On the battlefield of ‘ Theorie ’ Koselleck reads L. von Stein with Carl Schmitt’s eyes

The shadow cast by National Socialism over the German academic world, and Koselleck’s close relations with the Nazi lawyer Carl Schmitt, constitute a challenge for a historical inquiry of Koselleck’s historiography. To address this challenge, I propose a ‘close contextual reading’ of an article published in 1965 (‘Geschichtliche Prognose in Lorenz von Steins Schrift zur preussischen Verfassung’) in which Koselleck puts forward one of his major diagnoses of how the conception of history had evolved since 1750. This article praises Lorenz von Stein (1815–1890), a German public administration scholar and lauds him as a model after the French Revolution. 15 years later, Koselleck showed how much he valued this article by including it in his historiographic manifesto: Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (1979). To try to grasp the meaning and the historiographical, academic, and political issues raised by this diagnosis, I will start from the text, from the portrait that Koselleck draws of the historian in it, from its paratext, its references, its editorial history. As a result, this article proposes a specific way of contextualizing, and highlights the extent to which the label ‘theory’ represented a battleground in West Germany in the 1960s and 1970s.