Benjamin is fond of the aphoristic and fragmentary form: there are several collections of "theses" or "principles" in One-Way Street, for example. Everywhere, Benjamin returns to the question of the fragment, the singularity which disrupts the continuity of "progress" or "historicism", and which perhaps doesn't even seem to belong to history or historiography itself even as it inhabits it (see the first and the last of the "Theses").

The "philosophy of history" in the title of the "Theses" is Geschichtsphilosophie, which is exactly Benjamin's own word to describe the Arcades Project. The translation's not very precise: as Buck-Morss points out (55) what the original word's pointing to in each case is not so much a philosophy of history (an overall metadescription of history and how it works, a conceptual armature for it), but the project of making philosophy out of history: of taking something which seems in many ways beneath philosophy, something which has never been ennobled with an Idea but is part of the very texture of the banal and the everyday, and turning that into philosophy--and what's more, a philosophy which seeks to be engaged with that world in a quite revolutionary way: philosophy as explosive fragment, blasted out of history, in its very historicity.