Debate over Benjamin’s conception of history was for many years preoccupied with the question of whether it is essentially ‘theological’ or ‘materialist’ in character (or how it could possibly be both at once), occasioned by the conjunction of Benjamin’s self-identification with historical materialism and his continued use of explicitly messianic motifs (Wolhfarth 1978; Tiedemann 1983–4). This was in large part the polemical legacy of the competing influence of three friendships—with Gershom Scholem, Theodor W. Adorno and Bertolt Brecht—applied to the interpretation of Benjamin’s final text, the fragments ‘On the Concept of History’ (‘Über den Begriff der Geschichte’, popularly known as the ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’). Scholem promoted a theological interpretation, Brecht inspired a materialist one, while Adorno attempted to forge some form of compatibility between the two. Yet the question is badly posed if it is framed within received concepts of ‘theology’ and ‘materialism’ (the paradox becomes self-sustaining), since it was Benjamin’s aim radically to rethink the meaning of these ideas, on the basis of a new philosophy of historical time. This new philosophy of historical time is the ultimate goal of Benjamin’s later writings. It appears most explicitly, under construction, in ‘Convolute N’ of The Arcades Project, ‘On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress’; it is applied to art history in the 1937 essay ‘Eduard Fuch, Collector and Historian’; and is manifest in a condensed, rhetorically political and problematic form in ‘On the Concept of History’. It derives from a dual critique of the ‘vulgar naturalism’ of historicism and the deferral of action involved in the associated Social Democratic concept of progress (Kittsteiner 1986).  It gives rise to a conception of historical intelligibility based on ‘literary montage’ as the method of construction of ‘dialectical images’ (AP, 460–1). And it culminates in a quasi-messianic conception of revolution as an ‘interruption’ of history or an ‘arrest of happening’: “Classless society is not the final goal of historical progress but its frequently miscarried, ultimately achieved interruption” (SW 4, 402). 