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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.

‘Light on the enlightenment’ or ‘counter-enlightenment’?: Rereading Reinhart Koselleck’s Critique and Crisis in its context(s)