Futures Past

Fülszöveg

The fifteen essays in this book explore many dimensions of the concept of historical time. They are studies in the relationship of history to language and of language to the deeper movements of human understanding. But what will strike English-language readers first is the range of intellectual interests and capacities they display. The witnesses they invoke include politicians, philosophers,
theologians, and poets as well as historians, and their "texts" are as diverse as Lorenz von Stein's 19th-century essay on the Prussian constitution, a 16th-century painting by Albrecht Altdorfer, or the dreams of German citizens in the early 1930s. They are tied together by the fact that each witness or text articulates a particular connection between a given past and a given future.
The method of the essays is to focus on the semantics of central concepts in which the historical nature of time is implicated—concepts like history, revolution, chance, fate, and progress, but also... Tovább

Fülszöveg

The fifteen essays in this book explore many dimensions of the concept of historical time. They are studies in the relationship of history to language and of language to the deeper movements of human understanding. But what will strike English-language readers first is the range of intellectual interests and capacities they display. The witnesses they invoke include politicians, philosophers,
theologians, and poets as well as historians, and their "texts" are as diverse as Lorenz von Stein's 19th-century essay on the Prussian constitution, a 16th-century painting by Albrecht Altdorfer, or the dreams of German citizens in the early 1930s. They are tied together by the fact that each witness or text articulates a particular connection between a given past and a given future.
The method of the essays is to focus on the semantics of central concepts in which the historical nature of time is implicated—concepts like history, revolution, chance, fate, and progress, but also constitutional concepts, scientific temporal categories, and the classification of epochs by historians. Themes and ideas abound: One common thread is the discovery that societies that see their own place in time as "modernity" tend to place greater demands on the future.
Reinhart Koselleck is Professor of the Theory of History at the University of Bielefeld. He has spent much of the past two decades as one of the three editors of a massive German dictionary of historical concepts, five of six projected volumes of which have now been published. His book is included in the series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, edited by Thomas McCarthy.
I Vissza