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Koselleck's ideas are best located within the context of early-mid twentieth century Germany. Growing up in the Weimar Republic, fighting in the Second World War, and being part of a generation who had to come to terms with their nation's perpetration of the Holocaust, crisis thinking was imprinted on Koselleck's world-view. On this basis, Koselleck wrote a diagnosis of the modern world as an epoch in "permanent crisis", the origins of which lie in the Enlightenment critique of the early modern state and the delegitimization of instrumental sovereign decisions and political coercion. This layed the blame for the crisis—the symptoms of which include the Cold War and the Holocaust—with emancipatory ideologies, especially those that utilize philosophies of history as a self-justification.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-11060-4_3

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