Chapter 7 Historical Method
One of the best-known aspects of Collingwood’s philosophy is his ardent defense of the autonomy of history. Strangely enough, though, his views on the methodological aspects of history have not received the attention one would expect – and, one should add, they deserve. The reason for this must be found in the fact that attention has mainly been focused on Collingwood’s re-enactment doctrine and the methodological interpretation that has initially been given to it. Besides the fact that this interpretation is mistaken, it has had the effect that the real methodological views developed by Collingwood have been neglected. Donagan has been the first to point this out. Commenting on the ‘received’ methodological interpretation of the re-enactment doctrine he maintains: ‘Misleadingly expressed non-methodological passages were taken to pro- pound an eccentric methodology, and genuine methodological passages were misread or discounted. The crucial passages in the, The Historical Imagination and “Historical Evidence” were seldom used: their customary fate was to be either admired and passed over, or mined for glittering things to be displayed to advantage in imported settings’.1 There are signs, however, of a growing in- terest in Collingwood’s views on questions of historical methodology.2 These questions are not only discussed by Collingwood, though, in ‘The Historical Imagination’ and ‘Historical Evidence’ (IH, 231–82), mentioned by Donagan. They are also dealt with by him in the earlier articles ‘The Nature and Aims of a Philosophy of History’, ‘The Philosophy of History’, and especially ‘The Limits of Historical Knowledge’. These have hardly been noticed by Collingwood’s in- terpreters, however. In An Autobiography Collingwood refers several times to his study of histori- cal method (Aut, 85, 112, 133). In his 1932 Report to the Faculty as well he asserts that his aim in the study and teaching of history was – after declaring that
1 Donagan, ‘The Verification of Historical Theses’, 207. 2 See L.B. Cebik, ‘Collingwood: Action, Re-enactment, and Evidence’, Philosophical Forum 2 (1970), 68–90; G.S. Couse, ‘Neglected Implications of R.G. Collingwood’s Attack on “Scissors-and-Paste History”’, The Canadian Historical Association. Historical Papers, 1972, 23–38; C.A.J. Coady, ‘Collingwood and Historical Testimony’, Philosophy 50 (1975), 409–24.
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004424937_008 Historical Method 347 he wants to do it in mutual connection with philosophy – ‘not to neglect the methods and logic of historical work, and to emphasize the relation between history and its sources’. That he saw this aim in close relation to his archaeo- logical and historical practice is obvious when he describes a little further on his third project as ‘A large-scale work on Hadrian’s Wall, with special reference to the problems of archaeological method there arising’.3 This relation is also explicitly made clear by Collingwood in An Autobiography, when he contends: ‘Obscure provinces, like Roman Britain, always rather appeal to me. Their ob- scurity is a challenge; you have to invent new methods for studying them, and then you will probably find that the cause of their obscurity is some defect in the methods hitherto used. When these defects have been removed, it will be possible to revise the generally accepted opinions about other, more famil- iar, subjects, and to correct the errors with which those opinions are perhaps infected’ (Aut, 86).4 Discussing the importance of studying Hadrian’s Wall a similar statement is made in his article of 1931 on the Wall:
[I]f history is to be pursued at all – and that is not a question that can be raised here – it must be so pursued as to win respect by the solidity of its logical structure. It is not so much useless as mischievous to practise his- tory in so slipshod a manner that any alleged fact may be slightly wrong. By a combination of slight errors, the general character and significance of the whole are certain to be distorted; and the general sense of an his- torical narrative may easily be changed, by a distortion of this kind, into the very opposite of the truth. This danger, which increasingly besets his- tory in proportion as history deals with more interesting and important subjects, can only be averted by the discovery and application of the most rigidly scientific methods: methods not borrowed from other sciences, but worked out with strict reference to the special problems and char- acteristics of history itself. A single highly complex problem, like that of Hadrian’s Wall, just because of its richness in apparently pointless and fruitless minutiae of evidence and interpretation, offers a perfect field
3 See Appendix 2. 4 It is interesting to see how closely this statement corresponds with Collingwood’s view of Vico as expressed nine years before: ‘Vico’s chosen field, as an historian, was the history of remote antiquity. He studied distant and obscure periods precisely because they were distant and obscure; for his real interest was in historical method, and, according as the sources are scanty and dubious and the subject-matter strange and hard to understand, the importance of sound method becomes plain’ (PhH, 127).