Reinhart Koselleck reads Lorenz von Stein with Carl Schmitt’s eyes: for a close contextual reading , version submitted to 'History of European Ideas'published version: On the battlefield of ‘Theorie’ Koselleck reads L. von Stein with Carl Schmitt’s eyespublishers link: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01916599.2021.1937887

International audience; The shadow cast by National Socialism in the academic world of the Federal Republic of Germany and Koselleck’s close relations with the Nazi lawyer Carl Schmitt constitute a challenge for an historical inquiry of Reinhart Koselleck’s historiography. In order to address this challenge, I propose a “close contextual reading” of an article published in 1965 (“Geschichtliche Prognose en Lorenz von Steins Schrift zur preussischen Verfassung”) in which he expressed one of his leading diagnoses on how the conception of history had evolved since 1750. This article praises Lorenz von Stein (1815-1890), a German public administration scholar and hailes him as a model for the definition of a historian after the French Revolution. Fifteen years later, Koselleck showed how much he valued this article by taking it up in a collection of articles which he considered as an historiographic manifesto: Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (1979). To try to grasp the meaning and the historiographical, academic and political issues of this diagnosis in the then Federal Republic of Germany, I will contextualize starting from the text, from the portrait that Koselleck explicitly draws of the historian in it, from its paratext and external references (Carl Schmitt, Ernst Rudolf Huber, Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde) as well as from the history of the journal Der Staat. Thanks to this case study, this article tries to propose a specific way of contextualization and to highlight how much the label "theory" was a battleground in West Germany in the 1960s and 1970s.