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Summary R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History
Introduction: history’s nature, object, method and value, Greco-Roman Historiography (§1-11), The influence of Christianity (§1-10), The Threshold of Scientific History (§1-9)
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CollingwoodIntroduction
What I am attempting here is a philosophical inquiry into the nature of history regarded as a
special type or form of knowledge with a special type of object.
History’s nature, object, method and value
What history is, what it is about, how it proceeds, and what it is for, are questions which to
some extent different people would answer in different ways.
a) Nature: The definition of history: history is a kind of research or inquiry, it is a
science; the forms of thought whereby we ask questions and try to answer them.
Generating new knowledge, not rearranging what we already know.
b) Object: The object of history: res gestae; human actions done in the past.
c) Method: How does it proceed?: interpretation of evidence.
d) Value: What is history for?: human self-knowledge. The value of history is that it
teaches us what man has done and thus what man is.
1
,Greco-Roman Historiography
§ 1 Theocratic history and myth
Theocratic history; in which phrase “history” means not history proper, that is, scientific
history, but a statement of known facts for the information of persons to whom they are not
known, but for who, as worshippers of the god in question, ought to know the deeds whereby
he has made himself manifest.
There is another kind of quasi-history, of which we also find examples in Mesopotamian
literature, namely, the myth.
Theocratic history, although it is not primarily the history of human actions, is nevertheless
concerned with them in the sense that the divine characters in the story are the
superhuman rulers of human societies, whose actions, therefore, are actions done partly to
those societies and partly through them.
In theocratic history humanity is not an agent, but partly an instrument and partly a patient,
of the actions recorded. Moreover, these actions are thought of as having definite places in
a times-series, as occurring at dates in the past.
Myth, on the contrary, is not concerned with human actions at all. The human element has
been completely purged away and the characters of the story are simply gods. And the
divine actions that are recorded are not dated events in the past: they are conceived as
having occurred in the past, indeed, but in a dateless past which is so remote that nobody
knows when it was. It is outside all our time-reckonings and called “the beginning of things”.
It is quasi-temporal: the narrator is using the language of time-succession as a metaphor
in which to express relations which he does not conceive as really temporal.
These two forms of quasi-history, theocratic history and myth, dominated the whole of
the Near East until the rise of Greece. The Hebrew scriptures contain a great deal of both
theocratic history and myth.
§ 2 The creation of scientific history by Herodotus
The Greeks, including Herodotus and Thucydides, quite clearly and consciously
recognized both that history is, or can be, a science, and that it has to do with human
actions. Greek history is not legend, it is research; it is an attempt to get answers to
definite questions about matters of which one recognizes oneself as ignorant. It is not
theocratic or mythical, it is humanistic. The events inquired into are not events in a dateless
past: they are events in a dated past.
The ‘four questions’ applied to Herodotus: (1) it is scientific, or begins by asking questions,
whereas the writer of legends begins by knowing something and tells what he knows (2) it is
humanistic, or asks questions about things done by men at determinate times in the past
(3) it is rational, or bases the answers which it gives to its questions on grounds, namely
appeal to evidence; not evident in Herodotus! (4) it is self-revelatory, or exists in order to
tell man what man is by telling him what man has done (self-knowledge).
2
,The fact that history as a science was a Greek invention is recorded to this day by its very
name. History is a Greek word, meaning simply an investigation or inquiry. The historian
sets out to “find” the “truth”. It is the use of this word, and its implications, that make
Herodotus the father of history. Herodotus also explains that his purpose is to describe the
deeds of man (thus humanistic). And his end-goal, is that these deeds shall not be forgotten
by posterity.
These points also reappear in the preface of Thucydides, which was written with an eye on
that of Herodotus. Herodotus, however, does say explicitly that historical inquiry rests on
evidence.
§ 3 Anti-historical tendency of Greek thought
The creation scientific history by Herodotus is remarkable, for he was an ancient Greek, and
ancient Greek thought as a whole has a very definite prevailing tendency not only
uncongenial to the growth of historical thought but actually based, one might say, on a
rigorously anti-historical metaphysics. History is a science of human action: what the
historian puts before himself is things men have done in the past, and these belong to a
world of change, a world where things come to be and cease to be. Such things, according
to the prevalent Greek metaphysical view, ought not to be knowable, and therefore
history ought to be impossible.
The Greeks were quite sure that anything which can be an object of genuine knowledge
must be permanent; for it must have some definite character of its own, and therefore
cannot contain in itself the seeds of its own destruction.
Greek thought achieved its first triumph when it discovered in the objects of mathematical
knowledge something that satisfied these conditions. Greek thought therefore worked out a
distinction between two types of thought, knowledge proper and what we translate as
“opinion”. Opinion is the empirical semi-knowledge we have of matters of fact, which are
always changing. True knowledge, on the other hand, holds good not only here and now,
but everywhere and always, and it is based on demonstrative reasoning and thus
capable of meeting and overthrowing error by the weapon of dialectical criticism.
It is essential to the Greek point of view that this momentary sensuous perception of
momentary changing things cannot be science or the basis of a science.
§ 4 Greek conception of history’s nature and value
The Greek pursuit of the eternal was as eager as it was, precisely because the Greeks
themselves had an unusually vivid sense of the temporal. They lived in a time when
history was moving with extraordinary rapidity, and in a country where earthquake and
erosion change the face of the land with a violence hardly seen elsewhere. This recognition
of the necessity of change in human affairs gave the Greeks a peculiar sensitiveness to
history.
Knowing that nothing in life can persist unchanged, they came habitually to ask themselves
what exactly the changes had been which, they knew, must have come about in order to
bring the present into existence. Their historical consciousness was of violent,
catastrophic changes, from one state of things, to the opposite. This was how they
3
,interpreted the general character of human life in their dramas, and this was how they
narrated the particular parts of it in their history.
History had for the Greeks a definitive value. Plato himself laid down that the right opinion
was no less useful for the conduct of life than scientific knowledge, and that the poets
maintained their traditional place in Greek life as the teachers of sound principles by showing
that in the general pattern of these changes, certain antecedents normally led to certain
consequences.
According to the Greeks, history has a value, its teachings are useful for human life,
simply because the rhythm of its changes is likely to repeat itself, therefore, the history of
notable events is worth remembering in order to serve as a basis for prognostic
judgements, not demonstrable, but probable, laying down not what will happen, but what is
likely to happen.
This conception of history was the very opposite of deterministic, because the Greeks
regarded the course of history as flexible and open to modification by the well-instructed
human-will. Nothing that happens is inevitable.
On the other hand, valuable as the teachings of history are, their value is limited by the
unintelligibly of its subject-matter; and that is why Aristotle said that poetry is more scientific
than history, for history is a mere collection of empirical facts, whereas poetry extracts
from such facts a universal judgement. History tells us that Croesus fell and that Polycrates
fell; poetry, according to Aristotle’s idea of it, makes not these singular judgements, but the
universal judgement that very rich men, as such, fall. Thus poetry is for Aristotle the distilled
essence of the teaching of history. In poetry the lessons remain undemonstrated and
therefore merely probable, but they become more compendious and therefore more useful.
The Greeks regarded history not as a science, but as an aggregate of perceptions
What was the Greek conception of historical evidence? Evidence consists of
eyewitnesses’ narratives, and historical method consists of eliciting these.
§ 5 Greek historical method and its limitations
It was in this way that Herodotus conceived of evidence and method. This does not mean
that he uncritically believed whatever eyewitnesses told him. The Greeks as a whole were
skilled in the practice of the law courts, and a Greek would find no difficulty in applying to
historical testimony the same kind of criticism which he was accustomed to direct upon
witnesses in court.
The work of Herodotus or Thucydides depends in the main on the testimony of
eyewitnesses with whom the historian had personal contact. His skill as a researcher
consisted in the fact that he must have cross-questioned an eyewitness of past events
until he had called up in the informant’s own mind and historical picture of those events far
fuller and more coherent than any he could have volunteered for himself.
This conception of the way in which a Greek historian collected his material makes it a very
different thing from the way in which a modern historian may use printed memoirs. Instead of
the easy-going belief in the informant’s part that his prima facie recollection was adequate
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,to the facts, there could grow up in his mind a chastened and criticized recollection which
had stood the fire of such questions like “are you sure you remember it like that?” This
method of using the testimony of eyewitnesses is undoubtedly the method which
underlies the extraordinary solidity and consistency of the narratives which Herodotus
and Thucydides wrote about 5th c. Greece.
No other method than the Greek historical method deserving the name scientific was
available to the 5th c. historians, but it had 3 limitations: (1) it imposed on its users a
shortness of historical perspective; their method tied them to the length of living
memory, the only source they could criticize was an eyewitness with whom they could
converse face to face. (2) the Greek historian’s method precludes him from choosing
his subject. The only thing he can write about is the events which have happened within
living memory to people with whom he can have personal contact. Instead of the
historian choosing the subject, the subject chooses the historian; there were no people who
devoted their lives to the study of history, the historian was only the autobiographer of his
generation (3) one all-embracing history was impossible. If any given history is the
autobiography of a generation, it cannot be rewritten when that generation has passed
away, because the evidence on which it is based has perished. It can thus never be
improved or criticized, and it can never be absorbed into a larger whole.
According to Herodotus and Thucydides there could be a history of a fairly extensive
complex of events, like the Persian War of the Peloponnesian War, but only on two
conditions. (1) this complex of events must be complete in itself, it must have a beginning, a
middle and an end, like the plot of an Aristotelian tragedy (2) it must be like an Aristotelian
city-state; the length of a historical narrative could not exceed the years of a man’s lifetime.
§ 6 Herodotus and Thucydides
The genius of Herodotus triumphed over the anti-historical tendency of the Greeks, but after
him the search for unchangeable and eternal objects of knowledge gradually stifled the
historical consciousness and forced men to abandon the Herodotean hope of achieving a
scientific knowledge of past human actions. We see this in the transition from Herodotus to
Thucydides. The difference between the scientific outlook of Herodotus and that of
Thucydides is hardly less remarkable than the difference between their literary styles.
The style of Herodotus is easy, spontaneous, convincing. That of Thucydides is harsh,
artificial, repellent. Why does he write like that? Collingwood answers: he has a bad
conscience. He is trying to justify himself for writing history at all by turning it into something
that is not history. Whereas Herodotus is the father of history, Thucydides is the father of
psychological history.
What is psychological history? It does not narrate facts for the sake of narrating facts; its
chief purpose is to affirm psychological laws. What chiefly interests Herodotus is the
events themselves, what chiefly interests Thucydides is the laws according to which they
happen.
But these laws are precisely such eternal and unchangeable forms as, according to the
main trend of Greek thought, are the only knowable things.
5
,Thucydides is not the successor of Herodotus in historical thought, but the man in whom the
historical thought of Herodotus was overlaid and smothered beneath anti-historical
motives. This is a thesis which may be illustrated by mentioning one familiar feature of
Thucydides’ method. Consider his speeches. Is it not clear that the style betrays a lack of
interest in the question what such and such a man really said on such and such occasion?
Secondly, think of their contents. Can we say that, however unhistorical their style may
be, their substance is historical? The speeches seem to Collingwood to be in substance not
history, but Thucydidean comments upon the acts of the speakers, Thucydidean
reconstructions of their motives and intentions.
§ 7 Hellenistic period
After the 5th c. BC the historian’s outlook underwent an enlargement in time. In Greek eyes
history had been essentially the history of one particular social unit at one particular time:
(1) they were conscious that this particular social unit was one among many, and when it
came in contact with others, they were only considered in relation to themselves (hostile or
friendly), and not interested in others for their own sake. (2) they were conscious in the 5 th c.
that there was such a thing as the human world, this unit was for them only a
geographical, not an historical unity. The idea of ecumenical history, world history, was
still non-existent. (3) they were conscious that the history of the particular society in which
they were interested had been going on for a long time. But they did not try to trace it back
very far.
These three limitations were all overcome in what is called the Hellenistic period.
The symbol of the parochial outlook of the 5 th c. Greeks is the linguistic distinction
between Greeks and Barbarians. It became a familiar fact about the contemporary world
that Barbarians could become Greeks. The Hellenistic period is the period when Greek
manners and customs were adopted by Barbarians. Thus the Greek historical
consciousness, which for Herodotus had been primarily the consciousness of hostility
between Greeks and Barbarians (the Persian Wars), becomes the consciousness of co-
operation between Greeks and Barbarians, a co-operation in which Greeks take the lead,
and Barbarians, by following that lead, become Greeks, heirs to Greek culture, and thus
heirs to the Greek historical consciousness.
Through the conquests of Alexander the Great, the “world” became something more than
a geographical expression. It became a historical expression. The whole empire of
Alexander now shared a single history of the Greek world. The idea of the whole world as
a single historical unit, is a typical Stoic idea, and Stoicism is a typical product of the
Hellenistic period. It was Hellenism that created the idea of ecumenical history. By a
world-history could not be written on the strength of testimony from living eyewitnesses, and
therefore a new method was required, namely compilation. It was necessary to construct
a patchwork history whose materials were drawn from “authorities”, that is, from the
works of previous historians who had already written the histories of particular societies
at particular times. This is what Collingwood calls the “scissors-and-paste” historical
method. The ecumenical history of the Hellenistic age (which includes the Roman age) is
based on a high estimate of the work done by the particularistic historians of the Hellenistic
age.
§ 8 Polybius
6
, The idea of this kind of history is full-grown in the work of Polybius. His story begins more
than 150 years before the time of writing, so that the extent of his field is five generations
instead of one. His ability to do this is connected with the fact that he is working in Rome,
whose people had a kind of historical consciousness quite different from that of the
Greeks. History for them meant continuity: the inheritance from the past of institutions
scrupulously preserved in the form in which they were received.
The Romans, acutely conscious of their own continuity with their past, were careful to
preserve memorials of that past; they not only kept their ancestral portraits in the house,
as a visible symbol of the continuing and watchful presence of their forefathers directing their
own life, but they preserved ancient traditions of their own corporate history to the extent
unknown to the Greeks.
It is to the Romans, acting as always under the tuition of the Hellenistic mind, that we owe
the conception of a history both ecumenical and national, a history in which the hero of
the story is the continuing and corporate spirit of a people and in which the plot of the story is
the unification of the world under that people’s leadership. Even here, we have not arrived at
the conception of national history as we understand it: national history as the complete
biography, so to speak, of a people from its very beginnings.
For Polybius, the given, ready-made national spirit is the unchanging substance that
underlies all change. For Polybius, there is no problem of the origin of the Roman people; if
he knew the traditions about the foundation of Rome, as he doubtless did, he silently cut
them out of his field of vision as lying behind the point at which historical science, as he
conceived it, could begin.
With this larger conception of the field of history comes a more precise conception of
history itself. History is now conceived as a special type of research needing a special
name of its own. He is an advocate of the claims of this science to universal study for its
own sake. He thinks of himself as the first person to conceive of history as such as a form of
thought having a universal value. But he expresses this value in a way which shows that he
has come to terms with the anti-historical or substantialistic tendency which dominated the
Greek mind. History, according to this tendency, cannot be a science, for there can be no
science of transitory things. Its value is not a theoretical or scientific value, it can only be a
practical value. History, for Polybius, is worth studying not because it is scientifically true
or demonstrative, but because it is a school and training ground for political life.
However, Polybius does not think that the study of history will enable men to avoid the
mistakes of their predecessors and surpass them in worldly success; the success to which
the study of history can lead is for him an inner success, a victory not over circumstance,
but over self. What we learn from the tragedies of its heroes is not to avoid such tragedies in
our own lives, but to bear them bravely when fortune brings them. The idea of fortune
bulks largely in this conception of history and imports into it a new element of determinism.
As the canvas on which the historian paints his picture grows larger, the power attributed
to the individual grows less. Here Polybius is applying to history the same Hellenistic
conceptions which the Stoics and Epicureans applied to ethics. Both these schools agreed in
thinking that the problem of moral life was not how to control these events in the world
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