by Lotte List
“The expression ‘Sattelzeit,’” Reinhart Koselleck once quipped, “is obviously a trick concept [Kunstbegriff] which I used to get money!” (195). Nevertheless, since then, the notion of a “saddle period” in European history from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries has gained popularity as a methodological concept. It has spilled over from intellectual history to the “real world” of social history, and it has now come to constitute a link between that historical period and the instability and transformations of our present moment.
For Koselleck, the Sattelzeit resembled a mountain saddle, a valley in a pass, from which Europe could look simultaneously to the two plains of past and future, early and late modernity. It was a time of conceptual change, where concepts became “Janus-faced,” in that they were torn between outdated and not yet established semantic contents. Ideological struggles were waged over the right to define such concepts, which Koselleck and his co-editors conceived as “basic historical concepts” in their major dictionary project of the same name, the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (1972–1997). These concepts, again, were historical in a double sense: on the one hand, they constituted the content of the period as its ideological signature, and, on the other, they had as a central function the reinterpretation of history itself. To use Koselleck’s term, they came to “temporalize” history, whereby modernity came to understand itself as the first properly historical epoch.
This idea of an in-between period in which the modern European mind took shape through historical self-reflection remains influential today, not least because of Koselleck’s own treatment of such concepts as crisis and progress. His specific reconstruction of the character and consequences of the Sattelzeit, however, is deeply ideologically saturated. His project was essentially anti-Marxist and anti-socialist. For example, in his 1987 preface to the English edition of his first book, Critique and Crisis, he conceded that it was a product of the post-war era and motivated by the wish to “examine the historical preconditions” of both National Socialism and the Cold War divide between East and West, specifically their “Utopian roots” in the Enlightenment (1). It was the “loss of reality and Utopian self-exaltation” of the German National Socialists “which had resulted in hitherto unprecedented crimes.” That is, both the Third Reich and the Soviet Union sprung from the same source in intellectual history, namely the Utopianism of the revolutionary tradition. Although his 1959 book was more openly ideological, the GG remained motivated by the same project: to trace a genealogical lineage of Utopianism from the French and German Enlightenment to the civilizational breakdown of the twentieth century. Thus, in his own entries, Koselleck repeatedly argues that Enlightenment Utopianism culminates in Marx and Engels’s political appropriation of Hegelian philosophy of history (e.g. the entries on progress, history, and crisis).
To consolidate this narrative about a revolutionary tradition lying at the roots of the modern catastrophe, it was apparently important to Koselleck to exclude the British thinkers: “The Utopian ideas of the continental Enlightenment […] never gained a foothold across the Channel. There it was the Scottish moral philosophers with their sober theories rooted in social history who set the tone and who began to respond to the economic lead gained by Britain” (2–3). Continental Enlightenment politics, it would seem, was intoxicated with historico-philosophical fantasies of a Utopian future, whereas British Enlightenment economics was solidly grounded in the real world of empirics and material concerns. Koselleck’s genealogy of modern philosophy of history relies on this distinction: It was the secularized eschatology of revolutionary political thought which brought about the extremes of twentieth century ideologies—not the transition to capitalist production and the emergence of its ideological equivalent, liberal political economy; the French Revolution, not the Industrial.
The British political economists, however, were not as “sober” as Koselleck claimed. Philosophy of history played just as great of a role in economic thought as it did in political thought (if such a distinction can even be maintained). Here too, notions of universal history, progress, and crisis were abundant and formed the metaphysical foundation of moral and political arguments. This is true not least of that great godfather of liberal economics, Adam Smith. According to his first biographer, Dugald Stewart, the unifying feature of Smith’s thought was his method of inquiry, which Stewart defines as “conjectural history.” Similar to Hume’s notion of “natural history,” Stewart claims, conjectural history fills in the holes in documented history by deducing from the “principles of human nature” the most plausible cause of events (293–95). Where we have no written record of what actually happened, we are forced to speculate.
Yet conjectural history is more than just a solution to a practical problem in Smith. As Stewart’s remarks about the principles of human nature suggest, it includes a philosophy of the natural laws of historical development as rooted in Smith’s philosophical anthropology. In the words of Stewart: “When, in such a period of society as that in which we live, we compare our intellectual acquirements, our opinions, manners, and institutions, with those which prevail among rude tribes, it cannot fail to occur to us as an interesting question, by what gradual steps the transition has been made from the first simple efforts of uncultivated nature, to a state of things so wonderfully artificial and complicated” (292). These lines capture neatly the stakes of Smith’s philosophy of history: first, the idea of a natural progress of history, second, that this progress proceeds through a series of stages, third, that society advances from a natural state to the modern civilization, and fourth, that this diachronic development maps onto a synchronic differentiation of societies into degrees of “rudeness” and sophistication according to their level of progress, the most advanced among them of course being Britain. Smith believed in universal progress, not just regarding productive forces but also the perfection of humankind. Moreover, he believed that this progress led each society through four stages of development: from a primitive society of hunters and gatherers, over pasture, then agrarian, and finally commercial society (Skinner, 8 ff).
Smith’s theory of the stages of history has been interpreted as his version of historical materialism, an early inspiration for Marx. Yet it is important to note that Smith does not limit his characterization of the different stages to their mode of production, but sees their succession as a progression of human freedom. While the first stage, the age of hunters, is characterized by unlimited freedom, this freedom is checked by a lack of opulence and security, much like the state of nature in natural right theory. The following stages introduce property rights, thus increasing opulence, but these rights also lead to hierarchy, domination, and slavery. Only in commercial society is freedom united with opulence and security, so that humanistic progress can catch up with technological progress. In this way, Smith’s theory of historical stages is not purely material, but also includes a moral vision of the universal progress of humankind realizing its potential for freedom.
Natural history also was a standard for evaluating factual history. Thus, Smith’s primary argument against mercantilism, his rival economic theory, is that it inhibits natural progress: By establishing monopolies and tariff barriers, mercantilism limits the freedom of trade and impedes the civilizing and peacemaking force of the market (Smith, sec. IV.vii.c.44, henceforth WN). Mercantilist regimes thus constitute a deviance from the natural course of history, although they can never break away from this course entirely. In the same vein, according to Smith, the brutality of colonialists towards Native Americans and indigenous communities of British India arose “rather from accident than from any thing in the nature of those events in themselves” (WN: IV.vii.c.80); what ought to have been a peaceful and mutually beneficial exchange between two societies according to natural history must have in some way been derailed from this path by unnatural policies.
As Stewart emphasized, Smith’s progressive philosophy of history was no revolutionary theory; it posited no end-goal of history or eschatological emancipation (311). Rather, commercial society was itself the final stage of history, in which the perfect conditions for progress could ultimately be realized. Such progress was itself the telos of human nature: “It is hard in the stationary, and miserable in the declining state. The progressive state is in reality the cheerful and the hearty state to all the different members of the society. The stationary is dull; the declining, melancholy” (WN: I.viii.43). While not a revolutionary, Smith was just as much a believer in the natural and universal progress of mankind as the French enlightenment thinkers. Yet as many readers of Smith have observed, despite the structural role that his belief in progress plays in the architecture of The Wealth of Nations, it stands in a curious tension with an undercurrent of pessimism resurfacing now and again throughout the text. When natural and factual history diverge, natural progress gives way to an “unnatural and retrograde order” (WN: III.i.9).
This tension cannot entirely be ascribed to the vices of mercantilism, nor to those “human institutions” which have “disturbed the natural course of things” and inhibited progress (WN: III.i.4). Indeed, there are inherent contradictions within Smith’s own system. Heilbroner, for instance, has emphasized the inherent tendency of the progressive division of labor to deskill and mentally impoverish the working class, as well as the tendency of profit-seeking to impoverish them materially, both of which were already recognized by Smith himself. Others like Ince understand the tension between Smith’s vehement critique of mercantilist imperialism and his approval of settler-colonialism in North America as an instance of that deeper contradiction between liberal ideals (pre-dating the notion of “liberalism”) and capitalist historical reality central to what he calls “colonial capitalism.” I concur with both that we should not try to gloss over such tensions in Smith but rather see them as symptoms of something not adding up in the way he tries to extrapolate a “natural system of perfect liberty and justice” (WN: IV.iii.c.44) from the violent reality of capitalism’s historical emergence.
To return to our initial dispute with Koselleck, there is nothing sober about Smith’s thought, if “sober” means devoid of political ideology and speculative metaphysics. While Smith was indeed no utopian revolutionary, he contributed just as much as the French and German Enlightenment thinkers to the temporalization of history characteristic of the Sattelzeit: the emerging self-conception of a “modern” Europe which was understood to be uniquely historical in the sense that it was perceived as a time of deep and continuous transformation. Central to this temporalization of history were ideas of progress, natural history, and historical universalism—features which were not accidental to Smith’s system but structurally defining for the argumentative foundation for the superiority of commercial society.
If we keep in mind that the concept of Sattelzeit was meant to describe a specific transformative period in European consciousness—not a universal event in global social history—then Koselleck’s argument about temporalization appears convincing and useful. However, by limiting his focus to revolutionary Utopian thought and drawing a direct line from there to the political extremism and unrest of the twentieth century, he both ascribes to intellectual history the power to determine social history (a reductive inference he himself warned against) and places the responsibility for ideological excesses on emancipatory revolutionary ideals. However, non-revolutionary liberal economic thinkers such as Smith were just as ideological, in the sense that their metaphysical and moral convictions shaped their empirical claims, and in the long run arguably more influential. Ideals about progress and historical necessity were the vehicle, not just of Utopian politics, but of the ideological justification for the inescapability of capitalism as the final and ultimate stage of history.
While the Sattelzeit denotes a specifically intellectual shift in the self-conception of European elites, this does not mean that it happened in isolation from social history, as Koselleck takes care to point out in his essay “Social History and Conceptual History,” nor that its socio-historical context was limited to Western Europe. The Sattelzeit was a time of conflict and contention precisely because the concepts being fought over were politically invested and not only of purely philosophical interest. Thus, if we expand our concept of Sattelzeit to include economic thought, then we also need to revise our understanding of its historical context, its reactions to, conditions in, and influences on social history.
Writing before the historiographic tectonic shift of post-colonial studies, and in the shadow of such staunch thinkers of the jus publicum Europaeum as Carl Schmitt and Karl Löwith, in the late 1950s Koselleck could still claim that “European history has expanded into world history and there, it reaches its completion, having led the whole world into a state of permanent crisis. As was the case when bourgeois society initially captured the entire globe, so too the present crisis stands on the horizon of a historico-philosophical, mainly Utopian self-conception” (5, translation modified). However, the social transformation that Smith sought to systematize in The Wealth of Nations was not limited to Europe, nor to the condition of the bourgeoisie. On the contrary, as several scholars have pointed out, it was the emerging world-market, trade wars, and the conditions in the colonies, conflicts between natives and colonizers, as well as between colonizers and their home countries that formed his understanding of world-history. In this sense, modern world history does not emanate from Europe; rather, the Sattelzeit period’s Eurocentric idea of world history arose in part as a reaction to the new reality of a global economy. And although Koselleck was perhaps the most astute observer of this idea, he also remained trapped within it, because he did not acknowledge the material-economic origins of this transformational period. To understand the transformation of historical time in the Sattelzeit, it would be necessary to place it in its proper context: not merely the political transformation of Europe, but also the economic transformation of a world being shaped in the image of capital.
This think piece is part of the forum “The Return of Political Economy in Intellectual History.”
Lotte List is a Danish researcher in philosophy with a background in Marxism and critical theory. She is currently a Carlsberg Foundation international postdoc fellow at Bologna University. Her research focuses on the intersections between political and economic thought and philosophy of history.
Edited by Jonathon Catlin.
Featured image: The Montagu House, the first seat of the British Museum, which opened to the public in 1759 as a “universal museum” of “human history” and owes its unique collection to colonial conquest. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, the British Museum.
