Alexander Blake Ewing

History of European Ideas
ISSN: 0191-6599 (Print) 1873-541X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rhei20
Conceptions of Reinhart Koselleck's Theory

of Historical Time in the Thinking of Michael
Oakeshott
Alexander Blake Ewing
To cite this article: Alexander Blake Ewing (2016): Conceptions of Reinhart Koselleck's Theory
of Historical Time in the Thinking of Michael Oakeshott, History of European Ideas, DOI:
10.1080/01916599.2015.1118331
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Download by: [Flinders University of South Australia] Date: 09 February 2016, At: 02:26
HISTORY OF EUROPEAN IDEAS, 2016
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2015.1118331
Conceptions of Reinhart Koselleck’s Theory of Historical Time in

the Thinking of Michael Oakeshott
Alexander Blake Ewing
Department of Politics and International Relations, Oxford University, UK
Downloaded by [Flinders University of South Australia] at 02:27 09 February 2016
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
In recent years students of politics have begun to recognise Reinhart Oakeshott; Koselleck; time;
Koselleck’s practice of Begriffsgeschichte, the study of conceptual history, history; modernity; politics
as a useful approach for investigating key concepts in political
ideologies and the history of ideas. But his theory of historical time—the
temporal dimension to his semantic project and his broader theorising
of the historical discipline—is often overlooked and underused as a
heuristic device. By placing the thinking of Michael Oakeshott alongside
Koselleck’s theory of historical time, this article brings his thinking on
temporality to the forefront, fashioning a conversation between the two
thinkers about the place for history and the formal criteria necessary for
ordering the past properly. In doing so, it juxtaposes Koselleck’s
reflections on historicity and his theory of historical time with
Oakeshott’s philosophical enquiry on the historical mode of
understanding. It identifies important convergences and divergences
between the two thinkers’ theories, focusing in particular on questions
regarding the potential for representing the past as multilayered and
plural historical times. The article then suggests that their respective
thoughts on the theory of history are in part a reaction to the modern
politicisation of historical time and comprise a shared critique of radical
political change.
Contents
1. Introduction .....................................................................................................................................................1
2. Constructing Temporal Structures of the Past ...................................................................................4
2.1. Koselleck’s Theory of Historical Time ..........................................................................................7
2.2. Temporal Categories in Oakeshott’s Theory of Historical Understanding ..........................9
2.3. The Possibility of Plural Histories ...............................................................................................11
3. Historicity and the Politics of Time ....................................................................................................13
4. Conclusion ................................................................................................................................................17
1. Introduction
At first glance a comparative investigation into Michael Oakeshott’s thinking about ways of under-
standing time or a particular type of time may look like a curious undertaking. The idea of time is not
something to which he devotes much direct attention, nor given his roots in British Idealism is the
attempt to discover an external What then is time? an activity one would expect him to meet with any
CONTACT Alexander B Ewing alexander.ewing@politics.ox.ac.uk

© 2016 Taylor & Francis
2 A. EWING
enthusiasm.1 Nonetheless, upon closer inspection, temporal themes can be seen to flow under the
surface of much of his thinking. Like prospectors we can find references to time scattered around,
but his most accessible thoughts are found in his writings on the practice or mode of historical
enquiry, immediately opening up a space for dialogue with others interested in the intersection
between time and historicity, and its implications for the political.
This article makes one such comparison by juxtaposing Oakeshott’s remarks on different under-
standings of the past, and in particular a specifically historical understanding, alongside Reinhart
Koselleck’s call for a theory of historical science (Theoriebedürftigeit) and his related theory of his-
torical time (Historischen zeit).2 It focuses on two intersections: a comparison of their respective
theoretical approaches to the historical discipline and proposed formal criteria for representing
the past, and their responses to the application of historical time in the political.
This is admittedly to fashion a hypothetical space for a conversation between the two men. Even
though they were contemporaries, neither referenced the other’s work and it is unlikely that either
read the other (though this is undetermined). Koselleck was heavily influenced by Carl Schmitt and
Werner Conze, both familiar with Oakeshott, and is a product of the hermeneutical tradition of Mar-
tin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer, of which Oakeshott was certainly aware (the former Oake-
shott read closely, though the latter perhaps not at all).3 Still, as a historian Koselleck remained, and
in many ways remains, obscure to political theorists. He belatedly emerges on the radar of the Anglo-
American academic world in the mid-1980s, soon before Oakeshott’s death.4 Since then, following
the English translation of numerous essays, Koselleck is mainly associated with the project of
Begriffsgeschichte,5 the study of conceptual history, and the resulting eight-volume Geschichtliche
Grundbegriffe (still mostly untranslated into English), which catalogues the meaning of a range of
key historical concepts, particularly on the vernacular level.6
1
In this, Oakeshott follows the general British Idealist position that a fact cannot exist separate from experience, and that all experi-
ence is a world of ideas. For example, in Experience and Its Modes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 199, Oakeshott
writes: ‘the truth or falsehood of a scientific hypothesis is not a question of its correspondence with or discrepancy from a world
of fixed and unalterable objects, because no such world is anywhere to be found’.
2
For a background on Koselleck’s project, see Niklas Olsen, History in the Plural: An Introduction to the Work of Reinhart Koselleck
(New York, NY: Berghahn Books, 2013). For an introduction to Reinhart Koselleck’s idea of historical time, one can start with his
series of collected essays on Historik: Koselleck, Zeitschichten: Studien Zur Historik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2000). For time in con-
nection with Begriffsgeschichte, see Koselleck, Begriffsgeschichten (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2006). Many of these essays appear in two
English translations; see in particular Koselleck, ‘Begriffsgeschichte and Social History’, in Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical
Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2004), 75–92; Koselleck, ‘Time and History’, in The Practice of
Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, trans. Todd Samuel Presner, Kirstin Behnke, and Jobst Welge (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2002), 100–14. See also Koselleck, ‘Introduction and Prefaces to the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe’, trans.
Michaela Richter, Contributions to the History of Concepts 6, no. 1 (2007): 1–37.
3
For the influences of Gadamer and Heidegger on Koselleck, see Olsen, History in the Plural, 26–9. Luke O’Sullivan discusses the
influence of Heidegger on Oakeshott in Oakeshott on History (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2003), 228–31. Oakeshott writes that
he has Heidegger in mind when he discusses the different interpretations of history in ‘Present, Past and Future’, in On History
and Other Essays (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1991), 22–3. For a comparison of the thinking of Oakeshott and Gadamer, see
Edmund Neill, ‘Michael Oakeshott and Hans-Georg Gadamer on Practices, Social Science, and Modernity’, History of European
Ideas 33 (2013): 1–31; Kenneth B. McIntyre, ‘Prejudice, Tradition, and the Critique of Ideology: Gadamer and Oakeshott on Prac-
tical Reason’, Collingwood and British Idealism Studies 16 (2010), 136–66. More broadly, there are clear connections, yet also
important differences, between Oakeshott and the hermeneutical tradition’s discussions on the subjectivity and contextual
nature of knowledge. For a wider look at this relationship, see Terry Nardin, The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott (University
Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), 5–10, 100–10.
4
The two main proponents of connecting Koselleck to the so-called Anglo-American tradition are Melvin Richter and Kari Palonen;
see Melvin Richter, The History of Political and Social Concepts: A Critical Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 124–
42; Kari Palonen, ‘The History of Concepts as a Style of Political Theorizing: Quentin Skinner’s and Reinhart Koselleck’s Subversion
of Normative Political Theory’, European Journal of Political Theory 1 (2002): 91–106; Palonen, ‘Rhetorical and Temporal Perspec-
tives on Conceptual Change’, Finnish Yearbook of Political Thought 3 (1999): 41–59.
5
A number of essays about the influence of Begriffsgeschichte can be found in a special series entitled ‘Contingency and Conceptual
Change’ in Finnish Yearbook of Political Thought 3 (1999); see especially Janet Coleman, ‘The Practical Use of Begriffsgeschichte’,
Finnish Yearbook of Political Thought 3 (1999): 28–40.
6
The Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe is a collaborative work in eight volumes under the editorship of Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and
Koselleck, the only one of the three to see the project through to its conclusion. See Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart
Koselleck, eds., Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, 8 vols (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1972–1997).
HISTORY OF EUROPEAN IDEAS 3
But to focus solely on Koselleck’s account of conceptual change is to understate his intellectual
contribution and space for comparison. Begriffsgeschichte and its study of historical concepts is situ-
ated within Koselleck’s broader reassessment of Heidegger’s notion of historicity (Geschichtlichkeit)
involving a metahistorical survey of the shifting socially-influenced experience of historical being
and the transcendental categories used in historical analysis (Historik), reconsidered in order to
offer fresh theoretical premises for studying the past.7 His particular contribution to historical
science, ‘the study of the conditions of possible histories [Möglicher geschichten]’ which he mulls
over in numerous essays from the 1960s through to the 1980s, is a theorising of the formal criteria
necessary for representing the multilayered temporalities encountered when studying the past.8 If we
take his two enterprises together, the practice of Begriffsgeschichte and theorising Historik both
demonstrate his insistence that historians recognise the past as a world of plural historical times,
those revealed in its language and structures, offering a key solution, he hopes, to the longstanding
problem of how historians go about interpreting the past from a distant present. This is to investigate
what he calls an ‘anthropological given arc linking and relating historical experience with the knowl-
edge of such experience’.9
From a different perspective Oakeshott confronts a similar question. How should historians
appropriately construct a past time from the inescapable standpoint of the present? For him, though,
how historians narrate the past is part of a wider enquiry, rooted in British Idealism, about ways of
coming to understand things as they are—not as objects, but as ideational experiences.10 Historical
experience is but one mode of thinking or modification of the world of ideas as a whole. Put another
way, the historical mode is but one lens, one mode of understanding, that looks exclusively at the
past. It offers only a partial understanding of the ideational whole. History is only to investigate
the world of historical experience, a world of ideas sub specie praeteritorum.11 A question about
What then is time? would therefore depend on the varied considerations on time within distinct sys-
tems of thinking—in history, but also in philosophy, science, poetry or in practical life—where we
may conceptualise time differently, or perhaps not at all.12 History is exclusively an investigation
of past time, and in some ways similar to Koselleck’s Historik, his theorising of history is to think
about how, in this mode, one goes about constructing plausible explanations of past time from
the present.
While each author approaches this ‘arc’ from different intellectual origins, one motivating factor
that brings these projects together is a worry about the state of the historical discipline, and in par-
ticular a shared mid-century aversion to what both see as a modern tendency to combine historical
experience into what Koselleck calls a ‘collective singular [Kollektivsingular]’, where the past is given
unity via central narratives or underlying processes. Koselleck’s Historik is an attempt to eschew ‘sin-
gularisation’ of this sort and rebuild the discipline by theorising how various approaches to studying
the past can appreciate its diverse temporal strata, each accounting for historical change along differ-
ent trajectories and at varying speeds. Oakeshott does not explicitly promote a recognised ‘layering’
7
Koselleck, Zeitschichten, 99, 110. Elsewhere he writes: ‘theoretical premises must be developed that are capable of comprehending
not only our own experience, but also past and alien experience; only in this way is it possible to secure the unity of history as a
science’ (Koselleck, Futures Past, 94).
8
Zammito calls Koselleck a ‘veritable literary “hedgehog”’ who ‘worries his big idea [historical time] over and over again’; see John
Zammito, ‘Koselleck’s Philosophy of Historical Time(s) and the Practice of History’, History and Theory 43, no. 1 (2004): 126.
9
Koselleck, Futures Past, 93. See also Koselleck, ‘Linguistic Change and the History of Events’, The Journal of Modern History
61 (1989): 649–66; Koselleck, ‘Historik und Hermeneutik’, in Zeitschichten, 99.
10
On Oakeshott, history and Idealism, see David Boucher, ‘British Idealism and Michael Oakeshott’s Philosophy of History’, History
and Theory 23, no. 2 (1984): 193–214.
11
Oakeshott argues that only through philosophy can we fully understand experience in its totality; philosophy is ‘experience with-
out reservation or arrest, experience which is critical throughout, unhindered and undistracted by what is subsidiary, partial or
abstract’ (Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes, 80).
12
Oakeshott tells us in Experience and Its Modes, rather dubiously if we consider it in light of research in the natural sciences, that
‘nature is a timeless world, it neither changes nor evolves [ … ] it is static and self-contained and the conception of past and
future are inapplicable to it’ (Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes, 200). For more discussion on Oakeshott, time and nature,
see Roy Tseng, The Sceptical Idealist: Michael Oakeshott as the Critic of the Enlightenment (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2003), 221.
4 A. EWING
of the historical past in this sense but is more concerned with the proper practice for ordering related
historical events within the world of past experience. To compare him to Koselleck thus proposes a
central question about whether, for Oakeshott, the so-called wholeness of past time can accommo-
date historio-temporal plurality and simultaneity to such as degree. To set this out even more specifi-
cally: Koselleck’s theory prompts us to ask whether Oakeshott thinks historical experience as a world
consists ultimately of ‘the past’ to be put together by historians in greater detail and its contradictions
finally ironed out, or whether ‘past’ as a world of experience allows for simultaneous historical time
structures of different durations showcasing various combinations and rates of historical change.
2. Constructing Temporal Structures of the Past

Before exploring this further it is important to keep in mind that neither of them advocate for a
particular historical method. Their concerns are primarily twofold: articulating what history is for
and offering basic theoretical underpinnings for how one should go about it. To start with Oake-
shott, his various writings on history13 are concerned with the characteristics that define ‘the
activity of being a historian’,14 positioning his thinking as a philosophical inquiry into what con-
stitutes the ‘conditions or postulates, which distinguish history as a mode of understanding’.15 His-
tory is ‘a particular kind of thinking [ … ] resting upon the common presupposition of all kinds of
finite knowledge’.16 As a certain mode of enquiry, historical research exists for itself17 and lacks a
purpose other than developing an understanding of past time.18 Contrary to Heidegger’s view, his-
tory is an escape from practical life. We study a specifically historical past only for its own
sake19—‘we may think historically only when we bracket off our own Dasein’.20 To use the past
for the present is to concern oneself with a different past, a distinctly ‘practical past’, which relates
to the future-oriented considerations of practical life.21 Oakeshott suggests that in this mode the
past relates to ‘the present-future of practical engagement’.22 By contrast, the historical past is a
‘dead past, a past unlike the present’.23 It contains no consideration of future. Yet either way,
what is past can only be present—evidence of the past found in the present—and historical under-
standing is no more than a constructed explanation or organisation of what is the known world of
historical experience. History ‘does not lie, already identified, somewhere in the past, waiting to be
picked up; it does not exist until it is assembled by an historian in search of clues to the character of
a not-yet-understood historical event’.24 The actual course of events as Historie can be no different
13
Oakeshott’s thinking on history and the practice of the historian is scattered throughout his writing and lectures. For a selection of
writings on the practice of history, see, among others: Oakeshott, ‘The Activity of Being an Historian’, in Rationalism in Politics and
Other Essays, ed. Timothy Fuller, rev. ed. (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1991), 151–83; his description of ‘historical experience’ in
Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes, 86–168; his description of history as ‘goings-on’ in Oakeshott, On Human Conduct (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1990), 101–4; the first three essays in Oakeshott, On History, 1–128; Oakeshott, ‘History and the Social Sciences’
(Institute of Sociology, The Social Sciences, London, 1936), 71–81. For an introduction to Oakeshott’s approach, see W. H. Dray,
‘Michael Oakeshott’s Theory of History’, in Political and Experience: Essays Presented to Michael Oakeshott on the Occasion of His
Retirement, ed. P. King and B. C. Parekh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968); Boucher, ‘British Idealism and Oakeshott’s
Philosophy’, 193–214.
14
Oakeshott, ‘Activity of Being an Historian’, 151–83.
15
Oakeshott, On History, 5. Oakeshott is ‘not concerned with [ … ] methods of research [ … ] but with history itself—to determine
its character from the standpoint of the totality of experience’ (Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes, 88).
16
Michael Oakeshott, ‘Philosophy of History?’, in What is History? and Other Essays, ed. Luke O’Sullivan (Exeter: Imprint Academic,
2004), 132.
17
Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes, 103.
18
See Michael Oakeshott, ‘The Whig Interpretation of History’, in What is History?, 221.
19
20
Michael Oakeshott, ‘Notes on Heidegger’, LSE Archives 3/5 (quoted in O’Sullivan, Oakeshott on History, 229).
21
On a ‘practical past’, Oakeshott describes it as follows: ‘wherever the past is merely that which preceded the present, that from
which the present has grown, wherever the significance of the past lies in the fact that it has been influential in deciding the
present and future fortunes of man, wherever the present is sought in the past, and wherever the past is regarded as merely
a refuge from the present – the past involved in a practical, and not an historical past’ (Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes, 103).
22
Oakeshott, On History, 24.
23
Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes, 102, 106.
24
from our interpretation as Geschichte.25 ‘The historian’s business is not to discover, to recapture, or
even to interpret; it is to create and to construct’.26 In doing so, the historian can rely only on the
collected artefacts and recollected experiences of the past to organise events into a coherent assem-
blage for present understanding.27 Thought in this way, the past does not exist as a separate reality:
history is not a re-enactment of the actual past, as R. G. Collingwood claims, but only what is
known about the past from the present.28 It is simply ‘what the evidence obliges us to believe’.29
Oakeshott’s temporal approach to history is thus firmly presentist30; as a world of ideas, there
are only present constructions of the past based on the historian’s evidence-based judgement.31
He tells us that ‘the distinction between history as it happened (the course of events) and history
as it is thought, the distinction between history itself and merely experienced history, must go; it is
not merely false, it is meaningless’.32
As a start, Koselleck would agree with the basic precept that representation can only rely on cred-
ible evidence; but in significant ways he does not approach the historical discipline on quite the same
terms.33 First, he does not find it necessary to strictly differentiate the use of history in terms of a
practical past or historical past. Conceptual history reveals its manifold approaches and applications.
History may indeed be relevant to practical life, but we still choose whether to evoke and learn from it
or simply value the discipline for its own sake. His primary concern is the different ‘situationalities’
of diverse historical viewpoints, the anthropological arc, and developing ways for his contemporaries
to appreciate and accommodate the complex temporal structures of the past. A key feature of his
genealogy of conceptions of time and the experience and practice of history concerns the individual
and especially social conceptions of temporal being experienced in the past. It is in many ways an
expanded view of Heidegger’s individualised Dasein, surveying more broadly the changing under-
standings of time and uses of a specifically historical time. Moreover, compared to Heidegger and
also Schmitt, he accommodates a larger set of analytical frameworks for theorising the temporal
understanding of the past (beyond the historicity between ‘birth’ and ‘death’ or history as dis-
tinguishing ‘friend’ and ‘enemy’) of which the most notable expansion is his use of the horizontal
concepts of ‘experience’ and ‘expectation’ taken from Gadamer’s Truth and Method.34 Second,
Koselleck is not a strict presentist in the Oakeshottian sense. While he thinks the past is irretrievable
in its totality, it is not entirely dead. Fragments of the past are in the present, what we may call pre-
sent-pasts, and as such affect our condition of being present. He tells us that
the past has passed, irrevocably—and it has not: the past is present and contains future. It restraints and opens
up future possibilities, it is present in our language, it influences our consciousness as well as the unconscious,
our attitudes, our institutions [and] the way we criticize them.35
25
Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes, 94–5.
26
Ibid., 93.
27
Ibid., 111.
28
See R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 282–302.
29
30
On Oakeshott’s presentism, see Geoffrey Thomas, ‘Michael Oakeshott’s Philosophy of History’ in Leslie Marsh and Paul Franco eds.,
A Companion to Michael Oakeshott (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012), 104–10; David Boucher, Texts in Con-
text: Revisionist Methods for Studying the History of Ideas (Dordrecht: Martinus Nihhoff, 1985), 61–3.
31
32
Ibid., 93 (quoted in Collingwood, Idea of History, 153, where Collingwood characterises Oakeshott’s conception of the historian as
someone who is merely ‘organizing his present consciousness’).
33
See, for example, Koselleck’s notion of critical history and its sources (Vetorecht der Quellen) in Koselleck, ‘Standortbindung und
Zeitlichkeit. Ein Beitrag zur historiographischen Erschließung der geschichtlichen Welt’, in Objektivität und Parteilichkeit in der
Geschichtswissenschaft. Beiträge zur Historik. Bd. 1, ed. Reinhart Koselleck, Wolfgang J. Mommsen, and Jörn Rüsen (Munich,
1977), 17–46.
34
See Olsen, History in the Plural, 27–9, 63–6; Koselleck, ‘Historik und Hermeneutik’, in Zeitschichten, 97–118. On ‘situationality’,
Gadamer says: ‘every finite present has its limitations. We define the concept of “situation” by saying that it represents a stand-
point that limits the possibility of vision. Hence essential to the concept of situation is the concept of “horizon”. The horizon is the
range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point’; see Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and
Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, 2nd ed. (London: Continuum, 2004), 301–3.
35
Quoted in Olsen, History in the Plural, 230–1.
6 A. EWING
We affirm the existence of a distinct past, present and future by recognising their synchronic simul-
taneity. Thus, to study a past time is also to subscribe to the Heidegger-influenced view that studying
the past is to also to reflect on past horizons of future possibility (Vergangene zukunft).36 These are
the past-present horizons of anticipation, prognosis, hope and fear.37 As Koselleck puts it, ‘if we
direct our attention to past concepts embodied in words that might still be ours, the reader gains
entry to the hopes and wishes, fears and suffering of onetime contemporaries’.38 Considered histori-
cally from past-present experience or present-past representation, then, we should see the past and
future extending ‘Janus-faced’ from the present.39 A well-known example of this view is Koselleck’s
reflection on the simultaneity of past, present and future in his discussion on Albrecht Altdorfer’s
1529 painting Alexanderschlacht, depicting Alexander the Great’s victory over Darius at the battle
of Issus in 333 BCE, and its representation or ‘prefiguring’ of the contemporary Turkish siege of
Vienna.40 Like Altdorfer’s painting, an historical depiction of the past reflects the temporal perspec-
tive of the painter and represents those in the painting, whilst also reminding us, the observers, that
the past is always reassessed through present interpretation: ‘By virtue of the passing of time [history]
changes at each given present [ … ] and with growing distance, it also changes in the past, or better
said: history unveils itself in the truth of its day’.41
The interpretation of historical language is especially salient here. Koselleck remarks that ‘past
social and political conflicts must be interpreted and decoded in terms of their contemporary con-
ceptual boundaries, and the self-understanding on the part of past speakers and writers of their own
language-use’.42 And in interpreting them, the concepts employed by historians are the formal cat-
egories for making history possible.43 But for Oakeshott there is no link between action and rep-
resentation: reading the various ‘voices of’ or ‘conversations between’ actors, which is the
predominant form of evidence for the historian’s interpretation of historical experience, cannot
be equated with a past reality.44 Interpreting historical language only allows for postulates of histori-
cal understanding.45 In a review of the first volume of E. H. Carr’s The Bolshevik Revolution, Oake-
shott makes a clear distinction between the language of historical actors and the historian, something
he felt it important to preserve, and a distinction he accuses Carr of forgetting. The historian can only
differentiate his own language from that of his historical subjects, who ‘speak an extraordinary pri-
vate language [ … and] have an idiom in which they make their thoughts known to one another’.46
The historian is not there to question the truth of a historical statement or to somehow reveal the
intentions of the author.47 From the evidence available, the historian can only translate, as best as
possible, an anachronistic language into something intelligible to the reader.
This discussion on language is to recognise that for both, the past, whether it actually exists or can
be decoded, can never be understood other than through present perspective and narrated by con-
temporary language.48 However, the limited extent to which Oakeshott engages with a study of his-
torical language to the degree that Koselleck does, or writes much history himself, restricts the space
36
See Martin Heidegger, Being in Time (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 1962) , 444–9.
37
See Koselleck, Futures Past, 17–25. See also Koselleck, ‘Historical Prognosis in Lorenz Von Stein’s Essay on the Prussian Consti-
tution’, in Futures Past, 58–71.
38
Koselleck, Futures Past, 223.
39
Koselleck, ‘Introduction to the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe’, 9.
40
Koselleck, Futures Past, 9–25. For an analysis of Koselleck’s discussion of Alexanderschlacht, see Helge Jordheim, ‘Against Period-
ization: Kozelleck’s Theory of Multiple Temporalities’, History and Theory 51, no. 2 (2012): 158–60.
41
Koselleck, Practice of Conceptual History, 167.
42
43
Ibid., 112.
44
His discussion on voices and conversation is prevalent elsewhere; see Michael Oakeshott, ‘The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation
of Mankind’, in Rationalism in Politics, 488–541; Oakeshott, The Voice of Liberal Learning, ed. Timothy Fuller (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1989), esp. 35–61.
45
See Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes, 94–5.
46
Michael Oakeshott, ‘Mr Carr’s First Volume’, in The Concept of a Philosophical Jurisprudence: Essays and Reviews 1926–51, ed. Luke
O’Sullivan (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2007), 329.
47
Oakeshott, On History, 64. For an approach to uncovering the intentions of an author, see Quentin Skinner, ‘Motives, Intentions
and Interpretations’, in Visions of Politics: Regarding Method Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 90–102.
for conversation. We can find more promising ground for comparison by looking at how ‘idioms’ or
language reflect the historical experiences, or what Oakeshott also calls the ‘goings-on’ that must
make up the events that narrate history. For each author, history is not simply a survey of utterances:
it is the ‘science of experience’,49 as Koselleck puts it, and history is to investigate the relationship
between experience (Erfahrung), including temporal experience, and historical events (Einzeler-
eignis).50 It is at the intersection between temporality, experience and events, then, where Koselleck’s
historical time and Oakeshott’s thoughts on understanding the historical past may be examined
together more closely.
2.1. Koselleck’s Theory of Historical Time

As mentioned above, Koselleck’s Historik is an investigation of the ‘conditions for possible histories’
and the metahistorical categories (‘formal criteria’) employed to explain historical (Historisch)
activity. In affirming the need for a theoretical ‘toolbox’ for formalising how the historical discipline
can make the past intelligible,51 Koselleck’s theoretical contribution is to encourage historians to
recognise a plurality of historical time structures existing simultaneously. Theorising history is to
speak ‘not of one historical time, but rather of many forms of time superimposed one upon the
other’.52 This is both a historical thesis and a theoretical proposition, on one hand relating to Begriffs-
geschichte and Koselleck’s semantic-evidenced thesis on the historical experience of time, and on the
other referring to the temporal structuring undertaken in historical practice.53 As Luca Scuccimarra
also points out, Koselleck’s theory of historical time relates historicity with historiography—history
in general (Geschichte überhaupt) with history as a discipline (Geschichtswissenschaft).54 In various
places he illustrates this plurality of historical times through the use of a geologic metaphor,
Zeitschichten, for indicating the synchronic layering of diachronic times,55 which is analogous to
his reoccurring use of the idea of the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous (Gleichzeitigkeit des
ungleichzeitigen), a concept also employed by Ernest Bloch, which represents histories and temporal
strata that coexist at the same synchronic moment yet do not correspond.56 In both representations,
this view of the multilayerdeness of history speaks to the variation in structuring the past and also to
the simultaneity of the dimensions of past, present and future in synchronic points in time—‘any
synchrony is eo ipso at the same time diachronic’.57
48
Koselleck says: ‘The facticity of events established ex post is never identical with a totality of past circumstances thought of as
formerly real [ … ] reality itself is past and gone’ (Koselleck, Futures Past, 111).
49
Koselleck, Practice of Conceptual History, 47 (also quoted in Zammito, ‘Koselleck’s Philosophy of Historical Time(s)’, 129).
50
Koselleck, Zeitschichten, 43. Likewise, Oakeshott writes that it is only experience that exists (Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes,
54–5, 110). For Oakeshott on experience, see Thomas, ‘Oakeshott’s Philosophy of History’, 98–9.
51
Koselleck, Futures Past, 93–4.
52
Ibid., 2. Here Koselleck refers to Herder’s rebuke of Kant’s transcendental view of time. Koselleck quotes Johann Herder, Metakritik
zur Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Berlin, Aufbau-Verlag, 1955), 68: ‘In reality, every mutable thing has within itself the measure of its
time; this persists even in the absence of any other; no two worldly things have the same measure of time [ … ]. There are there-
fore (to be precise and audacious) at any one time in the Universe infinitely many times’ (Koselleck, Futures Past, 2).
53
This is an attempt to reconcile two different strands in Koselleck’s theory of historical time. One pertains to the conditions of
possible history based on the categories of ‘experience’ and ‘expectation’, which reveal historical time (Koselleck, Futures
Past, 262), and the other in terms of the temporal layers and repetitive structures of history (ibid., 95). Others interpret this dif-
ferently. Olsen notes that it is unclear as to how these two strands relate to each other (Olsen, History in the Plural, 230–1). Alex-
andre Escudier argues that after what Koselleck deems the pre-linguistic aspects of historical time (such as ‘birth and death’, ‘in
and out’, ‘master and slave’), what he calls ‘historical time proper’ is deduced from the dichotomy of ‘before’ and ‘after’ leading to
three levels of analysis. Historical time is constituted in terms of (1) the individuality and repeatability of historical events (iden-
tifying continuity and discontinuity); (2) the ‘generativity’ of history in terms of its relation to succession, socialisation and poli-
ticisation; and (3) the history built through applying the categories of ‘experience’ and ‘expectation’; see Alexandre Escudier,
‘Temporalization and Political Modernity’, in Political Concepts and Time: New Approaches to Conceptual History, ed. Javier Fernán-
dez Sebastián (Santander: Cantabria University Press), 131–63.
54
See Luca Scuccimarra, ‘Semantics of Time and Historical Experience: Remarks on Koselleck’s Historik’, Contributions to the History of
Concepts 4, no. 2 (2008): 160–8.
55
Koselleck, Zeitschichten, 9.
56
See Ernst Bloch, Erbschaft dieser Zeit (Zurich: Oprecht & Helbling, 1935).
57
8 A. EWING
With this in mind, Koselleck argues that Begriffsgeschichte reveals not only differences and shifts
in linguistic meaning but more significantly helps to hypothesise a so-called ‘saddle period [Sattal-
zeit] set roughly between the French and Industrial revolutions, where he claims there emerges a new
time (Neuzeit) that explains an intersection between historical change and a specifically modern
sense of temporal being.58 This he determines from the morphology of concepts like ‘history’, ‘crisis’
and ‘revolution’, suggesting a new historicity and subjectivity in experienced time horizons (Tempor-
algestalten), a historical time, emerging in place of previously dominant naturalistic and eschatolo-
gical temporal frameworks. In the Sattelzeit,
time does not just remain the form in which all histories take place, but time itself gains a historical quality [ … ]
history no longer takes place in time, but rather through time. Time is metaphorically dynamicised into a force
of history itself.59
Taking these times as a whole, Koselleck claims that anthropologically speaking there is a widening
gap between the space of experience (Erfahrungsraum) and horizons of expectation (Erwartungshor-
izont).60 In other words, his metahistorical analysis aggregates temporal experience to show a shift-
ing understanding of the relationship between that past and future among historical actors, driven in
part by changes in temporal experience and a reflection on the technology-induced acceleration of
temporal rhythms.61 Before it enters practical life, the separation between past and future emerges
first in historical writing, which moves from being Historie understood as Historia Magistra Vitae
—Cicero’s Plena Exemplorum, history as a purveyor of lessons rooted in experience—to history as
Geschichte, where historical narratives in a newly-contested temporal space are then moulded into
a Kollektivsingular that is seen as forward moving.62 Instead of a static time of reoccurring experi-
ences and past lessons, history points to an open-ended future whereby, unlike before, the future
becomes the dominant tense in a specifically modern regime of historicity, to use François Hartog’s
phrase (Régime d’historicité).63
The issue over the modern singularisation of contested historical time, incorporated into practical
and historical representations of the past, helps to explain Koselleck’s adjacent historiographical
enterprise in Historik and the ‘toolbox’ necessary for preserving a plurality of horizontal and struc-
tural historical times. Given the understood ‘interrelation between synchrony and diachrony’,64
Koselleck proposes criteria for structuring ‘experience’ into ‘temporal experience’ wherein history
can be layered, multidimensional and multi-durational, consisting of innumerable temporal
58
As Jordhiem has forcefully argued, it would be a mistake to consider historical time as a separate enterprise from the study of
historical concepts; see Helge Jordheim, ‘Does Conceptual History Really Need a Theory of Historical Times?’, Contributions to the
History of Concepts 6, no. 2 (2011): 21–41; Jordheim, ‘Thinking in Convergences – Koselleck on Language, History and Time’, Ideas
in History 2, no. 3 (2007): 65–90. See also Palonen, ‘Rhetorical and Temporal Perspectives’, 49–53. To summarise Jordheim,
Begriffsgeschichte is a rare approach to the study of language that in response to Saussure’s focus on language as a synchronic
system attempts to maintain a link between studying the structure of historical language and the diachronic structures of history
(Strukturgeschichte). Koselleck argues that studying language synchronically is mistaken in that it ignores the possible historical
influences on language on one hand and the impact of language upon history on the other. On this, see Koselleck, ‘Historik und
Hermeneutik’, in Zeitschichten, 97–118; Koselleck, ‘Erfahrungswandel und Methodenwechsel: Eine historische-anthropologische
Skizze’, in Theorie der Geschichte, Beiträge zur Historik Band 5: Historische Methode, ed. Christian Meier and Jörn Rüsen (Munich:
Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag Wissenschaft, 1988), 13–61; Koselleck, ‘Social History and Conceptual History’, in Practice of Con-
ceptual History, 25; Koselleck, ‘Linguistic Change and the History of Events’, 649–66.
59
60
See Koselleck, Futures Past, 255–75.
61
See Koselleck, Practice of Conceptual History, 160–7; Koselleck, Futures Past, 269. For an expanded (and improved) view of Kosel-
leck’s acceleration thesis, see Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity (New York, NY: Columbia University
Press, 2013).
62
Cicero says: ‘History is indeed the witness of time, the light of truth, the life of the memory, the messenger of antiquity; with what
voice other than that of the orator should it be recommended for immortality?’ (Cicero, De oratore, II:9, quoted in Koselleck,
Futures Past, 28). Hegel writes ‘that nations and governments have never learned anything from history or acted upon any lessons
they might have drawn from it’; see Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 21 (quoted in Koselleck, Futures Past, 38).
63
François Hartog, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and the Experiences of Time, trans. Saskia Brown (New York, NY: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 2015).
64
structures, many of which are ‘internal to and demonstrable in related events’.65 This theory pro-
poses histories based on categorising new and repeated experiences (an unpredictable ‘surprise’
being a particularly important category in historical writing),66 but at the same time implores histor-
ians to accommodate the temporal dimension of the Gleichzeitigkeit der ungleichzeitigen to reflect
‘varying extensions of time’ and the ‘diversity of temporal strata’, including the ‘prognostic structure
of historical time’ (the past containing the future), that extends from a synchronic moment:
From a combination of these three formal criteria it is possible to deduce conceptually progress, decadence,
acceleration, or delay, the ‘not yet’ and the ‘no longer,’ the ‘earlier’ or ‘later than,’ the ‘too early’ and the ‘too
late,’ situation and duration—whatever differentiating conditions must enter so that concrete historical motion
might be rendered visible.67
The idea of the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous is to remind us that history is comprised of
different types (structural, conceptual and event-based) and always extends in innumerable strands
of different durations, based on related events or long-term structures—shorter durations and
Longue durée—containing ‘numerous differentiable layers which each undergo change sometimes
faster sometimes slower, but always with varying rates of change’.68 The purpose of history, as he
says in Wozu noch Historie?, is ‘to uncover temporal structures that are shaped in accordance
with the multiple kinds of historical change. The temporality of historical events and the structures
of historical processes can thus organise historical writing—as they organise history itself’.69
2.2. Temporal Categories in Oakeshott’s Theory of Historical Understanding

This temporal structuring of history shows commonalities and important differences with Kosel-
leck’s approach. For Oakeshott, the intelligibility of historical change in different ‘passages of
occurrences’70 involves a theory of historical reasoning in order to explain how situations consti-
tute events (not structures) and how our understanding of historical events fit together (is struc-
tured) within a world of historical ideas that comprise a single ideal whole. This understanding of
history as a whole, a unity encompassing a single world, is for Oakeshott a permanent condition of
the possibility of historical understanding, and from this basic premise his theoretical challenge is
to outline a legitimate way to make durations of historical change intelligible.71 As he puts it, ‘the
work of the historian consists in the transformation of this world as a whole, in the pursuit of
coherence’.72
Constructing this coherence is a multistep process that relies on a formulised structuring of his-
torical experiences into a narrative of related historical events. First, the historian must identify or
‘individualise’ events based on the ‘situations’, ‘occurrences’ and ‘performances’ brought to us by his-
torical evidence. We postulate history from ‘the present contents of a vast storehouse into which time
continuously empties the lives, the utterances, the achievements and the sufferings of mankind’.73
This evidence helps us to mould occurrences into ‘events of various dimensions, durations and con-
stitutions’,74 each identified by a discernible before and after in relation to other ‘significantly-related’
65
66
See Koselleck, ‘Transformations of Experience and Methodological Change’, in Practice of Conceptual History, 45–83. For a fuller
discussion on Koselleck’s science of experience, see Scuccimarra, ‘Semantics of Time’, 162–3. For more on Koselleck and contin-
gency as ‘chance’, see Koselleck, Futures Past, 115–27.
67
68
Koselleck, Zeitschichten, 330 (quoted in Olsen, History in the Plural, 226).
69
Koselleck, Wozu noch Historie? (quoted in Olsen, History in the Plural, 218–9).
70
71
Historical truth ‘is the entire world of experience seen as a single and coherent world of ideas sub specie praeteritorum. And it is
the business of the historian to introduce into the world of experience whatever coherence this category of the past is capable of
introducing’ (Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes, 118).
72
Ibid., 99.
73
74
Ibid., 68.
10 A. EWING
antecedent events.75 To do so, Oakeshott proposes that historians employ formal categories of ‘con-
tinuity’ and ‘change’ in order to discern a self-complete event. The capacity for individualising an
event ‘lies in the discontinuity, the relative breaks which seems to precede it; and its capacity for
maintaining its individuality lies in the continuity or relative absence of break’.76
Once we mould occurrences into individualised events, the second step is to explain the intrinsic
relationship between events.77 History is no more than ‘an explanation of the world in terms of
change, and an explanation of change in its world’.78 Taking their formed events, the historian’s
task is the ‘discovery of details and the discovery of their interconnection’,79 that is, ‘to mediate
one circumstance to another’.80 This connection gives a history its identity, and its validity depends
on its connectivity and its coherence within a world of ideas. The determination of this coherence,
the ‘discovery of their interconnection’, cannot rely on chronology or notions of teleology, evolution-
ary or organic change, but on what he calls the ‘contingent relationship’ between events.81 For Oake-
shott, unlike Koselleck’s category of experience as a surprise or J. B. Bury’s idea of historical facts as
chance occurrences,82 this idea of contingency is not in reference to a type of event (something as
contingent) but rather the relationship between events; that is, those related ‘contingentially’.83 His-
torical identities ‘are composed of related circumstantial occurrences’ where within the form of
events they must ‘touch’. What follows is a direct response, not a chronological or causal link, to
what came before. The world of history ‘is only an unbroken continuity of occurrences, each a
unity of particularity and genericity’.84
We cannot construct events however we want. History based on contingency or touching is to
acknowledge the ‘internal or intrinsic’ relationships between distinct events,85 consisting of what
Oakeshott calls ‘inherent continuity’, where ‘the identity, the oneness, of a length of chain composed
of nothing but its links [ … ] is itself a function of the continuity of its parts’.86 Historians searching
for inherent connectivity cannot look forward from a synchronic event to establish a causal connec-
tion, but only back in search of the antecedents from which an event follows. Historical ‘intelligibility
lies in the recognition of what came after as acknowledging, taking up, and in some manner respond-
ing to the antecedent, and of what went before as in some respect conducive of what came after’.87
The historian therefore forms relationships by fitting events together according to an internal
75
For Oakeshott, an individual event is an inferred or imagined past occurrence that is different from the antecedent happenings to
which it is significantly related. It is a ‘conflation of accessories’ with ‘no exclusive characters but [which] are the difference made
in a convergence of differences which compose a circumstantial historical identity’ (Oakeshott, On History, 103).
76
Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes, 121–2. A similar theme is discussed in On History: ‘I have argued that the relationship
between antecedent historical events and a subsequent recognized as their outcome must be a contingent relationship. And
I distinguished this from a relationship of “change”, from a causal relationship and from a relationship in terms of something
called in from the outside, the glue of normality or the cement of general causes. I shall now argue that the identity in
terms of which an assembled passage of historical events, recognized as differences, may be understood as a passage of change
is nothing other than its inherent continuity; this continuity to be distinguished from some changeless item in the situation, from
an enduring purpose or end to be realized and from the normalities or the “law” of the process of change’ (Oakeshott, On History,
122).
77
Oakeshott, On Human Conduct, 101.
78
79
Ibid., 143. In ‘The Activity of Being an Historian’ he says something similar: ‘in the “historian’s” understanding of events, just as
none is “accidental”, so none is “necessary” or “inevitable”. What we can observe him doing in his characteristic inquiries and
utterances is, not extricating general causes or necessary and sufficient conditions, but setting before us the events (in so far
as they can be ascertained) which mediate one circumstance to another’ (Oakeshott, ‘Activity of Being An Historian’, 172).
80
Oakeshott, ‘Activity of Being An Historian’, 183.
81
82
See J. B. Bury, ‘Darwinism and History’, in Darwin and Modern Science, ed. A. C. Seward (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2009), 529–42. For Oakeshott’s discussion of Bury’s idea of contingency as an accident, see Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes,
140; Oakeshott, On Human Conduct, 102.
83
84
History is the explanation of a ‘sequential relationship of intelligent individual occurrences where what comes after is recognised
to be conditional upon what went before’ (Oakeshott, On Human Conduct, 104).
85
86
Ibid., 125.
87
logic—‘composing an intelligible continuity of conditionally dependant occurrences’.88 Intelligibility

gives a history its recognisable identity. If history is undertaken properly, then, the historian is said to
have created an account of a ‘continuity of change’.89
The main influence on this formal structuring of historical time is not historiography but Aris-
totle’s Physics. Oakeshott believes his notion of continuity to be similar to Aristotle’s understanding
of ‘contiguity’, a concept which Aristotle also pairs with identity,90 when ‘a whole is composed of
distinguishable uniform parts which touch one another without interval and hold together in virtue
of what they themselves are without extraneous mediation’.91 Continuity in history is a ‘function of
the continuity of its parts’. Sequences of historical events remain contiguous while also accounting
for change. In this way, Oakeshott tells us he takes Aristotle’s notion of change in the Physics in order
to ‘translate it into the language of time’.92
2.3. The Possibility of Plural Histories

Several issues might emerge from this theoretical juxtaposition, but the most salient concerns
whether Oakeshott’s modal understanding of history as the totality of experience sub specie praeter-
itorum can accommodate a diversity of temporal strata comparable to Koselleck’s theorisation of
layered historical time. If the past remains an ‘organized whole’, a ‘homogenous world of experience’
or a ‘self-contained unit’,93 it remains somewhat unclear as to whether history properly understood
allows for simultaneous or even different narratives of historical change, or whether studying the past
is the activity of accumulating knowledge of the single tapestry of the past world where ‘each event
has its own place in the whole’.94 If studying the past is a matter of cumulative understanding, this
would suggest that the assembly of historical time is simply to reply to particular queries of What
happened? and How did it come about? in increasingly precise detail, inviting historians to revisit
areas of the past only when new evidence demands a reappraisal.
In places Oakeshott supports this view. He explains that ‘the problem of historical thinking is to
detect what modification a new discovery, a new experience produces in the world of history as a
whole’.95 But at the same time, his recognition of the wholeness of the past world still accommodates,
to some degree at least, different historical constructions coexisting within it. Histories give events
88
Ibid., 104. In On History he writes something similar, describing contingency as ‘the kind of relationship which, when in an his-
torical enquiry it is found to subsist between antecedent events and a subsequent event, composes an identity which may be
described alternatively, as an event properly understood as an outcome of antecedent events, or as an assemblage of events
related in such a manner as itself to constitute an historically understood event. I shall call it a contingent relationship’ (Oakeshott,
On History, 101).
89
Oakeshott writes: ‘a succession of occurrences [ … ] may be recognised to be “change” if it is continuous and solely in virtue of its
continuousness [ … ]. That is “continuity” of change is itself a form of identity or sameness’ (quoted in O’Sullivan, Oakeshott on
History, 245–6). Elsewhere Oakeshott writes that history is ‘understood as the continuity or the continuousness of the passages of
differences; continuity being recognized as a kind of contiguity. And an historical past may be identified, alternatively, as an
assemblage of antecedent historical events contingently related to a subsequent historical event, or as an assembled passage
of antecedent differences which, in virtue of its continuity, constitutes a passage of historical change the outcome of which
is a subsequent difference’ (Oakeshott, On History, 125–6).
90
Oakeshott cites a passage from Aristotle’s Physics (V, 3, 277a): ‘The continuous is a kind of contiguity [ … ]. It is found in things
whose nature is such as to make them one when they are in contact’ (Oakeshott, On History, 122). The influence of Aristotle’s
‘contiguity’ on Oakeshott is also discussed in O’Sullivan, Oakeshott on History, 245–7; David Boucher, ‘The Creation of the
Past: British Idealism and Michael Oakeshott’s Philosophy of History’, History and Theory 23:2 (1984), 165.
91
Oakeshott, On History, 122. In his lectures on the history of political thought, Oakeshott also considers Aristotle’s view of science as
a systematic inquiry into what causes a thing to behave and the nature of things, and an inquiry into the ‘circumstantial or con-
tingent relations between different things; the accidents that happen to them, or (in the case of men) the designs they may have
and carry out’, the latter of which is a historical, not philosophical, enquiry according; see Oakeshott, ‘Aristotle (1)’, in Lectures in
the History of Political Thought, ed. Terry Nardin and Luke O’Sullivan (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2006), 105.
92
Oakeshott, ‘Historical Change’, 13 (quoted in O’Sullivan, Oakeshott on History, 246).
93
94
Oakeshott, ‘Philosophy of History?’, 126.
95
Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes, 99. For another example of Oakeshott’s thoughts on cumulative historical knowledge, see
Oakeshott, On History, 69. See also Oakeshott’s review of Peter Laslett’s edited edition of Locke’s Two Treatises in The Historical
Journal 5 (1962): 97–100.
12 A. EWING
different meanings, connecting to different antecedents in myriad ways in response to a seemingly

limitless set of research questions.96 An historical identity may therefore differ from other identities,
even though sharing evidence from the same passage of time, as long as each history is a past ‘com-
posed of related historical events assembled in answer to an historical question’.97 Thought in this
way, we understand the past by constructing contingently-related passages of historical change,
which may then help us challenge existing narratives and overcome contradictions to better under-
stand the past as a whole. What Oakeshott requires is not one long history, but that historians abide
by a common practice: shaping contingently-related events to account for different passages of his-
torical change.
The potential for such plurality stems from the different ways in which historians can form and
order events. The historian’s task is to compose and construct events, not simply assemble pre-cut
pieces.98 The raw materials that comprise events—the individual artefacts, situations and utterances
—are ‘an oblique source of information which may be used in seeking answers to a variety of
historical questions about the past’.99 These materials do not have an exclusive character but have a
quality of heterogeneousness that makes them eligible for use in response to a variety of historical
enquires:
Events have not the absolute shape of the parts of [a] puzzle [ … ] they change their shape in the process of
being related to one another, and it is because no historical event can ever achieve its final shape that history
will continually be rewritten so long as men retain an interest in it themselves.100
As such, to a degree, we can rearrange the events in different ways—‘antecedents are not absorbed in
[the] subsequent but remain eligible to be significantly related to a variety of other subsequents’.101
The historian builds what Oakeshott describes as a historical ‘dry wall’, where the stones (antecedent
events) that compose the wall (the subsequent event) are held together not by mortar or any
‘extraneous connexion’, to use F. H. Bradley’s phrase, but in terms of their shape.102 Juxtaposing
the two metaphors, he tells us that the
product of historical enquiry and imagination is not like the resolution of a jigsaw puzzle, what is on the table
being made to correspond to the picture on the lid of the box. There is no such picture and there are no such
firm shapes to be picked up and put into their predestined places one at a time. What an historian has are shapes
of his own manufacture, more like ambiguous echoes which wind in and out, touch and modify one another;
and what he composes is something more like a tune (which may be carried away by the wind) than a neatly
fitted together, solid structure.103
Such variability seems to make plural and simultaneous histories possible, but for a number of
reasons we should not take this plurality of contingent identities to be as wide-ranging as Koselleck’s
idea of the multilevel layering of diverse ‘temporal extensions’ or ‘reaches of historical movement’.104
First, in Oakeshott’s view there are no future-extending strata or prognostic structures to historical
time because such prognostication is anathema to the historical enterprise. We cannot predict events
ahead of their response to antecedents.105 Second, while contingent relationships can form identities
of varying length, with events of varying magnitude, Oakeshott cautions us in attempting history
‘written upon a large scale’, as it is ‘likely to display change more abruptly’. His conception of his-
torical change instead ‘identifies an historically understood past as a past without surprises and
96
97
98
Ibid., 76.
99
Ibid., 52–3.
100
Oakeshott, What is History?, 127.
101
Oakeshott, On History, 102–3.
102
Ibid., 102. See also F. H. Bradley, Essays on Truth and Reality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1914), 362. The idea of ‘extraneous con-
nection’ is also discussed in Boucher, ‘The Creation of the Past’, 212.
103
104
Koselleck, Futures Past, 108, 105.
105
devoid of great changes [ … that stand] in relative isolation’.106 He encourages historians to explain
contingent change at its most incremental, emphasising ‘direct’ contingency that should not ignore
the intermediate events that better mediate the event structure of a historical identity. Highlighting
the abruptness of any so-called revolutionary events, watersheds and great leaps forward are judgements
more familiar to practical understandings of the past.107 Third, Oakeshott is critical of what Koselleck
discusses as ‘structural pre-givens’, that is, the structural histories of Longue durée or any history that
does not narrate historical change via a strict structuring of events.108 He thinks long-term structural
histories offer too little change in the situational identity, their trajectories describing ‘situations so
extended and anatomized on so large a scale that they display almost “geological stability”’.109
As a last point, it remains to discuss how Oakeshott might respond to Koselleck’s account of his-
torical change according to the changes in the experience of time, historical or otherwise. He
expresses no interest in devising a formal way to account for changes in this way. Instead we can
only hypothesise that he believes the linguistic evidence of such changes may serve as units by
which we can identify events. But while his writing on the historical past express a general disinterest
in historicity, his writings on modernity and the practical implications of what it means to be modern
subscribes to a view close to Koselleck’s thesis of a Neuzeit and his reaction to the shifting importance
of the future in relation to the past in the modern mindset.
3. Historicity and the Politics of Time

For Koselleck, the infusion of history into the political is a key consequence of modernity, whereas in
historical writing, political language showcases a divorcing of past and future: ‘The process of tem-
poralization which, as has been shown, began to develop first in historical theory, [has] now entered
deep into daily life’.110 Koselleck’s account of the introduction of temporalised concepts into the field
of social and political action showcases newfound political harnessing and contestation of historical
time. In particular, he claims that these temporalised concepts, either brand new or reformulations of
older forms, are increasingly incorporated into the language of ideologies (Ideologieierbarkeit),
which in their orientation point forward in the direction of political change and improvement.
‘Many basic concepts, above all those designating movements—isms—concur in the demand that
future history should differ fundamentally from the past’. Among such concepts are ‘progress’,
‘development’, ‘emancipation’, ‘liberalism’, ‘democratization’, ‘socialism’, and ‘communism’.111 As
with history, the politics of time undergoes a radical transformation—‘a growing trend away from
life in settings of manageable size and relative stability, and towards new horizons of possible experi-
ences’. In this way ‘history and ideology now complement each other’; as an accompaniment to the
slogans and propaganda employed for the mobilisation of large groups, ‘history becomes a tool of
ideology’.112 Ideological concepts serve as ‘instruments for the direction of historical movement’,113
and demonstrate for Koselleck that the use of political language is also to control the temporal per-
spectives wrapped up within it.114 The contestation of historical time thus becomes an essential
element of political discourse: in modernity ‘time itself becomes a title of legitimation open to
106
Ibid., 125.
107
Ibid., 125–6.
108
109
110
111
Koselleck’s remarks are given in Hartmut Lehmann and Melvin Richter (eds.), ‘The Meaning of Historical Terms and Concepts:
New Studies on Begriffgeschichte’, German Historical Institute Occasional Paper No. 15, Washington DC, 61.
112
Koselleck, ‘Introduction to the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe’, 13–4.
113
See Koselleck, Futures Past, 251. See also his summary of this argument in Koselleck, ‘Time and Revolutionary Language’, Gradu-
ate Faculty Philosophy Journal 9, no. 2 (1983), 124: ‘in our times [ … ] political and social concepts are becoming the navigational
instruments of historical movement’.
114
Contrary to the enduring Marxist interpretation, ideologies may be thought of as foremost an attempt to harness the meaning of
ambiguous or contestable political concepts like ‘liberty’, ‘freedom’, ‘tradition’ and ‘community’ that are produced, utilised and
consumed in the political for the purpose of explanation or action. On this conceptual approach, see Michael Freeden, Ideology: A
14 A. EWING
occupation from all sides. Specific legitimising concepts would no longer be possible without tem-
poral perspective’.115
Koselleck’s own response to this politicisation of historical time is a call to return to a more stable
understanding of historical being that balances past experience and future expectation.116 His con-
cern over what may be called the ideological politics of time, and in particular the future-oriented
progressivism of a brand of radical historicism, is a central theme in Kritik und Krise, his published
doctoral thesis, where he claims that the genesis of the twentieth-century political ‘crisis’ can be
traced back to the Enlightenment ‘critique’ of the absolutist state. It was the critique of crisis that
‘transformed into a [historical] process’ and ‘into the morally just and rational planning of the future
by the new elite’.117 Political ideology, as he sees it, is a consequence of this process—the
coordination of ideas and political compulsion—which through temporalised concepts gave rise
to singularised philosophies of history.118 Here ‘human actions [were] transported into a rational
“system” [ … ] that made possible an epic unity that disclosed and established internal coherence’.
When used politically a singluarised temporal narrative had ‘a power that connected and motivated
everything in accordance with a secret or evident plan to which one could feel responsible, or in
whose name one could believe oneself to be acting’.119 His prescriptive alternative viewpoint is to
accept the imperfection of the social order and the permanence of conflict in the political. This is
a view close to Schmitt,120 although Koselleck does not want to enter into any ideological debate,
nor is he interested in politicising Schmitt’s formalised differentiation between ‘friend’ and
‘enemy’.121 Plural histories are his way of countering modern temporality.
This call for temporal plurality and a degree of continuity between future and past brings Kosel-
leck in line with Oakeshott’s own thinking on a modern politics of radical temporality.122 Oakeshott
agrees with Koselleck that ideologies are foremost a form of political discourse that attach particular
meaning to abstract political concepts, and in doing so compare, contrast and compete with other
ideologies over the meaning of ambiguous concepts like ‘liberty’, ‘equality’ and ‘justice’. Ideology
is ‘a vocabulary of beliefs in terms of which to conduct political discourse’.123 They function as short-
hand, or ‘abridgements’ to use his phrase, for describing our general dispositions and political cul-
tures, or in the name of change, serve as handbooks for achieving a particular future goal.124 What he
calls ‘ideological politics’, then, is something that ‘is not simply politics of principle as against politics
of expediency but is a style of politics which springs from attributing to principles a certain charac-
ter’.125 As handbooks for political application, ideologies serve the practical interests of change, the
defining feature of the practical mode of experience, where the world is consumed with the relation-
ship between the ‘what is’ and the ‘not yet’, the ‘here and now’ and the ‘what ought to be’.126 The use
Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), esp. 45–66; Freeden, Ideology and Political Theory (Oxford: Clar-
endon Press, 1996), chapters 1–3.
115
116
See Koselleck, Futures Past, 43–57; Koselleck, Practice of Conceptual History, 154–69.
117
Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988),
10.
118
Ibid., 183.
119
120
On Schmitt’s influence on Koselleck, see Niklas Olsen, ‘Carl Schmitt, Reinhart Koselleck and the Foundations of History and Poli-
tics’, History of European Ideas 37 (2011): 197–208; Timo Pankakoski, ‘Conflict, Context, Correctness: Koselleck and Schmitt on
Concepts’, Political Theory 38 (2010): 749–79.
121
This is discussed in Olsen, ‘Schmitt, Koselleck and the Foundations of History and Politics’, 204.
122
I am borrowing this phrase from Timothy Fuller, ‘Radical Temporality and the Modern Moral Imagination: Two Themes in the
Thought of Michael Oakeshott’, in A Companion to Michael Oakeshott, 120–33.
123
Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics, 75.
124
See Michael Oakeshott, ‘Conduct and Ideology in Politics’, in What is History?, 245–54.
125
Ibid., 248.
126
Oakeshott says: ‘In it the alteration of existence is undertaken. Practical life comprises the attempts we make to alter existence or
to maintain it unaltered in the face of threatened change. It is both the production and the prevention of change, and in either
case it is not merely a programme for action, but action itself’ (Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes, 256).
of the past in practical experience is thus dictated by the unending tension between the real and the
ideal.127
Oakeshott believes that this future-oriented practical mode of experience is a permanent
temporal condition from which we cannot escape—but his periodisation of modernity, loosely
set out as it is with Koselleck’s Sattelzeit, also postulates a particular reorientation of the
relationship between the past and future that places a new set of pressures on the political
arrangements of practical life.128 In modernity the practical past is not used for the present,
but minimised or discarded entirely. A politics of grand plans is a symptom of the ‘confident
and adult language of the eighteenth century’,129 where the practical past is no longer connected
to and considered for the present, but seen as a present divorced from the past in the name of
radical change, where expectation dominates at the expense of experience. ‘The vice of contem-
porary political reflection is to take an excessively long view of the future and an excessively
short view of the past [ … ] by abridging the pedigree of our political character we restrict
our understanding of it’.130
A manifestation of this shift away from the ‘pedigree of our political character’ is the rise of
what he terms ‘Rationalism’, an intellectual force which promotes technical knowledge at the
expense of accumulated practical knowledge in the interest of perfecting human conduct.131
Rationalism attempts to inhabit a timeless world, harbouring a ‘deep distrust of time, and [an] impa-
tient hunger for eternity and an irritable nervousness in the face of everything topical and transi-
tory’.132 Political ideologies become useful tools of the Rationalist, and as ‘abridgements of
tradition’ that are ‘independently premeditated’ they too are abstractions that are meant to transcend
time in their applicability.133 As handbooks they are timeless. Contrary to Koselleck’s ‘concepts of
movement’, the value of ideological concepts for Oakeshott is precisely in their historical
detachment:
They compose an understanding of what is to be pursued independent of how it is to be pursued [ … ]. A pol-
itical ideology purports to supply in advance knowledge of what Freedom or Democracy or Justice is, and in this
manner sets empiricists to work.134
The implementation of an ideological style of politics subsequently brings the timeless into the
time-bound. In this ideological style of politics we see the rapid present-centred differentiation
between the ‘what ought to be’, the ‘here and now’, and the ‘what was’, where thanks to ideological
slogans, time disconnects past and future. Yet while it is cut loose from the past, the future is
not open but already predicted. As a response to the plurality of individual ends, the variety of
human desires are compromised in favour of communal temporal direction and coherence
where goals are already set, the course of action laid out.135 This temporal politics is a particular
form of enterprise association, where agents are related to each other in agreement upon a com-
mon purpose.136 Unforeseen contingencies require ‘managerial decisions’ in order to procure a
127
This term is first used in O’Sullivan, Oakeshott on History, 18.
128
Politics is not itself a mode, but foremost a practical consideration. It is ‘the activity of attending to the general arrangements of a
set of people whom chance or choice have brought together’ (Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics, 44).
129
Michael Oakeshott, The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism (Selected Writings of Michael Oakeshott), Timothy Fuller ed.
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 24. See also Timothy Fuller, ‘Michael Oakeshott: The Philosophical Skeptic in an
Impatient Age’, in Political Philosophy in the Twentieth Century: Authors and Arguments, ed. Catherine Zuckert (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2011), 145.
130
Oakeshott, Politics of Faith, 2.
131
Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics, 22–3.
132
Ibid., 7.
133
Ibid., 48.
134
Ibid.
135
For Oakeshott’s version of the singularisation of time, see Oakeshott, ‘On Being Conservative’, in Rationalism in Politics, 425–6.
This has clear ramifications for the role of government: ‘Thus, governing is recognized as a specific and limited activity; not the
management of an enterprise, but the rule of those engaged in a great diversity of self-chosen enterprises’ (ibid., 429).
136
See Oakeshott, On Human Conduct, 114–21.
16 A. EWING
wished-for outcome.137 An enterprise of this sort is a symptom of a disconnected politics of expec-

tation, where
the activity of governing is understood to be in the service of the perfection of mankind. There is a doctrine of
cosmic optimism which, not from observation but as an inference from the perfection of its creator, attributes
an unavoidable perfection to the universe [ … ] human perfection is sought precisely because it is not
present.138
As an alternative to individual initiative, the politics of solidarity ‘endows government with power
and authority such as it has never before enjoyed’139 and often breeds a politics of impatience to
accelerate the process by which the ‘what is’ becomes the ‘what ought to be’. In his account of an
imagined ill-fated attempt to reach the heavens by building a ‘Tower of Babel’, Oakeshott
says that the slogan ‘time flies as the crow flies’140 was a particular selling point, and for the
‘Babelian’ people the catchphrase ‘“Take the Waiting out of Wanting” had bitten deep into
their consciousness’.141 The disconnectedness and impatience of this type of politics of faith
worries Oakeshott:
We forget that, in order to make the fire burn a little more briskly, we have pulled out all the dampers, and in
our enjoyment of the warmth we fail to remark that the scuttle is empty and the chimney near to being on
fire.142
Like Koselleck, his response to the ‘radical temporality’143 of modern historical time is to close the
gap between experience and expectation, by reflecting on the importance of the past-present, what he
calls ‘traditions of behaviour’, a concept that itself has a specific temporal dimension:
[it] is not a fixed and inflexible manner of doing things; it is a flow of sympathy. It may be temporarily disrupted
by the incursion of a foreign influence, it may be diverted, restricted, arrested, or become dried-up, and it may
reveal so deep-seated an incoherence that (even without foreign assistance) a crisis appears. And if, in order to
meet these crises, these were some steady, unchanging, independent guide to which a society might resort, it
would no doubt be well advised to do so. But no such guide exists; we have no resources outside the fragments,
the vestiges, the relics of its own tradition of behaviour which the crisis has left untouched.144
To follow this is to accept the localised and dimensionally connected situationality of our temporal
existence. The division between the ‘what is’ and the ‘what ought to be’ is always to be
remade—‘nowhere in practice is there uninterrupted progress or final achievement’.145 Upholding
tradition is to recognise our contextual temporal orientation of our present, lending to a ‘vernacular
language of civil understanding and intercourse’ that takes account of the continuity of time.146
‘When we acquire a tradition we are aware of a past and future as soon as we are aware of a pre-
sent’.147 And like the historical past our traditions of behaviour are a continuity of change where
‘all parts of a tradition do not change at once and are potential within it’.148 This is to follow
what Oakeshott calls a ‘principle of continuity’, where
137
Ibid., 114–5, 130–1. Oakeshott elaborates that ‘an enterprise is a “policy”, and enterprise association is a ‘managerial’ engage-
ment; it is agents related to one another in the substantive activity of choosing performances contingently connected with a
common purpose or interest, or of their acknowledgement of such choices and performances as their own’ (ibid., 115).
138
Koselleck, Futures Past, 23
139
140
Ibid., 466.
141
142
Oakeshott, Politics of Faith, 11.
143
I take this phrase from Fuller, ‘Radical Temporality and the Modern Moral Imagination’, 120–33.
144
Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics, 59. Oakeshott and his concept of tradition are discussed in J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Time Institutions
and Action’, in Politics, Language, and Time (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 233–72.
145
146
147
148
Ibid., 61.
authority is diffused between past, present and future; between the old, the new, and what is to come. It is steady
because, though it moves, it is never wholly in motion; and though it is tranquil, it is never wholly at rest.149
In contrast to the accelerated world of radical change, the principle of continuity shows a ‘preference
for slow, small changes [ … ] it is more important for a society to move together than for it to move
either fast or far’.150 Politics, therefore, is not the pursuit of dreams, but the following of ‘intimations’
in the here and now.151 As offshoots of our rituals, traditions and general practices,152 these intima-
tions are an inheritance from which we should not depart. To pursue them is the moniker of mod-
eration in an impatient age.153
4. Conclusion
The intention of this paper has been to put Koselleck and Oakeshott in conversation with each other.
From this we can take away several conclusions. For both, temporality offers a way of understanding
the world, and time is to recognise our presentness in attempting to construct understandings of the
past.154 From this standpoint, both encourage historians to employ formal temporal categories for
making the past intelligible—but it is here where major differences emerge. Koselleck aims to broadly
theorise history as both an experience and a discipline—without ruling out the connections between
the two—in order to account for the various reasons for history and the different ways in which we
go about explaining it. Oakeshott takes a narrower view. First, while we think of the past, there is no
past apart from the present evidence of it. Second, he advises against the temptation to read a dis-
tinctly historical past for the future, distinguishing the discipline from other modes of past under-
standing by its purpose and formulaic ordering of continuities of change according to the direct
contingent relationship between individual events. The historical past is an understanding from
the present that has no bearing on our practical choices. Third, he does not entertain a wide
range of historical approaches, a type of structural history being the most conspicuously absent.
Meanwhile, Koselleck distances himself from a strict presentist claim. As in Altdorfer’s Alexanders-
chlacht, any historical point along the so-called arc between action and representation may contain
past, present and future. However, while history relates to and may influence present possibility, the
futurity of expectation or prognosis need not only concern the practical implications of historical
time. A strictly ‘historical past’ may still contain structures that extend into the future. In the politi-
cal, though, future becomes the dominant tense, where past and present are action-oriented towards
future. And in a modern Neuzeit the differences between past and future changes even further: ‘con-
cepts of movement’ and applied Rationalist blueprints reveal a tendency to alter temporal situation-
ality and separate the experiences and lessons from the present-past from the hopes and
anticipations of present-future expectation.
As a second theme, this article suggests that Koselleck’s theory of the layering of historical times
pushes us to ask whether Oakeshott’s historical past as a world can accommodate diversified and
simultaneously non-simultaneous historical identities. It suggests that, to a lesser degree, Oakeshott
does allow for plural historical times, based on different event-based structures of historical change
in response to a seemingly limitless range of historical questions. Historians may use the materials
for constructing events in numerous arrangements. To envision a singularised historical time is to
invite histories according to central laws or processes. His metaphor for simultaneity is not geologic
layering—and does not accommodate all that this implies—but rather a uniquely assembled dry
149
Ibid.
150
Ibid., 396–7.
151
Ibid., 66. For a discussion of this phrase, see W. H. Greenleaf, Oakeshott’s Philosophical Politics (London: Longmans, Green and Co.,
1966), 54.
152
Intimation as ritual is discussed in Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics, 429.
153
For more on ‘intimations’, see Timothy Fuller, ‘Editor’s Introduction’, in Oakeshott, Politics of Faith, xviii; William Coates, ‘Michael
Oakeshott as a Liberal Theorist’, Canadian Journal of Political Science 17 (1985): 781.
154
The idea of ‘presentness‘ is discussed in Elizabeth Corey, Michael Oakeshott on Religion Ascetics and Politics (Columbia, MO: Uni-
versity of Missouri Press), 65–72.
18 A. EWING
stone wall. Still, Oakeshott’s preference is to narrate the past according to the direct relationship
between contingent-related events, thereby encouraging narratives of historical change at its most
incremental.
Finally, in the practical application of historical time, both thinkers endorse a brand of temporal
connectivity—or better put: plural connectivities. Both eschew efforts to break or restart time.
Thought of as ‘space of experience’ or ‘traditions of behaviour’, the past should not be divorced
from present-future expectations. As an alternative, we must balance experience and expectation
by choosing a middle ground between Oakeshott’s temporal bookends of a singularised expec-
tation-driven politics of faith on the one side, and the change-averse politics of scepticism on the
other. We should not hope for a future identical to the past, but different possible futures that in
looking forward still remain connected to experience. Like in historical theory, Oakeshott’s prefer-
ence is for a politics embracing the continuity of change. To break wholesale with our past is a folly
bound to fail. By pushing back against this temptation, what Koselleck sees as the heart of the mod-
ern disposition, both thinkers contribute to our discourse about the proper nature and meaning of
time to our daily lives—and ask several important questions for our own time about how are we to
view our own existence within time and how temporality can influence political conduct.
Acknowledgements
Previous versions of this article were presented at the Michael Oakeshott Association Conference, Colorado College,
Colorado Springs (I would like to thank Colorado College for the generous financial support which enabled me to
attend), and at the History of Political Thought Seminar Series, St Anne’s College, Oxford. This article benefited
from a number of comments and reflections, especially from Edmund Neill, Michael Freeden, Noel O’Sullivan,
Luke O’Sullivan, Niklas Olsen, Rutger Kaput and Michael Bentley. I am especially indebted to Janet Coleman, who
introduced me to the work of Reinhart Koselleck, and Timothy Fuller, who first introduced me to the work of Michael
Oakeshott.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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History of European Ideas

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Conceptions of Reinhart Koselleck's Theory

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Conceptions of Reinhart Koselleck’s Theory of Historical Time in

CONTACT Alexander B Ewing alexander.ewing@politics.ox.ac.uk

2. Constructing Temporal Structures of the Past

2.1. Koselleck’s Theory of Historical Time

2.2. Temporal Categories in Oakeshott’s Theory of Historical Understanding

logic—‘composing an intelligible continuity of conditionally dependant occurrences’.88 Intelligibility

2.3. The Possibility of Plural Histories

different meanings, connecting to different antecedents in myriad ways in response to a seemingly

3. Historicity and the Politics of Time

wished-for outcome.137 An enterprise of this sort is a symptom of a disconnected politics of expec-

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