I learned about R.G. Collingwood and his famous book from a Chinese podcaster who quoted Collingwood as saying, “All history is the history of thought” (in Chinese, 一切历史都是思想史). Struck by the profoundness of the quote, I decided to dig deeper.  Collingwood is known as the most underrated philosopher in history, a reputation largely earned by “The Idea of History”. The book was published posthumously after his premature death in 1943, at age of 53.

By “all history is the history of thought”, Collingwood means history can only exist in the re-enactment of the past in a historian’s mind. The past events are over, cease to exist, and hence cannot be perceived and studied as a real, actual object. Thus, history is knowable only by thinking, and the proper object of history is thought itself: “not things thought about, but the act of thinking itself”.   It follows, I believe, there is no such a thing as the true past, or the real history.  History is idealistic in nature.  Seen in this light, the translation—“一切历史都是思想史” —is misleading. The quote should rather read, “一切历史都是思考史“。

Collingwood believes that a historian must go beyond the materials inherited from authorities.  Otherwise, he is a mere “copy-and-paste” historian. Collingwood goes so far as suggesting history, like novel, is the work of imagination, and in this regard, they do not differ.  The historian must tell a coherent and believable story in which the actions of his characters are justified by circumstances, motives, and psychology.  I suppose Collingwood’s novelistic historian is in sharp contrast with most Chinese historians, who actually praised and cherished the copy-and-paste tradition, sticking to Confucian’s famous precept: 述而不作（pass on the wisdom of the sages without adding anything new to it）.

Collingwood argues the purpose of history is to inform the present, by revealing “what man has done and thus what man is”.  Reconstructing the past is always done to know the present and to tell us what to do in the present.  Moreover, the past and the present are the same object in different phases and therefore inseparable: we come to know the present naturally by studying the past, because the past is part of the present.

Collingwood believes all history is biased because everyone approaches history with their own biases. Indeed, if it were not for these biases, nobody would write history in the first place.   He does say a good historian must take no sides and “rejoices in nothing but the truth”, but how much of history is written by good historians?

Finally, Collingwood harshly criticized the “scientific” theories of universal history, i.e., the idea that the progress of human history is governed by some universal law.  Chinese students of my generation can attest this is exactly what we had learned in history classes.  According to Collingwood, the value of these theories “was exactly nil”, and, if they have been accepted by so many, it is only because they have “become the orthodoxy of a religious community”.  He claims only two types of people were still writing universal history at his time: the dishonest attempting to “spread their opinions by specious falsehoods”, and the ignorant naïvely writing down everything they know without “suspecting that they know it all wrong”.

To someone growing up in China where historical materialism is treated as the one and only truth, Collingwood’s idea seems like heresy at first glance.  However, the more I read, the more I agree with him.  Since much of the book was compiled from lecture notes, the experience is close to taking a philosophy course: not exactly fun but worth the effort.