The Idea of History [1946 Edition]

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.

R. G. Collingwood (1889- 1943) had bad health and was in a race against time to complete his many academic projects. The Idea of History was not the finished book he wanted to write, but the next best thing, a compilation of 32 of his lectures on the philosophy of history published posthumously in 1946.An explanation of Collingwood's thinking can be found in Edward Hallett Carr's What is History? (Knopf publisher, 1961, p.23-24). “The views of Collingwood can be summarized as follows. The philosophy of history is concerned neither with “the past by itself” nor with “the historian’s thought about it by itself,” but with “the two things in their mutual relations. (This dictum reflects the two current meanings of the word “history”—the enquiry conducted by the historian and the series of past events into which he enquires.) The past which a historian studies is not a dead past, but a past which in some sense is still living in the present. But a past act is dead, i.e. meaningless to the historian, unless he can understand the thought that lay behind it. Hence all history is the history of thought, and history is the re-enactment in the historian’s mind of the thought whose history he is studying. The reconstitution of the past in the historian’s mind is dependent on empirical evidence. But it is not in itself an empirical process, and cannot consist in a mere recital of facts. On the contrary, the process of reconstitution governs the selection and interpretation of the facts: this, indeed, is what makes them historical facts. “History,” says Professor Oakeshott, who on this point stands near to Collingwood, “is the historian’s experience. It is ‘made’ by nobody save the historian: to write history is the only way of making it.” (Michael Oakeshott. Experience and its modes, p 99)Collingwood states his philosophy of history in about a dozen pages, then traces how the writing of history has evolved in western Asia and Europe in the last 4,000 years.

Writing was hard to follow

Collingwood provided people with a better way to look at history, a way that should preface what is traditionally thought about and taught in the name of history.

I read this for a graduate seminar in historiography; it's an important work for the historian, and an interesting look into the historiography of the 1930's and 40's. The methodology is, of course, still miles ahead of the naive positivism which plagues popular-level and journalistic discussions of history today.