In this work, Koselleck subjected the Enlightenment and its philosophy of history to a critical appraisal influenced by the authoritarian idea of the state of his early mentor Carl Schmitt.
His doctoral supervisor was Johannes Kühn, a friend of his father's and also godfather to Reinhart Koselleck, who is occasionally referred to in the literature as his maternal uncle.
[4] Recent research literature has criticized the fact that many details of these relationships are often presented inaccurately, speculatively, one-sidedly, misleadingly or demonstrably incorrectly in the now numerous accounts;[5] However, further information can be expected from the forthcoming publication of the correspondence between Schmitt and Koselleck.
[7] The subject of the book is the portrayal of a historical epoch in the 18th century that Koselleck sees as connected in terms of intellectual history: absolutism, the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.
[8] According to Jürgen Habermas, this Enlightenment, conceived "from a dialectic of politics and morality"[9] Koselleck unfolds the premise that the absolutist state performs a pacifying function for "the space devastated by the religious civil wars".
[11] According to the reviewer Helmut Kuhn, the axiomatic of the political "always affirmed in advance" owes much to his mentor Carl Schmitt, who is "present in every chapter of this study".
As its elite "negated the absolutist state and the church", the bourgeois class gained self-confidence and "increasingly regarded itself as the potential bearer of political power".
[17] Koselleck traces the stages of the increasingly political criticism of the writings of biblical exegetes Richard Simon and the Enlightenment philosophers Bayle, Voltaire, Diderot and Kant.
The third chapter describes the escalating crisis in the relationship between bourgeois society and the absolutist state as reflected in the writings of Rousseau, Raynal and Thomas Paine.
[19] Koselleck notes a blinded "rule of utopia" which, because it fails to recognize the essence of power (the prevention of civil war), takes "recourse to sheer violence"[20] and seeks its justification in philosophy of history.
Koselleck suggests that the dynamic set in motion by Enlightenment critique with its utopian exuberance, which led to revolution and terror, still determines the situation after the Second World War in a different constellation.
In the context of the Cold War, the exclusive claim to moral and philosophical legitimacy of both liberal-democratic America and socialist Russia can be traced back to the ideas of the Enlightenment.
[25] According to Jan-Friedrich Missfelder, Critique and Crisis definitely paraphrases, though never explicitly mentions, what Schmitt brings to the term: World Civil War is the category that analytically links the early modern period and the present.
His aim remains to "reverse the dialectic of critique-crisis" (Imbriano): to counter-critique the utopia of progress in order to prevent the crisis and "downfall" (Koselleck).
[28] However, the emergence of the bourgeois world is no longer negotiated solely on a political level, but is also explained in terms of social, technical and economic changes.
He considers its concepts of movement, such as "revolution, progress, development, crisis, zeitgeist, all expressions that contain temporal indications", to be an unmistakable criterion of the modern era.
[39] Carl Schmitt, who had already accompanied the work on the study with questions and answers, was asked by Koselleck to write a review after the printed version was published.
A short review appeared in the yearbook Das Historisch-Politische Buch[40] (an erroneous excerpt was later used as the blurb for the Suhrkamp edition without citing the source).
[47] In his study on the formation of the bourgeois public sphere - Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (1962) - took up many of Koselleck's historical references,[48] But as early as 1960 (in an essay in Merkur), he questioned the central thesis of the book: that criticism established as indirect political violence necessarily triggers the crisis was not convincing.
Schwartz's misjudgments include Koselleck's definition of the absolutist state; it ignores the fact that there was often no causal relationship between confessional civil war and the emergence of absolutism in European reality (p. 38).