This classical book by R. G. Collingwood is a discussion of the philosophy of history. It also discusses how the philosophy of history developed. He writes, “This book is an essay in the philosophy of history. The name ‘philosophy of history’ was invented in the eighteenth century by Voltaire, who meant by it no more than critical or scientific history, a type of historical thinking in which the historian made up his mind for himself instead of repeating whatever stories he found in old books. The same name was used by Hegel and other writers at the end of the eighteenth century; but they gave it a different sense and regarded it as meaning simply universal or world history. A third use of the phrase is found in several nineteenth-century positivists for whom the philosophy of history was the discovery of general laws governing the course of the events which it was history’s business to recount. The tasks imposed on the ‘philosophy’ of history by Voltaire and Hegel could be discharged only by history itself, while the positivists were attempting to make out of history, not a philosophy, but an empirical science, like meteorology. In each of these instances, it was a conception of philosophy which governed the conception of the philosophy of history: for Voltaire, philosophy meant independent and critical thinking; for Hegel, it meant thinking about the world as a whole; for nineteenth-century positivism, it meant the discovery of uniform laws.” [p. 1]
After distinguishing between philosophy and other fields such as psychology, Collingwood tells us, “For the philosopher, the fact demanding attention is neither the past by itself, as it is for the historian, nor the historian’s thought about it by itself, as it is for the psychologist, but the two things in their mutual relation. Thought in its relation to its object is not mere thought but knowledge; thus, what is for psychology the theory of mere thought, of mental events in abstraction from any object, is for philosophy the theory of knowledge. Where the psychologist asks himself: How do historians think? the philosopher asks himself: How do historians know? How do they come to apprehend the past? Conversely, it is the historian’s business, not the philosopher’s, to apprehend the past as a thing in itself, to say for example that so many years ago such-and-such events actually happened. The philosopher is concerned with these events not as things in themselves but as things known to the historian, and to ask, not what kind of events they were and when and where they took place, but what is it about them that makes it possible for historians to know them.” [pp. 2-3]
Collingwood next considers history itself–its definition, its object, how it proceeds, and what it’s for: “Every historian would agree, I think, that history is a kind of research or inquiry. … The point is that generically it belongs to what we call the sciences: that is, the forms of thought whereby we ask questions and try to answer them. Science in general, it is important to realize, does not consist in collecting what we already know and arranging it in this or that kind of pattern. It consists in fastening upon something we do not know and trying to discover it. … One science differs from another in that it finds out things of a different kind. What kind of things does history find out? I answer, res gestae: actions of human beings that have been done in the past. Although this answer raises all kinds of further questions many of which are controversial, still, however they may be answered, the answers do not discredit the proposition that history is the science of res gestae, the attempt to answer questions about human actions done in the past. … History proceeds by the interpretation of evidence: where evidence is a collective name for things which singly are called documents, and a document is a thing existing here and now, of such a kind that the historian, by thinking about it, can get answers to the questions he asks about past events. … History is ‘for’ human self-knowledge. It is generally thought to be of importance to man that he should know himself: where knowing himself means knowing not his merely personal peculiarities, the things that distinguish him from other men, but his nature as a man. … The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is.” [pp. 9-10]
Collingwood then traces the development of how people thought about history from the Ancient Greeks and Romans through to the twentieth century. He outlines the major figures and their writings, then provides a critique of each.
According to Collingwood, “The historian, investigating any event in the past, makes a distinction between what may be called the outside and the inside of an event. By the outside of the event I mean everything belonging to it which can be described in terms of bodies and their movements: the passage of Caesar, accompanied by certain men, across a river called the Rubicon at one date, or the spilling of his blood on the floor of the senate-house at another. By the inside of the event I mean that in it which can only be described in terms of thought: Caesar’s defiance of Republican law, or the clash of constitutional policy between himself and his assassins. The historian is never concerned with either of these to the exclusion of the other. He is investigating not mere events (where by a mere event I mean one which has only an outside and no inside) but actions, and an action is the unity of the outside and inside of an event.” [p. 213] Further, he says, “For history, the object to be discovered is not the mere event, but the thought expressed in it. To discover that thought is already to understand it. After the historian has ascertained the facts, there is no further process of inquiring into their causes. When he knows what happened, he already knows why it happened. … All history is the history of thought. But how does the historian discern the thoughts which he is trying to discover? There is only one way in which it can be done: by re-thinking them in his own mind. … The history of thought, and therefore all history, is the re-enactment of past thought in the historian’s own mind.” [pp. 214-215]
Collingwood also considers statistical analyses in history. He writes, “Statistical research is for the historian a good servant but a bad master. It profits him nothing to make statistical generalizations, unless he can thereby detect the thought behind the facts about which he is generalizing. At the present day, historical thought is almost everywhere disentangling itself from the toils of the positivistic fallacy, and recognizing that in itself history is nothing but the re-enactment of the past thought in the historian’s mind; but much still needs to be done if the full fruits of this recognition are to be reaped.” [p. 228]
He also looks at historical evidence and its use. “History, then, is a science, but a science of a special kind. It is a science whose business is to study events not accessible to our observation, and to study these events inferentially, arguing to them from something else which is accessible to our observation, and which the historian calls ‘evidence’ for the events in which he is interested. History has this in common with every other science: that the historian is not allowed to claim any single piece of knowledge, except where he can justify his claim by exhibiting to himself in the first place, and secondly to any one else who is both able and willing to follow his demonstration, the grounds upon which it is based.” [pp. 251-252]
This edition also includes some of Collingwood’s lectures and outlines on the philosophy of history. He stresses, “A source, authority, or document is the raw material out of which history is made. It may be itself a statement of past fact, that is to say it may be homogeneous with the finished product into which the historian tries to convert it; but it need not be. It may be a document such as a charter or deed or proclamation, which takes the form of a command; and in this case nothing is easier than to convert it into narrative by saying ‘in the year x, king y gave such and such lands to such and such an abbey’; but one must bear in mind the possibilities that the command was not obeyed and that the person who gave it did not even intend it to be obeyed. For that matter, when one’s documents take the form of narrative, one must bear in mind the possibility that the narrator was ignorantly, or intentionally, circulating falsehoods. The case becomes more complicated when the source is not even a command, but a mere relic of action, such as a dropped coin, or the remains of buildings and utensils. Here it becomes evident, even to the least reflective mind, that the document tells one nothing unless, by the application of principles, one can succeed in interpreting it, arguing that buildings of this kind must necessarily have been intended for a certain purpose, built at a certain time, and so forth. But what is true of these non-verbal sources is in fact true of all sources whatever. All are dumb except to a mind that can interpret them; and even a source consisting of simple narrative–a Thucydides or a Froissart–yields no historical results whatever, good or bad, till some kind of method of interpreting it has been worked out. The interpretation of sources, then, is the formal element of history, counterbalancing the material element which is the source itself. Without these two elements, there is no history.” [p. 368]
It’s a slog to get through, but Collingwood offers some interesting insights into history as a craft. If you want to improve your “inside baseball” view of history, this book can help you. If, however, you’re only interested in reading history to know what happened, this book will not be a good use of your time.
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