I was recently introduced to Reinhart Koselleck by an article in aeon (an excellent magazine, by the way) about his historical theories. The article juxtaposes Koselleck with the communist Eric Hobsbawm, whose historical method was a direct outgrowth of his communist politics. For Hobsbawm, history was praxis. The journal he helped found, Past and Present, and his participation in the Historian’s Group of CPGB made these connections explicit through academic research and political engagement respectively.
Koselleck rejected this entirely. He could not stand anachronisms and what could be more anachronistic than reading our moment onto the past. To explain this, Koselleck developed his theory of historical time that recognized no laws of history other than historians’ desires to find order in the jumbled chaos of the past, the creation of a capital ‘H’ History that imbues the past with a quasi-mystical meaning that fuels our current conflicts; borrowing, as Marx says, “names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.”
The political Hobsbawm versus the “apolitical” Koselleck. The analogy is summed up perfectly by Hobsbawm’s participation in the CPGB versus Koselleck’s friendship with Carl Schmitt.
Others have tried to keep what is useful about Koselleck while ignoring what respectable liberals like François Furet found objectionable. His arguments for depoliticization are valueable but give up the ghost about what that really means: an empowered right. Jörn Rüsen, tried to argue that by creating meaning (historische Sinnbildung), historians are only trying to “put historical events into an ‘order’ and thus to integrate them into a historical process. History therefore has a narrative meaning that is multiple and diverse in nature and, in some cases, in competition with other narrative meanings.” (pp. 25)
This convenient definition comes from some of my teachers here in the tax haven in their 2010 book, Inventing Luxembourg. The teachers, I should add, are very good and I respect them greatly, but it is their historical claim on pages 25 and 26 that I would like to continue quoting at length:
In most western countries, the production of narrative meaning has tended to be heavily guided by religion, moral values, the idea of progress, or ideologies. The latter has certainly included nationalism. Nowadays, scholarly ‘producers of meaning’ (Sinnstifter) are probably less heavily influenced by official ideologies, but they nonetheless remain closely linked to a political, academic and cultural context, which is no less influential. Historians have hence attempted to approach history from below, to study the history of subaltern or dominated groups, or to enlarge their perspective and choose a transnational or even larger (e.g. European) framework. In these cases, the search for meaning is closely linked to the contemporary context and its needs. (pp. 25-6)
Their book is about the uses of the past in contemporary Luxembourg, but they go to great lengths to distance themselves from the political implications of how the past is used. A collaborative effort, the book was also created as part of a technocratic evaluation of the future of Luxembourg, which would have given the book political significance, which makes its depoliticization all the more important.
Why would they depoliticize politics? It is the Luxembourgish ideology.
Signed,
Andrew (Pfannkuche)
Normal Thoughts 