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Collingwood's Historical Individualism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
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.
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- Copyright © The Authors 1980
References
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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.
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35 Ibid.
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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.
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