CUisis AuthoU(s): ReinhaUt Koselleck and Michaela W ... - iSites

Koselleck + Crisis
direction of history, this critique is propelling the crisis. In Bruno Bauer's
words: "History . . . will elevate to power the freedom which theory has
given us and thereby create the world in a new form .... History will take
care of the crisis and its outcome."'03 Judging history correctly will deter-
mine whether the problems of state, church, and society demanding a deci-
sion can be solved in practice. The concept of crisis thus remains within a
philosophy of history calling for the execution of tendencies revealed
through critique.
In the words of Mevissen, an entrepreneur close to the Young Hegeli-
ans and protector of Marx, "The recognition of the presence of an organic
affliction, the sources of which are not yet or insufficiently understood,
presages a historical crisis. Today, as in similar epochs in the past, the sole
reason for the crisis is the incongruence between the culture [Bildung] of
the century and its actual customs, forms of existence and conditions. The
sole alternatives are whether the crisis will be resolved through revolution-
ary upheavals or whether the human spirit has become strong enough to
transform voluntarily and from within those conditions revealed by the
power of knowledge." In line with his theory, Mevissen actually sought to
abrogate the privileges of property and, through the creation of a "General
Assistance and Educational Association" to integrate-unsuccessfully-the
"excluded majority" of workers into society, thereby linking freedom and
equality.104
That same diagnosis was offered by Lorenz von Stein when, in 1850,
he was the last to attempt a system-immanent interpretation of history derived
from the premises of German Idealism. "Seen from the perspective of
society's development," European history reveals "two great epochs": The
first, antiquity, was marked "by the coexistence of free property and unfree
labor"; the second, the period of the Germanic kingdoms, "witnessed an
ever-changing battle between free labor and free property. Our present
epoch is nothing but the last stage of that battle. Throughout Europe there
is a sense that the present condition cannot last much longer. Powerful and
terrible movements are coming to the fore; no one dares to predict where
they will lead. Hence no one has the right to offer a magic formula for the
future." For this reason, von Stein withdraws to a third position and ad-
103 Bruno Bauer, Die gute Sache der Freiheit und meine eigene Angelegenheit (1842), cited
in Stuke, Philosophie der Tat, 174.
104 Gustav von Mevissen, "Ober den allgemeinen Hilfs-und Bildungsverein" (1845),
printed in J. Hansen, Gustav v. Mevissen vol. 2: Abhandlungen, Denkschriften, Reden
und Briefe (Berlin, 1906), 129ff.
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