History in the Plural

Olsen, a postdoctoral fellow at University of Copenhagen, presents an intellectual biography of 20th-century historian, Reinhart Koselleck. Koselleck's work was wide-ranging and included political history, history of consciousness, historiography, and the relationship between language and social history. Olsen aims to show the complex and ever developing relationship(s) Koselleck had to historical subjects, other historians and social theorists, and even his own reception. A central argument Olsen makes is that Koselleck's writing aimed to establish an approach to science and politics that was beyond both utopianism and relativism, while also maintaining that "history must be plural." This is not to say that Koselleck's work is dominated by micro-histories, but that he wanted "to integrate, theoretically as well as empirically, the plurality of histories into narrative forms of writing history that include generalizations, without relying on historical-philosophical notions of unity, progress, and meaning." The text itself is comprised of seven chapters. The first looks at his early life and contexts, while the other six elaborate on different themes in his work. Olsen draws on published texts -- books, articles, reviews, interviews, research programs and newspaper articles -- but also letters he exchanged with German political theorist, Carl Schmitt. Annotation c2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Niklas Olsen received his PhD in History from the European University Institute in Florence. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Copenhagen working on a project on the variants of liberalism in Denmark and Western Europe, 1945–1990.