Critique and Crisis established Reinhart Koselleck's reputation as themost important German intellectual historian of the postwar period. This firstEnglish translation of Koselleck's tour de force demonstrates a chronologicalbreadth, a philosophical depth, and an originality which are hardly equalled in anyscholarly domain. It is a history of the Enlightenment in miniature, fundamental toour understanding of that period and its consequences.Like Tocqueville, Koselleckviews Enlightenment intellectuals as an uprooted, unrealistic group of onlookers whosowed the seeds of the modern political tensions that first flowered in the FrenchRevolution. He argues that it was the split that developed between state and societyduring the Enlightenment that fostered the emergence of this intellectual elitedivorced from the realities of politics.Koselleck describes how this disjunctionbetween political authority proper and its subjects led to private spheres thatlater became centers of moral authority and, eventually, models for politicalsociety that took little or no notice of the constraints under which politiciansmust inevitably work. In this way progressive bourgeois philosophy, which seemed tooffer the promise of a unified and peaceful world, in fact produced just theopposite.The book provides a wealth of examples drawn from all of Europe toillustrate the still relevant message that we evade the constraints and thenecessities of the political realm at our own risk.Reinhart Koselleck is Professorof the Theory of History at the University of Bielefeld and author of Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Critique and Crisis is included in the seriesStudies in Contemporary German Social Thought, edited by Thomas McCarthy.