Koselleck's Dichotomies Revisited

Abstract

One of the characteristics of conceptual history as developed by Reinhart Koselleck is its relation with social history. This connection refers to a constitutive dichotomy of conceptual history between reality and language. In this article, I argue that in Koselleck's works, the meanings of conceptual history/social history and reality/language dichotomies are not evident, and I propose to explore them through an analysis of his methodological texts on historical writing from the 1980s. Furthermore, I suggest that these dichotomies function as a limit for thinking about the problem of the symbolic, which I seek to account for by drawing on Claude Lefort's notion of the political and an examination of the concept of Jewish people.