Benjamin was interested in ‘culture’ not as an autonomous realm of values (“the independent values of aesthetic, scientific, ethical… and even religious achievements”), but on the contrary, like the sociologist Georg Simmel, whose Philosophy of Money he cities in this regard, as “elements in the development of human nature” (Simmel, quoted in AP, [N14, 3], 480). In this respect, cultural study is situated within the field of a materialist philosophy of history. And the philosophy of history insists on a conception of history as a whole. It is here than the messianic structure of Benajmin’s concept of history confronts us as unavoidable; although not thereby necessarily ‘theological’, since it is the transition of a conceptual structure from one philosophical context into another that is at issue (Benjamin’s favorite surrealist method of ‘decontextualization’ and ‘defamiliarization’), not its meaning in its original theological context as such. In his search for a non-Hegelian, non-developmentalist conception of history as a whole, in ‘On the Concept of History’ Benjamin figured now-time, quasi-messianically, alternatively as a ‘model’ of messianic time and as “shot through with splinters of messianic time.” In the context of a diagnosis of the European crisis of 1939–40 as a world-historical crisis, the ‘critical state of the present’ thus came, in this text, to acquire a theological-political tenor. “A revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past” is compared to “the sign of a messianic arrest of happening” (SW 4, 396–7). Benjamin was aware that this rhetoric would lead to misunderstanding. But the combination of perceived political urgency and isolation compelled him to extend his concept of history beyond the state of his philosophical research, experimentally, into an apparently definitive statement. It is as if Benjamin had hoped to overcome the aporia of action within his still essentially hermeneutical philosophy (Osborne 1995) through the force of language alone. Formally, however, ‘On the Concept of History’ should be read as a series of fragments, in the early Romantic sense. As such, it remains resolutely negative—and thereby importantly partial—in its evocation of the historical whole, which is acknowledged as unpresentable. In this respect, Benjamin’s final text recalls his earliest major publication, the 1919 thesis ‘The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism’: as a gesture towards the philosophy of history needed to complete a modified and ‘modernized’ version of the early Romantic project.