The name of Reinhart Koselleck has gone down in history for being, together with Werner Conze and Otto Brunner, the editor of the portentous dictionary Fundamental Historical Concepts. Historical lexicon of political-social language in Germany, from which the three voices gathered in this volume have been extracted. Koselleck was the main supplier of the programmatic guidelines for this conceptual cartography of modernity, both theoretical and field work, conceptual history linked to a theory of historical times. In the time span covered by said program, from 1750 to 1850, the conceptual triad proposed here is forged and becomes pregnant: Enlightenment, progress, modernity.
Inherent in the conceptual and terminological first of the Enlightenment is a consciousness of rupture that reaches its apotheosis with the French Revolution and heralds the change of the very concept of revolution, which from previously signifying a cyclical and recurrent movement comes to mean a single event. and unrepeatable and to inaugurate an unknown future. Modernity is incubated here, understood as a new time, that of acceleration, which, in order to assert itself, is forced to detach itself from what refutes it, that is, the old, resorting to the strategy of compulsively emancipating itself from tradition. Progress, etymologically "step forward", is decantation towards the future. The Age of Enlightenment, the entry into the modern era, the era of progress, thus constitutes one of the high points of «futurocentrism».