Infinite Progress and the Burdens of Biography

Abstract

Not the least of the remarkable features of Hans Blumenberg’s books is that they are as dense as they are long, single pages or even sentences sometimes seeming to condense an entire career of sustained writing and intense yet unimaginably broad reading, and suggesting numerous avenues of further enquiry. His rules for writing fat books were neither those gently mocked by Walter Benjamin, where numerous examples of the same phenomenon are piled up, nor those of Niklas Luhmann, where a machine is cranked up and the words tumble out. In this respect the scholar he most resembles is perhaps Max Weber, especially the Weber of Economy and Society. While their chief substantive concerns only overlap here and there, in this chapter I use two thin yet robust slices of Blumenberg to make a sandwich much of whose meat is provided by Weber. The first slice is a statement about progress in science; the second is an account of time and the life of the politician. The meat in between is Weber on both, with some Simmelian trimmings.