Koselleck—foucault: The birth and death of philosophy of history

Abstract

According to Reinhart Koselleck, the period he calls Sattelzeit, which spans from 1730 through 1850, witnessed a crucial conceptual transformation. It was associated with a new, ‘modern’ way of experiencing temporality, which in turn gave rise to the emergence of the concept of History as a singular collective noun and, consequently, to the philosophies of history. Koselleck’s perspective converges, besides, with Michel Foucault’s view in The Order of Things, in which Foucault also remarked on the great conceptual break that occurred around 1800 and gave rise to the emergence of what he called the ‘Age of History’. However, our attempt at matching Koselleck’s Begriffsgeschichte with Foucault’s archaeological perspective will also reveal why the former is not yet sufficiently attentive to the diversity of the modes of conceiving of temporality during the four centuries that modernity spans. Lastly, it will allow us to better understand what was the intellectual ground on which the philosophies of history were founded, and also how it eventually became undermined, along with the concept of temporality that was at its basis.