Clio's Advocate: A Work in Progress

To write a biography of a philosopher is particularly difficult in the case of R. G. Collingwood. His daughter (born of his second wife) did not cooperate with Fred Inglis and refused to answer his letters. Did she share her father's animus against biography in general, believing it to be fit only for addicts of gossip instead of being focused on "actions expressing thoughts," which is the historian's proper territory; or was she just protecting her privacy?

Inglis, a professor emeritus of cultural studies at the University of Sheffield in England, has written an ambitious and very readable biography of a philosopher who was an original and influential thinker. Inglis hopes he has fashioned a book that will be read as both art and history. His prophecy that it is the political Collingwood who will connect to our present and future seems unlikely, but nobody else has written about both his life and his writings.

Inglis prizes above all his hero's An Autobiography (1939), in which he wrote about his family background and school days, as well as his wealth of experience as an archaeologist of Roman Britain and its influence on his ideas about the philosophy of history. Asking the right questions in the right order, he concluded, was the key to research in both disciplines. Writing the history of Roman Britain (1923) offered a prime example of his idea that the past lives on to some degree in the present, just as British life did under the Roman occupation. Collingwood's autobiography became well known, however, mainly because of its unexpected last chapter, expressing his passionate political critique of England in the early 1940s.

Inglis follows Collingwood's lead and does a remarkably thorough and often eloquent job of setting out the development of Collingwood's philosophy and interweaving it with the biographically significant events of his life. Inglis has broadened the focus of typical biography by having each chapter "closed by a section in which topics arising from a narrative of the past are reconsidered in the light of the present." It sometimes reads as if it were an effort to over-egg the pudding, but it is his way of paying tribute to Collingwood's "prime lesson" that "the past may be found living in the present."

Collingwood was the first philosopher writing in English to make the idea and practice of history a continuing theme of his thinking, and he was a trenchant critic of positivism at a time when most philosophers thought the scientific method was the only key to open any door to knowledge. The time had come in the 1940s for philosophic reflections on history as a fundamental category of reality. Professor John William Miller of Williams College gave a course on the philosophy of history, and Professor Morton G. White offered a graduate seminar at Harvard on the same topic (I took both courses). These were academic innovations at the time. Collingwood's The Idea of History first saw print in 1946, and in 1960 the new journal History and Theory appeared with the aim of bringing historians and philosophers into a common conversation. José Ortega y Gasset in Spain and Raymond Aron in France were also part of this contemporary trend.

The new thinkers about history analyzed actual passages written by historians, rather than made-up ones, and they did not treat historians as if they were trying, but failing, to be natural or social scientists. Louis O. Mink and William Dray devoted their philosophical careers to the issues Collingwood had raised. They supported the claim that "the structure of narrative history," as Mink wrote, "is a contribution to knowledge, not just a literary artifice for the presentation of a series of factual descriptions."

Collingwood by all accounts was an inspiring teacher and also a skilled mariner—sailing with some of his students to the Dutch East Indies and keeping up his writing while on board, in spite of his having had strokes that would finally...