Futures past : on the semantics of historical time / Reinhart Koselleck ; translated and with an introduction by Keith Tribe.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Koselleck, Reinhart, author.

Contributor:

Tribe, Keith, translator, writer of introduction.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

History--Philosophy.

History.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xxvi, 330 pages)

Other Title:

Futures past

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, [2018]

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Cover

Half title

Title

Copyright

Contents

Translator's Introduction

Author's Preface

Part I: On the Relation of Past and Future in Modern History

1. Modernity and the Planes of Historicity

2. Historia Magistra Vitae: The Dissolution of the Topos into the Perspective of a Modernized Historical Process

3. Historical Criteria of the Modern Concept of Revolution

4. Historical Prognosis in Lorenz von Stein's Essay on the Prussian Constitution

Part II: Theory and Method of the Historical Determination of Time

5. Begriffsgeschichte and Social History. 13. Neuzeit: Remarks on the Semantics of Modern Concepts of Movement

14. "Space of Experience" and "Horizon of Expectation": Two Historical Categories

Notes

Index. 6. History, Histories, and Formal Time Structures

7. Representation, Event, and Structure

8. Chance as Motivational Trace in Historical Writing

9. Perspective and Temporality: A Contribution to the Historiographical Exposure of the Historical World

Part III: Semantic Remarks on the Mutation of Historical Experience

10. The Historical-Political Semantics of Asymmetric Counterconcepts

11. On the Disposability of History

12. Terror and Dream: Methodological Remarks on the Experience of Time during the Third Reich.

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.