In 1939, R. G. Collingwood took passage on a freighter bound for the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). He undertook this voyage because--at least in part--he was attempting to deal with his chronically high blood pressure, which would eventually take his life in January 1943 after a series of strokes. Medical science had no effective treatment for high blood pressure other than to recommend the rest cure. Collingwood, an amateur sailor, undertook the journey. Did he rest? While we may assume that he undertook no strenuous activity, he did write two books, one of which is The Principles of History. But he gave attention to the other book he wrote on that trip (An Essay on Metaphysics) and then turned immediately to writing The New Leviathan, which became the last book he published in his lifetime. After his death, literary executor, T.M. Knox, brought together several of Collingwood’s writings on history, including lecture notes and three chapters from The Principles of History, and published them through Oxford University Press as The Idea of History. And as I mentioned, it proved quite a success (at least according to the standards of its peer group.) Knox left out some papers, but the source was considered exhausted. Except it wasn’t.
In 1995, archivists at Oxford University Press discovered the (uncompleted) manuscript of The Principles of History that Collingwood has written during his 1939 cruise to Indonesia. The new materials didn’t reveal any startling new positions or arguments made by Collingwood, but they helped to complete his positions and to reveal his overall plan. He'd intended to publish two volumes on the subject of history. The Idea of History covered much of this area, but not all of it, nor in the manner that Collingwood had intended. The Principles of History helps to fill the gaps. Given the depth and significance of Collingwood’s thought, this book provides us with even deeper insights into his unique and compelling ways of thinking about history. In addition, Collingwood's widow Kate, in 1978, deposited thousands of pages of Collingwood manuscripts with the Bodleian Library at Oxford, which proved to be another treasure trove of Collingwood's work. Selections from those manuscripts pertinent to the philosophy of history are included in this volume. Indeed, some of the most interesting and revelatory parts of the present book come from these manuscripts.
Knox included less than one-half of The Principles manuscript in the text of The Idea of History (1946) for reasons not entirely known, but the editors speculate that Knox thought this material either unimportant or of insufficient quality--a mistake from either perspective. A great deal of the material included in The Idea of History came from writing that Collingwood undertook for lectures around 1935-36, while The Principles of History was written entirely in 1939. And while certainly the two works and two sets of writing are largely congruent, they do differ or address different topics in ways that reveal new aspects of Collingwood's thinking (which seemed always in flux). The editors of this work, Dray and van der Dussen, identify several important topics that The Principles elucidate:
There are no parallels in his other writings,for example, to his stress in this manuscript on the idea of evidence as language; on the alleged analogy between the historical and the aesthetic imagination; on the different relations to human action of essential and inessential emotions; or on the radical unlikeness of history and biography. . . . [T]he new manuscript also contains valuable clarifications and extensions of his case against historical naturalism; his conception tion of the autonomy of history; his view of the specifically historical past; his idea of rationality; and his understanding of the concept of probability in its application to history as well as to other fields.
R. G. Collingwood. The Principles of History: And Other Writings in Philosophy of History (pp. liv-lv). Kindle Edition.But this quote neglects one of the most puzzling (or tantalizing) differences between the two texts: The Principles does not mention "re-enactment," a term and manner of conducting historical thought that is central to the argument in The Idea of History (and Collingwood's Autobiography), a term that distinguishes Collingwood and one that, for some commentators, provides grounds for derision of this thought. Instead, Collingwood at one point uses the term "reconstruct" rather than "re-enact," which, at least to my ear seems a more felicitous term, perhaps (quite arbitrarily and unfairly) because "re-enactment" rings of American Civil War re-enactment hobbyists or Monty Python's "Townswomens' Guild of Sheffield Re-enactment of the Battle of Pearl Harbor." I'm confident that Collingwood had neither of these examples of "re-enactment" in mind when he settled on this phrase, but the term "reconstruct" seems not to lend itself to quite so literal an interpretation, and it would seem to fit better the overall description of his project, which is, as it were, to get inside the heads of actors in history, with events and actions the expression of thoughts (broadly understood).
However, there are basic concepts from which Collingwood doesn't vary in The Principles, The Idea, or An Autobiography. For example, his contention that "all history is the history of thought," and his contention that res gestae--human actions or "deeds"--are the embodiment of thought and therefore the subject-matter of history, properly considered. The variations between the newly discovered materials and the publications of his works up through 1946 (with The Idea of Nature) do not fundamentally alter our understanding of Collingwood's ideas about history, but they do provide more nuance and a just enough variety to suggest different paths of development that he might have traversed had his life not been cut off at the age of 53.
This book also reinforces an important lesson: read the entire title of the work. In this book, it's nothing quite so dramatic as a counter to the most widely discussed main themes of the book, but the details that are expanded upon that make the additional manuscripts quite important. As I alluded to above, these manuscripts reveal Collingwood's mind at work in ways that are quite suggestive and even provocative.
The most interesting of these pathways revealed are contained in the final section, "Conclusions to Lectures to Mind and Nature." These conclusions were discovered in 1995 along with The Principles of History manuscript. On their face, these writings belong more The Idea of Nature than the topic of history (although none of these made the cut by Knox for The Idea of Nature), but regardless, these "conclusions" show a train of thought that Collingwood touches upon in both The Idea of History and The Idea of Nature: that of process philosophy as exhibited in the work of fellow Brits Samuel Alexander (1859-1938) and Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947). These older contemporaries, along with Henri Bergson (1859-1941) brought time, events, and process into philosophy from the new physics of Einstein and the quantum thinkers. Although careful to maintain a line between nature and history (with history as the realm of human action), Collingwood very much admired and seems to adopt their line of thinking. Reading the last section, Collingwood reminded me of his younger American contemporary, Charles Hartshorne (1897-2000), who studied under Whitehead and who carried process philosophy into the post-World War II era. Had Collingwood lived long enough to have expanded upon his work, one avenue he might have pursued would have been to more explicitly blend his thinking about history with the process philosophy of nature put forth by Alexander, Whitehead, and (later) Hartshorne. (For another "what if" conjecture about Collingwood, I recommend Ray Monk's piece from 2019, "How the Untimely Death of R.G. Collingwood Changed the Course of Philosophy Forever.")
This is my second review of this book. My first review was written after my first reading of it in 2015, and I copy a bit of the introduction of this review from that one. But because of the depth and extent of this book, it has greatly rewarded my re-reading, and it certainly merits further consideration, which I hope to undertake with further study. But you may be sure that I could write a great deal more about this book and its implications than what I've merely touched upon here (and much more that I've not mentioned).
