Abstract
The notion of “temporalization” is one of the key concepts in the Koselleckian Begriffsgeschichte. It refers to the general issue of human temporality and more specifically to the epistemological problem of historical temporalities. In Koselleck’s writings, it constitutes a fundamental interpretative framework for political modernity as a whole. This article returns to these different issues and reconstructs their common background : an implicit “general theory of historical experience”. There then follows a general survey of the analytical uses of the notion of “temporalization” as understood by Koselleck himself. As a result, the key concept of “temporalization” emerges as a global process within political modernity as a whole working in interaction with other global processes. Henceforth, these should be identified and typologized precisely, continuing on from Koselleck’s notion of course, but also prospecting further and moving beyond his initial framework. The present article is concerned with distinguishing and also combining on an ad hoc basis the different levels of analysis at work in the historicization of modern political languages. In so doing, it reengages the dialogue between both history (structural, cultural and political historical studies) and political science ; it ascribes a particular causality status to modern religious and political ideas, to modern political philosophy and theories of law and to the inertia of historical semantics in the long term. These are all different types of historical factors which most of the time are underestimated and which nowadays are neglected as disciplines as a result of too narrow a definition of what historical experience is.