We live in an inheritance society. This applies to the simplest and most straightforward case: each year in Germany since the 2000s, the affluent post-war generation has bequeathed a sum of 250 billion euros to their children and other relatives (see Friedrichs, 2016). The consequence is decisive: for the generation born after 1970, the social status that can be achieved in a lifetime generally depends less on the income an individual earns and increasingly on whether they have inherited. Familial inheritance thereby significantly determines life’s success, along with all the social equity issues that come with it.

Yet the contemporary inheritance society isn’t exhausted by questions of wealth alone. It speaks much more to the fact that in late modernity, at multiple levels, the general societal appreciation of being confronted by an inheritance from past generations has also sharpened. One views oneself and others from the perspectives of: individuals, as social groups, as a national society, and even as the species Homo sapiens, who inherit in the present from the past or, in the future, will inherit something. This can represent something positive and gratifying, something negative and disastrous or a legacy that’s ambivalent from the outset. It’s true: one can’t not inherit.

Jacques Derrida (1994) argued, in his text Specters of Marx, that to live properly always means to live with the presence of the dead. The dead are never totally dead; they are like spectres who necessarily remain. The present is haunted by the inheritance of the past. Derrida formulates a general philosophical position, but at the same time comments on a relation that, since the 1990s, has become increasingly clear: Western societies are confronted with a past that doesn’t want to pass. In particular, the history of violence in Europe and North America, whose traces remain in the present, have become a prominent object of late-modern remembrance culture.

However, inheritance that society as a whole manages can in no way be reduced only to a taxing liability. It is notable that, alongside increased sensitivity towards the legacy of modern violence (Gewalterbe), appreciation has also grown for what is referred to as the cultural heritage (Erbe) of the past – in its institutionalised form, administered by UNESCO in its ever-increasing program of world heritage sites (Weltkulturerbe). Their starting point is that history has brought about its own valuable goods that have retained worth, which require, as the ‘heritage (Erbe) of humanity’, ongoing protection from destruction.

But even then, the presence of inheritance in contemporary society isn’t exhausted. For me, it’s about a panorama of what appear, at first glance, disparate contexts in which contemporary culture addresses inheritance and also about the perspectival shifts to the outline of a problem that is connected with it. To determine the relevance of inheritance in contemporary society is not a marginal finding. Rather, through this, a fundamental structural and cultural shift to some of the ruling categories becomes clear, which have defined social modernity and that are suspended: in the transformation from classical modernity to late modernity, which took place from the 70s to 80s, a reconfiguration in the relation of society and its subjects to temporality and historicity becomes visible. The phenomenon of inheritance plays a central role in this reconfiguration.

Modernity, Late Modernity and the Transformation of Temporality

At the latest since Reinhart Koselleck’s (2004) study of historical semantics, there has been a consensus that the historical anomaly of modern society and its development since the 18th century with enlightenment philosophy, industrialisation, democracy, scientification and individualisation, is rooted in its exceptional orientation towards the future. For moderns, the continuity between the space of experience and the horizon of expectation breaks. The future, so its credo, will be completely different – and indeed better. This future orientation is accompanied by a certainty in progress. In the classic modern regime of time, which ruled in the 19th and 20th century, the place of the past is reduced in its role for orientation in the present. It appears far more as a condition that has been surpassed and fortunately left behind.

This structure of time has a crucial consequence to the status of inheritance: in modernity, inheritance stands under suspicion (cf. Willer, 2014; Willer et al., 2013). To consider the filiation of the inheritor, grantor, and inheritance, and to allow it, now appears a pre-modern, traditional, and illegitimate relic. The continuity of inheritance/ing is foreclosed by modernity’s aspiration for discontinuity. It suggests that it’s fundamentally not only desirable but also possible to leave behind inheritance, which keeps the past looming over the present. This is the double precondition of modernity’s promise of progress: inheritance can be overcome, and it ought to be overcome.

This applies to individuals as well as to society in general. Applying the principle of modern meritocracy, an individual’s social status and identity should result from their own independent actions. Speaking with Talcott Parsons (1991), modernity, in comparison to traditional societies, shifts from ‘ascribed’ to ‘achieved’ identities. Ideally, the identity of the individual is no longer socially ascribed due to their background and status, but is instead acquired through individual achievements. This fits the legal discourse on inheritance law, which arose around 1800 in France, Germany and the USA, which problematised both the legitimacy of material inheritance within the family due to the risk of testator capriciousness, as well as the relation between inheritance and society’s meritocratic self-understanding (cf. Beckert, 2008).

Yet, the modern scepticism of inheritance applies to society in its entirety: the institutionalised imperative of progress is built upon breaking with the inheritance of the past and to outdo it again and again in an endless chain of innovation – whether it’s in science and technology, economics, politics, or the shift of socio-cultural values. To hold onto inheritance appears reactionary. Nothing is older than yesterday’s novelty, which needs to be surpassed over and over through ‘creative destruction’ (Schumpeter) in the direction of an open future. In modernity, the younger generations, compared to older generations, prove themselves to be ‘the terrible children of modernity’ (Sloterdijk, 2025) with their orientation towards the future calibrated by renewal and revolution, breaking away from the inheritance of their fathers and mothers. Or as Thomas Jefferson (1789) has it, ‘the earth belongs in usufruct to the living […] the dead have neither powers nor rights over it’.

Against the background of this distancing movement, the late-modern appreciation of inheritance that has formed since the 1980s demonstrates a striking break. From the perspective of late modernity, it doesn’t appear either possible to leave behind inheritance without difficulty, whatever kind it may be, or for this to appear sensible and desirable. For this reversion of perspectives to have come about, inheritance turning from illegitimate to necessary, presupposes that the temporal culture of classical modernity, which is oriented towards the future and is progress-oriented, has also been overlaid by a late-modern temporal culture (cf. Assmann, 2020). Through this, the future loses credibility in its promise of outdoing the present in a progressively recognised form. In the extreme there is the greater threat, from the perspective of late modernity, of a ‘future as catastrophe’ (Horn, 2018), either through developments in climate, authoritarianism, or war. So the future appears not as a space of probable improvement, instead, one of possible loss. When certainty in the future disappears, it’s only consistent that the perspective on the past shifts. This is now visible in a double sense of inheritance: as positive and as negative inheritance (cf. Reckwitz, 2024).

The Janus-faced nature of late modernity’s appreciation of inheritance is characteristic: on the one hand one cannot avoid recognising that the past has worthwhile goods to offer – be it the material or cultural inheritance of the family, be it the cultural or institutional inheritance of the society. The past, which impacts the present, is not surpassed from this perspective, but instead offers resources and values, which open possibilities in the present and future. On the other hand, late modernity now sees a negative inheritance in the past, an inheritance as burden or liability, which acts in the present as trauma or guilt, as the worsening of living conditions or as epigenetic restriction. Inheritance both positive and negative show themselves in late-modern culture as central sources of a manifold of conflicts about identity, recognition, and justice. Not infrequently are the identity conflicts of late modernity presented as inheritance disputes.

In late modernity, it’s regarded as fundamental: the past isn’t closed. It doesn’t allow itself to be closed off at all, instead it affects the present (and future) as inheritance, where its impact continues. This inheritance is ambivalent. It contains, at the same time, resources and liabilities, values and debts¹. In addition, fundamentally a transmission takes place in every inheritance, in which something – be it wealth or genes, be it experiences or debts – is transferred from a preceding to a following point in time. In this process of transmission however two mechanisms go hand in hand: the facticity of the impact of the past, which happens, if desired or not, and the acquisition of inheritance in the variable cultural practices of inheritance which take place in doing heritage / inheritance.

There is then, on the one side, from the point of view of the modern belief in the malleability of biography and disruption to society, an unavailability of inheritance. Here, a past becomes visible which doesn’t want to pass, which for example appears as the unequal distribution of wealth, as public debt, as a traumatic trace in the psyche, or as irreversible change in the climatic structure of the earth. This is the materiality of inheritance. On the other hand, inheritance can never be thought of as independent of the practices, in which it is culturally adopted, in which it is cultivated or dismissed, legally regulated or museumified or debates on what should or shouldn’t count as inheritance. This is the culturalness of inheritance. Inheritance shows itself as a cultural-material double.

Familial Inheritance and Wealth

When inheritance becomes a topic in contemporary culture, it relates first of all to the individual and their familial inheritance. The family, as a social form, has to partially disable the principles of modern sociality. In the family, there remains an obdurate remainder, a remnant of the filial relationships of traditional communities (cf. Goody, 2000). On the one hand, the modern model of the nuclear family frees itself from the extensive kinship networks of traditional societies with their privileges and restrictions. On the other hand, the generation coming of age in the nuclear family, even under the conditions of modern society, is unavoidably burdened with an inheritance, or else comfortably endowed by it. Through biological reproduction, family socialisation processes and finally through inherited wealth, the modern individual, even as an adult, is subjected to the defining influence of the family they come from, who completely or partially revoke individual decision-making and provisions and respectively arrange for the unequal distribution of assets and handicaps. In the framework of a late-modern society, which takes modern individualism and its ideals of self-actualisation and self-responsibility to the extreme, the unavailability of this endowment of family inheritance, of many kinds, can only appear as an irritation and provocation.

In relation to material wealth, since the 1990s a structural shift is visible, whose explosiveness has since reached public debate. The French economist Thomas Piketty (2011) identifies a fundamental structural transformation in his historical study of the wealth structure in France, which is similarly present in most Western societies. Graphically represented it takes the form of a U-curve: the bourgeois society of the 19th century was in considerable part a post-aristocratic rentier society, in which the privileged classes lived from their inherited wealth. In the 20th century wealth inequality reduced: the middle class society, which reached its peak in the trente glorieuses, was at its core a meritocratic society, in which the paid work of the middle class successfully enabled translation into (property) wealth. In late modernity, according to Piketty, wealth inequality has increased again, particularly through unequal inheritance.

The generally immobile and stagnating contemporary societies, whose economies show only meagre growth rates and in which narratives of social advancement en masse are consigned to the past, present elements of the old rentier society. The amount of inherited wealth derives new relevance as a sorting mechanism for the distribution of chances in life. The journalist Julia Friedrichs (2016) graphically described the possible consequences of this process ten years ago in We Inherit (see also Linartas, 2025): capital, mainly inherited from parents, rises to a decisive headstart, which enables property ownership for the inheritor in the late-modern middle class, or becomes a backup for entry to the workforce, or in starting a family and the means later for investing in education for their own children. Those who don’t inherit, even as academics with middle-class incomes, live in reduced circumstances compared to those who do. From the background of the normative model of a meritocracy, the role of merit-free wealth presents immense equality problems.

Cultural and Emotional Inheritance

Family inheritance doesn’t end just at monetary wealth. As Pierre Bourdieu (2018) states, its efficacy is not limited only to the economic, but also pertains to cultural capital; the cultural habitus of social classes is inherited to a certain degree. This is no new sociological insight. New, however, is that since the 2010s, public discourse has become sensitive to the consequences of inherited socialisation. Particularly striking here is the widely circulating genre of the so-called auto-sociological biography, which encompasses non-fiction, novels, and hybrid forms (cf. Blome et al., 2022). From Didier Eribon’s Return to Reims and Édouard Louis’ The End of Eddy, J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy to Christian Baron’s Ein Mann seiner Klasse (A Man of his Class) and novels like Saša Stanišić’s Where You Come From or Anke Stelling’s Higher Ground, a series of books have become bestsellers in which the complex cultural and social inheritance of social classes becomes a theme. Often, these address the representation of a family background in the working class or a precarious lower class, which produces a tension that gives these texts their particular appeal. The authors who write about their background have, as writers, grown out of their childhood milieu and demonstrate with their biography that class doesn’t have to be fate. At the same time, it becomes visible that even in these cases, the inheritance from the milieu of their background stays in force in the form of class shame and in particular, dispositions from their background that are so deeply set that they remain in force in their ‘new life’.

There is yet another form of familial inheritance for which an appreciation has developed in recent decades: the emotional and epigenetic inheritance. The question of the emotional family inheritance that authors such as Galit Atlas, Peter Teuschel or Mark Wolynn work on goes beyond what has been the central problematic of psychoanalysis since the beginning, childhood experience and family constellations (Atlas, 2022; Teuschel, 2015; Wolynn, 2016). What now comes to greater light is the intergenerational transmission of psychological problems, not least of all traumas. The initial spark for the analysis of emotional inheritance was given by the symptoms of the adult children of the victims of violence, in particular from families of Holocaust survivors. A burdening emotional inheritance is also found in families with parents who, as children or adolescents experienced war, had fled or were displaced, suffered severe illness or sexual abuse. Sabine Bode (2009) pointed to the emotional inheritance of the ‘children of wartime children’ in Germany, for whom there was long no appreciation.

Psychological and biological research came to the conclusion in the 1990s that the transmission of this emotional inheritance doesn’t take place only through socialisation. Instead, additional so-called epigenetic mechanisms operate here, through which the experience of bodily traumatisation in childhood is manifested and causes epigenetic changes, that can later be biologically inherited by their own children (see Kegel, 2009). In such circumstances, the trauma of the mothers and fathers are deposited in the bodily (epigenetic) programming of their children, independent of socialisation processes. Epigenetics however, appears not as fixed, but instead changeable through behaviour: the therapeutic objective then becomes to break the cycle of intergenerational emotional inheritance (see Munir, 2024).

Societal Inheritance: Three Kinds of Liability

Inheritance doesn’t apply only to individuals and their families. It applies to society as a whole. It is notable that since the 1990s, a series of politically decisive discourses have been established, which at their core circle around the presumption of a negative inheritance from the legacy of Western modernity that influences both contemporary society and the future. Above all, three inheritance discourses are influential: inheritance of a modern violent history, climatic-geological inheritance of the anthropocene, and finally, inheritance of economic debt. Violence, climate, debt – three of the most important keywords of late-modern self-understanding are based on the concept of a societal inheritance as a liability.

It has been frequently stated that since the 1980s in Europe and North America, a memory culture has been established, which broadly handles the topic of state violence in European and North American history. The thematisation of the national socialist genocide of European Jews, which arose in the West German and US public sphere in the 1970s, can be seen as an initial spark for the late-modern memory culture. Since the 1990s, the violent inheritance of the communist system of Eastern Europe, but also the authoritarian systems in Southern Europe, have been raised to collective consciousness. Since the 2000s, the public appreciation for the legacy (Erbe) of European colonialism and US slavery has developed. It operates from the debate over looted art to the Black Lives Matter movement and continues to complicate Western memory relations (Conrad, 2021). The recognition of victims, the responsibility of the perpetrators, and the status of violence and suppression within national and global histories – all make the inheritance of violence a politically fractious object. From the perspective of a collective inheritance of this kind, history is anything but closed off, instead a ‘hot history’ (Lorenz, 2010), which flows through to the present with all its painfulness and reproduces conflict there.

It’s striking that the widely held debate since the 2010s on the anthropocene, whose theoretical contribution has given the climate movement intellectual momentum, has ultimately written a new history of humanity (see Bonneuil and Fressoz, 2016). In the centre of which is a fundamental shift in the relations of humans and nature. From an epoch in which humanity acted within very stable natural conditions, to one where humans have intentionally and unintentionally transformed these natural conditions and indeed ultimately through climate change in a direction that is threatening to both society and nature. Although the exact historical beginning of the anthropocene is disputed, most often the beginning of this new unstable geological era is identified with European industrialisation in the 18th and 19th centuries. Industrialisation, within which the modernisation narrative long dominated and that was interpreted as a decisive step in the direction of the progressiveness of modernity, but now shows itself as a fatal inheritance, because of its extensive energy requirements supplied by fossil fuels. The theory of the anthropocene presupposes a negative inheritance of an ecological kind, which in its facticity appears out of control. Past energy use has already left irreversible marks in the geo-climatic structure of the earth. At the same time, this inheritance doesn’t appear as an indelible fate – this has been the dominant position in the climate movement until now. The negative inheritance won’t go away all at once, but could, if the change in the direction of a post-fossil future succeeds, at least be broken.

The third motif of negative inheritance that late-modern discourse refers to is debt. At its core is the burdening of future generations through the extensive financial debt of many national states in Europe and North America (see Streeck, 2017). The USA has now reached a national debt of 125% of GDP and in Germany 64% (Federal Ministry of Finance, 2025). With the help of debt, time is bought in the present – interest and repayments happen however, in the future. Thus, the present generation lives at the expense of those coming. Even infrastructure that is neglected in the present can, at least in a general sense, be interpreted as a form of debt: investment in infrastructure is underfunded in the present, so future generations inherit ailing roads, schools, and hospitals. The question then is no longer which debts one wants to take on, but instead, which one is happy to put up with. Looking at public debt, there is a peculiar contrast to the relations of wealth in families: while in the upper third of the social pyramid private wealth is inherited to a greater extent, society in general inherits debt from the national budget on a scale never seen before. The contrast between private wealth and public debt can and must be interpreted through the lens of inheritance sociology.

With the discourses on violent histories, the anthropocene, and debt, the optimistic view of progress in modernity is reversed: modern society is leaving behind multiple liabilities, which will haunt the coming generations. In the history of ideas: late modernity gives the Christian conception of original sin (Erbsünde) a secular counterpart. The scepticism of inheritance in modern progressive thought, with its orientation towards the future, also cleared away at the same time the discussion of original sin (see Sloterdijk, 2025). The traditional Christian conception that humanity is burdened since its creation by a genuine sin, which came from human hubris, is alien to the optimistic philosophical and historical thought of the enlightenment. In the critical perspective of late modernity, the guiding principle of a distant, ethically fatal inheritance, that can’t be shaken off, reappears. The Christian original sin of humanity has transformed into the multiple debts of history in modern Western societies, which have always been tied up with it.

Cultural Heritage

Is it possible to think of collective inheritance today as only something negative, as a burden or liability? That would be too simple. There are approaches that recognise a positive collective inheritance, that is, a societal wealth, which the past leaves to the present and is seen as worthwhile to be passed from the present into the future. Under the conditions of the late-modern regime of time, this is consequential. When the future is expected to be only positive, with a qualified amount of progress and innovation, the focus on the values and advances of the past and present increases. It’s important to protect against their loss.

In this context, the question of cultural inheritance has given rise to distinct positions over the preceding decades. What cultural inheritance is and how it can be protected accompanied the problem of the ‘Birth of the Museum’ (Bennett, 1995) in Europe and North America from the beginning of the 19th century. Since the 1970s, however, under the title of cultural heritage, a political and cultural discourse on inheritance has exploded, which has had substantial consequences for politics and urban development (see also Smith, 2006; Anheier and Isar, 2011; Gillman, 2010). The heritage protection movement has, since the last decades of the 20th century, made the public and the state sensitive to the value of retaining historical buildings, the expansion of the museum industry has opened up the space of what is declared worth maintaining far beyond art works into the area of the everyday, popular, and industrial cultures and heritage tourism has allowed visiting the cultural heritage of the city and county to become an important section of the expanding tourist economy.

The UNESCO program of World Heritage has proven an international pacesetter, which has increased its remit since the 1970s: now it’s more than just the world of objects made by humanity that appear culturally relevant, but also landscapes and even immaterial inheritance, that is, cultural practices such as music, performing arts or food culture. Originally, the perspective of cultural inheritance referred to relics from times before social or aesthetic modernity², but now assets of modern society, like industrial heritage or modern aesthetics like the buildings of the international style achieve heritage character.

Modernity itself becomes cultural inheritance – although one that is disputed. No small amount of the notorious culture wars of late modernity, on closer observation, circle around the question of: what counts as cultural inheritance and for whom, and which inheritance is more significant than another. The valorisation of inheritance is invariably in the field of a symbolic economy with its conflictual dynamics of value attribution over that which counts as being historically singular (see Reckwitz, 2017). The heated debate about the historical reconstruction of the Berlin Palace and the demolition of the Palace of the Republic can be decoded as one of these inheritance disputes: which inheritance appears more worth maintaining – the classical baroque palace of the Prussian capital or the multi-functional cultural and political building of the GDR?

Institutional Inheritance

The issue of positive inheritance can’t be reduced to the political and cultural field. Doesn’t modern society in its central institutional spheres also contain, in some senses, a valuable inheritance whose continuation becomes a task? This question became virulent recently, not least in connection with the rise of political populism and the destructive power it released. A concrete example: in her election campaign for the US presidency in 2024, the Democratic candidate Kamala Harris made the defence of abortion rights one of her central issues. Harris lost the election, but the interesting point, in this context, is that the candidate for the ‘party of progress’ gave a central role not to the conquest of a new and better future, but instead the defence of a recent achievement. Not only for conservatives but also for progressives, it has clearly become a mission to defend a particular inheritance – in this case, one of the legal systems that protects a particular civil liberty. Harris’ abortion issue reflects a central concern, which in the face of the international populism that has risen since the 2010s, has weighed on the left, liberal and moderate conservative powers: it consists in fending off an acute threat to the legacy of liberal democracy itself, which formed over a long historical process as a political system in Europe and North America. To understand liberal democracy as a fragile inheritance requires a shift in perspective: Western democracy appears no longer sure historico-philosophically – with Hegel, Habermas and the common sense modernisation theory behind it – forming the only logical result of an irreversible societal learning process, from which a lasting slip can’t be imagined. Instead, it becomes visible as a valuable yet fragile institutional network that emerged during a particular historical phase and under very particular conditions, and can disintegrate in the future (see Runciman, 2018; Levitsky and Ziblatt, 2018). An inheritance, then, can be gambled away, it can be destroyed or forgotten. The transmission of inheritance doesn’t come about automatically; instead, it requires doing heritage / inheritance, an active working on the transmission of the valuable to coming generations.

The question of the social inheritance of modernity regards the inheritance of progress: in late modernity, progress is only considered to a limited extent to be an endless sequence of improvement, which awaits us in the promising future. Progress can be seen far more in all that modernity has achieved – how imperfect always and how controversial in its particulars – in the last decades and centuries. That which is called progress then appears less as a project of the future and more as a hard-earned and fought inheritance of modernity in particular practices, institutional arrangements, values, and experiences in the most varied areas of society. When one wants it to be protected and developed, it needs to become visible as this kind of positive inheritance. The work of the French sociologist Bruno Latour (2013), An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, interestingly has a similar thought at its base: that which he calls the necessary ‘recall of modernity’ runs on a critical assessment of modern institutions – science, education, art, economy, law, politics etc. – from the perspective of what’s worthwhile fighting for in them, and what they have to offer ‘modes of existence’.

There are actually several things that speak in favour of the increased appreciation for the fragile inheritance of modernity, which appear to require care, in order to make use of the scope of possibilities they open up. Beyond the political inheritance of democracy and the constitutional state, there are less spectacular examples for the new appreciations of inheritance. For example, in economics. Since the 1970s, following Arnaldo Bagnasco (1977), an economic sociology has defined the particular structure of the so-called Terza Italia: the north-east of Italy which is marked by highly developed living conditions and economic robustness. The preconditions can be described by the very specific regional economic tradition, a historical network that has developed since the early modern age of small artisanal businesses with their capability for innovation and relationships of trust. In Terza Italia there is a strong foundation for a regional inheritance of business and industrial culture, which must be recognised as such in order to be tended to and developed further as a condition of economic prosperity even in the time of the cognitive-cultural economy.

The appreciation of inheritance is apparent even in the most everyday of areas: that of modern infrastructure. Since the second half of the 19th century, Europe and North America have developed comprehensive networks of electricity, energy and water supply and public transport, which provide the backbone to the comforts of modern life, as the group Foundational Economy presents it (Foundational Economy Collective, 2018). The neglect of these and other public facilities in recent decades have brought to light what a valuable inheritance these apparently trivial infrastructures are – an inheritance that falls apart when it isn’t continually maintained.

The Reconfiguration of Late Modernity

Because late modernity moves away from optimism in the future, inheritance and bequests come into view as necessities. This shift in perspective allows some trusted concepts of modernity to appear in a new light. This relates to the rich tradition of the distinction between conservatives and progressives. In classical modernity, the roles were clearly designated: those who marched under the banner of progress, the left and liberal, plead for a decisive break with backwards inheritance, while the conservatives were given the role to desperately hold onto a (pre-modern) inheritance. In late modernity these roles don’t function anymore. Inheritance under the sign of late modernity is no longer a conservative domain. Far more as an issue, it circulates through the entire society and in all political quarters.

A shift in perspective causes a new apprehension of inheritance with respect to the concept of generations. Tim Ingold (2024), from the view of cultural anthropology, pointed out the need for a new appreciation of generations. Classical modernity was deeply preoccupied with the idea of generations and linked them to the concepts of innovation, discontinuity, and progress. In this perspective, the younger generation inevitably forms an avant-garde, the spearhead of progress. If you develop the appreciation of inheritance, on the other hand, it will become visible how much the chain of generations pass the baton to each other, how much the older influence the younger and pass on resources and burdens. Following this, Ingold develops the vision of a new generational contract in which the generations aren’t competitors; instead emerge as coalitional partners. The generations of the present appear then not isolated, instead as members of a long chain between the dead and not yet born.

With this a changed perspective of the future crystallises. It would be mistaken to restrict the appreciation of inheritance only to the relation between past and future. While the future appeared in classical modernity as an open field of possibilities, in which future achievements will take place with a boldness that isn’t able to be foreseen, late modernity views the future more strongly from the aspect of what the present will bequeath this future. The future perfect applies: what will we have inherited – and which effect will this inheritance in the positive and negative have on the following generations? The popular concept of sustainability is in the end, a shorthand for this appreciation of inheritance applied to the future.

The position of classical modernity of a discontinuity between present and future is overtaken in late modernity by the conception that there will be an unavoidable transmission from the present into the future. Today’s present appears as the powerful past of the future present. It begs the question of society not only of the burdens inherited in the future, but also the institutions and practices that should be bequeathed. To this it applies: to not inherit is just as impossible as not to bequeath. Either way you won’t get rid of your inheritance.

Translator’s note

This essay was originally published as Andreas Reckwitz, ‘Vom Erben’, Merkur: Deutsche Zeitschrift für europäisches Denken 79(916), September 2025, pp. 5–21. It appears here in English translation by permission of Merkur and the author.

Notes

1. Translator’s note: the German Schuld means both ‘debt’ and ‘guilt’.

2. In this sense inheritance discourse was also a part of the neo-conservative cultural compensation theory of the Ritter school; in this context Odo Marquard coined the motto ‘Every Future Needs a Past’.

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