Book Review

Methods/Theory

The starting points for this ambitious and challenging work are Reinhart Koselleck's suggestive distinction between "space of experience" (Erfahrungsraum) and "horizon of expectation" (Erwartungshorizont), his concept of accelerating historical time, and the importance of all of this for modernity. The French Revolution was a transitional era, signifying nothing less than a definitive rupture as expectations of a new social and political future raced ahead of anything hitherto experienced. The perception of time changed, history having been dethroned as a guide to the future: experience and expectation became separated.

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Ernst Wolfgang Becker's finding is that Koselleck's conceptual framework for the age of revolution is too ambitious for the German case: the gap between expectations and experience did not grow steadily larger, and progress did not leave the past ever further behind. The relationship between these metahistorical categories fluctuated in response to the experience of revolution and reaction. There were ruptures between 1789 and 1849, and there were blockage and stagnation. The meaningful idiom of an "age of transition"—meaningful for the project of Begriffsgeschichte (history of concepts)—that inaugurated a "new time" is dissolved by the acid wash of complex real time and the actual experience of revolution. Only in limited and qualified ways could time be "made" within the context of the revolutionary first half of the nineteenth century. The thought of revolution, however, served as a foundation for continuity, because it kept awake unredeemed national and constitutional expectations drawn from the past and so held out the promise of a new time. It was precisely the threatened decoupling of experience and expectation that necessitated a kind of compensatory recourse to the past. Hence Becker's observation that the relationship between expectation and experience as outlined by Koselleck ought to be reversed.

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