Collingwood's The Idea of History

A Reader's Guide

Peter Johnson

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781441118578
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

The Idea of History is the best known work of the Oxford philosopher and historian RG Collingwood. Published posthumously in 1946 it is, in effect, two books: a historiography and a philosophy of history. Students look to Collingwood for a history of thinking about history, and to discover his ideas about the nature of historical understanding. It is an indispensable text for historians and philosophers yet it is also highly challenging and many of Collingwood's innovations have been seriously misunderstood. The primary focus of this book is on Collingwood's actual arguments, especially the most radical of these, with the aim of elucidating their construction and appraising them in the clearest possible way. This guide is the ideal companion to Collingwood's classic text both for students coming to it for the first time and for those wishing to consider its arguments afresh. It offers clear and concise accounts of the book's composition; the intellectual context of Collingwood's ideas; its central arguments concerning the nature of history; and its reception and influence.

CHAPTER ONE

Background to the text

Text

Collingwood’s The Idea of History is not an uncomplicated text. It is not wholly the book which Collingwood intended to write on history and it consists of material written at different times and for different purposes. Thus to make it less complicated we need to establish what Collingwood’s intentions were and then get a clearer picture of the book’s content.

In 2012 we are in a much better position to understand Collingwood’s plans for the publication of his writings on history than would have been possible in 1946, and, indeed, for a number of years afterwards. What Collingwood actually intended is unambiguously laid out in letters he wrote to the Clarendon Press, Oxford in June and October 1939 (see Peter Johnson, The Correspondence of R. G. Collingwood, An Illustrated Guide, The R. G. Collingwood Society, 1998, Letters C2lxxv and C2lxxix). What Collingwood planned was a series of volumes divided into three categories: (1) Philosophical Essays to consist of An Essay on Philosophical Method (published in 1933) and An Essay on Metaphysics, (published in 1940); (2) Philosophical Principles to consist of The Principles of Art (published in 1938) and The Principles of History (parts of which were published in The Idea of History in 1946 and much of the remainder, together with other material in 1999), and (3) Studies in the History of Ideas to consist of The Idea of Nature (published in 1945) and The Idea of History (published in 1946).

From this plan we can see that, as originally intended, The Idea of History was to cover the history of ideas about history from the ancient world to the modern, roughly the material concerning historiography on which Collingwood had lectured in Oxford in 1936 (and other years) and which is included in Parts I to IV of the book as it was later published in its edited form. We can be sure that Collingwood’s design of his series was not accidental. For whereas his aim in the History of Ideas category is to give an account of the historical emergence of the idea of history (or of the idea of nature), together with their evolution and development, the goal of Philosophical Principles is quite different. Here his objective is to show what it is that makes art or history possible at all. Just as Collingwood’s aesthetics in The Principles of Art aims to establish the nature of art proper as opposed to a number of false approximations of it, so his Principles of History aims to reveal the autonomy of historical understanding by distinguishing it from ways of thinking that are unable to capture history’s true character. In other words, both works are intended to make us think about the inner rationale of the activities they examine.

Collingwood believed that to get to grips with history, both approaches were necessary. Mapping the conceptual boundaries of history is not an activity that could be conducted out of the blue. Equally, Collingwood interjects his history of the ideas of history with comments aimed at revealing the adequacy of any given idea. We may readily assume that this is why Collingwood planned the history and the principles to appear together in two separate volumes. What we should not assume, however, is that this gives us anything more than a hint about the philosophical issues at stake. Publishing the two volumes in tandem does give us a strong indication of the close relation philosophy bears with history, but it is only an arrangement of thought, not the thought itself.

Why, then, were Collingwood’s writings on history made public in the form of The Idea of History, a text which is something of a problem text, rather than as he would have wished? The words contained in The Idea of History are Collingwood’s own and the text is not deliberately ambiguous, but it is a composite work, some parts of which are finished, others very much less so, including sections of The Principles of History itself. It is not that Collingwood did not try to complete The Principles of History. In 1939 during a recuperative voyage to the Dutch East Indies he wrote a little over one-third of it. But then work stopped. In fact, the answer is suggested in the date of Collingwood’s voyage and the reason for it. In 1939 Collingwood was suffering from a progressively debilitating illness. He knew that if he was to finish the work he had planned he would have to work fast, and he also knew that some projects would have to be sacrificed. By 1939 Collingwood was aware that the coming Second World War was inevitable. He needed to speak out, and so he formed the intention to write another work about principles, this time the fundamental principles of a liberal politics. This was The New Leviathan (published in 1942). It occupied Collingwood up until the last year of his life and we have good reason for thinking that this is the book which The Principles of History was set aside to complete.

After Collingwood died early in 1943 it was felt that the writings on nature and history made the best case for publication. Whereas the nature manuscript was self-contained the material on history was diverse, and the job of editing it and preparing it for publication was given to a student and friend of Collingwood’s, T. M. Knox. It was Knox, then, who had the task of bringing The Idea of History, as it was to be called, into the world. This he did in 1946. Knox selected manuscript material for publication by reference: first, to how finished he thought it was, and second, to the availability of the content elsewhere in Collingwood’s published writing, especially in his An Autobiography which had been published in 1939.

Knox’s Preface to the 1946 edition, together with Jan van der Dussen’s invaluable Editor’s Introduction to his 1993 revised edition of The Idea of History, tell us a great deal about how the volume, was composed. Knox’s first decision was to publish Collingwood’s writings on history in one volume rather than two as had been originally planned. His second was to divide the volume into two sections, one on historiography (Parts I to IV), and the other on the philosophical principles of history (Part V). While Collingwood had revised a small part of the first section in 1940, it was more or less complete, being the main body of the lectures on the subject he gave in 1936. Part V was a very different matter, however. To some degree following Collingwood’s own title, Knox called Part V, Epilegomena. Here Knox decided to include material from Collingwood’s 1936 Lectures concerning the nature of historical knowledge, together with material from Chapters 1 and 4 of the unfinished manuscript of The Principles of History. To this Knox added two published items, The Historical Imagination, Collingwood’s Inaugural Lecture which had been published in 1935, and Human Nature and Human History, a lecture to the British Academy which had been published in 1936.

Summing this up, the Epilegomena section consists of work produced between 1935 and 1939, some of which was published, some not. Some of this takes the form of essays and lectures, some manuscript material from the unfinished The Principles of History. The division of Part V into seven subsections was also Knox’s, as was the ordering of the material it contained. Thus, we have the Epilegomena as Knox entitled and presented it.

1Human Nature and Human History 1936

2The Historical Imagination 1935

3‘Historical Evidence’, Chapter 1 of the unfinished The Principles of History 1939

4‘History as the Re-enactment of Past Experience’ 1936 Lectures

5‘The Subject-matter of History’ 1936 Lectures

6‘History and Freedom’, part of Chapter 4 of The Principles of History 1939

7‘Progress as Created by Historical Thinking’ 1936 Lectures

Research on Collingwood’s manuscripts has revealed grounds for disagreement with Knox’s procedures, but I think that two points need to be made here. First, there is a strong sense in which Collingwood’s philosophical insights about the nature of history rise above their edited format. The doctrines central to Collingwood’s account of history emerge clearly from The Idea of History, and while they often provoke a considerable degree of argument, including, sometimes, opposition, their meaning is, more often than not, quite transparent. This is not to say that some topics, re-enactment, for example, are always treated exhaustively, nor is it to deny that fringe topics, such as the relation between history and biography, are given more attention outside The Idea of History than in it. Second, there is an equally strong sense in which debates about the adequacy of Knox’s edition are of limited interest because since the publication in 1999 of The Principles of History together with the incorporation of much relevant additional material, there is little of Collingwood’s writing on history that is now outside the public domain. Collingwood’s writings on history, if not in the form he intended, are now completely open to discussion and debate.

Context

While Herodotus is considered to be the father of history, we can reasonably think of Collingwood as the originator of modern philosophical accounts of history. Yet, Collingwood was resistant to modern analytical philosophy, and so his account of the emergence of history as an autonomous form of understanding is largely conducted independently. What interests Collingwood is not history consisting of statements which can be tested against scientific criteria, but the idea of history itself. Even so, the thought that historians are in some sense concerned with ascertainable fact is not easily set aside. So when Collingwood turns to the history of ideas of history he is careful to acknowledge what is true as well as what is false in theories of history which take verifiability as their model.

To express this point more generally. The best method for setting The Idea of History in context is to turn to the history of ideas of history in the first four parts of the book. This discussion of Graeco-Roman historiography, the rise of Christian ideas of history, of the approach of scientific history and of scientific history itself is important to philosophers as well as to historians of ideas, since in these sections Collingwood does more than just identify the salient characteristics of the thinking about history in each period. He plots the development of the idea of history as an autonomous discipline of thought, and so he charts lines of progress and regression, startlingly new insights which find themselves repeated in later ways of thinking, as well as relapses and setbacks in which history finds itself embraced by understandings which are not its own. In other words, there is a significant sense in which Collingwood wants his readers to understand his survey as leading to the completion of his own point of view. Given that Collingwood’s history of the ideas of history was originally given as lectures, this is not, perhaps, surprising. Not only does Collingwood’s thinking about historiography parallel and also inform his investigations into the nature of history, we do not go far wrong in concluding that he intended that it should.

Once Collingwood’s general approach has been grasped, we can see how it works in individual cases. Thus, in Collingwood’s hands (IH 17–20), the historical writings of Herodotus do not simply chronicle his own age. They contain in embryonic form some of the elements of autonomy that the modern understanding of history requires. An ancient historian’s view of evidence as the testimony of eyewitnesses for the occurrence of a particular event – say, the death of an individual in battle – is an advance because it allows the eyewitness account to be tested, thus permitting the historian to move from the belief that the death occurred to the knowledge that it has. But, equally, this ancient understanding of evidence is limited to what testimony can provide and this in turn limits the scope of history. Collingwood thought that the interrogation of eyewitness accounts was a development of the first importance in the emergence of the idea of history. Limited in range, it provided nevertheless an essential feature of scientific history as Collingwood understands it, namely a critical method for the establishment of fact.

We see a similar technique in Collingwood’s treatment of the English Renaissance historian and philosopher Francis Bacon (IH 58–60). What Bacon achieved was the identification of the past as past, as an area of human experience worth studying for its own sake rather than as the manifestation of a divine plan or as the function of the divine will. But Bacon limited history by restricting it to what could be recovered by memory. Thus, in addition to the project of understanding the past as past, what was needed was a critical method for carrying this out. To restrict history to the remembered past is to look at the past with one eye closed. Thus, while it is the past as past which the historian is interested in reconstructing, systematic rules and procedures are needed to achieve this when memory is absent.

In Collingwood’s account the emergence of history as an autonomous discipline of thought is neither smooth nor settled. There are periods when the idea is grasped only dimly or where it is outweighed by lack of the necessary practical or technical skills. But there are also times when the ingenuity of a particular individual presses the idea forward, massively anticipating understandings of history which only come to be appreciated later. Collingwood thought that Vico was such an individual. In fact, on T. M. Knox’s account, Collingwood used to say that if Plato was his favourite philosopher it was Vico who had influenced him the most (IH viii). His philosophy was the subject of Collingwood’s first book, a translation of a work by the modern Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce, The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico, published by Howard Latimer in London in 1913, an event that conveniently links Vico to Croce as two of the most important influences on Collingwood’s views.

Working in eighteenth-century Naples, Vico developed a way of thinking about history which was as revolutionary in his time as Collingwood’s was in his. Through Vico’s inspiration the idea of history overcame Cartesian scepticism and so cleared the way for history as a distinct human science which offered both knowledge and practical wisdom. Collingwood writes about Vico with verve and affection. In the first place, Vico was an historian who knew the problems of historical research from the inside. Collingwood thought that it was impossible to get to grips with any activity, theoretical or practical, unless one had long and hard experience of it. Theories of boat building, for instance, were useless without the actual experience of shaping the hull or situating the masts. The same is true of history. Vico passes this test with scarcely a murmur of doubt on Collingwood’s part.

On Vico’s substantive contribution Collingwood is firm, but he adds reservations. What Vico saw clearly was that history has no existence at all if it is thought of as the apprehension of fact. First, in human understanding, facts do not come alive until the ideas internal to them are grasped. Second, the appropriate question to ask of human activities is not whether they are true or false, but what they mean. Almost at a stroke Vico sweeps away a host of assumptions about historical method. Historians do not proceed by reference to testimony, but by putting testimony to the test. Records, documents, inscriptions are no longer to be considered as authorities but witnesses to be questioned. The aim is to reconstruct the past on its own terms, but the means for achieving this are no longer the cutting and pasting of sources, but the active interrogating power of the historical mind itself. Vico switches the focus from what is known to how we know it. It is a move of extraordinary power and significance, since its result is to make history critical. Sources are not self-authenticating, but conditional on their capacity to yield answers to the historian’s questions. It is, in other words, the historian who reigns.

Through Vico’s discoveries the idea of history ceases to be the poor relation of empiricism. Once the narrow conception of the facts is abandoned, historians are able to deploy a wide range of human material from myths to fairy-tales and the practices of primitive societies. However, as Collingwood insists, while this move to make history critical was a major step forward, much more was required. Vico had shown that the imagination of the historian was the key to the very possibility of history itself. He had shown that to expect from history a level of certainty beyond the narratives of the past that historians construct is to expect what history cannot provide. History is the product of the historical mind. This is what makes it critical. We do not yet know what makes criticism scientific, but Vico’s revolution was an advance, one which Collingwood was keen to identify as such.

Croce’s book on Vico introduces a more immediate context to The Idea of History. Collingwood saw the history of the idea of history and the influences on his own thought in very much the same light, and he shares Croce’s tendency to understand earlier conceptions of history as stepping stones to his own. We might think of this as a deliberate philosophical technique, one that both philosophers acquired from Hegel. Collingwood and Croce wrote against the broad philosophical background of Hegel’s own works, and the tradition of nineteenth-century Hegelianism which they inherited. Not that either Collingwood or Croce ever read Hegel except through their own intellectual needs and circumstances. Thus, the Hegelian understanding of human experience in terms of a comprehensive phenomenology which reveals the unity behind diverse modes of thinking and acting is one which to various degrees in specific periods of his writing Collingwood followed. On its own, however, this project does not pin down exactly what makes history different. It certainly tells us that a mode of understanding which works very well in ordering one type of experience will fail completely when faced with another. Hegel’s opposition to naturalism, therefore, is to be counted an advance because it captures the sense in which the historian is concerned with actions rather than with events or happenings. But the actions which are the subject matter of history are past actions and so the historian’s problem is how to breathe life into a past which is now dead. By a similar token, Collingwood’s problem, as a philosopher as well as an historian, is how to make sense of history as an activity which delivers knowledge of the past, as opposed to beliefs, guesses or intuitions about it.

Collingwood believed that with Hegel (together with a number of other late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thinkers examined in Part III of The Idea of History), we reach the threshold of scientific history. Why? To answer this question we must retrace our steps a little. Scientific history (or history proper as we might understand it, using Collingwood’s language in The Principles of Art), arises out of dissatisfaction with the commonsense solution to the problem of historical knowledge. On the commonsense view the acquisition of historical knowledge looks like this. The historian wishes to arrive at an account of the past – say, the storming of the Bastille during the French Revolution – which is factually correct. Since it is obviously impossible for historians to be observers of this experience they must rely on the observations of those who were there at the time. Thus, the testimony of participants becomes the essential raw material of history. On this basis, the commonsense view concludes that the job of the historian is to collect testimony, to select and rearrange it, and sometimes to reject it as inconsistent or unsound. Collingwood argues, however, that the collection of testimony is not history but chronicle. Chronicle is history falsely understood. Even so, chronicle contains the hint of history proper because the historian, in choosing between testimonies, is not a passive recipient of them but actually bringing them to life. With the arrival of critical history the hint of history proper becomes stronger. Sour...

Table of contents

• FC
• Bloomsbury Reader’S Guides
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Text
• Prologue
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• A Note About Reading
• 1 Background to the text
• 2 Collingwood’s great discovery: The autonomy of history
• 3 Arguing with Collingwood (I)
• 4 Arguing with Collingwood (II)
• 5 Receptions and reactions
• Glossary
• Further reading
• Index