The Idea of History

This is a very fine edition of Collingwood's magnum opus The Idea of History. It also includes two earlier papers on the philosophy of history, etc. Any student or scholar who studies the discipline of history will need this book, and should read it closely. Van Der Dussen's introductory essay is also very good. Highly recommended.

Highly Recommended. This book is one of the best books ever written on the Nature and Aims of History. This along with his "Principles of History" should give most readers all they need to know about the how and why of history.The book is extremely easy to read; harder to understand. Some criticisms of the book are not up to the mark, as for example complaints that Collingwood used Greek and Latin phrases in the book, and not everyone understands them. Most of the Greek and Latin are very easy to understand, any good comprehensive foreign phrase dictionary will readily yield them. In fact everyone at the Oxford of Collingwood's day, and nearly everyone who considered themselves a philosopher at that time, could read Latin, and most of them Greek. Don't complain because Kant wrote in German (and Latin and Greek), and that Collingwood writes British English (and Latin and Greek). His style is beautiful, the thoughts expressed profound. One does not get Collingwood's complete philosophy in this book, and indeed, parts of it cannot be understood without reading his other works. I think particularly of his famous doctrine of "re-enactment" of past thought, which is best understood in the light of the chapters on language presented in his "Principles of Art" (Oxford, 1938). Much invalid criticism has been written by those who have assumed this meant some kind of mental telepathy or intuition. This book, and everything Collingwood has written, will amply repay the thinking reader. He may, in fact, soon find himself armed with new philosophical ideas with which to think about the world.

R. G. Collingwood's The Idea of History would be more correctly classified as a work of philosophy than a work of history, as the primary goal of the work is to present Collingwood's philosophical conception of the nature of history. In terms of methodology, Collingwood's book can be divided into two main sections. Parts I-IV are more historical as Collingwood traces the development of the practice of history. It begins with its Greco-Roman roots, examines the influence of Christianity, and moves on toward the development of modern scientific history, and finally finishes by examining the concept of history up to the then-present day. Throughout this first portion Collingwood does not directly present his philosophy, leaving it to the reader to infer it from his critiques of other historians. Part V is where Collingwood finally lays out his entire philosophy of history, fully elaborating what he only partially revealed in parts I-IV.

A suberb book, one that will change the way you think. Collingwood's central thesis is an explanation of why history has always been regarded as the poor relation of the other sciences, and often not as a serious science at all. The reason for this, he says, is that the methodology and high status given to the natural sciences since the 18 and 19th centuries has been used as an analogy -a false one- for the study of history. However,history is not a series of events in the past, but rather the recreation of events in the mind of the historian in the here and now. An event consists of an outside (what happened) and an inside (why it happened, or what was in the mind of the actant to cause the action) History is thus the history of thought. This does not mean that history is just 'made up' by the historian. Those historians who amass a wealth of statistical evidence regarding an event or a period without trying to understand the thoughts or consciousness involved are only doing half their job (again they are under the influence of natural science) and only studying the outside of the action. What's missing in this kind of positivist approach is an exploration of the inside of the event. Collingwood writes like a dream. His style is a model of clarity, precision and concision. This is the kind of book that has you thinking about each sentence for a few minutes before reading the next one. Not exactly a page turner then,but endlessly fascinating and intriguing. The excitement lies in watching and following an incredible mind think out a totally original approach to the relationship between history, philosophy and thought itself. Highly recommended.

Collingwood's book is an expression of the most original reflection on the nature of History ever produced in the English speaking world. Its central conception is that historical understanding consists in the historian literally experiencing the same mental life NOW as that of the personage being studied. Their minds intersect, as it were, in eternity. It underpins Collingwood's other books, such as "The Idea of Nature", which studies nature in terms of changing human accounts of it. Changing Cosmologies ARE the Mind grasping Nature and by re-enacting these various changes within the historical imagination, one grasps in its very essence what the nature of scientific grappling has always been. The doctrine here is as radical as anything produced by more well-known Continental philosophers such as Hegel or Marx, and rather less likely to do damage. I unreservedly recommend this book to anyone interested in cognition and its relation to time.