of
politics for peace, he surreptitiously places the distinction between private
conscience and the state at the centre of the constitution of absolutism. From
the late 17th century, this distinction is problematized and set at the heart of
the critique of absolutism developed by the emerging bourgeoisie. In an
important sense, the absolutist state created the very grounds on which it was
be opposed and eventually overthrown:
The bourgeois intelligentsia set out from the private inner space within
which the State had been confining its subjects. Each outward step was a
step towards the light, an act of enlightenment. The movement which
blithely called itself ‘the Enlightenment’ continued its triumphal march at
the same pace which its private interior expanded into the public domain,
while the public, without surrendering its private nature, became the forum
of society that permeated the entire State. In the end society would knock on
the doors of the political powers, calling for attention there, too, and
demanding admission. (Koselleck, 1988, 53).
Koselleck sees John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding as
an important moment in the transformation of private opinion into bourgeois
public 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 of
opinion or reputation’ (Locke, 1997, 317). Locke departed from Hobbes by
transferring the character of this law from the private conscience of the
individual to the public realm. Moral law is discussed and determined
intersubjectively, in the context of ‘societies, tribes and clubs’ and comes to act
as the standard by which citizens judge their own and others’ actions: ‘The
citizens no longer defer to the State power alone; jointly, they form a society
that develops its own moral laws, laws which take their place besides those of
the State’ (Koselleck, 1988, 55). Constant attention to and discussion of one’s
actions, in the court of public opinion, gives rise to moral laws that bear the
weight of ‘society’ and are of equal standing to those of the state. ‘What Locke
had thus put into words was the decisive breach in the Absolutist order, the
order expressed in the relationship of protection and obedience. Morality was
no longer a formal matter of obedience, was not subordinated to the politics of
Absolutism, but confronted the laws of the State’ (Koselleck, 1988, 58).
However, the distinction between morals and politics did not only appear in
the works of philosophers. For Koselleck, it came to inform the practice of two
kinds of social structure that were instrumental in the eventual destruction of
absolutism: the Republic of Letters and the Masonic lodges. These ‘indirect
countervailing powers’ would first establish themselves in distinction from the
state, eschewing the notion that they were political entities while actually
constituting major sites in the contestation of absolutist political power. The
new 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, the
merchants, financiers and businessmen who made up the rising bourgeoisie
and, 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: the
exchanges, coffee-houses, academies, salons, libraries and literary societies.5
These institutions, at their birth, were inherently ‘social’ and only indirectly
political. At the same time, the more exclusively bourgeois institution of the
Masonic lodges represented another dimension in which elements of the new
public were free from the gaze of the absolutist state. The lodges were secretive
and autonomous institutions, committed to upholding the moral law and,
according to Article VI of the Masonic constitution, ‘resolw’d against all
Politicks’ (Koselleck, 1988, 74). This secret space within the absolutist state
allowed for the flourishing of the new public’s sense of civil liberty: ‘Freedom
in secret became the secret of freedom’ (Koselleck, 1988, 75).
The Republic of Letters and the lodges would increasingly take on political
functions at the same time as they professed to occupy the non-political sphere
of morality. Koselleck draws our attention here to the dramaturgical aspect of
the 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 forum
for the exploration of the moral character of man, independent from the
secular laws of the state. For Schiller, the ‘jurisdiction of the stage’ was meant
to operate not simply when the state strayed from a moral line, but constituted
the opposite of the entire apparatus of secular law. Of course, the stage’s
jurisdiction had no immediate political effects — it was designed entirely as a
critique of politics and the state as they existed. However, once again, the
outcome was to strengthen the Enlightenment’s claim that the sphere of
‘society’, represented here by public performance and art, and being the
exclusive site of the moral law, is distinct from and opposed to the absolutist
state. Thus, ‘the jurisdiction of the secular law does in fact obtain, but unjustly
so, whereas the jurisdiction of the stage does not, although it has right on its
side’ (Koselleck, 1988, 100). The moral judgements presented on the stage were
starkly binary: vice/virtue; foolishness/wisdom; happiness/misery; and beauty/
ugliness. The state always found itself as the negative term of the couple, and in
this 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 heart
of Koselleck’s argument. His analysis of these two concepts anticipates his
later, more systematic approach of conceptual history. In itself, and as will be
seen below, this represents an important development in contemporary social
and political theory. However, for Koselleck the specific historical significance
of the concept of critique, as it is widely employed in the 18th century, is that its
meaning 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 for
his judgement. Reason stood outside of theology and, in a claim that rendered
Bayle 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 pursuit
of the truth. What was essential to criticism was the liberty of the critic to think
without obligation to others. For Koselleck, Bayle’s Republic of Letters is on a
par with Hobbes’s state of nature; the battle is between critics to establish what
is true in a perpetual war of ideas. While Bayle himself was not an overtly
political critic, he did perform a conscious separation of critique and the state.
Critique remains in the realm of the Republic of Letters, protected from the
power of the state.
In those that follow Bayle, we begin to see the emergence of a critique of the
state, not in the sense of criticisms of this or that policy of a king, nor even of
particular kings, but rather a critique of the very institution of kingship and the
absolutist conception of sovereignty. At first, in the work of Voltaire for
example, this critique appears spasmodically and primarily in the form of
literary and historical criticism, where the church and state are occasional
targets (Koselleck, 1988, 113). However, at the waning of Enlightenment,
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‘[c]riticism gave birth to hypocrisy’ (Koselleck, 1988, 117). What Koselleck

meant by this striking claim was that critique was increasingly used as a
universal standard of judgement. It came to judge all men, and as kings were
men they too were eventually to fall under its gaze. In this respect, it was reason
that became sovereign, and everything that stood against it, including the
power of the state, came to be regarded as an enemy to be destroyed. While
Bayle had placed a barrier between critique and the state, the enlighteners
ultimately breached it, subjecting the state to the rational, moral law. It is
exactly in this sense, for Koselleck, that the Enlightenment became
hypocritical: it became a critique of all power yet what it sought was the
power to judge all mankind (Koselleck, 1988, 119).
In the final part of Critique and Crisis, Koselleck was concerned to show how
late Enlightenment critique was instrumental in giving rise to a historical sense
of ‘crisis’. The notion of crisis was tied to a philosophy of history that was
dualistic and anti-political. The moral and the political realm stood as
opposites, and history developed towards the annihilation of the latter.
However, the normative aspect of Koselleck’s critique of critique was that
morals and politics cannot be easily separated, nor that either realm can be
overcome. Morals and politics relate to one another dialectically, and with
respect to Enlightenment critique this meant that what was a moral critique of
politics should have been recognized, at the same time, as a political critique of
the morality of absolutism. However, in fact, ‘the process of unmasking caused
political blindness’ (Koselleck, 1988, 183). The Republic of Letters failed to see
the 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 utopia
could be legitimized. The perverse conclusion that followed from this was that
civil war, on a global scale, was something that could be justified on moral
grounds. Just because it failed to recognize the nature of power, ‘it took refuge
in naked force’ (Koselleck, 1988, 184). The consequences of this failure were to
become 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 of
Enlightenment thought, culminating in Kant, in its anti-political and utopian
character. An obvious retort, from a historical perspective, is that no such
unitary Enlightenment existed. According to La Vopa, Koselleck provides a
range of ‘quite conventional, not to say old-fashioned thinkers’ who are
presented as the principal exemplars of this unified phenomenon (La Vopa,
1992, 86). Indeed, Koselleck himself pointed to this limitation of his study in
his 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 the
18th century, America — ignored a significant source of Enlightenment
thinking that was neither anti-political nor utopian in the sense employed in
Critique and Crisis. The work of historians of political thought, such as JGA
Pocock, has shown that there was an important and self-aware dialectic of
morals and politics unfolding in aspects of Enlightenment thought (Pocock,
1975, 1985).
As Koselleck himself recognized, after 1688 the relative lack of tension
between state and society in England (then Britain) had created the conditions
in which a pragmatic reformism could develop. In Britain, ‘there never
emerged, as some think there did in France, un petit troupeau des philosophes
y [t]he British avant-garde was not a network of persecuted rebels or
underground samizdat authors, destined to hand down the torch of liberal
democracy’ (Porter, 2001, xviii). ‘National’ Enlightenments, as Porter
illustrates in his book on the British Enlightenment, had their own
peculiarities. The British enlighteners spoke to many different ideas and
problems and ‘their register was ironic rather than dogmatic’ (Porter, 2001,
xxi). The same pluralism applied in other settings, not just in terms of the
disparity of thought to be found between individual thinkers in different
contexts, but in the diverse times and rhythms of the Enlightenment that were
experienced in various national and cultural conditions. Even where recent
historians have been concerned to portray ‘the European Enlightenment as a
single highly integrated intellectual and cultural movement’ (Israel, 2001, v),
they have argued that distinct political and social consequences emerge from
different philosophical positions taken up within that movement. Thus,
Jonathan Israel has recently distinguished between a ‘moderate’ Enlightenment
that lent itself to the support of enlightened absolutism and piecemeal reform,
and a ‘radical’ Enlightenment that had revolutionary social and political
intentions.
In Critique and Crisis, then, Koselleck seemed in danger of reducing the
complexity of Enlightenment thought to identity under the conceptual
distinction between morality and politics. The normative implication seems
obvious: that Koselleck was condemning Enlightenment thought because, in
itself, it leads to the legitimation of perpetual civil war, terror and
totalitarianism. The error of this kind of argument is clear: not only is it
intellectually vulgar, but it rests on a teleological view of historical
development. Franc¸ois Furet made a similar point in condemning Marxist
interpretations of the French Revolution: the specific course of the revolution
could not be explained by long-term social and economic ‘contradictions’
because it turned around a dialectic between ideological and political events
that 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 key

explanatory concept of the Enlightenment, as a ‘bourgeois movement’, would
seem to overlook the contingent character of historical events. The French
Revolution and its aftermath was no more a product of the logical progression
of the morality–politics dichotomy than was the Cold War. Each was the
outcome of a certain playing out of ideologies and politics in specific historical
contexts. Revolution, terror and totalitarianism were not the inevitable
historical outcomes of the Enlightenment, and where they did occur as
contingent historical phenomena, they did so under specific social and political
conditions that were not solely or even mainly determined by the logic of
‘Enlightenment thought’.
Furet also argued, however, that there was something radically new about
the concept of revolution that emerges in the French Revolution, that is, ‘the
appearance on the stage of history of a practical and ideological mode of social
action totally unrelated to anything that came before. A specific type of
political 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 that
Furet refers to relates to the way in which the latter conceives of a utopian
future not as a return to an idealized past (a notion involved with the concept
of ‘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 and
ideological mode of social action’. In fact, Critique and Crisis shares a very
similar view of what is new about the Enlightenment conception of revolution
and the mode of social action it entails. Indeed, this is in an important respect
Koselleck’s key argument. He was attempting to demonstrate that the
Enlightenment marks the emergence of a modern way of conceiving of and
acting on the relationship between theory and practice.
In an important respect, Koselleck here anticipates Michel Foucault’s
description of modernity as:
an attitude rather than a period of history. And by ‘attitude,’ I mean a mode
relating 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 behaving
that at one and the same time marks a relation of belonging and presents
itself as a task (Foucault, 2000, 309).
In ‘What is Enlightenment?’, Foucault presents this modern attitude as a
constant concern for and challenge to the self, consciously measured against a
past that is over, but which has nevertheless left its indelible trace on the
subject 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 the
world 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 envisage
the future as an irreversible break with the past, a destination foreseen in
philosophies of history that predicted the triumph of morality over power and
the state. However, that future is realizable only given a prior understanding of
the relationship of the present to the past, which is precisely the function of the
philosophy of history.
While in Critique and Crisis, then, Koselleck occasionally referred
to the Enlightenment as a ‘movement’ (Koselleck, 1988, 53), it is evident
from a close reading of the text that what he had in mind was not a movement
either in a purely intellectual sense, nor in the sense of a unified social and
political organization. Rather the unity of the Enlightenment lay in a certain
attitude or ethos, which while not fully formed by the time of the
French Revolution, had the same broad character that it was to exhibit
though the 19th and 20th centuries. This attitude was moulded around key
social and political concepts that were, or were becoming, common currency by
the end of the 18th century: the distinction between state and society; between
politics and morality; the notion that critique according to the standard of
reason was and should be applied to all areas of life, including the state and
politics; and the beginnings of a temporalization and acceleration of history, to
which the concept of ‘crisis’, with its eschatological overtones, was crucial.
While, and certainly under the influence of Schmitt, Koselleck at times seemed
to want to condemn the ‘movement’ of the liberal bourgeoisie, it is clear that
nothing in his analysis can lead to the conclusion that ‘Enlightenment’ itself
was responsible for civil war, terror and totalitarianism. Rather, the
contemporary world, and here Koselleck was clearly thinking about the
ideological utopias of the Cold War both in the form of American capitalism
and Soviet communism, had taken on the anti-political attitude of the
Enlightenment 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 the
political and social vocabulary of Enlightenment acts as a means by which we
can decode the political concepts and ideologies of the modern world. As is
argued in the last section, despite the end of the Cold War, Koselleck’s
argument is as important for understanding political theory and discourse
today as it was when first published.

Conclusion: Critique and Crisis Today

With hindsight, we might see Critique and Crisis as an important staging-post
in 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 attributed
in Critique and Crisis to conceptions of historical time in the constitution of the
present. Modernity sees a temporalization and acceleration of history, such
that the chronologically recent, when understood as an element of a different
‘age’, comes to be seen as very distant (Koselleck, 2004, Chapter 1). This
conception of historical time is, for Koselleck, characteristic of a modern
attitude towards the world, one which has its foundation in the period that was
in focus in Critique and Crisis. Yet, the formulation of this conception was not
simply an intellectual event. What Critique and Crisis attempted to make clear
was the intimate connection between social and political thought and practice
in 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 in
which their meaning remains stable or is transformed in different contexts, is
the importance of conceptual structures in relation to social and political
practices.
This relationship between concepts and social history is central to the
approach developed by Koselleck and his colleagues from the 1960s onwards:
Begriffsgeschichte. From the perspective of Begriffsgeschichte, there can be no
simple distinction between social history, that is the comprehension of long-
term social structures and processes, and conceptual history, understood as the
study of the meaning given to social and political life in specific contexts (see
Koselleck, 2002, Chapter 2; 2004, Chapter 5). Critique and Crisis is itself
already an example of this approach. Koselleck traces the way in which key
concepts developed in (and indeed prior to) the Enlightenment are not simply a
reflection or representation of social structures and interests, but are
themselves instrumental in providing for the self-understanding of social and
political actors. As such, Critique and Crisis might be seen as part of the
linguistic turn in social and political theory. Indeed, Begriffsgeschichte shares
much in common with the work of thinkers like Michel Foucault and Quentin
Skinner, who have attempted to chart the impact of conceptual and discursive
practices on social and political life.6 However, as Tribe argues, it is
appropriate to see Begriffsgeschichte not so much as a method, but as a
‘contribution to our historical self-understanding’, even if it has its own
particular — and specifically German — origins and concerns (Tribe, 2004,
xix–xx).
Central to the description of this historical self-understanding is the manner
in which social and political concepts are themselves open to contestation. The
forms of such contestation, and the way they change over time, are key for
understanding the character of political conflict in the modern world. Such
conflict cannot be reduced to socio-structural substrata, or be comprehended
as the misinterpretation of essential meanings. Consonant with Gadamer’s
hermeneutic 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 the
interpreter and the horizon of his historical object (Freeden, 1996, 118). While
Critique and Crisis does not explicitly spell out the character of this process, it
is clear from the text that Koselleck rejects the idea that the contestation of
conceptual meaning in the Enlightenment is determined by a social and
political ‘outside’. The very grounds on which this contestation takes place are
those of concepts, their meaning and what kinds of action follow from them in
a given social and political context.
Outstanding and important as Koselleck’s contribution to Begriffsgeschichte
and the broader field of the history of ideas has been, it would be anachronistic
to view Critique and Crisis simply as a moment in his intellectual development.
Critique and Crisis articulates a notion of politics that is inextricably tied to
Koselleck’s view of the political character of conceptual contestation, one
which remains of great value for contemporary political theory. While
Koselleck draws on Schmitt’s view of politics as the act of distinguishing
between friend and enemy, Critique and Crisis sees the very process of
determining what constitutes politics — and, importantly, the depoliticization
of politics that occurs in the Enlightenment — as political in character. The
limitation of the realm of politics, and its gradual subordination in the
Enlightenment to society and morality, is a process that has a political, rather
than social or moral imperative. The enlighteners’ distinctions between politics
and society, politics and morality had the function of identifying the friends
and enemies of absolutism. To a large extent, political theory has continued to
be shaped by this problematic, which for all intents and purposes is that of
modern liberalism.
While this problematic has had many critics, it continues to pose the central
problems around which much of political theory, and social and political
discourse more generally, are organized. The concept of the political has come
to represent a distinct sphere of activity whose objective is two-fold: to
represent and negotiate between different social interests; and to reign itself in,
so that it remains distinct from, and subordinate to the apolitical realms of the
social and moral. As Koselleck demonstrated in Critique and Crisis, this
concept of the political formed part of the armoury of an attitude towards
modernity and the future that was characteristic of the social and political
discourse of the Enlightenment. We continue to live with its legacy. With
respect to political theory and political philosophy, this can be seen in
preponderant concerns with liberal conceptions of justice and of human nature
that are much indebted to (a liberal reading of) Kant. This is most obviously
the case in the field of ‘normative’ political and legal theory that has formed
around the work of Rawls (1971) and Habermas (1987). Critique and Crisis,
with its implicit criticism of this kind of Kantianism, poses a serious question
to 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 of

contestation 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 certain
understanding of ‘global civil society’, as a possibility produced by a ‘crisis’ of
sovereignty, is widespread (Kaldor, 2003). Among advocates of global civil
society, there is a commonly held view that new political, social and economic
arrangements are necessitated by the perceived crisis of the sovereign territorial
state. A continuity might be seen here between contemporary advocates of
global civil society and Enlightenment thinkers, the latter who perceived a
crisis in the sovereignty of the absolutist state. The understanding of a post-
national global civil society embodies the Kantian desire for a world order
governed according to moral imperatives that operate above and indepen-
dently of the political relations between states and interest groups. Yet, the idea
that this is a possible or even desirable state of affairs is grounded in a
misunderstanding of the deeply rooted conflicts that exist in the world,
conflicts that have become all the more acute since the reputed unravelling of
national sovereignty. As Critique and Crisis reminds us, the end of absolutism
did not herald the cessation of political conflict and sovereignty, but rather saw
their intensification. Similarly, if we are indeed witnessing the decline of an old
order based on the sovereignty of nations, we should expect to see — and are
perhaps seeing — the deepening of current conflicts and the generation of new
ones. It is utopian indeed to believe that such conflicts can be overcome by the
adoption of universal precepts of justice, however ‘thin’ these might appear. As
in the past, if these conflicts are to be resolved they will be so in a political
manner: that is, either through the achievement of agreement through
negotiation and compromise, or through the vanquishing of enemies, so
conceived. The idea of constraining political power by universal law and justice
is a humane aspiration. However, as Critique and Crisis brilliantly demon-
strated, this — modern — attitude was only possible given an equally humane
aspiration that arose in early modern history: to end the killing and chaos that
had resulted from the subordination of politics to various notions of divine law
and justice.
We should read Critique and Crisis today not just because it provides a
cogent account of the relationship between social and political concepts,
discourses and practices. It also provides a timely reminder that political
conflict today, as in the Enlightenment, is as much as anything a conflict about
the very meaning of politics.

Date submitted: 22 April 2005

Date 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 Jürgen 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 (Müller, 2003, 104–5).
5 This important sociological thesis was to be taken up and expanded by Jürgen 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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