User:TheStripedOne/Reinhart Koselleck

Reinhart Koselleck (born 23 April 1923 in Görlitz, died 3 February 2006 in Bad Oeynhausen) was an important theorist in the fields of history and historiography.

Life
During his University studies, Koselleck studied under many well-known historians and philosophers, including Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, Karl Lowith, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Werner Conze, Alfred Weber, Ernst Forsthoff and Viktor Freiherr von Weizsacker.

Work
The basic premise of much of Koselleck's work is that "History is always more than concepts can grasp, and concepts entail always more than their historical usage." Accordingly, his work often dealt not only with history, but with its underlying concepts and with the history of those concepts.

His 1959 dissertation explored paradoxes in the construction of the concept of "a public" as it emerged in the Eighteenth century, as well as the "social and institutional processes that explain its emergence." It was published in English in 1988 under the name Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society

From the 1970s on, much of Koselleck's scholarly work was spent on an 8-volume Encyclopaedia titled Basic Historical Concepts (German: Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe) which he co-edited with Werner Conze and Otto Brunner. The encyclopaedia is still regarded as a standard work on the history of the concept of political and social speech in Germany.