Futures Past

On the Semantics of Historical Time
Erscheinungsjahr 2004
ISBN: 978-0-231-12771-4
Verlag: Columbia University Press

Buch, Englisch, 336 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 154 mm x 230 mm, Gewicht: 481 g

Modernity in the late eighteenth century transformed all domains of European life -intellectual, industrial, and social. Not least affected was the experience of time itself: ever-accelerating change left people with briefer intervals of time in which to gather new experiences and adapt. In this provocative and erudite book Reinhart Koselleck, a distinguished philosopher of history, explores the concept of historical time by posing the question: what kind of experience is opened up by the emergence of modernity? Relying on an extraordinary array of witnesses and texts from politicians, philosophers, theologians, and poets to Renaissance paintings and the dreams of German citizens during the Third Reich, Koselleck shows that, with the advent of modernity, the past and the future became 'relocated' in relation to each other.The promises of modernity -freedom, progress, infinite human improvement -produced a world accelerating toward an unknown and unknowable future within which awaited the possibility of achieving utopian fulfillment. History, Koselleck asserts, emerged in this crucial moment as a new temporality providing distinctly new ways of assimilating experience. In the present context of globalization and its resulting crises, the modern world once again faces a crisis in aligning the experience of past and present. To realize that each present was once an imagined future may help us once again place ourselves within a temporality organized by human thought and humane ends as much as by the contingencies of uncontrolled events.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Koselleck, Reinhart

Weitere Mitwirkende

Tribe, Keith (Book Review Editor

Tribe, Keith

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtswissenschaft Allgemein Historiographie
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtswissenschaft Allgemein Geschichtswissenschaft: Theorie und Methoden

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction, by Keith TribePart I: On the Relation of Past and Future in Modern History Chapter 1 Modernity and the Planes of HistoricityChapter 2 Historia Magistra Vitae: The Dissolution of the Topos into the Perspective of a Modernized Historical ProcessChapter 3 Historical Criteria of the Modern Concept of RevolutionChapter 4 Historical Prognosis in Lorenz von Steinís Essay on the Prussian ConstitutionPart II Theory and Method of the Historical Determination of Time Chapter 5 Begriffsgeschichte and Social HistoryChapter 6 History, Histories, and Formal Time StructuresChapter 7 Representation, Event, and StructureChapter 8 Chance as Motivational Trace in Historical WritingChapter 9 Perspective and Temporality: A Contribution to the Historiographical Exposure of the Historical WorldPart III Semantic Remarks on the Mutation of Historical Experience Chapter 10 The Historical-Political Semantics of Asymmetric CounterconceptsChapter 11 On the Disposability of HistoryChapter 12 Terror and Dream: Methodological Remarks on the Experience of Time during the Third Reich Third ReichChapter 13 ìNeuzeitî: Remarks on the Semantics of Modern Concepts of MovementChapter 15 ìSpace of Experienceî and ìHorizon of Expectationî: Two Historical CategoriesNotes

Über Autor(innen)

Reinhart Koselleck, now retired, was previously professor of historical theory at the University of Bielefeld, Germany. He is the author of The Practice of Conceptual History and Critique and Crisis.Keith Tribe was Reader in Economics at Keele University, UK, until 2002. He is now a private scholar and rowing coach at the King's School, Worcester.