"According to Burckhardt, man’s mind and soul were complete long ago. And continuity is more than mere going on, because it implies a conscious effort in remembering and renewing our heritage, instead of merely accepting the cake of custom. Conscious historical continuity constitutes tradition and frees us in relation to it. The only people who renounce this privilege of historical consciousness are primitive and civilised barbarians. Spiritual continuity as constituted by historical consciousness, is 'a prime concern of man’s existence,' because it is the only proof of the 'significance of the duration of our existence.' Hence we must urgently desire that the awareness of this continuity should remain alive in our minds. Whether such continuity exists outside our historical consciousness, in a divine mind concerned with human history, we can neither tell nor imagine." - Karl Löwith, Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History

"In order to make histories possible, we must supplement Heidegger’s central determination of running toward death with the category of being able to kill. It is characteristic of histories of human beings that they have not only made survival the primary aim of their efforts within the horizon of their impending death. From hunter-gatherer hordes to highly armed modern superpowers, the struggle for survival has always threatened the death of others, or, perhaps more commonly, death at the hand of others. It is also well known that this threat can limit the use of violence. The actual risk of survival brings with it the chance that various organised groups of people may kill each other and that they believe they need to kill each other to survive." - Reinhart Koselleck, "Historik and Hermeneutics" in Sediments of Time: On Possible Histories In this connection, Koselleck supplements Heidegger’s Being-toward-death with the category of “being able to kill,” insofar as the existential analytic of Dasein, taken on its own, is insufficient as an account of historical experience. The analytic can disclose the formal structures of existence and relatedness, but it cannot, by itself, account for the specific relations through which histories become plural and conflictual: the mutual threat of killing, the distinctions between friend and enemy, inner and outer, above and below, before and after, generational succession, and so on. Koselleck’s conceptual pairs, historical constants, or metahistorical categories function as conditions for the possibility of histories and are therefore quasi-transcendental. Heidegger’s existentials likewise articulate supra-empirical conditions of possibility, disclosing the structures of human existence and, with them, the horizon of historical intelligibility. The two thus have analogous functions but differ in kind. Heidegger’s existentials articulate the constitutive structures of Dasein and are unified in Sorge (care), whereas Koselleck’s categories are antithetical and relational, conditioning the possibilities of human interaction and, by extension, of historical conflict.

With the emergence of "History" as a collective singular at the end of the 18th century, History came to be understood as a subject with aims of its own. It became a judge, invoked to condemn and discipline the plurality of actual histories unfolding in the concrete world. Modernity collapsed the distance between experience and expectation into a single, directional process oriented towards declared ends: Freedom, the End of History, Communism. But the emergence of this conception of History was not in itself destructive. It made possible a distinct historical consciousness, as well as the very idea of historical change as such. The problem arose when History ceased to function as a conceptual framework for understanding change and was instead hypostatised into a subject endowed with its own telos. Once History was viewed as an agent pursuing its own ends, the plurality of actual histories could be subordinated to the demands of a supposedly necessary historical process, with all the terrors, cruelties, and absurdities this view entailed. History should therefore be understood as a singular category of reflection, not as an agent pursuing its own goals. Given the accelerated temporality of modernity and its largely progressive-optimistic horizon, any reaction against this temporalisation must necessarily begin from within it. Any analysis of "modern time" must acknowledge the significant changes in how time is experienced, understood, and organised, while resisting the assumption that these transformations represent a "fundamental rupture" with the actual conditions of human existence. What Koselleck called the Sattelzeit transformed the semantics of time and reconfigured the horizon of expectations. It did not, however, abolish the fundamental conditions of human existence. People still suffer, fail, and ultimately die - often at the hands of others who justify their actions in the name of (historical) necessity, moral imperatives, or doctrines of faith, whether secular or theological. The presumed "inevitability" of History in modernity has never exhausted the possibility of other histories emerging.

"F. J. Stahl, a Prussian conservative, who in his lectures 'Über die gegenwärtigen Parteien in Staat und Kirche' treated the many contradictions of constitutional liberalism, offered a very simple explanation: The hatred of monarchy and aristocracy drove the liberal bourgeois leftward; the fear of being dispossessed of his property, which was threatened by radical democracy and socialism, drove him in turn toward the right, to a powerful monarchy whose military could protect him. He thus oscillated between his two enemies and wanted to fool both." - Carl Schmitt, Political Theology

Schmitt's conception of the state as decision is explicitly opposed to the liberal constitutional state. But in his polemic against liberalism, he overlooks the fact that liberal constitutionalism is itself dependent upon political decisions. His absolutist conception of sovereignty - modern rather than conservative in any meaningful sense - is not incompatible with parliamentary government. Historically and politically, liberal and democratic parliaments have shown that they can exercise precisely the powers Schmitt suggests they cannot. Liberal and democratic regimes can act "monarchically," declare stages of siege, and suspend law under exceptional circumstances. This is evident in the case of the Roman and Venetian republics, the French revolutionary regime, and several liberal states throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Neither Bodin nor Hobbes, both of whom Schmitt draws upon, had any theoretical difficulty in stating that sovereignty possessed the same force whether vested in a monarch, an aristocracy or oligarchy, or a democratic assembly. The distinction is therefore not necessarily between "monarchical" and "parliamentary" sovereignty, but between different institutional arrangements for exercising sovereign power. A monarchy, a dictatorship, or presidential regime can be more effective at responding to emergencies, but this is a question of political efficacy rather than an inherent attribute of sovereignty itself. Even so, there is an abundance of historical examples of weak "monarchical" sovereigns. Nor is Schmitt's emphasis on decision in any way new. Decisionism, and the broader critique of liberalism as an attempt to avoid the political, can be found in both left-wing and right-wing thought. Schmitt is nevertheless correct when he states that liberalism attempts to present itself as apolitical. The irony, of course, is that the attempt to restrain or overcome political decision is itself dependent upon a political decision. This may contradict liberalism's self-understanding, but the more important question is how liberal regimes actually act in historical practice. This is precisely where Schmitt's polemics blind him. He places too much emphasis on exposing the contradictions between liberal theory and liberal practice, as though demonstrating those contradictions would undermine the liberal order. But liberalism's historical success is very real. Liberal regimes defeated the counterrevolutionary forces that opposed them along with the later conservatives. Whatever the contradictions between liberalism's declared principles and its actual conduct, those contradictions have not prevented it from succeeding politically and historically. The broader lesson here is that we can, of course, analyse how individual actors, movements, and ideologies understand themselves. Such self-understandings matter, but they are ultimately secondary to their concrete political, social, and historical conduct. Schmitt fails to appreciate this distinction because his conception of decision is fundamentally normative: he recognises liberal decision as a form of non-decision because it does not conform to what he deems a genuine political decision to be. Rather than recognising liberalism's capacity to make decisions, exercise sovereignty, and act under exceptional circumstances, he treats its own view of these as proof of its political impotence. For these reasons, Schmitt can be situated within the broader orbit of "liberalism," especially given the lack of any systematic or definitive account on his part of how market relations and property rights should to be organised. In this respect, one might regard him as adjacent to "liberalism," much like figures such as Tocqueville, Treitschke, and Weber. This does not mean that any of them were liberals in the conventional sense of the term, but rather that their thought remained embedded in, and engaged with, the political and intellectual conditions of bourgeois modernity. The broader point is that Schmitt’s critique of liberalism does not necessarily place him outside the political, socio-historical, and intellectual world he attacks. His thought can be understood, in part, as an attempt to confront the contradictions and dissolution of bourgeois modernity from within that very world.