ABSTRACT
A recent visitor at the University of Chicago and the New School of Social Research, Reinhart Koselleck has for many years served as professor of the theory of history at the University of Bielefeld. Like Blumenberg, he is a specialist in conceptual history. His Crisis and Critique: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society, an essay on the structural determinants of the emergence of freemasonry, is available in English; so, too, is the collection of essays entitled Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, from which I have taken a representative excerpt. Koselleck is also one of three editors of the several volumes of a German dictionary of historical concepts. Among such concepts are several of which either Pizzorno or Blumenberg would be prepared to provide at least an analytical sketch: politics, religion, progress, and history itself. Koselleck refines the analysis of the emergence, the impact, and the interconnections among all these concepts in what follows. He refines the analysis of modernization concomitantly.
