Time Strata. Reinhart Koselleck’s Theory of Possible Histories

Reinhart Koselleck is best known for his pioneering contributions to the theory and practice of Begriffsgeschichte. But in one of his most famous essays he described Begriffsgeschichte as merely a “propaedeutic” for a theory of history – for what he called a Historik. This paper will argue that this theory of history received its ultimate expression in the geological metaphor that Koselleck employed as the title for his final collection of essays: Zeitschichten [Time Strata]. It thus proposes to reconstruct the genesis and development of this figure in three steps. The first will explore how Koselleck’s Historik was first conceived as a response to the so-called crisis of historicism. The second will examine how this response led Koselleck to distinguish formally between actual histories and the conditions of possible histories. The third will show how this results in the articulation of a multitemporal conception of history, which salvages historicism’s axiom of uniqueness by indicating the “structures of repetition” that condition it.