Reinhart Koselleck

Who is Reinhart Koselleck?

Reinhart Koselleck 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, the epistemology of history, linguistics, the foundations of an anthropology of history and social history, the history of law and the history of government.

He became known for his doctoral thesis Critique and Crisis, 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, followed in 1965. Between 1972 and 1997 Koselleck co-edited, together with Werner Conze and Otto Brunner, the eight-volume encyclopedia Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe 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 changed into the language of modernity.