The Idea of History

by R.G. Collingwood, Jan van der Dussen (Editor)

The Idea of History is the best-known work of the great Oxford philosopher, historian, and archaeologist R.G. Collingwood. It was originally published posthumously in 1946, having been mainly reconstructed from Collingwood's manuscripts, many of which are now lost. This important work examines how the idea of history has evolved from the time of Herodotus to the twentieth century, and offers Collingwood's own view of what history is. For this revised edition, Collingwood's most important lectures on the philosophy of history are published here for the first time. These texts have been prepared by Jan van der Dussen from manuscripts that have only recently become available. The lectures contain Collingwood's first comprehensive statement of his philosophy of history; they are therefore essential for a full understanding of his thought, and in particular for a correct interpretation of The Idea of History itself. Van der Dussen contributes a substantial introduction in which he
explains the background to this new edition and surveys the scholarship of the last fifty years.

Genres: History, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Academic, Theory, World History, Anthropology

564 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1946

About the author

Robin George Collingwood was an English philosopher and historian. Collingwood was a fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford, for some 15 years until becoming the Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Magdalen College, Oxford.

Reviews

[Ahmad Abdul Rahim · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a highly specialized topic written for a book. Readers (who are not historians) will find themselves completely at the mercy of the author: his choice of topics, his analysis on other historians approach, his refutations and arguments. However I believe Collingwood intended this book for the lay audiences. His main points were repeatedly reiterated throughout the book. And he used common and shared experiences to drive his ideas home; that history is a different kind of science than what's being oftenly accepted, but its a science nevertheless; and historical thought is achieved by reenacting the historical events in one's own mind and reliven it.

I view the Idea of History as a book that describes whats going on inside a historian's mind: his hopes and fears, his assertions and contentions, and the pursuit of objectivity within an intrinsically subjective-minded kind of inquiry.

[Varad · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book anyone who is - or pretends to be - a historian must read. That is not to say it will be easy for many historians to read, or that they will agree with its conclusions. It is a difficult work, a work of genuine philosophy; and Collingwood's conception of history seems to contradict much of what historians think about their craft and their subject.

The first part of the book is taken up with Collingwood's account of the development of history as an entity in its own right, that is one with a defined subject and object. For Collingwood this means history's evolution from various annalistic, political, and theological approaches, and in modern times its escape from the grip of scientism and naturalism. In other words, his concern is with history's maturation as philosophically viable, independent, and complete. History, that is, for and by its own sake.

The real substance of the book is Collingwood's analysis of history from this philosophical viewpoint. The influence of idealism is apparent (Collingwood was one of the British idealists), and the philosophy itself is too rich and complicated for exegesis here. Two main ideas underpin the edifice. The first is the notion that the past has no independent existence, having ceased to be the moment it passed into whatever temporal oblivion things that have occurred pass into. (It need not be pointed out that the philosophy of time is itself hugely controversial, but Collingwood only introduces that to the extent it impinges on his enterprise, and no more.) The past can only be known in the present, because all that is known of it is what of it that has persisted into the present. We can know of it only what is left.

Because of this Collingwood argues that history ends in the present; the historian's task is to understand how it came to be, but can say nothing about the future because it no more exists than the past. It is how the historian goes about doing all this that is surely the most controversial aspect of his philosophy of history. Because the past itself does not exist, and all that is known of the past is based on the evidence of it that exists in the present, Collingwood asserts that all history is a reconstruction of the past, an imaginative reconstruction which takes place in the historian's mind. And what the historian reconstructs is not events or actions, for those are lost, but the thought that went into those events or actions. For Collingwood, "All history is the history of thought" (215). The only way to know the thought of the past is to recreate it in one's own mind; that is history. Hence Collingwood's lapidary assertion, a stone cast into the very foundations of history itself: "The history of thought, and therefore all history, is the re-enactment of past thought in the historian's own mind" (ibid.)

A stunning claim, and a controversial one. It raises all sorts of issues, such as what constitutes a thought, what an event is, whether humans in the present can re-think the thoughts of humans in earlier centuries if their thought processes are incommensurate (which introduces the vexed question of the unity and uniformity of human nature), and so forth.

One can challenge Collingwood's philosophy of history both on its premises and its conclusions. But from his premises his conclusions are entailed logically. For they all flow from the basic premise upon which the entire structure is erected: history is by necessity philosophical for it is a product of the human mind. It is created by humans thinking, by our mental processes. To use one's mind, for Collingwood, is to act philosophically. History and philosophy are in this respect, for him, identical.

This is implied throughout the main text, but is most forcefully established in the essays and lecture notes which were added to the 1994 edition. Here Collingwood makes clear, in powerfully protreptic fashion, his conviction that history without philosophy is a nullity. "The philosophy of history, then, is the exposition of the transcendental concept of history, the study of history as a universal and necessary form of mental activity" he writes at the end of his essay on "The Idea of a Philosophy of Something" (357).

From this arise profound metaphysical, epistemological, and moral consequences. Metaphysical, for history is an attempt to unite in the concrete reality of the present the wholly ideal existences of the past and the future. "The past is in no sense whatever actual. It is wholly ideal" (403). The present itself is is only a momentary phenomenon, the point at which the two unrealities meet. "The present is composed in this way of two ideal elements, past and future" (405). Epistemological consequences stem from the metaphysical, for the unreality of the past constrains our ability to know it. "History, regarded as knowledge of past fact, is unattainable" (394).

What we are really trying to know, of course, is the present. The past is "necessary" while the future is "possible." It is the present alone that is "actual" (412-3). It is probably the most controversial proposition in all history (the discipline, not the subject), whether we study the past for its own sake or our own, but Collingwood eminently, sensibly, chooses the only way he must: "The purpose of history is to enable us to know (and therefore to act relatively to) the present" (406). All history leads up to the present; we seek to comprehend it by "reconstructing its determining conditions" (420).

And comprehend it we must, for it is innate in our humanity. It is part of what makes it human. And this brings us to the moral consequences of Collingwood's conception of history. "History is one of the necessary and transcendental modes of mind's activity, and the common property of all minds." (422). That is why history is, and must be, philosophical: it emanates from our minds. We apprehend the world through thought, and no thought is more crucial than that by which we reconstruct the making of the world we inhabit, that is, the present. Every past that was once a present was itself reconstructed in that way. So it is that Collingwood can declare that all history is the re-enactment of past thought. Philosophy and history are both concerned with thought. "In a very real sense," therefore, "they are and must be the same. For their problem is the same." (422). Indeed, history is the "immediate and direct source of all philosophical problems." History requires philosophy, but so does philosophy require history. Without history, philosophy lacks sustenance and withers. Nurture a historical consciousness, though, and you have all, save its own methodology, "that philosophy needs. All philosophy is the philosophy of history."

They are one and the same; two sides of the same coin, a symbiosis that originates in the human mind itself. Not only does Collingwood vindicate history as a way of understanding the world, he vindicates humans as beings compelled to understand the world through history. Of all the consequences of Collingwood's philosophy of history, this is surely the most important. History is philosophy because it must be; we make it so. History exists because humanity does; it emerges from our perspective on the world.

I think, therefore I am. And because I am, I think historically. Everyman is his own historian. And every historian, according to Collingwood, is his own philosopher. Whatever else one may think of Collingwood's philosophy, on this essential point he is entirely correct. For not only is every historian his own philosopher, he must be, if he is ever to be worthy of the name.

(Originally written 1 August 2010, edited 28 June 2011)

[Luís · Rating 5 out of 5]

The fact that R.G. Collingwood's [1889-1943] philosophy of history has been commonly identified with the theory of historiographical activity as a re-enactment of the thought of historical agents has meant that his other contributions, equally rich and even more critical, have remained less well known.
This theory was especially the case with the concept of the "ideality of history," which he would only deal with extensively and definitively in his posthumous work, "The Idea of History" [1946]. The relevance of the concept lies in the fact that it ultimately constitutes the presupposition of Collingwood's entire doctrine of historical knowledge, including the notion of re-actualization.
Furthermore, in "The Idea of History," he made a point of emphasizing that he arrived at the ideality of history exclusively through his own experience as a historian of the Roman occupation of England, in keeping with the tendency to couple historiographical practice and epistemological reflection, unfortunately still rare today, except in the work of [Henri-Irénée] Marrou [1904-1977] or Paul Veyne [1930].
In short, the ideality of history means that the objective of historiographical activity is not a tangible object, like that of the natural sciences or as it might be in other human sciences, such as anthropology (when studying a society on the ground) or economics (when analyzing a recession in the very period in which it occurs), but an ideal object, whose basic characteristic is that it presents itself to observation in the form of traces or residues of an object that was also once real. Hence, in Collingwood's intellectual career, the theory of the ideality of history could only emerge after the second half of the 1920s, when he consummated his break with the realism and empiricism of the English philosophy predominant at the time, particularly at his home university, the University of Oxford.

[Matthew Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

As emotional and subjective beings we never simply look to raw history, rather, we look to history and think about history through our own presuppositional lenses. Collingwood calls this the second degree of reflective philosophy. We typically think about the thoughts that we are having about history. In other words, we tend to interpret history through our cultural environments. What we highlight and what we see in history is dictated by our cultural, anthropological and philosophy of history.

To establish a context for this paper I am going to lay out a bird’s eye view of each period’s main tenets or could I say, “Worldviews.” More specifically, I believe that it would be beneficial to look more specifically at each time period’s view of mankind. I will begin with the Greeks and progress toward our present contemporary context of the enlightenment and romanticism. The material below has been fleshed out by Collingwood.

Greco-Roman Historiography:
This era was framed within a context of humanism. It was based on the idea of man as essentially a rational animal, by which I mean the doctrine that every individual human being is an animal capable of reason. The Greeks had a lively and indeed a naïve sense of the power of man to control his own destiny and thought of this power as limited only by the limitations of his knowledge.

Pendulum Shift:
According to Collingwood there was a pendulum shift where the historical philosophy and narrative shifted from a one-sided humanistic perspective to a one-sided theocentric view.

Medieval Historiography:
With the advent of Christianity in the Constantinian Era came a new historiography, or rather a shift. As noted above the pendulum shifted. Rather than an overt view of mankind with the Greco-Roman History, the optimistic idea of human nature was replaced with an understanding of mankind’s downfall of original sin. Rather than seeing sin as an action, it was seen as an inherent part of natural man. This de-emphasis of man’s power, intellect and abilities shifted the narrative from mankind to the working of God.

Revolt:
According to Collingwood the second major shift happened as a revolt not only against the religious institution but also against the meta-narrative of the Medieval times.

Enlightenment Historiography:
The philosophical theory in this movement was that certain forms of mental activities are primitive forms, destined to perish when the mind arrives at maturity. Mankind may be limited and irrational but certainly capable of being converted from the weak view of medieval times to an enlightened state.

While Collingwood did spend time on how each period of time viewed history (i.e. as progress, as continuation, etc…), I believe assessing how each period viewed mankind really captures the bedrock foundation of how one conducts their history. Collingwood continuously reinforces that a historian cannot simply report the outward activities and expressions of a historical event. Rather the historian’s job is to exegete and ascertain the psyche behind the historical events, so as to communicate the thoughts of the historical period to the present. However, where this gets tremendously difficult is twofold. The first is the challenge of assessing the historical time period’s view of mankind and his/her relationship to the events around him, as previously expressed. Secondly, things are also complicated depending on the historians own anthropological presuppositions of himself and the audience that he is attempting to communicate to. Take for example the Enlightenment. Individuals from the Enlightenment had an overly inflated view of mankind in his/her supposed enlightened state. According to Collingwood, due to the overly optimistic view of mankind in the enlightenment, many rejected and had no sympathy for the non-rationalistic period of human history within the Medieval period. In fact, many of them began to be interested in history at the point where the modern enlightened spirit appeared on the stage.

While the enlightenment’s view of mankind certainly undercuts and usurps the historiography and meta-narrative of the Medieval age, it is also at odds with modern Christian historiography. While each period’s historiography and view of mankind is formed from pendulum swings and revolts, as students of the Bible we need to keep in mind that the scriptures form and inform our anthropology and our presuppositional lenses in which we assess and understand history. It is extremely valuable for the church to understand the ancient historiographical presuppositions of each age, not only when reading history, but also in interpreting it (i.e. good exegesis of history). Furthermore, it is essential for the church to understand the modern historiographical presuppositions in our day in age in order to assess the possible eisegesis of modern historians.

[Matthias]

This is a work of fascinating, rigorous scholarship, full of judicious opinions and savage attacks on received falsehoods. Unfortunately, the fascinating parts are not rigorous, the rigorous parts are not only dry but irrelevant, the judicious opinions are commonplaces - or at least they are now, perhaps I am not crediting him enough with popularizing them - and the grapeshot used to sink falsehoods would appear to scatter and hit much else, trying to rule out much of social science on a technicality. The book ties itself in endless dreary circles, especially in the last essay, examining increasingly minute and irrelevant hypotheses within philosophy of mind, propagating again and again a simple error in epistemology.

The book starts off okay enough. Like a late night in a seedy nightclub, the first half is jolly good fun if you can just swallow the pills he’s offering you. They are:
1. past history-writing is good to the extent it matches our current conceptions of the discipline
2. the extent to which they did so proceeded directly from the metaphysics and epistemology of contemporary philosophers, and
3. Collingwood understands these philosophers.

Thus, we discover that Greek history-writing was hampered by the belief that veridical knowledge could only concern eternal truths; so that the singular achievement of Herodotus in inventing history wasted away either in Thucydides' assimilation of history into scientific analysis (Collingwood's enemy throughout this book) or else an examination of the "souls" of men as villainous or heroic as in the Hellenistic annals. (But didn't Aristotle, the Milesians, and many others concern themselves with changing things of this world of generation and corruption? Shouldn't we be looking to say India, which had as advanced philosophy but almost no history-writing at all?) We learn that Christianity made a great progress in introducing the idea that things change over time, that there are genuinely new things introduced into the order of the world and their origins must be explained and not taken for a given, and also that the men's actions do not always produce what they wish; but then it also introduced the great error of thinking that all of this was due to some great plan that can be projected into the future. (But then Collingwood offhandedly implies that he thinks that by the term *actus purus* Aquinas was some sort of process theologian, so it's unclear how well he understands the philosophers of this or other epochs.) We see the Enlightenment producing the first real skepticism about sources, and then in its skepticism and arrogance condemning the "dark ages" as both too obscure and too irrelevant to investigate. We see Romanticism....

and so on. It actually is great fun! (One wishes there were more history-writing examined, amid the philosophy that supposedly so constrained it, is actually much more my complaint than its lack of rigor.) But as the drugs start to wear off, as we get closer to modern philosophers, we get closer to an examination of what Collingwood thinks history *really* should be. And it is here that he descends from the lofty heights of irresponsible speculation to the dreary business of highly rigorous examination, which I ought applaud, except he never convinces me that his object is an interesting one in the first place.

What is history? asks Collingwood. Well, he replies, It is the mental re-reconstruction of intentional actions by humans of the past, in the mind of the historian, by means his own critically examination of sources.

Now, this isn't so bad as a slogan, or a starting point, or as a description of what much good history consists in, or of some of the things which, if history didn't include it, something would be wrong. But for Collingwood this is much less a slogan or starting point or even minimum program for what history as a discipline needs to bring than a law code. Collingwood is a judge riding circuit and a hanging judge, and all throughout his circuit, he passes judgment.

"Of what is the defendant guilty, your honor?" Of not being history.

"To what do we sentence the guilty, your honor?" To hnot being history! (Gasps in the crowd.)

Through this we learn that a great many scholarly activities "may be a fine activity in themselves, but are not history." Finding patterns in history is not history. Discovering mere "animal facts" about people, such as how many calories were in their diet, is not history. Sometimes these have withering names: relying on or using (the distinction is not clear) secondary sources is "scissors-and-paste history," reconstructing exact details is "philological history;" needless to say despite the presence of the word "history" these are not history. Only the mental re-reconstruction of intentional actions by humans of the past, in the mind of the historian, by means his own critically examination of sources, is history.

By the end of this the poor reader is ready to cry uncle as to his assertions about what does and does not count as history; they are yet left in the dark, however, about why they should care. I could take him as saying that my own field of historical sociology - which must depend to a great degree on the secondary literature which has been produced by judicious historians, and proceeds to make a series of generalizations from them - is illegitimate, but he has done little of this (merely told me that it is, fair enough, not, history); if it is its own autonomous field, then he has given me little reason to care where the boundary-markers between these fields are drawn. (Thankfully, relatively few scholars seem to care, and so the scholarship of each is enhanced by all sorts of boundary-crossers.) I will not take offense; I will look on in puzzlement.

Worse still is the painstaking analysis he makes to defend the coherence of his concpetion of history, so properly construed. For instance, if an historian must call to mind the thoughts of those in the past, what counts for this? The interesting practica question of "how do I know I'm thinking roughly what another person really, factually thought" is acknowledged and then ignored in favor of conceptual analysis of what it means to have "the same thought" by two different people, whether sense-experience is a thought, and so on. This is analytic philosophy at its worst.

To engage in a bit of the reconstruction of thought of a past thinker myself, what seems to drive Collingwood's own fascination with these questions is twofold. First, he wants to defend history as a respectable pursuit, and is tired of people only honoring natural sciences and then by extension claiming they will only honor history once it behaves like a natural science. The second is his belief that a respectable discipline will give us demonstrable knowledge, Knowledge with a capital K, rather than mere probabilities. These tie him in knots; and lead him to a rather curious emphasis on history as something taking place *inside* the mind of the historian because we *can* fully know the contents of our own mind, with all critical methods matching this to what someone else thought grafted on. This solipsistic-but-not-really endeavor is thus able to compete with the certainties that he imagines the natural sciences are able to demonstrate, even though in fact they are only able to demonstrate probabilties either.

Allow me to assert a number of alternative doctrines that I think better defend the discipline without policing its boundaries:
1. History is valuable because we are curious about a great many things that happened in the past. Sometimes this interest may be instrumental, for instance when we want to know how to seize or weild political power; a great amount of it is simply intrinsic.
2. Some of the methods we use to investigate history wouldn't pass muster in most of the natural sciences, because of the inherent lack of replicability.
3. Empathetic reconstruction, demographic models, social-scientific theories, philological analysis, simple guesswork, and many others will all be involved in these. It would be an odd duck of a scholar who worked with all of them; she would instead have to know one area well and trust others in others.
4. "History" is these investigations defined by family resemblance rather than necessary and sufficient conditions, and where history ends and some other discipline begins is mostly unimportant.

I will not defend these rough-and-ready propositions, but kick the stone of actually existing history: I refute him thus!

[Steve Greenleaf · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the spring of 1973, I took a course in the Philosophy of History through the Philosophy Department at the University of Iowa from Professor Laird Addis. As a text, he assigned Patrick Gardiner's Theories of History (1959) (The field does not move quickly.) Included in that book were readings from R.G. Collingwood's The Idea of History. Professor Addis also listed Collingwood's book in the syllabus as a work to read in its entirety if we wanted to write about it. I have no recollection of reading any of it. I have no idea of what Collingwood argued. This could be in part the fault of Professor Addis, who was working in his own book with a neo-positivist perspective on history and the social sciences. (The Logic of Society: A Philosophical Study (1975).) Then again, it was probably because I was a dumb kid. Curious, but still behind the curve.

Since then, reading E.H. Carr, John Lukacs, John Lewis Gaddis, Niall Ferguson, Owen Barfield and others writing about history as a way of knowing, Collingwood's name kept popping up. So, in Jaipur, seeing an inexpensive copy (of the revised edition), I popped for it. It made the trip back to China from the U.S. this year, and now I've completed it.

It is a great book. I kick myself for waiting so long to read it.

As a historian-archeologist and as a philosopher, Collingwood knows his stuff. He treats various issues in detail, constructing sophisticated and subtle arguments with appealing, workman-like prose. While the book changes the way we think, it does so without over-taxing our patience or resolve. Indeed, this work, first published after his death in 1943 through the efforts of his former pupil, T.M. Knox, is composed in some part from lectures given by Collingwood as well as from completed essays. But whether a particular part of the book is based on lectures or on written essays, it makes no difference. While reading Collingwood at any juncture, I had the feeling of listening to someone wise discoursing on a topic that he knows deeply by heart.

Collingwood means to bring to history that same questioning attitude that marked the development of the natural sciences from the 17th century on. But he doesn't suggest that history is a weak sibling to natural science; instead, he sees history as the gateway to self-knowledge and to understanding our world. Collingwood stakes out his territory very thoroughly. For instance, he discusses the nature of evidence for historians, and he draws upon the English detective novel tradition of the 1920s and 1930s--Christie and Sayers pop to mind--to illustrate how the historian proceeds. To bookend this practical concern, he deals with the failings of realist and empirical theories of history. He prefaces all of this with a history of the philosophy of history (not a term coined until Voltaire), taking the reader from Herodotus and Thucydides to his own peers, such as Croce and Oakshott.

I could go on at some length about this book, picking almost any page at random to showcase some profound insight, but I'll stop here with the intention of a deeper exploration in the future.

Do I go too far? The Times Literary Supplement named The Idea of History one of the 100 most influential books in western culture since WWII. Whether that is correct, I know not, but it should be!

[Nuruddin Azri · Rating 5 out of 5]

I never expected that Collingwood will be as interesting as this. This is the last book that is written by him and actually it is not finished yet though the readers may find that it is one of the excellent, wit and critical book on philosophy of history that ever exist in the history.

Collingwood analyses the historiography of Greco-Roman, the thought of the main world philosophers and historians and teaches the readers how to be a scientific historian which need the unity of experience (as what Bacon said - the best knowledge is the ripest and the richest experience), self-training, read the great texts of history in a different spirit, ask question in minds about the texts, study the problems (not the periods) and broaden the basis of history which also use the non-literary sources like coins and inscriptions.

This differs with scissors-and-paste historian, which only study the periods, take history in a receptive spirit without asking questions, analyse and arrange it systematically and so forth like what Macaulay said in Essay on History - a perfect historian must possess an imagination sufficiently powerful to make his narrative affecting and picturesque. Here we can notice that past is not merely a series of event but it is a system of things known.

History, from the Collingwood's lens, is for the human self-knowledge, knowing what human has done and what human is. Historian need to re-enact the history of past in his own mind, identify and think for the philosophical problem and find out the possible solutions for it. Bundle of indexes and bibliographies are not merely for the sources and evidences, but that are monographs and need to be the starting-point for the historian himself.

The chapter where Collingwood gives a critical analysis (just like what Russell did in A History of Western Philosophy) on every philosopher of history like Kant, Schiller, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Marx, Bradley, Bury, Oakeshott, Toynbee, Windelband, Rickert, Simmel, Dilthey, Meyer, Spengler, Bergson and Croce is just amazing where we can find a crystal-clear stance on which Collingwood satisfies and unsatisfies with the method and understanding of a particular historian.

I bought this book other than dozens "gold" more at the used bookstore in East Lansing, Michigan and it is one of the worth trip to United States in which I can reflect my understanding back on the philosophical meaning of history and why it is important for the human being.

[عبدالله العبيد · Rating 4 out of 5]

من أفضل الكتب التأسيسية التأصيلية في القرن العشرين لإشكالية الكتابة التاريخية و أبعادها المعرفية

[Mark Bowles · Rating 4 out of 5]

Genesis of the book
1. During the 1st 6 months of 1936 Collingwood wrote 36 essays on the philosophy of history. These essay's fell into 2 parts;
a) The historical account of the modern idea of history from Herodotus to the 20th century
b) Metaphysical epilegomena: philosophical reflections on the nature, subject-matter, and method of history.
2. He began to work on the book epilogemena in 1939 during his stay in java.
3. In 1940 he began to revise a part of the 1936 manuscript and renamed it The Idea of History. This was the last time he worked on the book before his death in 1943.
4. His posthumous papers were edited by T.M. Knox and published in 1946.
C. Collingwood's views on philosophy
1. His main goal was to bring a rapprochement between philosophy and history
2. He believed that philosophers should not ignore history
3. These views have been compared to Croce
D. Health
1. In 1932 his health began to trouble him [xxi]
2. See this paragraph in book
3. Ill health transformed him from modesty to someone who believed in his considerable superiority [xxiii]
II. Epilegomena
A. Human Nature and Human History
1. The Science of Human Nature
a) Self-knowledge is the key to understanding all things. Self-knowledge is not anatomy and physiology, nor feeling, sensation, or emotion, but thought understanding, or reason [205]
b) To understand the human mind we must use the same approach in which we study nature
c) Observe the ways in which the mind works, then establish the laws which govern them. This is the science of human nature [206]
d) This science of human nature (which was attempted in the 17th and 18th) has failed to understand what understanding is [208]
e) The reason Collingwood believes it failed is because its method broke down in the analogy to the natural sciences
f) Thesis: The science of human nature was a false attempt-falsified by the analogy to the natural sciences-to understand the mind itself. The right way to understand nature is science. The right way to understand mind is the methods of history. [209]
2. The Field of Historical Thought
a) Attempt here is to define what historical knowledge is. [210]
b) The object of history is not to uncover mere events (Caesar crossed the Rubicon), but to uncover the thoughts associated with them (What was the relationship to the Roman Republican government) [214]
c) History is therefore the history of thought [211]
d) How does the historian discern these thoughts? By re-thinking them in his own mind. So, history is the re-enactment of past thought in the historians mind, and criticized within the context of his own thoughts and time.
e) Thus, the field of historical knowledge is limited to human affairs, because only here lies human thought [216]
3. History as Knowledge of Mind
a) Historical knowledge is the knowledge of what mind has done in the past [218]
b) Historical inquiry reveals to the historian the powers of his own mind. Whenever he discovers something which is unintelligible-he has discovered a limitation in his own mind.
c) All knowledge of mind is historical. Ex. what I did last year. You know what you did last year by remembering (re-enacting) it or reading something you wrote at that time [219]
d) Distinction between psychology (what mind is) and history (what mind does). Thus is distinguished structure (psychology) from function (history) [221]
4. Conclusion
a) History is not the study of successive events from a dead past (this is the positivistic view) [228] This view is dangerous to history because it does not allow the historian to get to the thoughts of those he studies
b) The subject of psychology (the science of mind) are the irrational thoughts of the mind which are not the subject of history [231]
B. The Historical Imagination
1. History, in recent times has worked out a type of thought all its own [232]
2. Collingwood claims that historical knowledge has been ignored by philosophers [233]
3. Two type of history
a) History is like perception, subjective and something different for everyone
b) History is like science because knowledge is gained by reason. [234]
4. Purpose of this section is to describe a third type of history: reasoned knowledge of what is transient and concrete
5. Common-sense theory: There is such thing as historical truth. It is based on memory and authority. The historian must not add, tamper, or disagree with any historical document [235]
a) Yet, the historian does all of these things. He selects, constructs, and criticizes [236]
b) Thus, the historian has autonomy, by these three things, to reject his authorities [237]
c) The common-sense theory is clearly refuted [238]
6. What is the criterion of historical truth? We now know that the common-sense theory of memory and authority is incorrect and so we need another theory [239]
a) According to Bradley the answer is experience. The historians own experience is the criterion to judge the authorities
b) Collingwood believed that Bradley failed to understand what the historian brought to understand the past authorities [240]
c) The key is constructive history: interpolating between the statements taken from our authorities
d) What is inferred is what is imagined. This imagination is what bridges the gap between what our authorities tell us, and gives us the historical narrative [241]
e) Imaginative construction serves as the basis by which we decide that facts are genuine [244]
7. Three rules of method for imagination [246]
a) The historians picture must be localized in space and time
b) The history must be consistent with itself
c) Most important, it must stand in relation to some form of evidence. What is evidence and what is its relation to historical work?
C. Historical Evidence
1. Introduction
a) History is a special kind of science (organized body of knowledge). [251]
b) It is a science which attempts to study events not open to observation, and to study these events inferentially.
c) These events are argued through evidence [252]
2. Different kinds of inference (inductive & deductive)
3. Testimony: Statements made by an authority [256]. Testimony needs to be reinforced by evidence. When it is it becomes historical knowledge [257]
4. Scissors and paste
a) This is history constructed by excerpting and combining the testimonies of different authorities
b) This began to change when critical history became the adopted norm in the 19th. The word authority was changed to 'source'. [259]
c) The way out of this is to not ask if a source is true of not, but what is the meaning of the source [260]
D. History as re-enactment of the past
1. How can historians know the past? [282]
2. He is not an eye-witness, so it is always inferential or indirect
3. The historian must re-enact the past in his own mind.
E. The Subject Matter of History
1. The subject matter is that which can be re-enacted in the historians mind [302]
2. First is experience. Ex. there is no history of nature.
3. The experience of sensations, feelings, etc. is not historical
4. Only thought can be historical, feelings and emotions are not [303]
5. And only thought which occurs in the conscious part of the brain [308]
6. Warfare has a history because we study the thoughts of a military commander [310]
7. Economic activity has a history because it results from men who have a distinct thought in mind when they build a bank or a factory
8. There is a history of religion because it is based on reflective thought [314]
F. History and Freedom
1. We study history to attain self-knowledge [315]
2. To illustrate this Collingwood will show that our knowledge that human activity is free has been attained only through our discovery of history
3. The freedom of history consists of the fact that the activity of human reason is controlled by itself [317]
4. The historian must solve problems for himself, the natural sciences cannot assist [318]
G. Progress as created by Historical Thinking
1. Progress in nature is evolution [321]
2. Historical progress is a succession of events [324]
3. It refers to the coming into existence of new specific types. Ex. a bee that gathers honey visits a different flower each time. When a man is hungry he eats a different mean each time
4. It is difficult to judge whether a progress was beneficial or not [326]
5. It is impossible to judge a certain way of life [327]. Historical periods of greatness and decadence are never historically true.
6. There is no progress in art only development from one stage to another. [330]
7. Progress is possible in such areas as science. A new theory can explain more phenomena than an old one. Ex. Darwin's theory of evolution better explained nature than the belief in a fixed species. [332]
8. When and where progress has occurred are question for historical thought [333]
9. The only way that progress becomes real is by retaining how the old way of thought was bettered by the new way. Thus, historical thinking creates progress
10. Einstein progressed by knowing Newton's thought and furthering it.

[Brett Green · Rating 5 out of 5]

Need to read this again. A lot of good food for thought for people just getting started in philosophy, esp philosophy of history. A quarter of the text or so covers developments in how older periods/cultures conceived history, ending up with the Germans/Hegel. He then dives into prominent 19th and 20th century thought on the matter, divvying up English, German, and French thought in the process. There are then a few essays of his own where he explicitly covers his own "idea" of history.

I read this in parts, first as a grad student getting my feet wet with this stuff. I later read the rest out of interest and when finishing coming away thinking that this guy believes in that same sort of historical miasma as I do; that it's all just retrospective presentism. In light of some more recent reading on Hegel and the ubiquity of that Zizek guy, I'd like to reread the second part of this book and see what parallels may or may not be warranted!

--------------

Reading this again, this is really a masterclass of how to make difficult ideas as accessible and alive as possible. His aim is nothing more than to make the rationality of the historical idea as a living, shared object of rational discourse as justified in its being as the scientific-analytic discourse that we reflexively take to be 'the truth'. The idea as somewhere between 'logos' and 'flux', I suppose.

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book changed my apprehension of the historical process. Collingwood's presentation is an architecture in thinking about history as a philosophy, as a craft and as an idea. His presentation of the major thinkers in the realms of history and of philosophy has him fitting the forebears of thought into a larger geometry of which functions as a set of records in the architecture of the past. This past so designed presently and actively is descended to us by forming a structure for history to reside within. This book subsequently gave rise to my thoughts about the existence of an architecture of imagination present in the writing of historical novels.

Collingwood's big yet, precise ways of approaching history, gets at the role of the historian at the intersection of philosophical history, science and human meaning present in the best and most forceful historical writing. This is a wow book for theorists.

Ultimately, Collingwood's clear thought on a web of ideas in The Idea of History is a treat presented as a philosophical treatise and {set} of answers for the writers and recipients of historical writing - by answering a capital Q question, Why do historians write?

[Turkish · Rating 4 out of 5]

Не знаю, конечно как тут какие-то оценки ставить, да и тема очень узкая, но что-то напишу все таки.
Даже учитывая, что концепция гносеологии исторического знания автора сильно впадает в идеализм, это все еще очень необычный ответ на то, как вообще возможна история. К тому же автор зациклен (по понятным причинам) на критике позитивизма и неореализма. Иногда все скатывается в разглагольствования о том, какой позитивизм и неореализм херовый. Кстати, в советском издании, которое я читал, критическая статья, посвященная трудам Коллингвуда, очень и очень неплохая. Если кто будет таки знакомиться, не пугайтесь ужасов марксизма-ленинизма на некоторых страницах статьи и читайте далее.
С методической же точки зрения это просто обязательная книга для любого историка. Во-первых, (и это также отмечалось в заключительной статье) Коллингвуд очень хороший историк идей. В первой части труда автор четко и понятно анализирует историю философии истории (или историю исторического знания) от Геродота до Кроче. Получается неплохой учебник с комментариями самого Коллингвуда. Во-вторых, автор отстаивает позиции рациональной, научной истории. Приводит примеры как должен исследователь устраивать допрос источника. Выступает против того, что Коллингвуд называет "историей ножниц и клея": т.е. слепого заимствования историком из источника. И хотя сегодня эти тезисы, наверно, понимает и применяет любой серьезный исследователь, до Коллингвуда, Марка Блока и других деятелей исторической науки 20 в. это не было общим местом. Возможно, прочитай я эту книгу в университете целиком, а не тезисно в учебниках, то проблематика моих выпускных работ была бы немного интересней, а работать мне было бы проще. Метод "вопрос-ответа" Коллингвуда, мне кажется, самый кратчайший путь для воспитания в себе правильных навыков исторического исследователя. К тому же, само желание автора сблизить историю и философию мне очень импонирует. Короче, читайте.
Что касается Автобиографии.
Ее тоже стоит прочитать, потому что многие идеи Коллингвуд в ней раскручивает, дополняет примерами. Лично мне где-то помогло лучше понять его мысли. В целом, из Автобиографии складывается впечатление, что человеком Коллингвуд был очень непростым, если не сказать тяжелым. Философ итак был себе на уме, а затравленный популярными в то время реалистами, он порой срывается в дартаньянство.
Да и просто интересно почитать, чего уж там. Коллингвуд был обречен на большие достижения - лучшие школы, колледжи, университеты - человек рос в атмосфере культа знаний, все вокруг стимулировало пытливость ума.
Кстати, интересно, что Коллингвуд жестко критикует сдачу Англией республиканской Испании франкистам. Даже Мюнхенский сговор сурово осуждает, а Чемберлена так и вовсе величает фашистом.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

As emotional and subjective beings we never simply look to raw history, rather, we look to history and think about history through our own presuppositional lenses. Collingwood calls this the second degree of reflective philosophy. We typically think about the thoughts that we are having about history. In other words, we tend to interpret history through our cultural environments. What we highlight and what we see in history is dictated by our cultural, anthropological and philosophy of history.

To establish a context for this paper I am going to lay out a bird���s eye view of each period���s main tenets or could I say, ���Worldviews.��� More specifically, I believe that it would be beneficial to look more specifically at each time period���s view of mankind. I will begin with the Greeks and progress toward our present contemporary context of the enlightenment and romanticism. The material below has been fleshed out by Collingwood.

Greco-Roman Historiography:
This era was framed within a context of humanism. It was based on the idea of man as essentially a rational animal, by which I mean the doctrine that every individual human being is an animal capable of reason. The Greeks had a lively and indeed a na��ve sense of the power of man to control his own destiny and thought of this power as limited only by the limitations of his knowledge.

Pendulum Shift:
According to Collingwood there was a pendulum shift where the historical philosophy and narrative shifted from a one-sided humanistic perspective to a one-sided theocentric view.

Medieval Historiography:
With the advent of Christianity in the Constantinian Era came a new historiography, or rather a shift. As noted above the pendulum shifted. Rather than an overt view of mankind with the Greco-Roman History, the optimistic idea of human nature was replaced with an understanding of mankind���s downfall of original sin. Rather than seeing sin as an action, it was seen as an inherent part of natural man. This de-emphasis of man���s power, intellect and abilities shifted the narrative from mankind to the working of God.

Revolt:
According to Collingwood the second major shift happened as a revolt not only against the religious institution but also against the meta-narrative of the Medieval times.

Enlightenment Historiography:
The philosophical theory in this movement was that certain forms of mental activities are primitive forms, destined to perish when the mind arrives at maturity. Mankind may be limited and irrational but certainly capable of being converted from the weak view of medieval times to an enlightened state.

While Collingwood did spend time on how each period of time viewed history (i.e. as progress, as continuation, etc���), I believe assessing how each period viewed mankind really captures the bedrock foundation of how one conducts their history. Collingwood continuously reinforces that a historian cannot simply report the outward activities and expressions of a historical event. Rather the historian���s job is to exegete and ascertain the psyche behind the historical events, so as to communicate the thoughts of the historical period to the present. However, where this gets tremendously difficult is twofold. The first is the challenge of assessing the historical time period���s view of mankind and his/her relationship to the events around him, as previously expressed. Secondly, things are also complicated depending on the historians own anthropological presuppositions of himself and the audience that he is attempting to communicate to. Take for example the Enlightenment. Individuals from the Enlightenment had an overly inflated view of mankind in his/her supposed enlightened state. According to Collingwood, due to the overly optimistic view of mankind in the enlightenment, many rejected and had no sympathy for the non-rationalistic period of human history within the Medieval period. In fact, many of them began to be interested in history at the point where the modern enlightened spirit appeared on the stage.

While the enlightenment���s view of mankind certainly undercuts and usurps the historiography and meta-narrative of the Medieval age, it is also at odds with modern Christian historiography. While each period���s historiography and view of mankind is formed from pendulum swings and revolts, as students of the Bible we need to keep in mind that the scriptures form and inform our anthropology and our presuppositional lenses in which we assess and understand history. It is extremely valuable for the church to understand the ancient historiographical presuppositions of each age, not only when reading history, but also in interpreting it (i.e. good exegesis of history). Furthermore, it is essential for the church to understand the modern historiographical presuppositions in our day in age in order to assess the possible eisegesis of modern historians.

[Dee · Rating 2 out of 5]

Do they still require undergrads in history to read this? I thought it wasn't too great in 1988, and even reading it again more than a decade later, I'm still not impressed. I would have benefitted so much more from a solid research "how to" text than this jargon.

[Dan Snyder · Rating 5 out of 5]

The view that history has an inner and outer contingency is the salvation of the study of history itself. Reading Von Ranke or Mommsen is like reading a chronicler, whereas Tuchman is like reading a novelist. This is extreme, but the two movements toward understanding are both necessary to get any enriching contribution to the study of history - ultimately the study of humanity in the present.

Read this along with Spengler, Toynbee, Marx - any theorist of history, and you will see the sweep of Collingwood's erudition. Importantly, he brings the task of history back under the scope of philosophy itself.

[Todd Stockslager · Rating 3 out of 5]

Review title: Making history

How we make history and write history are separate topics not often so deeply examined as British historian, philosopher, and archeologist R. G. Collingwood does here. Writing in the first half of the 20th century, mostly in the years between the world wars, he examines in exhaustive and sometimes exhausting essays and lectures what we mean by the idea of writing and thinking about history.

First we need to know what history isn't, which is mathematics (p. 5)--because "mathematical thinking apprehends objects that have no special location in space or time."--or empirical science (p. 192) because "The aim of the scientist is to understand facts in the sense of recognizing them as instances of general laws; but in this sense history does not understand its object; it contemplates it, and that is all." However history is like science because like science it "begins from the knowledge of our own ignorance: not our ignorance of everything, but our ignorance of some definite thing" (p. 9)

History is not a collection and acceptance of authorities: "When the historian accepts a ready-made answer to some question he has asked, given him by another person, this other person is called his 'authority', and the statement made by such an authority and accepted by the historian is called 'testimony'. In so far as an historian accepts the testimony of an authority and treats it as historical truth, he obviously forfeits the name of historian." (p. 256). The historian is in fact a "critic, not skeptic; for a critic is a person able and willing to go over somebody else's thoughts for himself to see if they have been well done; whereas a skeptic is a person who will not do this." (p. 252). This view of the purpose of writing history has changed over the centuries, and Collingwood spends a big chunk of his writing covering the changing history of writing history, from the Greeks to the Romans to the Christian era to the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (remember that? My previous review was a survey of Enlightenment philosophers many of whom Collingwood references here) and the scientific era of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Writing as he was at the time of the rise of scientific theories justifying Nazi fascist racism he is very emphatic in stating that history is based on a "racial theory of civilization" is merely a "sophistical excuse for national pride and national hatred." (p. 91). While "In the later nineteenth century the idea of progress became almost an article of faith" (p. 144), the wars between which Collingwood wrote and taught at Oxford proved that faith in progress fatally and fatefully wrong.

What history is takes some assembly among the pages here because while published under one title, The Idea of History is in fact different ideas of history from different Collingwood essays and lectures assembled here. I will quote this passage at length comparing the novelist and the historian because I think it is the clearest and most practical definition Collingwood provides of what history is.

The resemblance between the historian and the novelist, to which I have already referred, here reaches its culmination. Each of them makes it his business to construct a picture which is partly a narrative of events, partly a description of situations, exhibition of motives, analysis of characters. Each aims at making his picture a coherent whole, where every character and every situation is so bound up with the rest that this character in this situation cannot but act in this way, and we cannot imagine him as acting otherwise. The novel and the history must both of them make sense; nothing is admissible in either except what is necessary, and the judge of this necessity is in both cases the imagination. Both the novel and the history are self-explanatory, self-justifying, the product of an autonomous or self-authorizing activity; and in both cases this activity is the a priori imagination.

As works of imagination, the historian's work and the novelist's do not differ. Where they do differ is that the historian's picture is meant to be true. The novelist has a single task only: to construct a coherent picture, one that makes sense. The historian has a double task: he has both to do this, and to construct a picture of things as they really were and of events as they really happened. (p. 245-246)

Collingwood provides other guide posts for the ideas, or philosophy, of history, a term he spends some time defining and justifying, that I will briefly reference here so as not to exhaust my reader like Collingwood may have his:

--the historian is studying an "actual inquiry [that] starts from a certain problem, and the purpose of the inquiry is to solve that problem" (p. 312).

--Writing history is an ongoing process of collecting and interpreting sources that is never "done" but is "only an interim report on the progress of our historical inquiries." (p. 391)

--The historian will never "know 'all about' something". . . . Even in the most favourable cases, one's ignorance is infinite. . . . There are infinities of things he does not know for every one that he does." (p. 484)

--History is tendentious (p. 398); see the quote above about historians being critics.

--The historian must study both "original sources" and "modern works" about the original sources: "To study the original sources is history; to study the modern works, and to trace in them the development of thought, is the history of history" (p. 463).

--a "universal" history of a topic is not defined by assembling a "number of separate monographs, but by the "unity of the point of view from which it is envisioned." (p. 455)

--Yet a universal history of the world is possible within boundaries that it "specializes on some particular problem to the exclusion of others." (p. 421). "Some historian . . . might select from this vast period one single limited aspect and treat the whole period as a genuine unity from that limited point of view. "(p. 481). A perfect example of this approach is my recent reading of The World: A Family History of Humanity, which reviewed all human history from the very specific aspect of human communities lead and governed by families.

This is a long book that frankly will not interest most lay readers. It took me a couple of weeks to work my way through and there were sections I skimmed over as I was reading because of the density of the arguments--and I majored in political science and minored in history and philosophy, and have read and reviewed nearly 500 histories on Goodreads. But perhaps the most important takeaway from and best reason for reading Collingwood's ideas of making history is the purpose: "The past and the present are not two objects: the part is an element in the present, and in studying the past we are actually coming to know the present, not coming to know something else which will lead us on to know or to manipulate the present." (p. 406). Making history is making the present. More than ever in 21st-century America we need that attention to duty and detail.

[Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Incredibly heady analysis of what history is. Only read the three essays at the end. Lots of good thoughts on what it means to "recapture" history and what the limits of history are. Interesting concept that the past is not actual, merely ideal, and that to study the past we must study the present, whether in the form of sources, archaeology, etc. We can only work our way closer to a more ideal version of the past...we never have "the past as it actually was." All history is the history of thought, since the past is ideal and therefore only exists in interpretations.

He also gives some great thoughts about evidence: anything can be evidence, provided we have the right questions to ask it. Nothing is evidence until we've asked it a question.

He gets strangely Hegelian toward the end, but his other thoughts are good enough (and he changes Hegel enough) that it's almost okay.

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

My favorite excerpt...
"To quote Kant: 'Man desires concord; but nature knows better what is good for his species.' Man wants to live easy and content; but nature compels him to leave ease and inactive contentment behind, and throw himself into toils and labours in order that these may drive him to use his wits in the discovery of means to rise above them. Nature, that is to say, does not care for human happiness; she has implanted in man propensities to sacrifice his own happiness and destroy that of other, and in following these propensities blindly he is making himself the tool of nature in her plan, which is certainly not his, for the moral and intellectual advancement of his species."

[Allan Williams · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was compiled posthumously from unfinished essays, fragments and notes that Collingwood didn’t get around to integrating into a coherent whole before his death. It is repetitive and in places half-baked. But that hasn’t stopped it from being hugely influential. I am not sure what to make of it yet but am going to read the Reader’s Guide by Peter Johnson next to see if that helps.

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reads much more modern than 1936 in my opinion... well, until you get to the parts where C recommends getting into your chosen people's heads to reenact the past.

The historical part is kind of a fun philosophical and wooly ride, and so's the murder mystery in the epilogue.

[Marco Nie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I learned about R.G. Collingwood and his famous book from a Chinese podcaster who quoted Collingwood as saying, “All history is the history of thought” (in Chinese, 一切历史都是思想史). Struck by the profoundness of the quote, I decided to dig deeper. Collingwood is known as the most underrated philosopher in history, a reputation largely earned by “The Idea of History”. The book was published posthumously after his premature death in 1943, at age of 53.

By “all history is the history of thought”, Collingwood means history can only exist in the re-enactment of the past in a historian’s mind. The past events are over, cease to exist, and hence cannot be perceived and studied as a real, actual object. Thus, history is knowable only by thinking, and the proper object of history is thought itself: “not things thought about, but the act of thinking itself”. It follows, I believe, there is no such a thing as the true past, or the real history. History is idealistic in nature. Seen in this light, the translation—“一切历史都是思想史” —is misleading. The quote should rather read, “一切历史都是思考史“。

Collingwood believes that a historian must go beyond the materials inherited from authorities. Otherwise, he is a mere “copy-and-paste” historian. Collingwood goes so far as suggesting history, like novel, is the work of imagination, and in this regard, they do not differ. The historian must tell a coherent and believable story in which the actions of his characters are justified by circumstances, motives, and psychology. I suppose Collingwood’s novelistic historian is in sharp contrast with most Chinese historians, who actually praised and cherished the copy-and-paste tradition, sticking to Confucian’s famous precept: 述而不作（pass on the wisdom of the sages without adding anything new to it）.

Collingwood argues the purpose of history is to inform the present, by revealing “what man has done and thus what man is”. Reconstructing the past is always done to know the present and to tell us what to do in the present. Moreover, the past and the present are the same object in different phases and therefore inseparable: we come to know the present naturally by studying the past, because the past is part of the present.

Collingwood believes all history is biased because everyone approaches history with their own biases. Indeed, if it were not for these biases, nobody would write history in the first place. He does say a good historian must take no sides and “rejoices in nothing but the truth”, but how much of history is written by good historians?

Finally, Collingwood harshly criticized the “scientific” theories of universal history, i.e., the idea that the progress of human history is governed by some universal law. Chinese students of my generation can attest this is exactly what we had learned in history classes. According to Collingwood, the value of these theories “was exactly nil”, and, if they have been accepted by so many, it is only because they have “become the orthodoxy of a religious community”. He claims only two types of people were still writing universal history at his time: the dishonest attempting to “spread their opinions by specious falsehoods”, and the ignorant naïvely writing down everything they know without “suspecting that they know it all wrong”.

To someone growing up in China where historical materialism is treated as the one and only truth, Collingwood’s idea seems like heresy at first glance. However, the more I read, the more I agree with him. Since much of the book was compiled from lecture notes, the experience is close to taking a philosophy course: not exactly fun but worth the effort.

[Cheng Wen Cheong · Rating 4 out of 5]

Collingwood is one of my favourite authors for just one reason: the accessibility of his writings. Academic philosophers are very tempted to write in abstruce language, because that is what we are exposed to in education. We pick up loaded phrases and jargon without much consideration of the audience, and sometimes in dull negligence. Collingwood's words hang on a delicate balance between substantial ideation and legibility and deserves full respect for upholding that balance.

If you're read his later Autobiography, you might witness some resounding parallels in concerns: the fear that we might be doing things the wrong way, and having the future generations pay for our mistakes. In this work, he highlights the same concern on history: we might be writing history wrongly all along, and we risk leaving a corrupted legacy if we do not heed his advice. Don't get me wrong; he meant that in good faith, and it is not difficult to trace this well-meaning throughout the work. I bring this out because I think this is the reason why he made his writing accessible.

The book has one central idea: history must be done in full fidelity of the sources. Because we can never access the past as it is, the best we can do in the present is to relive the memories of the people that lived in that particular past. This is where the idealism becomes apparent: the past remains noumenal (beyond our reach), and the only way to get to it is through our minds. By reconstruction, imagination and fidelity, we can seek to learn sufficiently from the past to lay grounds for the future.

I think this work is a staple for any readers interested in the intellectual history. Collingwood is an often overlooked figure because his claims are not as 'spicy' as his contemporaries (e.g. Wittgenstein, Quine, Heidegger). Not to mention that the period of his proliferation was an extremely gloomy one. Nevertheless, he deserves platform in any era, and I'm going to give him one whenever I can.

[Scott Pearson · Rating 5 out of 5]

What makes history tick and what turns history into human progress? These questions have been explicitly asked by philosophers since the Enlightenment, and historian R.G. Collingwood adds his voice to the mix in this classic work. He summarizes how we understand history since its recording began. In each epoch in the Western tradition, he outlines the major players and then provides his critique on their limitations.

Unfortunately, Collingwood’s analysis is, too, limited by his era. He does not account well for non-Western traditions as well as traditions of oppressed peoples (like women and sub-cultures within dominant cultures). In today’s diverse world, such accounts are sorely needed. Despite this major shortcoming, this work is helpful in understanding our place in this world.

Collingwood seems, in particular, to appreciate Immanuel Kant’s perspectives. He returns to them, over and over, to illustrate his points. He speaks of history being a foundation of human self-knowledge. Indeed, I would not be surprised if Collingwood affirmed the statement that history is the queen of the sciences. He sees history not as the accumulation of facts (cut-and-paste history) but as thinking afresh the ideas of the past in a new context. It results in the accumulation of self-knowledge.

Like any good work of philosophy, this work is not for the faint of heart. It took me a while to work through. Nevertheless, it is the most thoughtful work I’ve ever read on the subject of what history consists of. It avoids the common pitfalls that 19th-century philosophers fell into – the over-simplifications of Hegel and Marx. In contrast, Collingwood’s outlook is much more modern and humanistic than them. Almost seventy-five years later, his voice needs to continue to be heard by those who seek to seriously understand history.

[Jordan Coy · Rating 4 out of 5]

The First half of this book is an insightful critique of history written from Herodotus to the early 20th century as well as a critique of how history has been conceived by philosophers since the Enlightenment. Collingwood has an especial preference for Hegel and Vico's conception of history. The later half is Collingwood's contribution to the philosophy of history and what it is when we say we are studying history and what it is that we call "history".

Collingwood's main thesis is that "all history is the history of thought" (page 253). When we are doing history, we are not looking at simple facts and observations and reporting what happened as we would in a scientific experiment (contra a logical positivist view of history.) We are studying the ideas, motivations, and thought behind the historical action in those events.
Collingwood uses the example of Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon (173).
History is not simply knowing Caesar crossed the Rubicon with an army in 49 BC. But we must understand why Caesar crossed, what the interpretation of that action was to the contemporary Roman, the political and social implication in that action. History is then "the re-enactment of past thought in the historian's own mind." (173)

4/5 Great book on the philosophy of History

[Арсен Стрелецький · Rating 5 out of 5]

Книга є чудовим вступом для тих, хто хоче почати розгляд філософії історії. Окрім того, що більше половини основного матеріалу книги - це дуже короткий і реферативний розгляд доктрин основних мислителів-істориків, де починаєтсья все з Геродота і закінчується Кроче, в кінці автор все ж виводить власну ідеалістичну теорію щодо погляду на історію і її вивчення. Таким чином, ця книга вміщує в себе чудове ознайомлення із багатьма визначними мислителями, де коротко та доступно подається найбільш суттєві моменти, так і пропонує автентичну думку самого Коллінгвуда, з якою можна і не погоджуватися, адже є цілковито протилежні погляди (як у Карла Гемпеля).
Важливо наступне: ця книга просто чудово виконує роль бази для ознайомлення із дуже широким матеріалом задля подальшого вияснення того, з ким філософ-історик планує далі працювати: чи він забажає розглядати розвиток історії у дусі гегеліанства, вбачаючи у всьому поступове саморозгортання Weltgeist через свободу у державі, чи він забажає віддатися більш довільній формі, будуючи власне story про history, як то і пропонує сам Коллінгвуд, порівнюючи історика із детективом (або з прозаїком).

[Cody · Rating 4 out of 5]

Collingwood takes an interesting view on what history is. Some view it simply as facts about the past while others look not just at facts but causal mechanisms. Others look for generalizations so they can develop rules about human nature.

For Collingwood, history is simply the history of thoughts. Yes, historians look at the history of human actions, but all actions are caused by a thought in the actors mind (he reasons) so rather than looking for large generalizations or even causal mechanisms like economics or geography, he believes the job of the historian is to understand the thoughts of the people involved, which is done by historians using their thoughts to recreate the thoughts of the actors of history.

Because the past is the past of this present, a historian should be able to use what is known from experience to recreate the past, but it will never be the final word because as the present changes so will the way we use it to understand the past.

In short, his method is different but interesting.

[Bruno Romano · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great sections on ancient and medieval ideas of history, as well the englightenment and scientific history, permeaded with great insights on the meaning and methodology of history. As it approaches Kant and Hegel, becomes a difficult and troublesome read, requiring knowledge of german idealism.

The last part of the book is the essay on the idea of history properly, according to the view of Mr. Collingwood. Criticism of "scissors-and-paste" methods are sweeping and convincing. The so called re-enactment vision is an interesting novelty, that might suppport modern attempts to revive narrative history and the role of individuals. However, it just might. Arriving at the end of the book, the reader falls short in receiving a practical and clear explanation of what such a vision would mean in practice. The text often becomes tedious, and not all of it is profitable.

[Anthony Vecchio · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this work some years ago and was initially unimpressed by it. By the time of my second full reading, finished today, I held it in much higher esteem. True, there remain several things which Collingwood proposes about the mind in relation to its thought which, I think, is unnecessarily hostile to the Greek philosophy which he on occasion denounces (V.4). But the greater number of his ideas are dearly insightful and worthy of further development. For example, his recurring reference to history as a "reconstruction" of "human practice" bears a strikingly resemblance to Imre Lakatos's much later claims in his 1971 "History of Science and its Rational Reconstructions".

[Nick B · Rating 3 out of 5]

While I appreciate a good analysis of what "history is" this one sort of made my head hurt. The psychology of history is a tough one for the mind to grasp and I think without an immersion into the topic it certainly not something the amateur historian is going to grasp to the extent this book presents. I believe I have a decent grasp of analyzing and researching history but certainly nowhere close to the extent it would take to employ the techniques Mr. Collingwood presents. All that being said it is still a good topic and the book presents it in detail.

[Imaduddin Ahmed · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pakistan's preeminent historian Professor Ayesha Jalal recommended this to me to get a sense of what the science of history is, when I was considering applying to pursue an MA and then PhD in History. The book did do that. Important lessons for critical thinking and constructing a credible narrative here. This was written almost 100 years ago, and for lectures. Had it been written today for the purpose of being read as a book, I'm sure it would have been much more succinct and the writing would have been clearer.