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Collingwood's Historical Individualism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

William H. Dray
William H. Dray*
Affiliation:
University of Ottawa
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Extract

Central to R. G. Collingwood's philosophy of history, and among the most controvrsial of his doctrines, is the contention that historical understanding requires a re-anactment of past experience or a re-thinking of past thought. Some critics have found this contention in it-self incoherent or otherwise unsatisfactory, even as applied to what Collingwood apparently regarded as paradigm cases of historical thinking: for example, accounting for Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon in terms of his political ambitions. Others, while accepting the applicability of notions like re-enactment and re-thinking to such cases, have nevertheless rejected them as a basis for a general theory of historical understanding on the ground that their range of application is too narrow to encompass anything like the normal concerns of historians. In particular, these notions have been held to throw little light on what historians have had to say about largescale social events, conditions and processes.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , March 1980 , pp. 1 - 20
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1980

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References

1 What is History? (London: 1964). p. 64.

2 “Historical Understanding and the Empiricist Tradition”, in Williams, B. and Montefiore, A. eds., British Analytical Philosophy (London, 1966), p. 279.Google Scholar

3 Historians’ Fallacies (New York, 1971), p. 197.

4 Mind, History and Dialectic (Bloomington, 1969), p. 159.

5 Introduction to Philosophy of History (London, 1951 ), p. 53.

6 “The Character of an Historical Explanation”, Proceedings of the AristotelianSociety Supplementary Volume 21 (1947), p. 70.

7 Foundations of Historical Knowledge (New York, 1965), p. 148.

8 Historical Explanation: Re-enactment and Practical Inference (Cornell, 1977), p. 154.

9 History and Social Theory (London, 1969), p. 33.

10 (Oxford, 1946). Cited in the text hereafter as IH.

11 Cf. the one concerning Elizabeth, Marlborough, etc.

12 Op. cit., p. 197.

13 (Baltimore, 1937).

14 Review of “The Idea of History,” Journal of Philosophy (1947), pp. 186-87.

15 The Philosophy of History, reprinted in Debbins, W. ed., Essays in the Philosophyof History by R. G. Collingwood (Austin, Texas, 1965), p. 124.Google Scholar

16 Mandelbaum, M. The Anatomy of Historical Knowledge (Baltimore, 1977), p. 206, n. 4.Google Scholar

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18 The Later Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood (London, 1962), p. 206.

19 “Collingwood's Historicism”, op. cit., p. 156.

20 An Autobiography (Oxford, 1939), p. 90.

21 The Realist, 1929, reprinted in Debbins p. 119.

22 History and Social Theory, p. 33.

23 Maciver, A.M. “The Character of an Historical Explanation”, Proceedings of theAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 21 (1947), p. 38.Google Scholar

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25 (Oxford, 1942), p. 283.

26 Op. cit., p. 206.

27 Op. cit., p. 209.

28 Mind, History and Dialectic, p. 175.

29 Op. cit., p. 208.

30 Op. cit., p. 175. The two are not identical: on Collingwood's theory of mind the second could be realized by a group mind but the first could not.

31 Review of The Idea of History, op. cit., pp. 186-87.

32 See Collingwood on Cause Sense I in An Essay on Metaphysics (Oxford, 1940), chapter 30.

33 Op. cit., pp. 176ff.

34 Op. cit., p. 178.

35 Ibid.

36 Review of “Mind, History and Dialectic”, History and Theory 1970.

37 Since Mink in fact said “analysis”, not “explanation”, it may be improper to attribute this expectation to him; but the point remains that a non-explanatory analysis would give us very limited grasp of “the dynamics of historical change”, by contrast with Just the coerciveness of (existing) institutions.

38 Donagan states bluntly: “since there is no such thing as a group mind, historians must explain processes in groups by explaining the individual acts of which they are composed” (op. cit. p. 207). But what we want to know is whether Collingwood's theory of understanding rules out such a theory (I don't see that it does) and how close he got himself to accepting such a theory (I argue quite close).

39 Foundations of Historical Knowledge, p. 148.

40 Historians’ Fallacies, p. 197.

41 “The Theory of Historical Cycles”, Antiquity 1927, reprinted in Debbins, p. 84.

42 Op. cit., p. 197. The book in question is The New England Mind, by Perry Miller.

43 Op. cit., p. 71.

44 Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1924-25, reprinted in Debbins, p. 36.