Modernity in the late eighteenth century transformed all domains
of European life -intellectual, industrial, and social. Not least
affected was the experience of time itself: ever-accelerating
change left people with briefer intervals of time in which to
gather new experiences and adapt. In this provocative and erudite
book Reinhart Koselleck, a distinguished philosopher of history,
explores the concept of historical time by posing the question:
what kind of experience is opened up by the emergence of modernity?
Relying on an extraordinary array of witnesses and texts from
politicians, philosophers, theologians, and poets to Renaissance
paintings and the dreams of German citizens during the Third Reich,
Koselleck shows that, with the advent of modernity, the past and
the future became 'relocated' in relation to each other.The
promises of modernity -freedom, progress, infinite human
improvement -produced a world accelerating toward an unknown and
unknowable future within which awaited the possibility of achieving
utopian fulfillment. History, Koselleck asserts, emerged in this
crucial moment as a new temporality providing distinctly new ways
of assimilating experience. In the present context of globalization
and its resulting crises, the modern world once again faces a
crisis in aligning the experience of past and present. To realize
that each present was once an imagined future may help us once
again place ourselves within a temporality organized by human
thought and humane ends as much as by the contingencies of
uncontrolled events.
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