Abstract

This article addresses the boundaries of law and historiography in scrutinizing some rarely analyzed aspects of the works of Reinhart Koselleck. The article studies the significance of the tradition of ‘politico-juridical’ concepts in Koselleck’s thought, by tracing the intellectual history and biographies of some notable legal historians that for the large part defined the legal historical discourse after the Second World War. It is argued that a research of the connections between Koselleck and these legal historians provides an insight into the themes of the temporality of law and the universality of legal concepts in Koselleck’s articles. In contextualizing the thinking and texts of Reinhart Koselleck, this article benefits from previously unused primary sources and illuminates the reference group and intellectual atmosphere in which Koselleck worked in and around 1968.