Full name: Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time

Author: Reinhart Koselleck Year: 1985 Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: History, Philosophy, Non Fiction Purchase/reserch links: LibraryThing Goodreads Amazon ISBNs: 9780231127714 9780262610681 0231127715 026261068X

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. Similar books: The Idea of history by R. G. Collingwood The Writing of History by Michel de Certeau Metahistory by Hayden White The Historian's Craft by Marc Bloch In Defense of History by Richard J. Evans From Dawn to Decadence by Jacques Barzun The Isis Papers: The Keys to the Colors by Frances Cress Welsing The Life of Greece by Will Durant The Renaissance by Will Durant Our Oriental Heritage by Will Durant The Machine in the Garden by Leo Marx The Echo of Greece by Edith Hamilton The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918 by Stephen Kern Facing The Extreme by Tzvetan Todorov The American Soul by Jacob Needleman The Portable Enlightenment Reader by Isaac Kramnick Fire and Light by James MacGregor Burns Rethinking History by Keith Jenkins The Enlightenment by Anthony Pagden A Pelican in the Wilderness by Isabel Colegate