This article tackles the political implications of Reinhart Koselleck’s first work, Kritik und Krise, re-questioning its relationship to the ‘Enlightenment’ and the ‘Counter-Enlightenment’. Rather than establishing the semantic contents of this pair of antonymic concepts in an abstract way, I believe that we must study the concrete uses to which they are put, that is, the discursive strategies of the actors themselves showing, in each case, the specific adversaries against whom they are mobilized and the specific ends to which they (...) are used. The goal of the present essay is to understand whether the early Koselleck belonged to the tradition of the Enlightenment or the Counter-Enlightenment in the specific context of post-War West Germany intellectual debates. By locating Kritik und Krise in the controversies relating to the political identity of the new German Federal Republic, I show that he was not, in the 1950s, a representative of Cold War Liberalism or anti-totalitarianism but, rather, oscillated between different conservative positions (‘Traditional’ conservatism and ‘Conservative Revolution’) that were typical of the post-War period and, in large measure, hostile to the Enlightenment legacy. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article examines the prominent Japanese postwar thinker Maruyama Masao’s critical engagement with his contemporary German legal theorist Carl Schmitt. Maruyama engaged with Schmitt’s decisionistic notion of “the political” and sovereignty since he found it useful in addressing the pathological elements of Japanese political culture, namely, the widespread political passivity and fatalistic ethos of the Japanese public. In his view, such a “decision-avoiding” political culture, which had contributed to the rise of fascism in interwar and wartime Japan, posed a (...) fundamental threat to the viability of Japan’s postwar democracy. Although Maruyama objected to Schmitt’s authoritarian theory of political leadership, he nevertheless believed Schmitt provided important insights into the key concepts of modern politics, such as political agency and the constituent power of the people. In his efforts to foster political subjectivity and liberal individuality in postwar Japan, Maruyama attempted to strike a balance between two extremes: Schmittian normless decisionism, on the one hand, and a politically naïve liberal constitutionalism, on the other. I conclude by suggesting that the hitherto overlooked intellectual affinity between Maruyama and one of the leading Weimar-era constitutional theorists—Hermann Heller—can enrich our understanding of Maruyama’s unceasing effort to formulate and insist on the imperative role of political subjectivity and liberal individuality in consolidating liberal democracy in postwar Japan. (shrink)

Many recent attempts to define the current historical period presuppose a crisis of historical consciousness. Concepts such as ‘postmodernity’ or ‘posthistory’ entail the idea that the period is ch...