Modernization as Temporalization. History of Concepts and Epochal Change in Reinhart Koselleck’s Reflection

Abstract

Reconstructing the conception of historical change inside Reinhart Koselleck’s reflection, the essay deals with the affirmation and crisis of modern temporal order. If modernization has been intended as overcoming and abandonment of tradition, it becomes involved in the discovery of a multiplicity of temporal layers, that the formulation «contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous» is designated to describe. Consequently, the essay explores the possibility of a new Sattelzeit, able to motivate the acceleration of contemporary time or the new regimes of historicity that it reveals. The split between modernization and temporalization might point out the necessity to formulate a new conceptual history.