German Historian Reinhart Koselleck

German historian Reinhart Koselleck explains how historia magistra vitae, the Classical idea that history is the sole teacher of life and should serve as a lesson to the future, has become a flawed, outdated way of viewing history, contrasting it with a new, Modern perspective of how history is interpreted.

In Koselleck's interpretation, historia magistra vitae suggests that history is constant, and does not change over time. This leads to the conclusions that humans must be selfsame throughout time, and that the great ideologies behind law, government, and theology could not change over time. Lessons from the past would always remain relevant and repeatable, effectively suggesting a status quo on history. History would therefore be continuous as well as occur in natural time, further suggesting that there is a single ideology that will always remain applicable and influential, even if society does not know or understand the influence. In this view the language used to describe an event is also effectively equivalent to the event, leading to the assumption that any description of an event is true and therefore the language describing it would never present as a problem. Koselleck ultimately concludes that since historia magistra vitae is applicable only under a highly narrow set of circumstances, it could not represent genuine history, but only an ahistorical way in which people superficially understand it.

Using the linguistic transition of Historie to Geschichte, Koselleck portrays a transforming perspective involving the dissolution of historia magistra vitae in favor of the a modernized historical process. While Historie is merely the recounting of event, more importantly it is Geschichte that represents the event itself. In the modernized view history is open to change, and humans control that change, transitively suggesting that humanity controls history and therefore history is open to perfectibility and novel interpretations. There also