Critique and Crisis Today: Koselleck, Enlightenment and the Concept of Politics

Over the last 20 years, Reinhart Koselleck has become familiar to an Anglophone audience as the foremost practitioner of Begriffsgeschichte (conceptual history). Yet, an early work of his, Critique and Crisis: the Pathogenesis of Modern Society, is today largely overlooked by political theorists. In this paper, I argue that the book is an important resource for contemporary political theory. Not only does it outline a highly cogent approach to the relationship between political theory and practice, but its substantive argument concerning Enlightenment provides insights into the character of political concepts, and the concept of politics itself, that are relevant for thinking about political theory and discourse in the present.