Complete Koselleck’s account of what changed between roughly 1750 and 1850.

Koselleck called the period a Sattelzeit, in which the basic political vocabulary changed meaning. On his account the space of experience and the horizon of expectation came apart, because people stopped assuming the future would resemble the past.

The claim is psychological as much as political. Once expectation detaches from experience, the future becomes a thing to be planned, feared and argued about, which is the precondition for ideology, for programmes of reform, and for the idea that history has a direction one might either accelerate or resist.