 Unlike Dilthey—Simmel’s “antipode” (Ich habe viele Leben gelebt, 1964: 65)—Susman stays close to Simmel in interpreting individuals and intellectual movements in their historical context. While Susman feels historical configurations deserve our utmost appreciation, she does not take them to exude the kind of normative validity that Dilthey’s approach suggests they do. For her, “the act of understanding is itself temporal, historical”; the