This essay is the first attempt to compare Reinhart Koselleck's Historik with Hannah Arendt's political anthropology and her critique of the modern concept of history. Koselleck is well-known for his work on conceptual history as well as for his theory of historical time(s). It is my contention that these different projects are bound together by Koselleck's Historik, that is, his theory of possible histories. This can be shown through an examination of his writings from Critique and Crisis to his final essays on historical anthropology, most of which have not yet been translated into English. Conversely, Arendt's political theory has in recent years been the subject of numerous interpretations that do not take into account her views about history. By comparing the anthropological categories found in Koselleck's Historik with Arendt's political anthropology, I identify similar intellectual lineages in them (Heidegger, Löwith, Schmitt) as well as shared political sentiments, in particular the anti-totalitarian impulse of the postwar era. More importantly, Koselleck's theory of the preconditions of possible histories and Arendt's theory of the preconditions of the political, I argue, transcend these lineages and sentiments by providing essential categories for the analysis of historical experience.

This compendium of fifty essays by international philosophers examines history from the point of view of its cognate disciplines, historiography and the philosophy of history. The authors often use the terms history, the past, and historiography interchangeably. Essays are grouped in four broad categories: basic problems, major fields, philosophy and sub-fields of historiography, and classical schools and philosophers of history. The book provides useful insights, some dated by the fashion of postmodernism. The essays are largely independent of one another, and may be read in any order. The volume will be of interest to philosophers, historians, and social scientists with a theoretical bent.

Given World and Time is a collection of essays that summarizes much of the recent work on the theory of time, including cultural, political, and social conceptualizations of temporality. The grounding narrative of this collection, roughly stated, leads from the German and German-Jewish ideas of a temporality of crisis developed in the 1920s, to the French poststructuralism of the 1960s and 1970s, and concludes with the American syntheses of the 1980s and 1990s. Methodologically, the book weaves together different historical narratives with a new emphasis on their temporal dimension, all seen from the perspective of critical theory and recent cultural critique. However, it is interesting to point out that the majority of the articles do not challenge the classic critical tools of modernism, in spite of the frequent reference to poststructuralist critique. The volume editor has also not acknowledged more recent work that treats similar topics and themes through the application of a radical political critique, most significantly the work associated with biopolitics and the so-called theological turn.

Gorman proposes to investigate historical practice under the rubric of a philosophy of disciplines. Such philosophy must first “recover historically” the self-constitution of the discipline in order then to appraise its procedures for warranting claims. Gorman's concept of discipline would have profited from consulting the substantial body of empirical research and theory regarding disciplinarity, and his “historical recovery” of the discipline of history leaves a lot to be desired. These insufficiencies vitiate the interesting arguments he has to offer concerning the question of the truth-claims of whole historical accounts. A better reconstruction of disciplinarity might also have provided him with stronger rejoinders to the postmodern challenge to historical practice that he sees himself called to rebut.

The history of emotions is a burgeoning field—so much so, that some are invoking an “emotional turn.” As a way of charting this development, I have interviewed three of the leading practitioners of the history of emotions: William Reddy, Barbara Rosenwein, and Peter Stearns. The interviews retrace each historian's intellectual-biographical path to the history of emotions, recapitulate key concepts, and critically discuss the limitations of the available analytical tools. In doing so, they touch on Reddy's concepts of “emotive,”“emotional regime,” and “emotional navigation,” as well as on Rosenwein's “emotional community” and on Stearns's “emotionology” and offer glimpses of each historian's ongoing research. The interviews address the challenges presented to historians by research in the neurosciences and the like, highlighting the distinctive contributions offered by a historical approach. In closing, the interviewees appear to reach a consensus, envisioning the history of emotions not as a specialized field but as a means of integrating the category of emotion into social, cultural, and political history, emulating the rise of gender as an analytical category since its early beginnings as “women's history” in the 1970s.

Was the crisis of historicism an exclusively German affair? Or was it a “narrowly academic crisis,” as is sometimes assumed? Answering both questions in the negative, this paper argues that crises of historicism affected not merely intellectual elites, but even working-class people, not only in Germany, but also in the Netherlands. With an elaborated case study, the article shows that Dutch “neo-Calvinist” Protestants from the 1930s onward experienced their own crisis of historicism. For a variety of reasons, this religious subgroup came to experience a collapse of its “historicist” worldview. Following recent German scholarship, the paper argues that this historicism was not a matter of Rankean historical methods, but of “historical identifications,” or modes of identity formation in which historical narratives played crucial roles. Based on this Dutch case study, then, the article develops two arguments. In a quantitative mode, it argues that more and different people suffered from the crisis of historicism than is usually assumed. In addition, it offers a qualitative argument: that the crisis was located especially among groups that derived their identity from “historical identifications.” Those who suffered most from the crisis of historicism were those who understood themselves as embedded in narratives that connected past, present, and future in such a way as to offer identity in historical terms.

Recently, the diffusion of the so-called “new intellectual history” led to the dismissal of the old school of the “history of ideas” on the basis of its ahistorical nature (the view of ideas as eternal entities). This formulation is actually misleading, missing the core of the transformation produced in the field. It is not true that the history of ideas simply ignored the fact that the meaning of ideas changes over time. The issue at stake here is really not how ideas changed (the mere description of the semantic transformation they underwent historically), but rather why they do. The study of the German tradition of intellectual history serves in this essay as a basis to illustrate the meaning and significance of the recent turn from ideas as its object. In the process of trying to account for the source of contingency of conceptual formations, it will open our horizon to the complex nature of the ways by which we invest the world with meaning. That is, it will disclose the presence of different layers of symbolic reality lying beneath the surface level of “ideas,” and analyze their differential nature and functions. It will also show the reasons for the ultimate failure of the “history of ideas” approach, why discourses can never achieve their vocation to constitute themselves as self-enclosed, rationally integrated systems, thereby expelling contingency from their realm. In sum, it will show why historicity is not merely something that comes to intellectual history from without (as a by-product of social history or as the result of the action of an external agent), as the history of ideas assumed, but is a constitutive dimension of it.

Six questions are outlined and then responded to about Holocaust denial. These consider (1) Holocaust denial's view of the Holocaust counterfactually—if it had occurred; (2) the presumed adequacy of the binary choice between Holocaust denial and affirmation; (3) the status and credence of their own assertions among denial advocates; (4) the often implied historiographic uniqueness of Holocaust denial; (5) the contributions to Holocaust history of the denial position; (6) the measures—scholarly, legislative, practical—that have been or might be directed at the phenomenon of Holocaust denial.

Despite its title and stated objectives this edited volume does not provide a broad and inclusive survey of post-apartheid South African historiographical developments. Its main topic is the unexpected demise in the post-apartheid context of the radical or revisionist approach that had invigorated and transformed the humanities and social studies during the 1970s and 1980s. In the context of the anti-apartheid struggle the radical historians had developed a plausible model of praxis for progressive scholarship, yet in the new post-apartheid democratic South Africa radical historical scholarship itself encountered a crisis of survival. This should not be confused with a general “crisis” of historical scholarship in South Africa, as some of the uneven contributions to this volume contend, as that remains an active and diversely productive field due also to substantial contributions by historians not based in South Africa. If the dramatic and ironic fate of radical historical scholarship in the context of the transition to a post-apartheid democracy is the volume's primary topic, then it unfortunately fails to provide serious and sustained critical reflection on the origins and possible explanations for that crisis. A marked feature of the accounts of “history making” provided in this volume is the (former) radical historians' lack of self-reflexivity and the scant interest shown in the underlying history of their own intellectual trajectories.

Books reviewed in this issue.

Discourses of Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Enlightenment. Edited by Hans Erich Bödeker, Clorinda Donato, and Peter Hanns Reill.

The Annales School: An Intellectual History. By André Burguière.

A History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles, Romances, and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth Century. By John Burrow.

Liberalism and Hegemony: Debating the Canadian Liberal Revolution. Edited by Jean-François Constant and Michel Ducharme.

Der Fortchrittsglaube: Geschichte einer Europaïschen Idee. By Bedrich Loewenstein.

Il Reich di Bismarck: Storia e storiografia. By Anna Maria Voci.

Contested Histories in Public Space: Memory, Race, and Nation. Edited by Daniel J. Walkowitz and Lisa Maya Knauer.

The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History. By Gordon Wood.