Reinhart Koselleck
| Reinhart Koselleck | |
|---|---|
| Born |
April 23, 1923 Görlitz, Lower Silesia, Germany |
| Died | February 3, 2006 (aged 82) Bad Oeynhausen, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany |
| Fields | History of ideas, historiography, linguistics |
| Known for | Conceptual history Theories of historical time |
| Influences | Heidegger, Schmitt, Löwith, Gadamer, Weber, Hegel, Nietzsche, Kant, Hobbes, Goethe, Humboldt, Lessing, Chladenius, Stein, Luther, Thucydides, |
| Influenced | Habermas, White, Kondylis |
Reinhart Koselleck (23 April 1923 – 3 February 2006) was a German historian, considered as one of the most important historians of the twentieth century. He held an original position in the historical discipline and was not part of any historical 'school', working in such varied fields as conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte), the epistemology of history, linguistics, the foundations of an anthropology of history and social history, the history of law and the history of government.
Koselleck served as a German soldier during World War II. Towards the end of the war, he was captured by invading Soviet forces and marched to the Auschwitz concentration camp, before being transported to Kazakhstan and held there as a prisoner of war for 15 months until he was returned to Germany on medical grounds. He claimed that his personal experiences during the war were formative for his later academic direction, especially his interests in "crisis" and "conflict" and his skeptical stance towards "ideological" notions of moral or rational universalism and historical progress. He also claimed that the experience of being part of a defeated nation or culture enabled a more self-reflexive form of historical understanding, and that the most interesting perspectives on history are often written by the vanquished rather than the victors.
He became known for his doctoral thesis Critique and Crisis (1954), which was strongly influenced by the thought of Carl Schmitt; his habilitation thesis on "Prussia between Reform and Revolution", dealing with Prussia and Germany in the 18th and 19th centuries. Between 1972 and 1997 Koselleck co-edited, together with Werner Conze and Otto Brunner, the eight-volume encyclopedia Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (Basic Concepts in History: A Historical Dictionary of Political and Social Language in Germany.") This work, together with his later contributions, became the corner-stone of conceptual history, the study of the changing semantics and pragmatics of concepts in their social and political contexts. Among his main contributions to Historiography are his reflections on time and temporality in history and the history of language, most famously the leading hypothesis of the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe about a saddle time, or threshold time between 1750 to 1850, during which language (in Germany) changed into the language of modernity.
...
Wikipedia