I have a few more books to go in my temporary reading program on time and temporality, but I'm pretty sure this book will be the highlight of the series I've plowed through. Like most works by German history theorist Reinhart Koselleck, this is a collection of essays, published at different times, and therefore to some degree heterogeneous. The common denominator is the importance of temporality and of concepts, which themselves also evolve over time.
The first and last articles in particular are groundbreaking in this respect. In them Koselleck comprehensively outlines his view about the relationship between the space of experience and the horizon of expectation, the first focusing on what has passed, the other on what is to come. According to Koselleck this relationship has fundamentally changed with the breakthrough of modernity, in the period 1750-1850. Where past, present and future up to that point were more or less mixed, the space of experience in modernity was dissociated from and subordinated to the present and especially the future, in function of the concept of 'progress'.
I know, all of that remains fairly abstract, so this is by no means an easy read. There’s some repetition due to the different publication dates of the articles, but through them one can see that Koselleck formulated his theses more precisely, made them more concrete and put them in a broader context. This is history theory at the highest level! My rating is not the full 5 stars, because there are also some slightly lesser contributions, and also contributions that move at such a high philosophical level that they were less useful for me.
For a more elaborate review: see my History-account on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2449430878 ( )