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Beyond Utopianism and Relativism: History in the Plural in the Work of Reinhart Koselleck
| This paper presents a new overall interpretation of Reinhart Koselleck’s work in the context of the critical debates about philosophies of history in post-war Germany. The interpretation takes its point of departure in the characterization of Koselleck as a ‘partisan for histories in plural against history in singular’ that the philosopher Jakob Taubes (1923-1987) put forward in a commentary in the early 1970s. Taubes referred to the critique of modern philosophies of histories that Koselleck began in Kritik und Krise and to his contemporary ambition of outlining an alternative concept of history: he opposed the historical-philosophic notion of history as a single unified process that human beings direct towards a final aim. Instead, he attempted to develop a theoretical notion of history as plural. This paper will analyze this notion and illustrate how Koselleck's scholarly production can be interpreted as a continuous attempt to find modes of historical writing that reflect this theoretical stance. At the same time, this paper emphasizes that Koselleck’s theoretical writings also contain a critique of historical relativism as a notion based on the very same conceptual assumption that informs historical philosophies: history in the singular. In Koselleck's view, just as the utopian, teleological conception of history he identified as underlying most historical writing from the 18th century onwards, historical relativism presupposed the idea that one could formulate a coherent theoretical position on history as a totality. He believed that utopianism and relativism alike were based on theoretically-methodologically naïve and politically dangerous assumptions of history and politics that ignored or misunderstood the basic conditions of what is possible for human beings. Against this background, the paper will portray some of the scientific positions, the political concerns and the theoretical-methodological components, as well as the changes and transformations, which were involved in Koselleck’s lifelong attempt to develop and employ notion of history in the plural.
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