History and Theory 51 (May 2012), 151-171 Wesleyan University 2012 ISSN: 0018-2656

AGAINST Periodization:
Kosellecks Theory of Multiple Temporalities

Helge Jordheim

ABSTRACT

In this essay I intend to flesh out and discuss what I consider to be the groundbreak-
ing contribution by the German historian and theorist of history Reinhart Koselleck to
postwar historiography: his theory of historical times. I begin by discussing the view, so
prominent in the Anglophone context, that Kosellecks idea of the plurality of historical
times can be grasped only in terms of a plurality of historical periods in chronological
succession, and hence, that Kosellecks theory of historical times is in reality a theory of
periodization. Against this interpretation, to be found in works by Kathleen Davis, Peter
Osborne, and Lynn Hunt, among others, I will argue that not only is Kosellecks theory
of historical times, or, with a more phenomenlogical turn of phrase, his theory of multiple
temporalities, not a theory of periodization, it is, furthermore, a theory developed to defy
periodization. Hence, at the core of Kosellecks work is the attempt to replace the idea of
linear, homogeneous time with a more complex, heterogeneous, and multilayered notion
of temporality. In this essay I will demonstrate how this shift is achieved by means of
three dichotomies: between natural and historical, extralinguistic and intralinguistic, and
diachronic and synchronic time.

Keywords: Reinhart Koselleck, historical time, temporality, modernity, periodization,

conceptual history, layers of time

Among the most striking claims in the work of the German historian and theorist
of history Reinhart Koselleck is the one raised in his essay On the Need for The-
ory in the Discipline of History (ber die Theoriebedrftigkeit der Geschichts
wissenschaft) that history can exist as a discipline only if it is capable of develop-
ing what in the German original is referred to as eine Theorie der geschichtlichen
Zeiten.1 Even though it is repeated in almost identical form in several other
essays,2 this claim has rarely been the focus of discussion and research, at least
not in an Anglophone context. If not an explanation, at least a hint as to why this
claim has more or less been overlooked can be found in the English translation of
the essay in question published in 2002 in the book The Practice of Conceptual
History, which came out in the series Cultural Memory in the Present, with a

1. Reinhart Koselleck, ber die Theoriebedrftigkeit der Geschichtswissenschaft [1972], in

Koselleck, Zeitschichten: Studien zur Historik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), 302.
2. Cf., for example, Moderne Sozialgeschichte und historische Zeiten [1982], in Zeitschichten,
324: If we historians want to develop a real theory, different from the social sciences in general,
it must obviously be a theory that makes it possible to account for the transformation of temporal
experiences.
152 helge jordheim

preface by Hayden White. History, it reads, can only exist as a discipline if it

develops a theory of periodization.3 Even though a theory of historical times
would have been a perfectly viable and idiomatic translation, the translator opts
for a theory of periodization, probably based on the presupposition that this is
in fact the only theory of historical times that might interest historians. In this
context historical times, in the plural, as opposed to historical time, in the
singular, can logically refer only to periods in their chronological succession.
Obviously, this would not be a particularly interesting observation if it con-
cerned only one particular translation of a particular text, even if it affected a
series of interpretations of Kosellecks work that base themselves on a blatant
mistranslation. In reality, however, the confusion of historical times with
periods on the level of translation is symptomatic of a particular reading of
Koselleck that has been dominant in the Anglophone context until it was chal-
lenged by John Zammito in a review essay of Kosellecks Zeitschichten, pub-
lished in 2004. To avoid the misunderstanding that this is essentially a question
of languages and national research traditions, it should be stressed that scholars
in the German tradition havent given much attention to Kosellecks theory of
historical times either4 and those who have, do so in terms of a theory of peri-
odization and of one period in particular, modernity.5
In this article, which seeks to expand on some of the ideas brought forward
in Zammitos review essay from 2004, I aim to challenge this understanding
of Kosellecks work. My argument is not that his often impressionistic, wide-
ranging essays dont also contain a theory of modernity, or as he puts it, of the
Neuzeit, but rather that his theory of modernity is encompassed by another more
abstract and general theory, a metatheory, of historical times. This theory grows
out of his work with the relationship between language and history in the con-
text of Begriffsgeschichte, but expands beyond the methodological framework
for studying key concepts. In the first section of the essay I will discuss briefly
some of the more recent attempts to reduce Kosellecks entire work on historical
times to a theory of periodization embedded in a theory of modernity in order to
demonstrate how this leads to an inversion of his actual theoretical endeavors. In

3. Koselleck, On the Need for Theory in the Discipline of History, in Koselleck, The Practice of
Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, transl. Todd Samuel Presner et al. (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2002), 4.
4. One important exception is Gabriel Motzkin; see, for example, On Kosellecks Intuition of
Time in History, in The Meaning of Historical Terms and Concepts: New Studies in Begriffsge
schichte, ed. Hartmut Lehmann and Melvin Richter (Washington, DC: German Historical Institute,
1996), 41-46; ber den Begriff der geschichtlichen (Dis-)Kontinuitt: Reinhart Kosellecks Kon-
struktion der Sattelzeit, in Begriffene Geschichte: Beitrge zum Werk Reinhart Kosellecks, ed.
Hans Joas and Peter Vogt (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2011), 339-358. See also the recent article
by Alexandre Escudier, Temporalization and Political Modernity: A Tentative Systematization of
the Work of Reinhart Koselleck, in Political Concepts and Time: New Approaches to Conceptual
History, ed. Javier Fernndez Sebastin (Santander: Cantabria University Press & McGraw-Hill,
2011), 131-178.
5. Among the recent contributions, see Jrn Leonhard, Erfahrungsgeschichten der Moderne: Von
der komparativen Semantik zur Temporalisierung europischer Sattelzeiten, in Joas and Vogt, eds.,
Begriffene Geschichte, 423-448; and Michael Makropolous, Historische Semantik und Positivitt
der Kontingenz: Modernittstheoretische Perspektive bei Reinhart Koselleck, in Joas and Vogt, eds.,
Begriffene Geschichte, 481-413.
 against periodization 153
the second section, I will give an initial presentation of some of the elements and
arguments that point in a radically different direction. These are brought out in
part by Zammitos philosophical reading and in part by Kosellecks own interpre-
tation of Altdorfers painting Alexanderschlacht, which has become emblematic
of his theory of modernity. Finally, in the third section, I will present a structure
for systematizing and reconstructing Kosellecks theory of historical times in a
way that doesnt sever the links to his methodological innovations and empirical
work in the history of concepts. In this final part of the essay I will demonstrate
how Koselleck develops his theory of multiple temporalities by means of three
dichotomies that all serve to deconstruct the idea of one linear and homogeneous
chronological time: between natural and historical time, extralinguistic and intra-
linguistic time, and synchronic and diachronic time. Together these dichotomies
present a way of resisting the impending danger of history being brought to a
standstill by methods and approaches focusing on language and texts.

I. On Koselleck and periodization: critical views

In a series of essays collected in the volume Futures Past, which was published
in English in 1985 and which introduced Koselleck to an Anglophone audience,6
he presents his version of the advent of modernity understood as a shift from
one experience of time and history to another, from history as a homogeneous,
unchanging space to history as an indefinite and unstoppable movement or pro-
cess, to which every historical object, every action, every intention is subjected.
What is taking place, he writes, is a temporalization of history, leading to the
special kind of acceleration that characterizes our modern world.7 To describe
this process Koselleck develops a set of metahistorical or anthropological cat-
egories. At the threshold of modernity in the period of Western history that he
has famously coined Sattelzeit,8 the relationship between space of experience
[Erfahrungsraum] and horizon of expectation [Erwartungshorizont] becomes
increasingly asymmetrical and discontinuous. Thus our experiences, our histori-
cal knowledge at any given point in time, no longer serve as a solid foundation for
predicting the future, or generally, for knowing what to expect.9 From this initial
disjunction of experience and expectation, modernity, in terms of a historical
period spanning from the eighteenth century until today, became characterized by
a discontinuous relationship to the past in terms of experiences, traditions, and
origins, and correspondingly, by an almost obsessive interest in the future in the
form of expectations, plans, prognoses, and utopias.10
6. Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1985).
7. Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft der Frhen Neuzeit [1968], in Koselleck, Vergangene
Zukunft: Zur Semantik historischer Zeiten (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979), 19.
8. Koselleck, Einleitung, in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-
sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, ed. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck (Stuttgart:
KlettCotta, 1972), I, xv.
9. Koselleck, Erfahrungsraum und Erwartungshorizontzwei historische Kategorien [1975],
in Vergangene Zukunft, 366.
10. The obsessiveness of this interest in the future is brought out in polemical fashion in
Kosellecks first book Kritik und Krise: Eine Studie zur Pathogenese der brgerlichen Welt, which
154 helge jordheim

In the reception of Koselleck in the Anglophone world, this theory of the

advent and specific temporal qualities of the modern age, substantiated by his
monumental endeavors in the history of key concepts and social structures, has
come to represent the main focus of Kosellecks work to the extent that other
parts have been explicitly or implicitly ignored. In part, this very selective recep-
tion has been due to the lack of translations of other parts of Kosellecks works
into English; even in Futures Past, however, and even in the widely cited and
discussed interpretation of Altdorfers painting, there are elements that point in
another direction, to a more complex theory of historical times.
In her recent innovative study, entitled Periodization and Sovereignty, Kathleen
Davis discusses how ideas of feudalism and secularization govern the politics of
time and deals with Koselleck in the context of Carl Schmitt and his Political
Theology. Although she is unfamiliar with Kosellecks work on the theory of his-
torical times, other than what is translated in Futures Past, she accepts that it is
undoubtedly of profound methodological importance for studies in temporality,
but given this importance, there is all the more reason to consider his reliance
on periodization.11 Her criticism draws its considerable force from the argument
that his essays have made it easy for theorists to bypass the political intricacies
of periodization, and support reductive versions of temporality.12 In this context
Daviss claim that Koselleck, influenced by his personal and academic relation-
ship with Schmitt, substitutes a medieval/modern break for the absent foundation
of sovereignty13 and thus uses periodization of European history to sanitize its
politics,14 is less important than her foundational argument that Kosellecks stud-
ies of temporality must be understood in light of his reliance on periodization.
From a vantage point that contextualizes Futures Past in debates about moder-
nity and secularization in postwar Germany, where Schmitt and other teachers of
Koselleck, such as Karl Lwith and Hans Blumenberg, played major parts, Davis
has good reasons for insisting on the primacy of periodization. But by employing
a less biographical perspective that draws on a larger part of Kosellecks work,
the relationship between theory of modernity and theory of historical times can be
framed quite differently. From this point of view periodization appears as one of
many elements in a more comprehensive theory of multiple temporalities, which
as a whole seems rather to defy periodization than to support it. Nevertheless, this
argument for an inversion of Kosellecks theoretical project doesnt belie the basic
premise of Daviss claim that there is a potential conflict between Kosellecks
studies of temporality and his consistent theoretical and empirical attempts to
understand the specific features of modernity.

was first published in 1959 and was translated into English in 1988: Critique and Crisis: Enlighten
ment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (New York and London: Berg, 1988). Never as suc-
cessful as Futures Past, this books role in establishing Koselleck as someone working in the tradition
from Carl Schmitt and the German historiographical discussions about the emergence of modernity
still shouldnt be underestimated, as can be seen in the work of Kathleen Davis.
11. Kathleen Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization
Govern the Politics of Time (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 87.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid., 88.
14. Ibid., 87.
 against periodization 155
Before I move on to Kosellecks own struggle to distance himself from the
logic of periodization, I would like to comment briefly on two other contribu-
tions from an early and a more recent phase in the reception of Koselleck in
the Anglophone world. In his The Politics of Time (1995), Peter Osborne uses
Koselleck to illustrate what he refers to as the peculiar dual role of modernity as
a category. Modernity, Osborne claims, designates the contemporaneity of an
epoch to the time of its classification but at the same time registers this con-
temporaneity in terms of a qualitatively new, self-transcending temporality which
has the simultaneous effect of distancing the present from even that most recent
past with which it is thus identified.15 Whereas Davis criticizes Kosellecks idea
of the Neuzeit for being a substitute for the absent foundation of sovereignty,
Osborne recognizes in this idea a prehistory of the lived time-consciousness of
late nineteenth century European metropolitan modernity . . . that transitoriness
which lies at the core of the fugitive and the contingent.16 Because Osbornes
sole interest is the ontological structure of historical time, he fails to take account
of the phenomenological complexity of the theory of multiple temporalities that
frames Kosellecks theory of modernity. Finally, in a more recent contribution,
Lynn Hunt probes Kosellecks theory of modernity as a temporal experience
and concludes, in line with earlier commentators, that it is not really a theory of
modernity at all because it is completely unable to explain what might be the
genuine historical quality of the peculiar form of acceleration that to her
mind characterizes the modern age.17 The only explanation she can find consists
of some especially opaque references to technoindustrial progress and the
time saved by the increasing division of labor by machines.18 This criticism is
more than valid if ones focus is on theories of modernity. In a book on time and
history, however, it is surprising that Hunt does not consider the possibility that
Koselleck might never really have been out to develop a theory of modernity
as such, but rather a theory that deals with the multiple temporalities unfolding
between historical events and their linguistic representations.
In the studies by Davis, Osborne, and Hunt, Kosellecks theory of modernity
is presented as hampered by a series of weaknesses and paradoxes relating to
political, philosophical, or empirical issues, to which there appear to be no imme-
diate solutions within the theory itself. Against this background, it seems all the
more urgent to ask whether the insistence on periodization really does justice to
Kosellecks sustained reflection on the complexities of historical times. After all,
Koselleck himself seemed eager to distance himself from these kinds of readings,
and in what follows I will give but two examples of how he opposed attempts to
attribute to him a theory of periodization.
On the occasion of the completion of the eight-volume lexicon of key con-
cepts, Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, the intellectual historian J. G. A. Pocock
was invited to comment on the project of German Begriffsgeschichte. Pocock

15. Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (London and New York:
Verso, 1995), 13-14.
16. Ibid., 13.
17. Lynn Hunt, Measuring Time, Making History (Budapest: CEU Press, 2008), 75-76.
18. Ibid., 76-77.
156 helge jordheim

attacked the idea of Sattelzeit, presented in the introduction to Geschichtliche

Grundbegriffe as the period from around 1750 to around 1850 when our past
becomes our present,19 calling into question the relation between Begriffs
geschichte as a method and a discipline and the hypothesization of a Sattelzeit.20
In his response to Pocock and other critics, Koselleck was more than willing
to reduce the role of periodization in his work to a rather marginal and purely
heuristic tool intended for organizing and obtaining funding for the extremely
ambitious lexicon: Initially conceived as a catchword in a grant application,
this concept has come to obscure rather than to advance the project. . . . The Sat
telzeit is neither an ontological notion nor is it tied to a single national language.
This periodization is but one means of narrowing the GGs focus and making
its goals more manageable.21 At this point, however, the question of periodiza-
tion for Koselleck is still a question of method. For a more sustained theoretical
confrontation with the possibilities and implications of periodization, explicitly
drawing on the more comprehensive theory of multiple temporalities, I turn to the
last essay Koselleck published in his lifetime. This essay dealt with structures
of repetition in language and history, and I think it worth noting that it was
later reprinted in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and thus has gained an almost
testamentary quality. In his discussion of the interplay between repetition and
uniqueness in history, Koselleck starts out by calling into question his own idea
of the discontinuity of the Neuzeit. Here, Koselleck advocates that historians will
need to investigate what is really new in our so-called Neuzeit, in the sense that
it doesnt repeat what used to be the case, or, he adds, relativizing his own idea
of the emergence of modernity as a radical break, what was yet already there and
only returns in a new guise. In this way the diachronic organizes itself in terms
of multiple overlapping layers, which run contrary to the conventional periods
and opens up for different combinations. Finally, he concludes in a way that
goes directly against the interpretations offered by Davis, Osborne, and Hunt: In
analyzing the interplays between repetition and uniqueness, it is possible to plu-
ralize the temporalities, without recurring to the empty and not very illuminating
periodizations in referring to something as old, new, and middle.22 In these
and similar passages we close in on what can be seen as Kosellecks real theory of
historical times, not only presenting an alternative to periodization, but actually
defying it, which is going to be the topic of the rest of this essay.

19. Koselleck, Einleitung, in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, I, xv.

20. J. G. A. Pocock, Concepts and Discourses: A Difference in Culture? Comment on a Paper by
Melvin Richter, in Lehmann and Richter, eds., The Meaning of Historical Terms and Concepts, 58.
21. Reinhart Koselleck, A Response to Comments on the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, in ibid.,
69. Already in the introduction to the first volume of the lexicon, Koselleck refers to the Sattelzeit-
idea as a heuristic anticipation (xv). For a more comprehensive discussion of the Sattelzeit in light
of the theory of multiple temporalities, see Helge Jordheim, Unzhlbar viele Zeiten: Die Sattelzeit
im Spiegel der Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen, in Joas and Vogt, eds., Begriffene Geschichte,
449-480.
22. Koselleck, Wiederholungstrukturen in Sprache und Geschichte [2006], in Koselleck, Vom
Sinn und Unsinn der Geschichte: Aufstze und Vortrge aus vier Jahrzehnten, ed. Carsten Dutt
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2010), 98-99. See also Was sich wiederholt, in Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung (July 21, 2005), 6.
 against periodization 157

II. Toward a theory of multiple temporalities

As I understand it, Kosellecks theory of historical times is not a theory of peri-

odization except in a very superficial sense. Regarded as a whole, what Koselleck
has to offer is a radically different theory of overlapping temporal structures and
layers, synchronicities and nonsynchronicities that defy periodization and, as
stated in the passage just quoted, is even constructed with the purpose of defying
periodization, at least in the traditional historiographical sense. In the context
of this theory of multiple temporalities the logic of periodization, in terms of
a chronological succession of more or less well-defined units of time, can only
be one of many different temporal experiences, structures, and layers at work at
any moment in historymore or less decisive, depending on the subject and the
material in question.
In the Anglophone context, John Zammito was the first to account for the fact
that Kosellecks theory of historical times might be something more general and
comprehensive than a theory of periodization entrenched in a theory of moder-
nity, or vice versa. In his review essay of the volume Zeitschichten, in which
Koselleck had assembled much of his work on time, temporality, and history,
Zammito identifies Koselleck as a veritable literary hedgehog who worries
his big idea over and over again.23 This big idea, Zammito argues, is his theory
of historical times. Over more than thirty years, Koselleck has been distilling
and redistilling this notion of historical times as his key to a theoretical grasp of
the possibility of history. What Koselleck arrives at, according to Zammito, is
summed up by the term Zeitschichten, which Koselleck defines as several layers
of time of differing duration and differentiable origin, which are nonetheless pres-
ent and effectual at the same time.24 Zammito concludes that what Kosellecks
theory of historical times in fact should mean is that there is no total otherness of
the past, nothing like total incommensurability, but instead stratum upon stratum
of the past flows in and through the present at varying velocities,25 effectively
eclipsing the argument that Kosellecks theory of historical times is in reality a
theory of the discontinuity between different epochs, especially the premodern
and the modern. As much as I agree with Zammitos position, and as much as I
appreciate his wish to abstract Kosellecks transcendental inquiry into the pos-
sibility of historic timeor rather, times26 from the more methodological issues,
I think there are good reasons to maintain ties to Begriffsgeschichte as opposed
to severing them as completely as he does. At the end of his essay, Zammito sug-
gests that that the exploration of the varying flows of historical change can be
used to question the hypothesization of autonomous paradigms (or epistemes)
divided by total ruptures, as Kuhn (or Foucault) had it. For such an idea to be
23. Zammito has stressed this in Kosellecks Philosophy of Historical Time(s) and the Practice
of History, in History and Theory 43 (2004), 126.
24. Koselleck, Introduction to Zeitschichten, 9.
25. Zammito, Kosellecks Philosophy, 133.
26. Ibid., 125.
158 helge jordheim

effective, however, Kosellecks theory needs to be understood on the basis of its

methodological and empirical foundation in the history of concepts, in terms of
an investigation into the relationship between historical and linguistic change in
the wake of the so-called linguistic turn.27
However, before I move on to the more systematic part of this paper, where
I attempt to identify the three basic dichotomies underlying Kosellecks discus-
sion of temporality, I will first demonstrate how a different view of his theory
of historical times brings out a whole new set of dimensions in his interpreta-
tion of Albrecht Altdorfers painting Alexanderschlacht. For Davis, as for many
others, this opening scene of Futures Past is the true emblem of Kosellecks
theory of modernity. The painting by the German artist Albrecht Altdorfer was
commissioned by Duke Wilhelm IV of Bavaria in 1528 as part of a series of
paintings with biblical and historical motifs. It depicts the battle of Issus in 333
bce when Alexander the Great defeated a huge Persian army led by King Darius.
Altdorfer finished the painting in 1529, the same year that Turkish armies were
laying siege to Vienna. By looking at some of the rather striking anachronisms
in this painting, such as the numbers on the banners indicating the number of
soldiers actually killed in the battle at hand or the Persians depicted in the image
of the Turkish soldiers of Altdorfers own time, Koselleck unwraps an experi-
ence of history where past and present are parts of the same historical horizon.
Thus, the battle gains a timeless quality: the West against the East, good against
bad, Christians against Muslims. In the same way, Koselleck notes, the Persian
troops are dressed up in Turkish uniforms dating from the sixteenth century. In
Altdorfers historical imagination present and past were embraced by one com-
mon historical horizon; they were included in the same space of experience.28
Thus, Altdorfers Alexanderschlacht is turned into an emblem for the premodern
experience of history about to collapse under the pressure of temporalization
[Verzeitlichung].29 At the threshold of modernity history changes into a temporal
process constantly moving from the past through the present and into the future.
Later, Altdorfers Alexanderschlacht too will make the transition to modernity,
ending up on the wall in Napoleons bathroom. The premodern experience of his-
tory that it represented, however, is irredeemably lost, left behind by the restless
movement and progress of modernity.
Altdorfers Alexanderschlacht depicts the fateful moment when the Persians
flee the battlefield and Alexander and his men set off in pursuit. In the painting
all troops turn to follow Alexander, the horses at full gallop, banners fluttering in
the wind; this decisive historical moment prefiguring the fall of Persian rule at the
hands of Alexander is frozen at its most dramatic and dynamic. This inclination to
freeze history, to make it stop, is one of the unavoidable dangers of historical rep-
resentation in a painting as well as in a text. Martin Heidegger, one of Kosellecks

27. For a more sustained discussion of Koselleck and the linguistic turn, see Helge Jordheim,
Thinking in Convergences: Koselleck on Language, History and Time, Ideas in History 2, no. 3
(2007), 65-90: and Jordheim, Does Conceptual History Really Need a Theory of Historical Times?
Contributions to the History of Concepts 6, no. 2 (2011), 21-41.
28. Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft der frhen Neuzeit, 18.
29. Ibid., 19.
 against periodization 159
early teachers, wrote: Any narrative of the past depicts something which lies still
[was still liegt]. He continues: this kind of historical narrative explicitly freezes
history [ist eine ausdrckliche Stilllegung der Geschichte]whereas in reality
history is something that always takes place [ein Geschehen]. Any historical
approach in the truest sense of the word, Heidegger affirms, is bound to ask what
is still taking place, even though it is supposed to be in the past.30
For the painter Altdorfer, the Stilllegungto use Heideggers very apt term
allows him to depict all the details in this theater of war, be they the different
troop formations, the fleeing Persians, the attacking Macedonians, the landscape,
the rising sun and the moon, as all parts of the same historical moment, the same
synchronic unity. For the historian Koselleck, however, the main challenge
of analyzing this painting consists in retrieving from it historys character of
Geschehen, of something that is taking place. In other words, Kosellecks inten-
tion is to explore the ways that the frozen, synchronic moment of the painting is
in fact penetrated by a strong diachronic movement much in the same way that
Alexander penetrates the Persian lines. Koselleck puts different elements in the
painting into motion, in time and in history, spanning a period of more than 2,000
years from the battle itself in the year 333 bce to the French Revolution. From
the perspective of this long diachronic movementsimilar to what the French
historian, and one of Kosellecks most significant sources of inspiration, Fernand
Braudel, referred to as la longue dure31Altdorfers painting marks but an
instant, a moment about to disappear in the stream of history.
In his essay Koselleck analyzes this synchronic moment and its representation
in a way that makes it possible to regain its historicity. Thus, the numbers on the
banners, almost invisible to the naked eye, and in the same way the name Alex-
ander Magnus painted on the shields on one of the horses, unfold a diachronic
temporality. Obviously, they are anachronisms, or, to use a term that appears fre-
quently in Kosellecks work, Ungleichzeitigkeiten, instances of nonsynchronic-
ity, noncontemporaneity. Going into battle, banners high, no one could possibly
know how many soldiers in each legion would die. Likewise, Alexander had at
the time of the battle not yet received the epithet the Great. These are elements
of a later history that are introduced into the painting as if they were contem-
poraneous with the events represented. In Kosellecks temporal hermeneutics
of history the analysis of these nonsynchronicities, these Ungleichzeitigkeiten,
serves to illustrate the extent to which this painting still represents a Geschehen,
history taking place. The painting freezes history, but Kosellecks analysis sets it
in motion again by pointing at the elements that are nonsynchronous, that belong
in another time. These elements are not entirely separated from the time of the
painting but are linked to it through a diachronic historical movement that may
have been invisible to Altdorfer but is all the more visible to us. Hence, Altdor-
fers painting as a historical representation, as Stilllegung, is imbued with an
inherent historicity that restores its character of Geschehen as part of a diachronic
movement.

30. Martin Heidegger, Die Frage nach dem Ding (Tbingen: Niemeyer, 1975), 33.
31. Fernand Braudel, Histoire et sciences sociales: La longue dure, Annales: conomies, soci
ts, civilizations 4 (1958), 725-753.
160 helge jordheim

Rereading Kosellecks interpretation of Altdorfers Alexanderschlacht in light

of his theory of historical times changes it from an emblematic representation of
the absolute discontinuity between premodern and modern experiences of his-
tory to an example of what Zammito considers the main analytical innovation
in Kosellecks work, the ability to orchestrate the temporal layers of a moment
of time to grasp more fully the synchrony of systemic change with short-term
happenstance.32 What Zammito fails to acknowledge, however, and what is
going to be a main issue in the last part of this essay, is the extent to which the
Stilllegung der Geschichte enabled by periodization is linked to the question of
historical representation. Be they Kuhnian paradigms or Foucauldian epistemes,
periods in chronological succession take shape when history is brought to a
standstill by means of representation and turned into what Foucault refers to
as the restrictive figure of a synchronic system [la figure contraignante dune
synchronie].33 In the essay on Altdorfer this synchronic system is brought about
by a painting; in most of Kosellecks other essays, however, the means of repre-
sentation is language, more precisely political and social key concepts, that serve
as both indicators and factors of historical change.34 By consequence his theory
of historical times and his struggle with the dangers of periodization start and end
with an investigation into the relationship between language and history, between
language and time.
To challenge the imminent Stilllegung der Geschichte caused by periodization
Koselleck introduces a series of differentiations and distinctions into his theory
of history that all have to do with the concept of time and what he refers to as a
destruction of the natural chronology. The chronological line, along which our
history is still working its way [entlanghangelt] can in this way relatively easily
be exposed as a fiction.35 As a result of thisin the Heideggerian senseposi
tive destruction of the unity of chronological time,36 Koselleck ends up working
with three temporal dichotomies that reappear almost everywhere in his work:
between natural and historical time, between extralinguistic and intralinguistic
time, and between diachronic and synchronic time. By means of these dichoto-
mies Koselleck develops a comprehensive theory of multiple temporalities,
whichthough fragmented and scattered across his entire workoffers a viable
alternative to theories of periodization in postwar historiography.

III. Natural and historical time

For Koselleck the concept of time is both a historical and a metahistorical

category, or to put it another way, it is both the result of and theoretical precondi-
tion for historical studies in general. Moving from the singular to the plural, from
time to times, Koselleck ventures to replace the idea of one natural, chrono-
logical time, which also lies at the basis of all theories of periodization, with a
plurality of different and differing temporal experiences:

32. Zammito, Kosellecks Philosophy, 133.

33. Foucault, Larchologie du savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 216.
34. Koselleck, Einleitung, xiv.
35. Koselleck, ber die Theoriebedrftigkeit, 307.
36. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 17th ed. (Tbingen: Niemeyer, 1993), 22.
 against periodization 161
If one assumes that historical time remains embedded within natural time without being
entirely contained in it; or, to put it differently, that whereas chronological time may be
relevant for political decisions, historical interrelations cannot be measured with a clock;
or, to put it differently yet again, that the revolution of the stars is no longer (or not yet
again) relevant for historical time, we must find temporal categories that are adequate to
historical events and processes.37

However, Kosellecks metahistorical claim about the denaturalization38 and

destruction39 of natural chronology and, by consequence, the need for a theory
of historical time or times is in itself a result of historical studies. Thus the incon-
testable inconsistencies in Kosellecks work, pointed out by Davis, are in fact part
and parcel of a theory designed to defy periodization that relies in many of its fac-
ets on the paradox of this very same and highly questionable historical logic. The
particular convergence of historical and metahistorical categories in Kosellecks
work dictates that the metahistorical or pronouncedly theoretical efforts continu-
ously venture beyond the limits of the historical material. An example is when
Koselleck discusses how the synchronicity of the nonsynchronous, presumably
one of the chief characteristics of the modern experience of history, can also
be observed in the works of Thucydides, Augustine, and Bossuet in terms of a
condition for possible histories.40
Prior to the Sattelzeit, argues Koselleck, the process of history had been organ-
ized according to natural categories such as the rise and setting of the sun and
the moon, the change of seasons, or the birth and death of members of the ruling
dynasties. In response to questions about the beginning and the end of history,
this natural chronology was extended by theological or mythological categories.
In both cases a system different from and external to history itself imposed its
divisions on the historical process. To describe the change taking place in the
eighteenth century Koselleck paraphrases Kant: So far history has conformed to
chronology. Now its about making chronology conform to history.41 Follow-
ing this ambition, the program of Enlightenment historiography was to organize
historical time according to categories obtained from history itself.
On a historical as well as on a metahistorical level, the destruction of natu-
ral, but also mythological or theological, time, in the singular, and the rise of a
theory of historical times, in the plural, are due to a notion of human experience,
Erfahrung. To put it differently, the move from time to times can take place
only through the phenomenological mediation of human experience. Obviously,
there will always be natural and chronological time: the sun will rise and set,
seasons will change, and people will grow old and die. Far from denying this fact,
Koselleck wants to draw our attention to other sets of temporal experiences, such
as progress, decline, acceleration or delay, the not-yet and the not-anymore, the
before and the after, the too-early and the too-late, the situation and the duration

37. Koselleck, ber die Theoriebedrftigkeit der Geschichtswissenschaft, 304.

38. Ibid.
39. Ibid., 306.
40. Koselleck, Geschichte, Geschichten und formale Zeitstrukturen, in Zeitschichten, 137-142.
For a discussion of these examples, see Jordheim, Unzhlbar viele Zeiten, 460-461.
41. Koselleck, Moderne Sozialgeschichte und historische Zeiten [1987], in Zeitschichten, 323.
162 helge jordheim

and their role in political processes and events.42 In the end, Koselleck argues in
an article from 1973, these examples can be reduced to three modes of temporal
experience. First is the irreversibility of events, the before and the after in
historical successions. Second is the repeatability of events, both in terms of
two presumed identical events and in terms of constellations or typologies. Last
is what he terms the simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous [die Gleichzeitigkeit
der Ungleichzeitigen], implying that historical successions may have the same
natural chronology but totally different temporal organizations, for instance in
the case of utopian ideologies projecting their political and social ideals into the
future.43
In a later essay on Transformation of Experience and Methodological
Change (Erfahrungswandel und Methodenwechsel), first published in 1988,
Koselleck more or less makes the same distinctions among three kinds of acqui-
sition of experience [Erfahrungsgewinn]. However, there are some small but
interesting variations. First, instead of irreversibility he is now talking about sur-
prise, the temporality of this experience being the minimal difference between
before and after, between too early and too late. Though certainly not the only
possible subject of this kind of experience, Koselleck defines the single indi-
vidual as the primary subject because this kind of experience influences every
person in him- or herself.44 But experiences, he goes on to argue in a second
point, are made not only by surprise but also by repetition. They are results of
a process of accumulation, in which they confirm or correct each other. These
kinds of experiences do not unfold in the minimal temporal difference of the
surprise but in a different kind of temporality. For Koselleck, these are periods
that structure, reorient, and stabilize a life, and whose maximum length is the dis-
tance from birth until death.45 Hence, the typical subject of such experiences is
not the single individual but the entire generation or, more generally, all people
living together, it could be families, professional groups, inhabitants of a city,
soldiers of an army, members of states or social groups, believers or unbelievers
within or outside churches, members of political formations of every sort and so
on.46 These people share specific spans and thresholds of experience that, once
they are instituted or surpassed, create a common history.47 The third kind of
acquisition of experience discussed here, very different from the one discussed
in the first essay, is what Koselleck refers to as the long-term system changes48
as exemplified in the fall of the Roman Empire. Prior to introducing this third
point, however, he sums up his argument: The change of experience, always
unique in situ, nevertheless takes place on different temporal levels: namely, in
the interaction between those events that generate new experiences spontaneously
and in concrete situations, or more slowly, when experiences add up, confirm
each other, react to changes in the relatively stable net of conditions within which
42. Koselleck: Begriffsgeschichte und Sozialgeschichte [1972], in Vergangene Zukunft, 133.
43. Ibid., 132.
44. Koselleck, Sprachwandel und Ereignisgeschichte, 34f.
45. Ibid., 35.
46. Ibid., 36.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid., 39.
 against periodization 163
events become possible.49 Here, as well as in the preceding discussion of differ-
ent kinds or modes of experience, it becomes clear why linguistic representation
in the Koselleckian framework can never lead to a Stilllegung der Geschichte, to
history being frozen in distinct and stable chronological units such as historical
periods. For Koselleck, language is always linked to experience. There can be
no language that doesnt itself refer to individual and collective experiences, and
these experiences are always invested with temporal structures. In this way time
enters into language and puts it into motion.

IV. Extralinguistic and intralinguistic time

To proceed from experience to language means to proceed from something

intangible and in itself inaccessible to something both material and accessible,
constituting the primary object of historical research. This is to say that language,
linguistic representation, and mediation were always already at stake even though
our focus was on historical and temporal experience. Indeed, Koselleck would
be the first to emphasize the futility of evoking the question of historical experi-
ence without at the same time evoking the question of language and linguistic
representation. The differentiation between natural and historical time, on the one
hand, and extralinguistic and intralinguistic time, on the other, can only have a
heuristic and analytical purpose indicating two important and to a certain extent
consecutive steps toward a theory of multiple temporalities.
In the introduction to the first volume of Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe
Koselleck gives his famous and much contested definition of the concept, the
Begriff, deviating sharply from both the linguistic and the philosophical tradi-
tion. Indeed, it would be possible to claim that Kosellecks successful reworking
of some of the paradoxical consequences of the linguistic turn starts with his
entirely pragmatic and contextual distinction between word and concept.
Both words and concepts might have several meanings, but whereas the mean-
ing of a word can be determined with reference to the context, concepts are by
definition ambiguous. The word, Koselleck writes, becomes a concept when
the full richness of a social and political context of meaning [die Flle eines
politisch-sozialen Bedeutungszusammenhanges], in whichand for whichthe
word is used, is taken up in the word.50 The concept, he explains, assembles the
plurality of historical experiences as well as a series of theoretical and historical
issues in one whole, which is only given in the concept itself and can only be
experienced there.51 If we are to believe Koselleck, the function of the concept
with reference to historical and, by consequence, temporal experiences is not to
define and control them but rather to include as much as semantically possible.
The same goes for the relationship between the concept and historical reality.
Not only is the plurality of meaning and experience included in the concept,
but also the plurality of historical reality [die Mannigfaltigkeit geschichtlicher

49. Ibid., 37.

50. Koselleck, Einleitung, xxii.
51. Ibid.
164 helge jordheim

Wirklichkeit] . . . enters into the ambiguity of a word insofar as it can be

defined as a concept.52
This is not the place to go further into the possible linguistic or philosophical
inadequacies of Kosellecks pragmatic definition of the Begriff. Instead I am
going to move on to discuss how the concept as defined by Koselleck relates
to the question of natural and historical time. In order to overcome the herme-
neutical, mainly Gadamerian, contention that language and by consequence
interpretation envelops all dimensions of history and historiography,53 Koselleck
reintroduces the difference between language and history and, in so doing, a gap
is opened between language and time. On the one hand, Koselleck claims,
quoting his colleague Heiner Schultz, a certain situation [Zustand] exists;
on the other hand, he continues, we have a concept for this situation [ein
Begriff dieses Zustandes].54 Thus in the relationship between the concept and
the situation, between the concept and historical reality, there are four possible
variations: first, both remain more or less the same; second, both change simul-
taneously; third, the concepts change but not reality to the extent that reality is
conceptualized in a new and different way; or fourth, conversely, reality changes
but the concepts remain stable. The last two variations are both examples of
Ungleichzeitigkeiten, of a lack of synchronicity between language and reality,
between concepts and history. One of Kosellecks recurring examples of reality
changing faster than the concepts is the Marxist philosophy of history. As histori-
cal reality changed, capitalism, allegedly the last stage of history, was superseded
by imperialism, which was in turn superseded by fascism and National Social-
ism. As the historical reality changed Marxist theory was obliged to respond by
redefining the historical content of the concept of the last and highest stage of
capitalism.55 Hence, the conceptual framework was able to remain stable and
unfazed by the rapid changes in the reality of politics and ideology.
In this way we can observe how the relationship between language and extra-
linguistic time in itself contributes to creating a specific kind of historical dyna-
mism that challenges the inherently static nature of historical periods. In reality
there will always be temporal displacements when reality and language are not
in fact synchronic. To study these instances of nonsynchronicity means to study
history as a dynamic and diachronic process that is always in motion. However,
these temporal displacements, these Ungleichzeitigkeiten, do not occur only
between language and reality but also within language itself, within the concepts.
Hence, we move from extralinguistic to intralinguistic time.
Kosellecks definition of Begriff contains a plurality of historical experienc-
es. However, to understand how these experiences are organized according to an
idea of what shall here be referred to as intralinguistic time, meaning a temporal-
ity unfolding within the concepts themselves, we need to consider his redefinition

52. Ibid.
53. Koselleck, Historik und Hermeneutik, 111f.
54. Koselleck, Hinweise auf die temporalen Strukturen begriffsgeschichtlichen Wandels [2002],
in Begriffsgeschichten: Studien zur Semantik und Pragmatik der politischen und sozialen Sprache
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2006), 88.
55. Ibid., 89.
 against periodization 165
of the notions of structure and system, which stand in sharp opposition to the
definitions at work within the structuralist tradition. For Ferdinand de Saussure,
focus on the structural and systemic aspects of language served to free the study
of linguistic forms from the historical and diachronic approaches predominant in
his time. For Koselleck, however, the notion of structure is not derived from
structural linguistics but from the German Strukturgeschichte practiced before
World War II by his co-editors of Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, Otto Brunner
and Werner Conze, among others. Following Brunner and Conze, for Koselleck,
structure applies only to diachronic phenomena and most importantly to what
he terms structures of repetition [Wiederholungsstrukturen] when history or at
least historical experience seems to be repeating itself. The same goes for what
Koselleck refers to as the structural possibilities56 of historical concepts, or,
with another turn of phrase, their systematic claim.57 These structural possibili-
ties and claims unfold horizontally, in diachronic time, and notas could have
been expectedvertically, in the space of synchronic discourse.
According to Koselleck, every concept has its own internal temporal struc-
ture, which is inherent in the concepts and which is characterized by being
multilayered and complex.58 Furthermore, this temporal constellation is a
three-part structure comprised of all three dimensions of time: past, present, and
future. But Koselleck saw the investigation of this intralinguistic temporality as
more of a future possibility for research in conceptual history than as an already
accomplished goal: All key words in political and social language have a multi-
layered internal temporal structure reaching beyond the particular contemporary
reality, both forwards and backwards. It would be a fascinating enterprise to write
a history of concepts, which only concentrated on the elements of the past, the
present, and the future.59
To further specify this temporal structure we could argue that every political
or social concept comprises both a pragmatic and polemic element intervening
in the present, a prognostic or even utopian element anticipating the future, and
finally an element of duration surviving from the past. Even though all concepts
belong in a particular context, a situation, or as Koselleck calls it, a Zustand, they
still retain what he refers to as their Janus-faces60 with one side facing back-
ward toward a past that is long gone and the other side facing forward toward a
future that is yet to come. One example might be an analysis of the concept of
revolution in the context of the fateful days of October 1917 when the Bolshe-
viks were rebelling against the czarist empire. Here, we might suggest the follow-
ing temporal organization: first, the concept is pointing backward toward a past
overshadowed by the French Revolution and the revolutions of 1830 and 1848,
or even further back toward a premodern concept of revolution determined by
the movement of the stars and the planets; second, it is pointing forward toward

56. Koselleck, Sozialgeschichte und Begriffsgeschichte, 126.

57. Koselleck, Einleitung, xxi.
58. Ibid., vi; Koselleck, Hinweise auf die temporalen Strukturen begriffsgeschichtlichen
Wandels, 92, 95.
59. Koselleck, Hinweise auf die temporalen Strukturen begriffsgeschichtlichen Wandels, 92.
60. Koselleck, Einleitung, xv.
166 helge jordheim

the coming of a new era, the utopia of the communist society; third, it intervenes
in the present by summoning the workers to the barricades and urging them to
bring down czarist rule. Moreover, Koselleck adds in one of his articles, it is not
only concepts that have their own internal temporal structures but the same can
be said about sources [Quellen].61 In other words, it is not only single concepts
but entire texts that can be read and interpreted in terms of how they refer to or
point at the past, the present, and the future. Whats more, this strategy can be
applied beyond the investigation of texts; in Kosellecks later work on monu-
ments and cultures of memory, as well as in a series of influential works dealing
with the presence of the past in the present by scholars such as Aleida Assmann,
Svetlana Boym, and Andreas Huyssen, the same kind of temporal structures or
layers prove to be at work in other parts of our surroundings, such as landscapes,
cityscapes, buildings, objects, practices, and so on.62
Kosellecks both theoretical and methodological innovation provides an effec-
tive tool for challenging the logic of periodization. On the first level of temporal-
ity the concepts change their meanings and uses diachronically in time, that is,
natural extralinguistic time. But this diachronic movement is stopped or frozen
as soon as we choose to study a concept at a specific point in history, in a spe-
cific Zustand, situation, or discourseeven though a certain sense of movement
remains due to the temporal displacements between language and reality. On the
second level of temporality, however, the diachronic movement that appeared
to be frozen, stillgelegt to use Heideggers term, is repeated within the concepts
themselves as an internal, that is, intralinguistic temporal structure. Hence, even
if we choose to study a particular situation or discourse there will always be con-
cepts or even texts within this situation or discourse that, due to their temporal
organization, pointing at the past, the present, and the future, unveil a diachronic
movement through the synchronic moment. This then brings us to my last point,
the final instance of multiple temporalities, in other words, the final temporal
dichotomy developed in Kosellecks work.

V. Diachronic and synchronic time

In developing his theory of historical times, Koselleck draws mainly on the Ger-
man hermeneutic and historicist tradition in the form propagated by his many
illustrious teachers, among them Gadamer and Lwith. Nevertheless, he seems
to be returning to a set of questions that are also very much at the heart of the
structuralist and poststructuralist tradition.63 Indeed, his engagement with this
61. Koselleck, Hinweise auf die temporalen Strukturen begriffsgeschichtlichen Wandels, 96.
62. Koselleck, Transformation der Totenmale im 20. Jahrhundert, in Transit: Europische
Revue 22 (Winter 2001/2002), 59-86; Aleida Assmann, Erinnerungsrume: Formen und Wandlungen
des kulturellen Gedchtnisses (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1999); Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia
(New York: Basic Books, 2001); and Andreas Huyssen, Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of
Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).
63. Koselleck never engages with the French structuralists, and only rarely refers to Saussure;
his interest in the structuralist tradition is limited to the works of linguist Eugenio Coseriu and his
work Synchronie, Diachronie und Geschichte: Das Problem des Sprachwandels (Munich: W. Fink,
1974). For a discussion of the relationship between Koselleck and Coseriu, see Jordheim, Thinking
in Convergences, 76-78.
 against periodization 167
tradition becomes most explicit in his third and final step developing his theory of
multiple temporalities. The point of departure is the dichotomy of the synchronic
and diachronic introduced by Saussure in the Cours de linguistique gnrale as
a way of setting himself off from the dominant tradition of diachronic linguistics
and later turned into a theoretical dogma in the works of French structuralists and
poststructuralists such as Roland Barthes, Claude Lvi-Strauss, Jacques Lacan,
Jacques Derrida, and to a certain extent, Michel Foucault.
In his lectures, Saussure famously shifts the focus of linguistic investigation
from the diachronic, the movement of language through and in history, to the syn-
chronic, the structural and systematic aspects of a single language at a particular
time. In what later scholars have described as an attack on the complete domi-
nance of diachronic and historical perspectives, Saussure argued that historical
change is something that takes place on the level of parole and thus cannot be the
object of linguistic study.64 In response to structuralist and poststructuralist theory,
historical scholarship faces a rather difficult and potentially fatal choice. Namely,
give priority to language as a synchronic system in the sense of a discourse, an
episteme, or a culture, and risk suppressing parole, diachronic change, and
movement entirely. Or, conversely, ignore completely the synchronic, structural
aspects of language and return to a notion of history as a linear progression in
which linguistic expressions can serve only as sources for reconstruction of his-
torical events or as post festum representations. Faced with this dilemma that has
emerged from a rather dogmatic reading of Saussure, Koselleck insists on think-
ing about language and history in a way that encompasses both diachronic and
synchronic temporalities. Conceptual history, he argues in an essay from 1972,
transcends the absolute alternative of diachrony and synchrony [fhrt ber die
strikte Alternative der Diachronie und Synchronie hinaus].65
As part of the theoretical framework for the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe
Koselleck offers a rather practical and methodological solution for overcoming
the dichotomy of the synchronic and the diachronic in the theoretical frame-
work for the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. In writing the history of a concept,
Koselleck emphasizes, one always has to start by considering the concept at a
specific time and in a specific context. To define this first step he uses the term
synchronic analysis,66 which seems to be taken from linguistics but which he
rather associates with traditional historical criticism, Quellenkritik. To reveal the
contents of a concept, it is necessary to analyze the situation of the speaker and
the addressee as well as the possible intentions and interests at play, the imme-
diate context, and so ona familiar practice in the work of every historian and
developed to the level of theory in the works of Cambridge School-contextualists
such as Quentin Skinner and J. G. A. Pocock.67 For Koselleck, however, the syn-
chronic analysis marks only the initial step in the work of the conceptual his-

64. Saussure, Cours de linguistique gnrale, 116ff.

65. Koselleck, Begriffsgeschichte und Sozialgeschichte, 125.
66. Ibid.
67. Cf., for example, Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics. Vol. I: Regarding Method (Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002). For a comparison of Koselleck and Skinner, see Kari
Palonen, Rhetorical and Temporal Perspectives on Conceptual Change, in Finnish Yearbook of
Political Thought 3 (1999), 41-59.
168 helge jordheim

torian who is also and just as significantly guided by a diachronic principle.68

In other words, the specific theoretical and methodological contribution of
Begriffsgeschichte to historical scholarship occurs when, as Koselleck puts it,
the synchronic analysis is expanded diachronically.69 The concept, he writes, is
detached from its historical context and its different meanings are traced through
the succession of times.70 Finally, he concludes, the different descriptions of
concepts in their contexts are added together in a history for the concept.71 In
this way Koselleck presents a method for exploring how concepts change through
time, integrating synchronic and diachronic elements.
One criticism raised against the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe in general and
Kosellecks theoretical framework in particular questions the diachronic princi-
ple by asking whether it is possible to detach concepts from their contexts and
trace them through the process of history without ending up in a kind of belated
linguistic Hegelianism where the concepts themselves are seen as the real driv-
ing forces of history.72 Other critics, such as Quentin Skinner, have raised the
objection that Begriffsgeschichte practiced in this way runs the risk of offering
a mere history of words, in terms of linguistic forms and not of concepts in
their social and political contexts.73 Koselleck himself has been less concerned
about the strong diachronic element at work in conceptual history than about the
danger that conceptual history will end up relying too heavily on the structural
and synchronic aspects. In the introduction to the first volume of Geschichtli
che Grundbegriffe, he feels compelled to dissociate the ambitions of Begriffs
geschichte from modern linguistics, especially structuralist linguistics.74 He
returns to this distinction in the preface to the seventh and last regular volume,
published in 1992, warning that a linguistic semantics easily can dissolve into
pure synchronic textual analysis, thus failing to achieve the ambition of draw-
ing a long diachronic line, in a way that will make innovative turning and nodal
points become obvious.75
At this point Koselleck could be suspected of reintroducing the dichotomy
of the diachronic and the synchronic, which he wanted to transcend, by moving
it from a theoretical to a methodological level. In place of a rigid alternative,
Koselleck presents a procedure in two steps wherein the synchronic analysis of
the concept within a particular historical context comes first and then the concept
is detached from the synchronic context and introduced into a diachronic process.
All of the articles in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe are structured more or less in
accordance with this methodological maxim starting in antiquityif the history
of the concept in question actually goes this far backand then tracing the con-
68. Koselleck, Einleitung, xxi.
69. Koselleck, Begriffsgeschichte und Sozialgeschichte, 115.
70. Koselleck, Einleitung, xxi.
71. Ibid.
72. Cf. Dietrich Busse, Historische Semantik: Analyse eines Programms (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta,
1987).
73. Quentin Skinner, Language and Social Change, in Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner
and His Critics, ed. James Tully (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 119-132.
74. Koselleck, Einleitung, xxi.
75. Koselleck, Vorwort, in Brunner, Conze, and Koselleck, eds., Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe
VII (1992), vi..
 against periodization 169
cept through history more or less up to our own time. But we need only take a
closer look at one of these articles to realize that chronology or, in other words,
the diachronic is not the only temporal perspective in play here. For instance,
we could look up the concept of democracy around 1780, at a point in history
when the notion of democratic government is going through major political and
ideological changes.76 On the one hand, democracy is still a concept within
constitutional law, in the same way as aristocracy and oligarchy, going back
to Aristotles treatise on the different forms of government and used primarily
in scholarly debates on matters of law and government. On the other hand, and
at the same time, democracy is emerging as a much more general political
concept used by different members of the public sphere to express their hopes
or fears for the future, independent of theoretical or philosophical debates on the
advantages or disadvantages of various constitutional principles. According to
chronological and diachronic time, this would indicate that one meaning and use
of the concept of democracy precedes or succeeds another, but in the relevant
article in the Geschictliche Grundbegriffe this is clearly not the only possibility.
On the contrary, these two meanings continue to exist alongside each other simul-
taneously and in a sense as alternatives for a certain amount of time. To be able
to explore this historical simultaneity of different conceptual meanings, we need
an analytical tool that is more sophisticated than the traditional idea of chrono-
logical succession. The questions that conceptual history raises, Koselleck writes,
cannot be answered only diachronically,77 they are not exhausted by chrono-
logically enumerated word meanings, but must always take into account what
Koselleck refers to as the systematic claim of a historical concept.78 Conceptual
meanings do not only succeed each other chronologically but co-exist, overlap,
or come into conflict with one another and thus enter into a synchronic, mul-
tilayered structure. Hence, the relationship between synchronic and diachronic
time becomes much more complex. On a first level, the synchronic meanings or
contents add up to a diachronic history of the concept. On a second level, how-
ever, the diachronic element reappears within the concept or the text itself, as a
structural relationship between past, present, and future.
Finally, we approach what could be seen as the most interesting and complex
object of these kinds of studies, in which the Saussurean rigid alternative
between the synchronic and the diachronic is replaced by a much more flexible
and diverse structure. According to Koselleck the task of Begriffsgeschichte is to
study the different layers of conceptual meanings with different chronological
origins [die Mehrschichtigkeit von chronologisch aus verschiedenen Zeiten her
rhrenden Bedeutungen eines Begriffs], or in another recurring formula, the
synchronicity of the nonsynchronous, contained in a concept.79 As part of a par-

76. Werner Conze, Reinhart Koselleck, Hans Maier, Christian Meier, and Hans Leo Reimann,
Demokratie, in Brunner, Conze, and Koselleck, eds., Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe I (1972), 847ff.
77. Koselleck, Einleitung, xxi.
78. Ibid.
79. Koselleck, Begriffsgeschichte und Sozialgeschichte, 125; see also Helge Jordheim, Die
Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen als Konvergenzpunkt von Zeitlichkeit und Sprachlichkeit:
Zu einem Topos aus dem Werk Reinhart Kosellecks, in Divinatio: Studia Culturalogica series 22
(2005), 77-90; and Jordheim, Unzhlbar viele Zeiten, 471ff.
170 helge jordheim

ticular historical context, a particular discursive structure, or indeed a particular

rhetorical situation, every concept emerges under the temporal conditions of sim-
ultaneity, exemplified in speech acts, discursive relations, or rhetorical moves,
and can thus be the object of synchronic analysis. However, from the outset, this
analysis must take into account the many elements in a concept, in a text, or even
in a situation that do not originate within the same context, discourse, or situa-
tion, but are nonsynchronous remnants from a distant or not so distant past, or
prefigurations of a near or not so near future. In this way, Koselleck concludes,
the diachronic and the synchronic are interwoven [begriffsgeschichtlich ver
flochten]. Language, or more precisely, concepts gain a historical depth [eine
geschichtliche Tiefe], which is not identical with their chronology.80
In the key concepts the diachronic succession of meanings is arranged syn-
chronically. Every concept has several layers of time, and in each layer there are
semantic elements of different historical origin and duration. In the eighteenth
century most political and social concepts still contained semantic remnants of
Greek and Roman antiquity alongside other new and innovative elements taken
from the immediate political and social context and often having a prognostic or
utopian character. On one level, then, we can observe a semantic continuity of
more than 2,000 years, but on another we are witnessing ever more rapid changes,
the acceleration of social and political processes, leading to and indeed emanating
from the French Revolution. Hence, even if history appears to be frozen at a par-
ticular moment, in a Zustand, which is analyzed synchronically, there will always
be a diachronic movement through the synchronic moment that manifests itself
in the instances of nonsynchronicity, in the Ungleichzeitigkeiten, which can be
analyzed, or remains in the semantics of Zeitschichten, which can be excavated,
one temporal layer beneath the other.

VI. Conclusion: A theory of multiple temporalities

Contrary to what both translators and critics tend to think, Kosellecks Theorie
der geschichtlichen Zeiten, designed to give history a much needed edge on the
social sciences,81 is not a theory of periodization. The remarks, fragments, and
more sustained theoretical reflections scattered across all of his diverse and wide-
ranging essays bring out a radically different picture; taken together they amount
to a theory that challenges and even defies periodization. Koselleck developed
his theory of multiple temporalities, organized in the form of temporal layers that
have different origins and duration and move at different speeds, as an alterna-
tive to the linear and empty time of periodization. Thus the fact that historical
time is not linear and homogeneous but complex and multilayered accounts for
the futility of all efforts to freeze history in order to delimit and define breaks,
discontinuities, time spans, beginnings, and endings. Indeed, it accounts for the
futility of periodization itself.
In a systematic perspective, Kosellecks lifelong work to develop a theory of
multiple temporalities begins with the destruction of natural time and chro-
80. Koselleck, Einleitung, xxi.
81. Koselleck, Moderne Sozialgeschichte und historische Zeiten [1982], in Zeitschichten, 324.
 against periodization 171
nology, giving way to three dichotomies between natural and historical, extra-
linguistic and intralinguistic, and diachronic and synchronic timeconstantly
overlapping and interfering with each other. Together they form a highly flexible
and dynamic theory of competing and conflicting temporal experiences that are
at work in all human communication and action. Periods, discontinuities, and
structures of chronological succession form part of this theory, but so do nonsyn-
chronicities, structures of repetition, sudden events, and slow, long-term changes.
By necessity, historiographical efforts to identify, delimit, and define a particular
historical time span equipped with a beginning and, in some cases, an end, are
able to account for only some of these layers, whereas others move at a different
speed and have a different rhythm and will evade the attempts to reassemble and
channel them into a relatively stable and homogeneous historical period.
Finally, the point of this essay has not been to reject, let alone resolve, the
paradox that continues to haunt Kosellecks work and its readers, demanding that
they, and we, accept that a theory intended to challenge periodization is itself, at
least in its origins, dependent on this very same historiographical logic. Rather, it
has been my intention to argue that in Kosellecks work the theory and practice of
periodization are but parts of a larger theory of historical times, which, as a whole
and in the way it insists on the multiplicity of historical temporalities, represents
one of the most viable alternatives to periodization as a way of organizing histori-
cal knowledge and knowledge production.

University of Oslo