97
* Peace Institute & Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia
Filozofski vestnik | Volume XLII | Number 1 | 2021 | 97–126 | doi: 10.3986/fv.42.1.05 
Vlasta Jalušič*
Arendt, Koselleck, and Begreifen: Rethinking 
Politics and Concepts in Times of Crisis
1
Hannah Arendt and Reinhart Koselleck are two of the most outstanding schol-
ars of history and political thinking of the 20
th
 century.
1
While Arendt ushered 
in an unprecedented approach in political thinking, which is often misunder-
stood and accompanied by controversies, Koselleck created one of the most sys-
tematic opuses of the analysis of fundamental concepts in their historico-polit-
ical dynamic and established conceptual history as a historical method. This 
article looks at some important intersections between Arendt’s and Koselleck’s 
thinking of political concepts and politics. At the forefront are both authors’ 
respective thesis about the gap, rupture, or break in tradition (of political think-
ing and historical periods), the way they conceptualise concepts and the role 
thereof in thinking through times of crisis, and how this relates to their under-
standing of politics and the political. The inquiry has no ambition to carry out a 
“comparison” in a strict manner. The aspect of direct connections and influenc-
es between authors is rather one sided as only Koselleck refers to Arendt’s work. 
However, there are commonalties (and differences) arising from their shared 
intellectual-historical horizon, study background, and individual experience, 
which inform their eventual mutual “thinking space.”
2
 Focusing on the ques-
tion of both authors’ Begreifen in times of crisis and breaks in the political tra-
dition, I take into consideration the direct as well as indirect aspects.
1
 This article is a result of the research project J5-1749 “The break in tradition: Hannah 
Arendt and conceptual change”, https://www.mirovni-institut.si/en/projects/the-break-
in-tradition-hannah-arendt-and-conceptual-change/ and the research programme P5-
04133 “Equality and human rights in times of global governance”, both financed by the 
Slovenian Research Agency.
2
 The expression is borrowed from the exhibition idea of Wolfgang Heuer and Sebastian 
Hefti, i.e. Hannah Arendt Denkraum, cf. Peter Funken, “Hannah Arendt’s Denkraum: The 
Experience of an Experimental Exhibition”, http://www.wolfgang-heuer.com/denkraum/
eng/space.htm, accessed 24 April 2021.

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vlasta jalušič
Bridging Arendt’s and Koselleck’s thinking space
Koselleck has long been regarded as a particularly eminent theorist of histori-
cal concepts, while Arendt had not been in focus as a conceptual author until 
recent times. Studies and books that bring both authors’ conceptual thinking 
into a productive dialogue have been published only in the last decade.
3
 They 
identify their several common research topics: similar conceptions of time; the 
exploration and critique of the philosophy of history; opposition to thinking in 
terms of the history of ideas; a non-causal understanding of history and politics; 
similar considerations about modern secular power; a critique of the notion of 
progress as anti-political, etc. Barros, for example, tackles the common in histor-
ical thinking about the present, past, and future in the two authors, and shows 
where their otherwise parallel thesis of the break in tradition differs but can be 
brought into a dialogue. Hoffman identifies the points of contact and parallels 
between Koselleck’s Historik and Arendt’s political “anthropology” (relying on 
experience as one of the central categories) in some of their major works. Ma-
ria Pia Lara analyses how Arendt’s and Koselleck’s concepts of democracy, the 
state, emancipation, revolution, and the notion of critique relate to the web of a 
disclosive process of semantic transformation. She argues that conceptual his-
tory as a method was used by both authors “to explain the way specific notions 
of political agency have undergone a change or a transformation.”
4
 Both Hoff-
man and Lara claim that Koselleck was – to quite an extent – directly influenced 
by Arendt. Indeed, Koselleck either explicitly refers to her works
5
 or sometimes 
uses a similar line of argument, the same citations, etc. He started thinking of 
3
 Cf. José D’Assunção Barros, “Perspectiva sobe o tempo em Hannah Arendt e Koselleck: 
duas leituras sobre a quebra entre o Presente e o Passado“, Argumentos, 6 (12/2014), pp. 
169–189; Stefan-Ludvig Hoffman, “Koselleck, Arendt, and the Anthropology of Historical 
Experience”, History and Theory, 49 (2/2010), pp. 212–236, Maria Pia Lara, The Disclosure 
of Politics: Struggles Over the Semantics of Secularization, New York, Columbia University 
Press, 2013; Sebastian Huhnholz, Von Carl Schmitt zu Hannah Arendt? Heidelberger Entste -
hungsspuren und bundesrepublikanische Liberalisierungsschichten von Reinhart Kosellecks 
“Kritik und Krise”, Berlin, Duncker & Humblot, 2019. I refer here to only those studies that 
have both authors at the core and not just their particular concepts. 
4
 Lara, The Disclosure of Politics, p. 31.
5
 Niklas Olsen, Beyond utopianism and relativism: History in the plural in the work of Rein-
hart Koselleck, Florence, European University Institute, 2009, p. 46. Reinhart Koselleck, 
“Laudatio auf François Furet”, in Festschrift zur Vergabe des Hannah-Arendt-Preises für 
politisches Denken an François Furet, Bremen, Heinrich Böll Stiftung, 1996, pp. 9–12.

99
arendt , koselleck, and begreifen: rethinking politics and concepts in times of crisis
social and political concepts within the semantic web of their construction (and 
reconstruction). This was in fact similar to Arendt’s view that political concepts 
are intrinsically related to the political experience of those actors or spectators 
who coined them. Meanwhile, a recent study by Huhnholz which questions the 
“standard” interpretation of Koselleck’s understanding of politics and the “po-
litical” in relation to Schmitt, Hobbes, and political tradition, also relativises 
Koselleck’s own claim about the early direct influence of Arendt on him. 
These works touch upon several themes that are of interest here: the Western 
tradition, its crisis, and modernity; rupture, repetition, continuation, and con-
ceptual transformation; both authors’ approach to the possibility of historical 
and political thinking after the rupture, and what conditions and concepts are 
available/needed for such an endeavour. This last common point is particularly 
important for this article, as both Arendt and Koselleck express the need for a 
new kind of political theory or “political science,”
6
 in which conceptual think-
ing plays a crucial role. 
The importance of the concept
Apart from Koselleck’s monumental work on concepts in their historical dynam-
ic, several approaches to the basic concepts of politics, conceptual change, and 
history exist within the European research tradition. The differences notwith-
standing, they all proceed from either Heidegger’s temporal dimension (histor-
ical and existential position) or the so-called linguistic turn, and identify some 
kind of break between the “old” and “modern” world as the origin of modern 
concepts.
7
 In this context, Koselleck has the status of an undisputed authority 
on Begriffsgeschichte and international fame as a distinctive and original schol-
6
 Hoffman, “Koselleck, Arendt, and the Anthropology of Historical Experience”, p. 234.
7
 For an overview, see W. Steinmetz, M. Freeden, and J. Fernández-Sebastián (eds.) Concep-
tual history in the European space, New York and Oxford, Berghahn Books, 2017. The most 
known and viewed as different from Koselleck’s position is the Cambridge School of intel-
lectual history, which focuses on changes in the relation between speech and action. For 
the relationship between Koselleck and the Cambridge School, see Melvin Richter, “Re-
constructing the History of Political Languages: Pocock, Skinner, and the Geschichtliche 
Grundbegriffe”, History and Theory, 29 (1/1990). See also Kari Palonen, Die Entzauberung 
der Begriffe. Das Umschreiben der politischen Begriffe bei Quentin Skinner und Reinhart 
Koselleck, Münster, LIT Verlag, 2004 and The Struggle with Time: A Conceptual History of 
‘Politics’ as an Activity, Münster, LIT Verlag, 2014.

100
vlasta jalušič
ar.
8
 At the centre of the research in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe lies the resolu-
tion of the old and the emergence of the (new) modern world through the lens of 
social and political conceptuality from 1700 to the 20
th
 century.
9
The heuristic framework of this work is Koselleck’s hypothesis on Sattelzeit (sad-
dle time) which explains the phase of transformation (between the 17
th
 and 19
th
 
centuries) from the old paradigm to the formation of the modern paradigm of 
European concepts (in times of crisis) mostly in categories regarding the break 
in the traditional connections between the “experienced” (Erfahrenes) and the 
“expected” (Erwartbares).
10
 The horizon of the “expected” (the future) starts 
to increasingly dominate the “experienced”. The relation between the concept 
(der Begriff) and the conceptualised (das Begreifene) is inverted. The translo-
cation from the topological into the temporal perspective and conscious de- or 
re-contextualisation helps to understand how the concept gains a constructive 
role in history.
11
 Instead of one-meaningness, precisely historicity, politicalness, 
multi-meaningness, polemicalness, and conceptual change become precondi-
tions for the study of politics, culture, and history.
12
 The history of concepts is no 
longer an appendix to “social” history, but its driving force. 
Koselleck’s opus tackled a much wider range of topics than just the project of 
Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe and included philosophical and epistemological 
questions as to what history is. In his many essays he demonstrated the need for 
history and political science as two areas of scholarship to stay close together if 
we want to draw any “lessons” from the history of concepts (not from the “his-
8 The monumental work of Koselleck and his colleagues, accomplished over the course of 
several decades, comprises eight volumes of a dictionary of basic concepts (approximate-
ly 9,000 pages) covering 122 concepts or clusters of concepts such as revolution, state, 
rule, democracy, freedom, property, work, etc. See O. Brunner, W. Conze, R. Koselleck 
(eds.), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in 
Deutschland, Vols. 1–8, Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart, 1972–1997.
9 Cf. Reinhart Koselleck, “Einleitung”, in Brunner et al., Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, Vol. 1, 
p. XIV .
10
 Ibid., p. XV .
11
 Reinhart Koselleck, “Erfahrungswandel und Methodenwechsel. Eine historisch-anthro-
pologische Skizze“, in Christian Meier, Jörn Rüsen J. (eds.), Historische Methode, Munich, 
Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1988, pp. 13–61.
12
 Kari Palonen, “An Application of Conceptual History to Itself: From Method to Theory in 
Reinhart Koselleck’s Begriffsgeschifte”, Finnish Yearbook of Political Thought, 1 (1/1997), 
pp. 39–69. 

101
arendt , koselleck, and begreifen: rethinking politics and concepts in times of crisis
tory of ideas”). This close relationship that binds the history of concepts and 
their (socio-political) context represents one of the main points of intersection 
between Koselleck and Arendt.
A large portion of Hannah Arendt’s work consists of conceptual considerations 
as well, although not systematically historically. Her accounts at first sight look 
almost anarchic, like a bricolage, “wandering thought”, while rather “systemat-
ically” refusing traditional scientific methodology.
13
 Arendt was, mainly for this 
reason, for a long time not seen as a “conceptual” author. Due to her exceptional 
knowledge of classical thought, the unusual liveliness of the argumentation in 
her texts, and the simultaneous intertwining of highly complex theories with a 
free style of writing, she was often perceived as a somewhat essayistic writer.
14
Arendt seems to make a similar move as Koselleck, who defines Sattelzeit and 
the crisis as decisive moments in the transformation of traditional conceptuali-
ty. Only that she puts forward a thesis about the “break in (political) tradition,” 
which she historically locates in the total domination in the first half of the 20
th
 
century, while the break in theory preceded this. This becomes the negative 
starting point for thinking through the question of which modern concepts 
could frame an understanding of the new phenomena; whether these concepts 
still have a meaning at all, what consequences the break brings for our under-
standing of the basic concepts of politics (such as power, authority, violence, 
politics, bureaucracy, nation-state, imperialism, etc.) and how this affects our 
capacity for action. Arendt’s understanding of politics (not of the “political”) is 
13
 Cf. Antonia Grunenberg, “ Arendt, Heidegger, Jaspers: Thinking through the Breach in Tra-
dition”, Social Research, 74 (4/2007), Hannah Arendt’s Centenary: Political and Philosoph-
ical Perspectives, Part II, pp. 1003-1028. Steve Buckler, Hannah Arendt and Political Theory. 
Challenging the Tradition, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2011; Ernst Vollrath, 
“Hannah Arendt and the Method of Political Thinking”, Social Research (Summer 1977), 
pp. 160–182. 
14
 Hans Jörg Sigwart, The Wandering Thought of Hannah Arendt, London, Palgrave Macmil-
lan, 2016. It was, however, exactly this essayistic, experimental characteristic of her writ -
ing “style” that enabled her to translate the experiential dimension of her thought into 
meaningful conceptualisations and political thinking, taking into account the horizon of 
both actors and sufferers in political events. Cf. Wolfgang Heuer, “Verstehen als sichtbar-
machen von Erfahrungen”, in W. Heuer and I. von der Lühe (eds.), Dichterisch denken. 
Hannah Arendt und die Künste, Göttingen, Wallstein, 2007, pp. 243–257, and Ari-Elmeri 
Hyvönen, “The Janus face of political experience”, Arendt Studies, 2 (2018), pp. 125–147. 
Not surprisingly, Koselleck’s thinking of concepts too, apart from the Lexicon, is mostly 
written in the form of free style essays.

102
vlasta jalušič
based on this retrospective view from the point of rupture (between past and 
future) and establishes a specific framework for the reformulation of other basic 
concepts.
In the following, I first elaborate on the importance of the break in tradition 
and crisis as an incentive for conceptual thinking in both authors. I note that 
in fact both Arendt and Koselleck consider multiple breaks in tradition and not 
just one. Then, I examine their understanding of Begreifen, how they link it to 
the experience of the rupture in tradition and how this relates to their under-
standing of politics and the political, i.e. to their specific political conceptual-
ity. I conclude that there exists a common thinking space between Arendt and 
Koselleck concerning Begreifen: in spite of their different concepts of politics 
and the political, their thinking of the breaks in time and crisis can be read as 
complementary: especially their effort to return the responsibility for actions 
and concepts to the human sphere.
The break in tradition: thinking from the rupture in time
Totalitarian domination […] which […] cannot be comprehended through the usual 
categories of political thought, and whose ‘crimes’ cannot be judged by tradition-
al moral standards or punished within the legal framework of our civilization, has 
broken the continuity of Occidental history. The break in our tradition is now an 
accomplished fact.
15
Both Arendt and Koselleck proceed from experience as a central category in their 
conceptual inquiries, and from there they both strive to understand the condi-
tions for their respective subject of interest (primarily history in Koselleck and 
politics in Arendt).
16
 Arendt’s rethinking of concepts is based on her and others’ 
15
 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future. Eight Exercises in Political Thought, Middlesex, 
Penguin Books, 1985, p. 26.
16
 Both authors base their considerations of politics and history on specific notion of experi-
ence related to the acting and suffering of human beings. In Arendt, “all thought arises out 
of experience” (Hannah Arendt, “On Hannah Arendt”, in M. Hill (ed.), Hannah Arendt and 
the Recovery of the Public World, New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1979, p. 308). For Koselleck 
too, history is basically Erfahrungswissenschaft, the “science of experience,” and deals 
with the experiences and expectations of those who act and suffer (Reinhart Koselleck, 
Futures Past: on the Semantics of Historical Time, New York, Columbia University Press, 
2004, p. 256). On the notion of experience in both authors, cf. Hoffman; specifically re-

103
arendt , koselleck, and begreifen: rethinking politics and concepts in times of crisis
encounter with the totalitarian rule of the 20
th
 century. After experiencing shock 
in the face of the atrocities committed by the German Nazi regime, she pointed 
to the difficulty in understanding totalitarian institutions with the means and 
concepts that were available in the social and political sciences. Her questions 
were: What kind of government is this? How to understand it? Do we have ap-
propriate categories that can help us to think about it? The central phenomenon 
that prompted her thinking and attempt at an understanding (Begreifen) was 
the totalitarian institution of the extermination camp.
17
 For Arendt, its organ-
isation with the inversion of law and the total loss of meaning represents an 
ultimate novelty that marks the factual break in the Western political tradition. 
It provides a negative starting point for her questioning of political concepts. In 
the way this institution was set up, not only some groups became superfluous 
and were exterminated, but the human condition and crucial capacities them-
selves were at stake, such as plurality and capacity for action. That is why she 
considered such total domination to be “unprecedented”, in spite of the fact 
that phenomena had previously existed that were similar and contained the 
elements that could lead thereto (such as colonial violence, racism, eugenics, 
genocide, etc.). Arendt noticed that, while the whole program of extermination 
involved an insane consistency, it could not be understood with the help of the 
given concepts and categories – that is to say, it eluded conceptualisations. It 
therefore represents the ultimate challenge to the social and political sciences 
and induces not only a crisis of understanding, but a crisis of the existing theo-
ries. While representing a “questionable accumulation of tradition,” the avail-
garding Koselleck, cf. Gennaro Imbriano, Der Begriff der Politik. Die Moderne als Krisenzeit 
im Werk von Reihart Koselleck, Frankfurt and New York, Campus Velag, 2018, specifically 
regarding Arendt, cf. Hyvönen, “The Janus face of political experience”; and Jonas Holst, 
“Retrieving Experience: On the Phenomenology of Experience in Hegel and Kierkegaard, 
Arendt and Gadamer”, Open Philosophy, 2 (2019), pp. 480–490. 
17
 Arendt differentiated between concentration and extermination camps, which she consid-
ered “the most extreme form of concentration camps.” Concentration camps “existed long 
before totalitarianism made them the central institution of government,” and their specific 
was that they were not penal institutions intended for people who committed crime. Their 
inmates were those who “were deprived of their judicial person.” This deprivation of the 
status was already the first step towards extermination which, according to Arendt, “hap-
pens to human beings who for all practical purposes are already ‘dead’.” Hannah Arendt, 
Essays in Understanding, New York, San Diego and London, Harcourt Brace & Company, 
1994, p. 236. Cf. Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, London, André Deutsch, 1986, 
p. 286, pp. 300–302, pp. 437–459.

104
vlasta jalušič
able political concepts (i.e. of power, authority, violence, etc.) start concealing 
instead of revealing the new phenomena and events.
18
The reasons for this are twofold. First, there is a problem understanding what 
politics and the political were considered in the past, and what they became 
in the modern world – and this is connected with the way the whole tradition 
of Western political thought deals with political phenomena and events, while 
observing them from the point of view of the philosophical spectator (from Plato 
to Marx). That includes the question of whether the Western concepts of politics 
still reflect political experiences at all, or are just empty shells, and whether pol-
itics, from the point of view of political philosophy and the factual experience 
of extreme political violence in the 20
th
 century could still be deemed to be an 
activity that can claim any meaning.
19
 The break in tradition therefore took place 
in political philosophy, and in real history, while it is reflected in the crisis of 
conceptuality as well. 
In political thinking, the break was, on the one hand, epitomised by those the-
ories that turn the philosophical concept of the political (and historical) into 
the activity of social progress. Arendt devotes attention to the fact that tradi-
tional Western political thought very early turned away from the world of hu-
man affairs into the philosophical vita contemplativa and refused to take into 
account human plurality and the human potential for action – while modern 
philosophers returned to the political experience gained in the time of modern 
revolutions. That is why she deems Hegel’s philosophy to be the most important 
consequence of the French Revolution and Hegel to be the author who “actual-
ly broke with the tradition, because he was the first thinker to take history [as 
a realm of human affairs, remark added by V.J.] seriously, that is, as yielding 
truth.”
20
 Meanwhile, when elaborating on the event of the French and subse-
quent revolutions, modern thinkers have again, according to Arendt, taken a 
step away from the concrete experiences of the acting people and revived the 
18
 For more on this, see Vlasta Jalušič, “Les éléments de la tradition en question: Hannah 
Arendt en ex-Yugoslavie et dans les États successeurs”, Tumultes, 8 (30/2008), pp. 81–106. 
Cf. Arendt’s early essays in German: Hannah Arendt, Fragwürdige Traditionsbestände in 
politischen Denken der Gegenwart: vier Essays, Frankfurt, Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1957 .
19
 Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics, New York, Schocken Books, 2005, pp. 93–204.
20
 Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind. Vols. I & II, New York, Brace & Jovanovich, 1978, Vol. 
II, p. 45.

105
arendt , koselleck, and begreifen: rethinking politics and concepts in times of crisis
philosophical concept of the political. The result was the invention of the con-
cept of world history as a single process in the philosophy of history, whereby 
they attempted to find “the law of history”. This resulted in thinking about his-
tory in terms of (accelerated) processes and (social) progress. 
Arendt therefore writes about several breaks: a) the gap that always existed be-
tween the past and the future as the existential human condition; b) the break 
that arose in the 18
th
 century with modern political philosophy (already an-
nounced earlier by Machiavelli’s political thinking) and took place in the occi-
dental tradition together with the event of the modern revolutions (expressed in 
Hegel’s philosophy); c) 19
th
 century philosophy’s break with authority, tradition-
al values, and religion (in the works of Marx, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard); and 
d) the break embodied by the 20
th
-century totalitarian event that she considered 
to be the “final” rupture and therefore the ultimate crisis. This last break can 
no longer be bridged by means of traditional concepts; it is irreparable and has 
become a tangible reality, an experience of confusion for everyone and there-
fore a politically relevant fact as well.
21
 If politics, the state and its institutions, 
and so on, are capable of causing such horrors, and if the citizens are ready to 
participate, watching and/or ignoring it, what sense can these institutions make 
for the community at all?
22
 How can people arrange political forms of living to-
gether after such break?
According to Arendt, this burden is the predicament of our time represented in 
the conceptual and political crisis, which will not disappear but remain with 
us.
23
 This is not only a negative sign, but an opportunity as well, as it lays bare 
21
 Arendt, Between Past and Future. She discusses the breaks in several other texts. i.e. The 
Origins of Totalitarianism, On Revolution, and Hannah Arendt, “Karl Marx and the Tradi-
tion of Western Political Thought”, Social Research, 69 (2/2002), pp. 273–319, to mention 
just a few. 
22
 Arendt, The Promise of Politics.
23
 Jerome Kohn, “Introduction”, in Arendt, Essays in Understanding, p. xv. Cf. also Jakob Nor-
berg, “Arendt in Crisis: Political Thought Between Past and Future”, College Literature, 38 
(1/2011), pp. 131–149. Not only Arendt, but also several other thinkers such as Walter Ben-
jamin and Theodor W . Adorno noted that the 20
th
 century wars and the emergence of total-
itarianism with its culmination in Auschwitz represented a breaking point in history (cf. 
Barros, “Perspectiva sobe o tempo em Hannah Arendt e Koselleck”, p. 185) and revealed 
problems that are inherent to Western modernity. Arendt, however, linked this break with 
the need to rethink how the whole tradition conceptualised politics and human action. 

106
vlasta jalušič
the automatic assumptions of the social sciences: “Every science is necessarily 
based upon a few inarticulate, elementary, and axiomatic assumptions which 
are exposed and exploded only when confronted with altogether unexpected 
phenomena which can no longer be understood within the framework of its cat-
egories.”
24
 For Arendt, the contemporary (conceptual) thinking about politics 
and existing institutions therefore needs to start from this rupture in the pres-
ent and attempt to proceed “without banisters” (of tradition). It is worth noting 
here that Hannah Arendt – although she claimed that the tradition of political 
philosophy is responsible for our understanding of politics and political con-
cepts (because it did not take seriously their key dimension of human action) 
– in her attempt to understand total domination focused primarily on concrete 
social and political analysis. This means, on the study of actual structures of 
power, apparatuses of rule, rather than deriving conclusions from theoretical 
models.
25
 
Crisis, revolutions, and modern conceptuality
What in Arendt occurs as the rupture between past and future is represented 
in Koselleck by the phenomenon of crisis. Crisis originally implies a temporal 
dimension, and thus becomes a concept which, “in modern times, implicitly 
expressed a theory of time.”
26
 Moreover, crisis is one of the central concepts 
through which modern political conceptuality started to develop in the time 
between the 18
th
 and 19
th
 centuries (the so-called Sattelzeit), when the modern 
concept of time was born: “Crisis directs itself, as it were, toward the necessity 
of time to make itself comprehensible as a concept.”
27
 
In classical thought, crisis was connected with several domains (originating 
from medicine) and became a figurative expression for various kinds of un-
certainty, risk, and the absence of continuity, which would provide a basis for 
explaining new events. With the Neuzeit, the concept becomes (together with 
some other sets of concepts) generalised and starts to crucially define an entire 
24
 Arendt, Essays in Understanding, p. 232. 
25
 Cf. Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 98.
26
 Reinhart Koselleck, “Remarks on the History of the Concept of Crisis”, in R. Lilly and J. 
Sallis (eds.), The Ancients and the Moderns, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1996, 
p. 149.
27
 Ibid.

107
arendt , koselleck, and begreifen: rethinking politics and concepts in times of crisis
epoch and its events. Crisis articulates a growing consciousness of the existen-
tial difference between the way the world is experienced, and the expectations 
through which our intentions and anticipations about the world are formulat-
ed.
28
 Despite the fact that this is a universal condition of active human agents, 
the gap between the experienced (past) and the expected (future) becomes even 
more pronounced during revolutions. To underline the situation of such a crisis 
of tradition, where one is all of a sudden confronted with an absolute novelty, 
Koselleck refers to the times of modern revolutions and cites Tocqueville: “I go 
back from age to age up to the remotest antiquity, but I find no parallel to what is 
occurring before my eyes; as the past has ceased to throw its light upon the future, 
the mind of man wanders in obscurity.”
29
 [Italics added by V . J.]
Arendt uses the same sentences of Tocqueville to emphasise the feeling of an 
absolute novelty and the rupture in historical time that occurred with the mod-
ern revolutions and the emergence of the concept of history. For both Arendt 
and Koselleck, revolution represents the key to understanding the modern ex-
perience of politics, history, and also to the novel perception of temporality. Like 
Arendt, Koselleck considers it a novelty that cannot be compared to any pre-
vious political event in written history. The keyword “revolution” represents a 
paradigmatic example for his study of the history of concepts (in addition to the 
very concept of “history”) and it stands in his work as a kind of basis for his lat-
er monumental project Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe.
30
 In his elaboration of the 
notion of revolution, Koselleck relies on several authors, but also specifically 
refers to the book On Revolution by Hannah Arendt.
31
 He too – like Arendt – sum-
marises Karl Griewank’s extensive study on the modern concept of revolution.
32
 
Despite the fact that they both proceed from the same moment of the break in 
28
 Koselleck, Futures Past, p. 257. 
29
 Alexis de Tocqueville, On Democracy in America, cited in Koselleck, Futures Past, p. 31. 
These sentences are cited many times by both Hannah Arendt and Reinhart Koselleck 
when dealing with the phenomena and concept of time after the modern revolutions and 
the question of the tradition of political and historical thought. Arendt quotes it in her 
works On Revolution, Between Past and Future, The Life of the Mind, and Koselleck in Ver-
gangene Zukunft (Futures Past) and Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe.
30
 Cf. Olsen, Beyond utopianism and relativism, p. 172 ff.
31
 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1990.
32
 Karl Griewank, Der neuzeitliche Revolutionsbegriff: Entstehung und Entwicklung, Weimar, 
Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1955.

108
vlasta jalušič
tradition (and the crisis that accompanies it), the understanding of this break 
and the role of the modern revolutions in it is different for each of the authors.
Koselleck treats the concept of revolution in the broader context of his concep-
tual investigations and connects it to a large extent with the results of his early 
reflection on the crisis.
33
 There he attempted to explain the reasons for the crisis 
and therefore the rupture that occurred between the 18
th
 and 19
th
 centuries and 
which, according to him, continues to the present day. One of the key findings is 
that the deep crisis that took shape in the 18
th
 and 19
th
 centuries fuelled the ten-
sions that arose within the absolutist state (from his viewpoint, already a typical 
modern state that pacified religious wars and introduced the principle of moral 
and religious neutrality, by which it dug its own grave, so to speak). It produced 
bourgeois society, understood as the “new world” and having global aspira-
tions, while at the same time denying the old world, i.e. the absolutist state and 
its neutrality. The key political question of whether the apparatus of absolutism 
and its sovereign ruler will continue to rule, or whether the bourgeoisie of the 
new society will rule, is resolved by a revolution. Koselleck identifies two ep-
ochal events at the beginning and end of classical absolutism: at the beginning 
there were the religious civil wars that this state pacified, and at the end there 
was a different civil war, the French Revolution, which brought an end to the 
absolutist state.
34
 The process of secularisation thus led to a specific dialectic, 
disastrous for the absolutist state. It was only with this event that the crisis be-
came a constant companion of the modern age, and that European history, by 
pulling the whole world into a state of permanent crisis, became world history. 
In later writings, Koselleck analyses this spread and interaction of events in Eu-
rope and globally with Bloch’s words: Gleichzeitigkeit der Ungleichzeitigkeiten 
(the simultaneity of the non-simultaneousnesses).
35
In this constellation, a world of politics that is separated from morality becomes 
a constant object of criticism and, according to Koselleck, practically redun-
dant. It is replaced by the critique developed by the philosophy of history and 
33
 Reinhart Koselleck, Kritik und Krise: Ein Beitrag zur Pathogenese der Bürgerlichen Welt, 
Munich, Pieper, 1973/1959. Cf. also Andrew Simon Gilbert, The Crisis Paradigm. Descrip-
tion and Prescription in Social and Political Theory, Cham, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, pp. 
61–103. 
34
 Ibid., p. 11.
35
 Olsen, Beyond utopianism and relativism, p. 159.

109
arendt , koselleck, and begreifen: rethinking politics and concepts in times of crisis
the constant revolutionisation of consciousness, and this becomes fatal to the 
political way of reasoning. This type of utopian political thought, due to a break 
in time, focuses on the future, and the imagined future increasingly begins to 
determine the way in which the political experience and thinking of the present 
takes place.
36
 
Based on the split between politics (the corrupt absolutist state) and morality 
(the Enlightenment’s philosophy of history, representing the ideology of the ris-
ing bourgeoisie), a specific “dialectic of the Enlightenment” and new historical 
and political terminology formed. Koselleck sees a connection between the cri-
tique of the Enlightenment that emerged and the growing crisis, and underlines 
that the critics were unaware of this connection: it was hidden from them in 
“images of the future” of the philosophy of history and the vision of the “single” 
history they adopted. The view of the possibility of a political solution to the 
crisis is therefore blurred: what obscures it is the Enlightenment concept itself.
For Koselleck, therefore, the turning point that occurs with his version of the 
break in tradition represents the beginning of a kind of “ideal-type” of develop-
ment that takes place from the Enlightenment and French Revolution onwards.
37
 
It is a historical movement of modernity, which only intensifies in the 19
th
 centu-
ry. Its characteristic is a critique with an exaggerated focus on the future, which 
produces the historical philosophical concepts which he later describes as 
Bewegungsbegriffe (movement concepts) such as “emancipation”, “freedom”, 
“revolution”, and also “history”. They are, on the one hand, connected with the 
idea that history and human development can be controlled and, on the other, 
with the belief in progress which went together with the then technological de-
velopments and the experience of temporal acceleration whereby experience 
and expectation increasingly diverge.
Koselleck understands this trend as dangerous and irresponsible political 
thought. He criticises political utopias due to their Politikunfähigkeit (inability 
for politics).
38
 By focusing on the future, this “moralising” thought devalues the 
political present. He is also a sharp critic of the normativism of political theory, 
36
 “In the crossfire of criticism, not only was the then current politics worn down, but in the 
same process politics itself, also politics as a constant task of human existence, dissolved 
itself into utopian future constructions.” Ibid., p. 9.
37
 Olsen, Beyond utopianism and relativism, p. 98. 
38
 Huhnholz, Von Carl Schmitt zu Hannah Arendt?, p. 8.

110
vlasta jalušič
which, according to him, makes a decisive contribution to pushing politics as an 
activity to the sidelines. From a different point of view, Koselleck then develops 
his conception of history as an open course that presupposes actors who con-
tribute to its diversity, which consists of unpredictable elements. History cannot 
be “made” according to desires and utopian scenarios, but can only be “history 
in the plural.”
39
Arendt too, writes unfavourably about the philosophy of history, its “depolit-
icising” core and projections of world history developments – but not for the 
same reason as Koselleck. While being critical of projections of the philosophy 
of history and their utopian character, she maintains that, after the rediscovery 
of the human capacity for action in the French Revolution, the philosophers 
again turned away from the political experience. The event of revolution marks 
for her a different turning point regarding politics. She closely analyses several 
revolutions and discovers in them a temporary disclosure of politics and specific 
original political forms of power which usually disappear and which the specta-
tor’s gaze attempts to suppress (“the lost treasure”). 
Differently than Arendt, Koselleck remains profoundly critical/suspicious of 
any political revolution and rather rejects it as a civil war (with the necessary 
element of violence in it) – and instead further explores and re-describes other 
different uses of the concept.
40
 Arendt re-describes revolution as a specific ex-
perience of action “in concert” and with a political foundation, and thus con-
ceptualises it differently than other revolutionary thinkers (e.g. Marx, whom she 
sharply critiques). She warns against anti-political interpretations of revolution 
as merely a fight for power, and therefore civil war and violence.
This not only indicates the different attitude towards the concept and elabora-
tion of the experience of revolution in both authors, but also a different under-
standing of political action and politics. While Koselleck understands revolu-
tion (in accordance with his analysis in Kritik und Krise) as occupying and the 
withering away of the state and politics,
41
 Arendt sees the possibility of such 
39
 See Koselleck, “On the disposability of history”, in Futures Past, pp. 193-204, cf. Olsen, 
Beyond utopianism and relativism. 
40
 Koselleck, “Historical criteria of the modern concept of revolution”, in Futures Past, pp. 
43–57. 
41
 Cf. Koselleck, Kritik und Krise, p. 101. 

111
arendt , koselleck, and begreifen: rethinking politics and concepts in times of crisis
development only if revolution fails in the foundation of a new political con-
stitution and for this reason takes the course of violence and ends up in terror. 
For her, revolutions are basically the foundations of new political communities 
(guaranteeing freedom) by acting in concert. 
As a final point concerning thinking the break and crisis in both authors, it 
should be noted that Koselleck, unlike Arendt, and like many of his academic 
contemporaries in Germany, did not devote himself to research on war crimes, 
the Holocaust, and concentration camps until the 1970s. This perspective ap -
peared only in his later work and is connected with his study of the dreams in 
concentration camps, researched by Hannah Arendt’s close friend Charlotte Be-
radt.
42
 His reflections turn out to be similar to Arendt’s, at times even expressed 
in similar words; he speaks, for example, of a “loss of reality”. Koselleck, like 
Arendt, maintains that the experience of terror cannot (really) be understood 
and sufficiently explained with the usual (causal) means and categories of in-
terpretation. Due to the absurdity, extreme suffering, and loss of meaning expe-
rienced by the victims of terror, he, too, saw the Holocaust as a radical break in 
history which poses new, perhaps enormous, challenges to understanding and 
interpreting these experiences. Addressing this break by Koselleck could there-
fore, according to Olsen, be understood as a new Sattelzeit.
43
Begreifen 
“To think history, remains a challenge, understanding (Begreifen) will always 
force us to rethink.”
44
 
Arendt and Koselleck relate their notion of concept (Begriff) to “understanding/
comprehension” – and it is through this approach that their political and his-
torical concepts are bound to the worldly (political and social) experiences. In 
42
 Charlotte Beradt, Das Dritte Reich des Traums; mit einem Nachwort von Reinhart Koselleck, 
Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1981. Cf. Koselleck, “Terror and Dream. Methodological Remarks on 
the Experience of Time During the Third Reich”, in Futures Past, pp. 205–221.
43
 Cf. Olsen, Beyond utopianism and relativism, pp. 265, 268.
44
 Cf. Reinhart Koselleck, “Begriffliche Innovationen der Aufklärungssprache”, in R. Kosel-
leck, U. Spree, and W . Steinmetz (eds.), Begriffsgeschichten: Studien zur Semantik und Prag-
matik der historischen und sozialen Sprache, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 2006, pp. 309–339, cited 
after Christian Geulen, “Reply”, Contributions to the History of Concepts, 7 (1/2012), p. 118.

112
vlasta jalušič
German, they both use the term begreifen (to grasp) for what in English usually 
entails “to comprehend” or “to conceive”. Yet the meaning of the concept of 
Begreifen gets lost in translation, especially its link to experience, if it is trans-
lated as “conceiving” while it is closer to “grasping” (Be-greifen).
 45
 What does 
the concept of Begreifen mean?
Arendt explains her basic notion of Begreifen that frames her “method” of po-
litical thinking in several texts, but the account is particularly condensed in the 
introduction to the Origins of Totalitarianism. It is closely related to her question 
of where one should start to think after the experience of the break in tradition, 
resulting in total domination and terror. She writes: 
Comprehension (Begreifen) does not mean denying the outrageous, deducing 
the unprecedented from precedents, or explaining phenomena by such analo-
gies and generalities that the impact of reality and the shock of experience are 
no longer felt. It means, rather, examining and bearing consciously the burden 
which our century has placed on us – neither denying its existence nor submit-
ting meekly to its weight. Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, 
attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality – whatever it may be.
46
This explanation corresponds to what she said in different ways in several pub-
lished texts and in her series of lectures “The Great Tradition and the Nature of 
Totalitarianism”,
47
 the topic which became her main task when attempting to 
explain and differentiate the novelty of total domination (as she saw it) from 
tyranny. As stated above, Arendt’s predicament was how to understand/concep-
tualise the novel phenomenon of total domination, which has, in her opinion, 
caused “the explosion of categories of thought and standards of judgement.” 
Therefore, her main question was: “Where can appropriate categories be found 
to understand the nature of totalitarianism?” And her answer: “To understand 
the new form of government we have to understand anew, in the light of our 
45
 Cf. Geulen, ibid., Elías José Palti, “Reinhart Koselleck: His Concept of the Concept and 
Neo-Kantianism”, Contributions to the History of Concepts, 6 (2/2011), pp. 1–20.
46
 Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, p. viii.
47
 Some of them are published in Arendt, Essays in Understanding; cf. Hannah Arendt, “The 
Great Tradition and the Nature of Totalitarianism”, 1
st
 lecture, New York, New School for 
Social Research, 1953 (Series: Speeches and Writings File, 1923-1975).

113
arendt , koselleck, and begreifen: rethinking politics and concepts in times of crisis
experience, the traditional forms and the experiences which they express. Ex-
perience of living together, of Men, not Man.”
48
 
In Between Past and Future and some other essays, Arendt presented her blue-
print for understanding concepts as exercises in thinking that are strictly bound 
to events and phenomena in crisis (e.g. the crisis of education or culture, sub-
sequently also the Crisis of the Republic). In The Life of the Mind she further 
worked on the notion of Begreifen from the perspective of thinking, willing, 
and judging – while asking the question of whether thinking could prevent 
evildoing – such as happened in the terror of a totalitarian regime. Concepts as 
“thought things” need to have the potential to find out the “sense” (Sinn, mean-
ing)
49
 of the matter and not just describe what and how a thing functions, etc. 
All concepts are linked to specific experiences and proceed therefrom (either 
worldly and sensible or the experience of thinking and understanding), and 
while they at the same time go beyond it, they also need to be referred back to 
it – in a different setting.
As the experience of action has special importance in Arendt’s thought, her un-
derstanding – and therefore conceptualisation – of politics is in fact tied to it: 
one needs to take into account those particular moments in which politics as 
human action takes place. These events cannot be seen as “objects” of thought, 
but rather as temporal phenomena that appear as constituted by both those 
who are involved in them as well as by the “observers”, those who are interest-
ed in political events and think, judge, and, finally, write about them. There-
fore, political and historical science (both being closely related) are not merely 
“objective” sciences, but always already condition and “frame” political events 
both by narration about them and by their former conceptualisations. Thereby, 
they are in fact a part of the political phenomena. Arendt distinguishes between 
objectivity and impartiality. For her, political thinking, political science as she 
called it, is not just an “objective” weighing of events or measuring them ac-
cording to pre-given concepts, but understanding and judging, which is never 
blindly bound to the existing criteria. It always to a certain extent “participates” 
in and belongs to the phenomenal nature of politics.
50
48
 Ibid.
49
 Sinn is usually translated into English as meaning, yet it relates to sense and senses. 
50
 Cf. Vollrath, “Hannah Arendt and the Method of Political Thinking”.

114
vlasta jalušič
Arendt’s notion of Begreifen is therefore specific: it is linked to formal conceptu-
al questions, on the one hand, while on the other it is closely tied to rethinking 
concepts/events from the perspective of a specific experience. It is non-causal 
and inevitably linked to the capacity of imagination, which always comes to the 
forefront when we attempt to understand the actions and suffering of others 
(we can “think with” others and so practice what Arendt calls, with Kant, an en-
larged mentality). Imagination helps us in “bridging the abyss” to others and is 
“part of the dialogue of understanding” while enabling us “to see things in their 
proper perspective.”
51
 Koselleck too – most vividly when writing on terror and 
dreams – underlines the role of the historian’s imagination, who, in attempting 
to understand terror in the Third Reich, needs to use the means of fiction and 
not causal thinking or drawing on analogies.
52
 
Political concepts need to disclose and re-construct the Sinn/meaning of a con-
crete event. If we look at one of the most difficult political concepts, the very 
concept of the political and politics, then understanding (Begreifen), if we fol-
low Arendt, is definitely not a matter of establishing “truth” but of asking a 
question of Sinn/meaning (which is always temporal and concrete). Arendt, in 
her planned but never finalised book on politics (Introduction to Politics), looked 
into the Sinn/meaning of politics and not the “concept” of “the political” –  
although she reproaches the political tradition with never having a “concept” 
of the political due to thinking of Man in the singular and not the plural.
53
 In 
this respect, Arendt’s consideration is radically different from, for example, C. 
Schmitt advocating for the “essence” of the concept of the political, in which he 
then finds an emptied form of the “original” conflict between friend and foe, 
which is constantly repeated in various forms throughout history.
For Koselleck, concepts do not precede the way they appear in reality and are 
not defined a priori, without a link to the concrete, historical predicates that 
are attributed to them in concrete circumstances – therefore to what he terms 
“experience”. Concept, differently than “idea”, always contains a plurality of 
content.
54
 
51
 Arendt, Essays in Understanding, p. 323. 
52
 Koselleck, “Terror and Dream”. 
53
 Arendt, Introduction to Politics. 
54
 Ibid., p. 11.

115
arendt , koselleck, and begreifen: rethinking politics and concepts in times of crisis
A word can get one meaning [eindeutig] because it has many meanings [mehr-
deutig]. A concept, on the contrary, must retain multiple meanings in order to be 
able to be a concept. The concept is tied to a word, but it is at the same time more 
than the word. According to our method, a word becomes a concept, when the 
full richness of social and political context of meaning, in which, and for which, 
a word is used, is condensed into one word.
55
 [Translation by V .J.]
This description clearly shows Koselleck’s distance from the legacy of the school 
of the history of ideas. Against the aporia between the clear content of the con-
cept that enables an unambiguous definition and its changing discursive posi-
tioning within historical time, Koselleck accepted Nietzsche’s maxim that “all 
concepts escape definition that summarize semiotically an entire process; only 
that which has no history is definable.”
56
 While they do not endure definition, 
concepts still – through their differentiation – bring about a certain unity of 
sense, and can, once they are generated, also be broadly employed and gener-
alised. Through such process of differentiation, Koselleck arrives at a series of 
basic concepts and counter-concepts that are “purified” of sensuality and im-
mediacy and are brought to a certain generality.
57
 
For Arendt too, concepts are not definitions but reflect “living” judgements. To 
think conceptually is to differentiate. In The Life of the Mind she points to the 
fact that – from the perspective of thinking – concepts are linked to questions 
that arise out of lived experience. They refer, for example, to “What do we mean 
when we use this class of words, later called ‘concepts’” – such as friendship, 
knowledge, courage, justice, etc.
58
 With the help of the “answer of Socrates,” 
she describes these concepts as “part and parcel of our everyday speech,” yet 
“the most difficult for the mind to comprehend.”
59
 They get slippery when one 
attempts to define them, and their meaning is by no means stable. In fact, con-
cepts are manifestations of thinking. When they are written down and defined, 
55
 Reinhart Koselleck, “Einleitung”, in O. Brunner, W . Conze, and R. Koselleck (eds.), Geschicht-
liche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, Vol. 
1, Stuttgart, Ernst Klett Verlag, 1972, p. XXII; see also Koselleck, Futures Past, p. 85.
56
 Koselleck, “Einleitung”, p. XXIII; Koselleck, Futures Past, p. 84, cf. Palti, “Reinhart Kosel -
leck”, p. 7.
57
 This still shows a considerable similarity with C. Schmitt’s approach to concepts. 
58
 Arendt, The Life of the Mind, Vol. I, p. 166.
59
 Ibid., p. 176.

116
vlasta jalušič
so that common opinion gets hold of them, they might become mere results of 
cognition – no longer related to experience, and therefore need to be treated 
in the light of new experience. When referring to language, Arendt writes: “All 
philosophical terms are metaphors, frozen analogies as it were, whose true 
meaning discloses itself when we dissolve the term into the original context.”
60
 
As stated by Palti, concept in Koselleck is “nothing but the very semantic web 
woven through the series of its changing definitions, which are deposited in it 
and become reactivated in the present uses of that concept.”
61
 While they have 
a contingent nature, concepts contain historical experience, and can, therefore, 
“make” concrete actions meaningful. They articulate and connect living expe-
riences (and expectations) and also create new meanings. In order to grasp and 
think through long-term processes, conceptual history must therefore distance 
itself from social history. Concepts are “indexes of structural transformations” 
and retrospectively also “indexes of transformation in social experience.”
62
 Ko-
selleck, like Arendt, avoided Geistesgeschichte either in the form of a history of 
ideas or in the form of a mirror history of material processes. His focus was the 
experience condensed in concepts and the theory invested therein.
63
 
Both Arendt and Koselleck are (their criticism of philosophy of history notwith-
standing) to a certain extent Hegelians when it comes to thinking of concepts 
and understanding/Begreifen.
64
 Yet they are critical of any “system” and the im-
manent meaning contained in history, even if it discloses itself as a (dialectical) 
process.
65
 The question they attempt to answer is: How can anything new in his-
tory emerge at all if there is pre-stabilised, also conceptual, harmony? How can 
60
 Ibid., p. 104.
61
 Palti, “Reinhart Koselleck”, p. 11.
62
 Ibid., p. 9.
63
 “That the history is condensed/sedimented [niederschlägt] in specific concepts and it only 
becomes history in the ways it is grasped/understood/conceptualised at the time [wie sie 
jeweils begriffen wird] is the theoretical premise of the historical method that we use here.” 
Koselleck, “Einleitung”, p. XXIII [Translation ‘compiled’ by V . J.]
64
 I do not have space for further discussion of this within the framework of this text. For 
an elaboration of Koselleck’s concept of the concept of Hegel and neo-Kantianism, see 
Palti, “Reinhart Koselleck”. For the Arendt-Hegel constellations, see Vlasta Jalušič, “G. W .F . 
Hegel”, in W. Heuer et al. (eds.), Arendt-Handbuch. Leben – Werk – Wirkung, Stuttgart / 
Weimar, Metzler, 2011, pp. 216–221.
65
 Arendt, The Life of the Mind. Vol.  II.  B, pp. 39–51.

117
arendt , koselleck, and begreifen: rethinking politics and concepts in times of crisis
we understand (begreifen) that we are dealing with something new? For Arendt, 
this is only possible if we take into account the ability of humans to begin anew 
as a political capacity. For Koselleck, history represents a human “product” 
which is an open and contingent process and not a construction drawn by a 
transcendent demiurge.
66
Crisis as a crisis and a moment to understand
“For whenever in our own century revolutions appeared on the scene of politics, 
they were seen in images drawn from the course of the French Revolution, com-
prehended in concepts coined by spectators, and understood in terms of historical 
necessity.”
67
Koselleck sees the origins of “movement concepts” such as revolution, emanci-
pation, freedom, history, etc., in the modern rupture between the space of ex-
perience and the horizon of expectation. These concepts, which are the result 
of a crisis, at the same time constantly generate it. The horizon of expectation, 
which is critical and moral at the same time, produces an anti-political effect 
and has a share in the “acceleration” of history and real time. The crisis reveals 
the impossibility of formulating a politics that would meet the real challenges.
Arendt takes a step further and asks why philosophers and historians tend to 
construct anti-political concepts and think either in terms of analogies or in cat-
egories that (no longer) correspond to actual (political) experience. Koselleck’s 
answer to this would probably be that they escape to the realm of morality (cri-
tique), ignore political experience, and with utopian thinking further increase 
the rupture between experience and expectation. Arendt’s answer is that they 
jump into theory, a world that is elevated above politics and observed from Ar-
chimedes’ point, and then they judge politics according to their theoretical or 
philosophical criteria – coming from the experience of thinking, not acting. 
They want to regulate the world from the point of view of the will – which reach-
es into the future and subsumes the concept of politics based on the model of 
ruling and ruled (in Koselleck’s case, this would be essentially normative and 
therefore “moral” and not political). 
66
 Palti, “Reinhart Koselleck”, p. 12.
67
 Arendt, On Revolution, p. 56.

118
vlasta jalušič
Both authors, therefore, question the responsibility of those who think of his-
tory, politics, and human agency, and discuss concepts. Koselleck, like Arendt, 
argues that thinkers who pursued a moral argument had no concept of poli-
tics, and that they contributed to the “incapacity for politics.” He also addresses 
the critique of the Enlightenment philosophy of history to all those who sub-
sequently, for example in the revolutionary tradition, perceived themselves as 
initiated into the laws of revolution, understood as a self-accelerating process 
(of history). They pursued, according to Koselleck, a conscious aspiration for 
leadership.
68
 In other respects, he criticises the attitude of those who believe 
that it is possible to “make history” as something available and shows how well 
the historian Marx (in Ludwig Bonaparte’s 18
th
 Brumaire) understood the limits 
of the possibility of “making” history while he was shifting the horizon of expec-
tation ever further into the future.
69
Arendt too, criticises philosophers of will who attempt to rule instead of think-
ing. For her, the two different spheres of human experience (one arising from 
human action, the other from thinking) lead to two entirely different conceptu-
alisations of politics. Arendt sets out to explore these experiences and the impli-
cations that they have for political thinking and action. The first is the recurring 
experience of acting people (who live through it spontaneously, at times when 
they act together), from which in history, according to Arendt, there always arise 
anew specific forms of power – and in On Revolution she shows this in the case 
of the councils. However, they – like a lost treasure – usually sink into oblivion. 
This decline is greatly aided by another experience, which conceptualises poli-
tics on the model of philosophical and/or philosophical-historical thinking. The 
thinkers who wrote of modern revolutions mainly did not create new concepts 
according to the political experience of the joint actions of plural people, but 
relied on the old ones, and restored, adapted, and redefined them under the 
conditions of a “broken” tradition (for example, the concept of revolution, the 
concept of authority). This is, according to Arendt, one of the reasons why the 
experience of the French Revolution repeats itself as if it were a general expe-
rience of revolution – through the produced conceptual frameworks of necessi-
ty, violence, and terror – and why revolution is rejected as automatic violence 
rather than political action that can create stable political communities in the 
68
 Koselleck, Futures Past, p. 54.
69
 Ibid., pp. 201–202.

119
arendt , koselleck, and begreifen: rethinking politics and concepts in times of crisis
long run. The past experience of the joint actions of plural actors is not “immor-
talised” in memory through appropriate concepts, but is replaced by the results 
of the activities of observers-philosophers: it therefore appears as the result of 
(individual or collective) will and decisionism, whereby the stronger or weaker 
conflict of (sovereign) wills results in eventual conflict resolution/pacification. 
The meaning (not goal!) of politics is not freedom, it is rather understood as a 
means of ruling, governing, and managing “crises” (an oxymoron according to 
the original concept of crisis).
Koselleck’s perception of politics is, as I noted earlier, substantially different 
from that of Arendt. While she understands politics as the joint action of equals, 
Koselleck, who proceeded from Schmitt’s understanding of “the political”, 
nevertheless relies on the original meaning of crisis and conflict. Even though 
he, through a specific anthropology, which he conceives as a condition for any 
history,
70
 later forms a similar “basis” as Arendt in The Human Condition,
71
 he 
nonetheless establishes a binary (and not plural)  structure of the human sit-
uation.
72
 He departs from Schmitt’s essential conflict structure of the political 
and transforms it from the Begriff des Politischen (concept of the political) into 
the Begriff der Politik (concept of politics).
73
 Despite the emphasis on human 
action and plurality, he sees politics primarily as an original split, crisis, and 
conflict
74
 (as opposed to utopian projections of movement concepts). In order 
to achieve what is important to the community in the present, the political rec-
onciliation of conflicts and realistic expectations are required. Palonen insists 
that it is precisely the preservation of variability, plurality, and conflict that is 
the key to Koselleck’s temporal perception of concepts. This also makes it pos-
sible to understand conceptual change, rather than a kind of “anthropology” in 
spatial terms. He argues that besides Heidegger and Schmitt, Arendt too relies 
on anthropology and ontology, but not so Koselleck, who introduces the tempo-
70
 Cf. Imbriano, Der Begriff der Politik; Olsen, Beyond utopianism and relativism, p. 74.
71
 Cf. Hoffman, “Koselleck, Arendt, and the Anthropology of Historical Experience”. 
72
 Cf. Janet Coleman, “The Practical Use of Begriffsgeschichte”, Finnish Yearbook of Political 
Thought, 3 (1/1999), pp. 28–40.
73
 Cf. Imbriano, Der Begriff der Politik. 
74
 Cf. Timo Pankakoski “Conflict, Context, Concreteness: Koselleck and Schmitt on Con-
cepts”, Political Theory, 38 (6/December 2010), pp. 749–779.

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vlasta jalušič
rality of concepts rather than spatiality.
75
 However, Arendt’s understanding of 
political phenomena does not imply Palonen’s emphasis, as it is by no means 
any kind of essentialism. Her Sinn (sense) and not the “meaning” (Bedeutung) 
of politics is temporal, not some eternally present essence. Even when she says 
that the Sinn of politics (as opposed to the thesis of politics as ruling and being 
ruled or conflict) is freedom, she adds that “its field of experience is action,” so 
that freedom is not a given in terms of space, but “takes place” only temporarily, 
when people act together.
76
That this move was, all the differences notwithstanding, well understood by 
Koselleck is obvious from his elaboration of Arendt’s approach in his Laudatio 
to Furet, and the connection of his own thinking to these considerations. He 
emphasised that historical thinking must not abolish the political postulate of 
freedom: “The political postulate of freedom also has methodological conse-
quences for Histoire […]. The human being is responsible for the choice of the 
categories, by means of which s/he disentangles the history. It must be those 
which are also able to motivate and guide political action.”
77
 
Conclusion: The common thinking space
Despite the impression that each of them focused on the one main break be-
tween the past and the future, Arendt and Koselleck in fact both consider mul-
tiple breaks in tradition and not just one.
78
 To repeat, the existential tension be-
tween the past and the future (between the space of experience and the horizon 
of expectation) is a key moment of the human condition for both. For Koselleck, 
the main conceptual change in modernity occurred with the Sattlezeit, the En-
lightenment, and the French Revolution, and was later “supplemented” by the 
industrial and technological revolution and the “acceleration” of time. Arendt, 
as well, sees the French Revolution as crucial to Neuzeit and as the advent of 
the new temporality in which modern political conceptuality was born – yet not 
75
 Kari Palonen, “The Life and Work of Reinhart Koselleck”, Redescriptions. Yearbook of Po-
litical Thought, Conceptual History and Feminist Theory, 16 (1/2013), p. 219.
76
 Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 145.
77
 Koselleck, “Laudatio”, p. 9, emphasis added by V . J.
78
 One can agree with Palti, who problematises the thesis of a single break. Cf. Elias José 
Palti, An Archaeology of the Political: Regimes of Power from the Seventeenth Century to the 
Present, New York, Columbia University Press, 2017.

121
arendt , koselleck, and begreifen: rethinking politics and concepts in times of crisis
in accordance with the factual political experiences. Moreover, she too address-
es the socio-technological development of the 19
th
 and 20
th
 centuries as leading 
to the process thinking and acceleration. Her main emphasis, however, is that 
the onset of totalitarian rule in the 20
th
 century with the creation of extermina-
tion camps created a factual and definite break with tradition. While Koselleck 
at first did not conceive the terror of the concentration camps as another break 
in tradition, subsequently, in the 1970s, he seemed to join Arendt in thinking 
about another turning point that occurred with the 20
th
 century terror of the 
Holocaust. 
Arendt’s conclusion regarding the “difficulties of understanding” which occur 
when faced with the factual break in tradition is that one must unveil precisely 
the “burden” of incomprehensible experiences as the burden of our time. These 
events are only incomprehensible if the explanation is tied to the methodically 
constructed theoretical concepts that have lost their link with human capacities 
(and deeds and misdeeds). Therefore, even if one cannot objectively, by explain-
ing the causal chain, describe concentration camps, one can still attempt to un-
derstand them.
79
 It is this “non-communicative” locus comprising the starting 
point of her thinking from which Arendt develops her specific approach to Be-
greifen and political concepts. Koselleck comes very close to this when thinking 
about understanding the experience of concentration camps through dreams. 
Arendt calls Begreifen a “strange enterprise” that is always an attempt to ap-
proach and utter what “is”. It is not a theoretical procedure, but, so to speak, 
“the other side of action,” “that form of cognition, distinct from many others, by 
which acting men (and not men who are engaged in contemplating some pro-
gressive or doomed course of history) eventually can come to terms with what 
irrevocably happened and be reconciled with what unavoidably exists.”
80
 
She addresses the problems with contemporary political concepts not only in 
terms of the problematic of modernity, but as being inherent in the whole tra-
dition, particularly due to the neglect of plurality, which makes it impossible 
to think politics from the perspective of active people. That is why the modern 
(transformed) concepts contain the questionable sediments that became radi-
79
 Arendt, Essays in Understanding, p. 302, and Vollrath, “Hannah Arendt and the Method of 
Political Thinking”, p. 172. 
80
 Arendt, Essays in Understanding, p. 321–322.

122
vlasta jalušič
calised in the totalitarian rule of the 20
th
 century and why their further use hin-
ders an understanding of the new forms of government.
81
Paradoxically as this may sound, it seems that the thinking of the breaks in time 
and crisis by these authors, with such different conceptualisations of politics, 
can complement each other. Koselleck thinks in terms of stable structures that 
can prevent conflict, war, and so on. Arendt thinks in terms of the formation of 
such structures, the actions that can establish them, and at the same time about 
maintaining the capacity to act as the capacity for freedom and peaceful=politi-
cal interruptions of the seemingly automatic processes of society.
Koselleck’s Begreifen is a radical reconsideration of historical thinking and the 
way we understand history. By determining human experience, plurality, and 
reciprocity as a condition of the historical process, he highlighted the need to 
think history and politics together. As Mehring wrote about his last work: “With 
the ‘Begriffsgeschichten’, Koselleck makes it clearer than ever before that his 
theory and method represent a normative and political claim of their own, aim-
ing at a ‘grasped history’ (begriffene Geschichte), a clear historical picture. With 
Thucydides, Koselleck argues for a ‘redescribing’ (Umschreiben) of history: for a 
re-connection of exaggerated expectations to “experiences” and for historically 
controlled, justified expectations.”
82
If we look more closely, Arendt, in Between Past and Future, as far as history is 
concerned, also put it this way. Yet her elaboration of politics may seem more 
“utopian” in relation to what Koselleck offers us. Given the political experiences 
she draws upon and which sediment she has found in modern revolutions, she 
seems to imagine that human beings, who are endowed with the capacity for 
new beginnings, could strive for more than just “lower expectations” – although 
there might be times when this is needed as well in order to self-limit the burn-
ing revolutionary spirit.
81
 Arendt points to the revolutionary movements after WW2, and their understanding of vio -
lence, power, authority, and revolution. Cf. Hannah Arendt, On Violence, London, Harvest, 
1970.
82
 Reinhardt Mehring, “R. Koselleck: Begriffsgeschichten”, H-Soz-Kult, 2006, https://www.
hsozkult.de/publicationreview/id/reb-9137 , accessed 24 April 2021. 

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arendt , koselleck, and begreifen: rethinking politics and concepts in times of crisis
For Koselleck, who sees politics primarily as a conflict and a dispute (a crisis), 
and considers revolution to be the multiplication of conflict; the issue is primar-
ily how to calm it down, to ensure stability in the long run, and to link “exces-
sive” expectations to concrete, more “realistic” experiences. It may seem as if 
Koselleck seeks to bring “morality” (and thus critique) back into politics; yet, 
not in a way that makes politics moralistic, but in such a way that people are 
able to make critical judgments about what constitutes “possible” histories –  
and the role of the historian is precisely to open up this horizon. Perhaps this is 
why Koselleck’s “conservative” critique of moral “politics” can be read in paral-
lel with Arendt’s critique of “social” and “humanitarian” solutions to political 
problems (first in the French Revolution), i.e. solutions that can lead to violence. 
Both are therefore critical of the replacement of politics with morality (which, 
in their opinion, leads to terror). And they both, each in their own way, strive 
to achieve political solutions, and thus the “possible” (in politics and history). 
In short, for them, politics represents both the realisation of human potential 
(Arendt) and the possibility of formulating common realistic answers to burning 
questions (possible histories, Koselleck). 
While this article cannot even remotely capture the complexity of the concep-
tual thinking of the two authors considered, I would like to conclude that the 
conceptual journeys through the breaks and crises on which they developed 
a distinctive conceptual thinking (Begreifen) – related to many similar ques-
tions – are both close and apart at the same time. We can also read Arendt and 
Koselleck as parallel and complementary authors: what Koselleck pursued in 
history is emphasised by Arendt in political thinking. Both focused on people’s 
capacity to act and considered to be a key epistemological condition of the his-
torical and/or political thinking of events and concepts, while at the same time 
linking history and politics into a key common goal: to return the responsibility 
for actions and concepts to the human sphere.
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