The Afterlife of Idealism

The Impact of New Idealism on British Historical and Political Thought, 1945-1980

Admir Skodo

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9783319293844
• eBook ISBN: 9783319293851
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: British History

This book examines the legacy of philosophical idealism in twentieth century British historical and political thought. It demonstrates that the absolute idealism of the nineteenth century was radically transformed by R.G. Collingwood, Michael Oakeshott, and Benedetto Croce. These new idealists developed a new philosophy of history with an emphasis on the study of human agency, and historicist humanism. This study unearths the impact of the new idealism on the thought of a group of prominent revisionist historians in the welfare state period, focusing on E.H. Carr, Isaiah Berlin, G.R. Elton, Peter Laslett, and George Kitson Clark. It shows that these historians used the new idealism to restate the nature of history and to revise modern English history against the backdrop of the intellectual, social and political problems of the welfare state period, thus making new idealist revisionism a key tradition in early postwar historiography.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Admir SkodoThe Afterlife of Idealism10.1007/978-3-319-29385-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Admir Skodo¹

(1)

University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA

Abstract

Even though R.G. Collingwood’s and Michael Oakeshott’s lasting contributions to the philosophy of history and political theory have been registered, their impact on British post-World War II historical and political thought has been seen as marginal. It is symptomatic that Christopher Parker’s The English Historical Tradition, the only systematic study to seriously consider idealism as a tradition informing British historical thought, dismisses the new idealism from the theory and practice of British postwar historiography: ‘Of course, most historians concerned themselves not at all with either Oakeshott or Collingwood.’ The ever perceptive Perry Anderson has noted the absence of this type of idealism in discussions on postwar British ideologies: ‘Anglo-Scottish Idealism of the early years of this century […] has become one of the least recollected episodes of the native past.’

End Abstract

New Idealism and British Intellectual Life

Even though R.G. Collingwood’s and Michael Oakeshott’s lasting contributions to the philosophy of history and political theory have been registered, their impact on British post-World War II historical and political thought has been seen as marginal. ¹ It is symptomatic that Christopher Parker’s The English Historical Tradition, the only systematic study to seriously consider idealism as a tradition informing British historical thought, dismisses the new idealism from the theory and practice of British postwar historiography: ‘Of course, most historians concerned themselves not at all with either Oakeshott or Collingwood.’ ² The ever perceptive Perry Anderson has noted the absence of this type of idealism in discussions on postwar British ideologies: ‘Anglo-Scottish Idealism of the early years of this century […] has become one of the least recollected episodes of the native past.’ ³

This book argues that the new idealism of Collingwood, Oakeshott, and to a lesser extent their Italian counterpart, Benedetto Croce, had an unmistakable impact on the historical and political thought of the leading British historians and public figures E.H. Carr, G.R. Elton, Isaiah Berlin, Peter Laslett, Henry Pelling, George Kitson Clark, Oliver MacDonagh, Asa Briggs, and Maurice Cowling. ⁴ These historians are major representatives of what I will call (new idealist) revisionist historiography. ⁵ Most of these revisionists may be forgotten today, but they held prominent places in British academia and public life in the first three decades of the postwar era. More importantly, with their emphasis on the plural and contingent forms of social and political life, and their discussions on the nature of history, the revisionists helped shape the historical profession in a way that is recognizable even today. The impact of the new idealism and revisionism extended even to Marxist-inspired historiography, which made a point of incorporating culture and agency as historical categories in response to the pressure created by the idealists and revisionists to acknowledge the contingent and pluralistic quality of social life and historical interpretation. ⁶ But while Marxism, a nineteenth-century tradition, is today considered a significant intellectual force in postwar British historical and political thought, ⁷ idealism is not. This book argues that unless we consider new idealism as a major tradition in the postwar era, our understanding of the origins and content of postwar British historical and political thought will remain incomplete and lopsided.

The postwar period in British historiography has been surprisingly little studied. ⁸ This shortage of studies is striking since the period was, according to David Cannadine, the ‘Golden Age’ of British twentieth-century historiography, ⁹ reflecting, in Eric Hobsbawm’s oft-cited words, the broader Golden Age of the European twentieth century. ¹⁰ This was a time ‘when Clio never had it so good’ owing, in material terms, to the massive university expansion issuing from the educational reforms of the early postwar welfare state. ¹¹

Cannadine has made a very perceptive observation regarding the logic of Golden Age (including revisionist) scholarship. The logic of this scholarship lies in radically revising or strongly modifying liberal-whig ¹² historiography by drawing on the nascent social sciences and political norms from postwar British society. ¹³ Golden Age historians viewed the English past as a non-linear process of fractures, breaks, and discontinuities that are too complex to be conducive to a belief in a unitary English political culture able to withstand, even harness, rebellious social discontent and political opposition. In this context, Christopher Hill argued for the ‘Puritan revolution’ as a disjunctive break in English history; Elton spoke of the ‘Tudor revolution’ in English government; Laslett recovered an early modern world that ‘we have lost’; E.P. Thompson unearthed the ‘making’ of the English working class; George Kitson Clark spoke of the ‘making’ of Victorian Britain; and Oliver McDonagh championed the ‘administrative revolution’ of the nineteenth century. ¹⁴

These examples—which include historians of various ideological and methodological casts—clearly show that postwar historiography was informed by a variety of theoretical and ideological traditions. We should therefore reject the reductionism of professional historiography, as seems to be the prevailing trend, to that supposedly value-neutral, strictly empirical, and technical historical method that was established by the Rankean School in the early nineteenth century. William Stubbs, F.W. Maitland, and T.F. Tout purportedly imported this method to Britain at the end of Victorian period, and it has been the mainstay of historiography ever since. Michael Bentley—perhaps the foremost student of the historians that this book examines, which he calls ‘modernists’—thus argues that early postwar historiography is defined by a persistent Rankeanism: ‘Rather than find itself attracted to the idealism of Collingwood and Oakeshott […] the [historical] profession largely ignored them et hoc genus omne and forged a common-sense notion of truth and factuality out of a daily engagement with historical sources.’ ¹⁵ What modernist historians—such as Elton, Butterfield, Clark, Namier, and Trevor-Roper—above all wanted to achieve, according to Bentley, was ‘a Rankian process of self-dissolution’ through which the past in its nakedness would emerge to posterity. ¹⁶ Only this process would be conducive for ‘a modernized past’ to emerge which ‘would contain no “bias” and allow only judgments that aimed for “objectivity”’. Peter Novick has made a similar argument regarding the history of modern American historiography, ¹⁷ an argument that has been accepted wholesale in later accounts of the intellectual history of the American historical profession. ¹⁸

These accounts have persistently attempted to fend off idealism from the history of postwar historiography and political thought. Another clear example of this type of account is a recent history of Anglo-American constitutional historiography written by Anthony Brundage and Richard Cosgrove. These two historians go so far as to argue that Collingwood, despite his idealism, ‘held views of a decidedly Stubbsian nature’. Indeed, he often ‘held positions more like Stubbs’s than Hegel’s’. ¹⁹ Placing Collingwood in the same fold as Stubbs, who is often considered a, if not the, founding father of modern British scientific history, signals an attempt to reduce the new idealism to modernist historiography. But in doing so, it suggests that Collingwood and new idealism did have a part to play in the manifold making of modern British and American historiography. ²⁰

There is some truth to this reductionist interpretation, but it is lopsided. Brundage and Cosgrove, for example, rightly point out that the new idealists happily embraced the strictures of technical and empiricist historical scholarship. However, they wrongly bring their interpretations to a close there, since for the new idealists, numerous problems stemming from both the past and the present prompted an approach to the past that was faithful to the evidence, but remained underdetermined by the evidence since there is more than one supporting pillar in the architecture of historical knowledge acquisition. Among these other pillars are, most importantly, the ‘historical imagination’ and an irreducible methodological pluralism and perspectivism.

* * *

At this point, it may be useful to introduce the new idealism and British revisionist historiography in more precise terms. The new idealism was an interwar philosophical movement in Italy and Britain which arose in opposition to the historical, but not political, thought of the ‘absolute’ idealism that had dominated British intellectual life during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. British absolute idealism—the leading figures of which were T.H. Green, Edward Caird, Bernard Bosanquet, and F.H. Bradley—drew heavily on Hegel in conceiving all reality as spiritual and intellectual activity, the individual expressions of which are fundamentally united in an ‘Absolute Mind’ or ‘Absolute Spirit’, the highest historical stage of which was the nation-state, and the final historical goal of which was the God of Christian theology. History, for the absolute idealists, was the teleological process through which the Absolute Mind overcomes its internal divisiveness and historico-logical contradictions to achieve the metaphysical unity from which it ultimately originates. This optimistic and absolutist conception of mind and history lost its hold over many British historians and philosophers following the trauma of World War I, the rise of totalitarianism, the coming of an irreducible plurality of contending social groups and ideologies on the national-political main stage, and the emergence of anti-metaphysical scientific and technocratic expertise within culture and politics.

The new idealists were reared in the language of absolute idealism and accepted its analysis of reality as mind and history. In light of the socio-political changes just mentioned, however, they conceived of mind, and thereby human reality, as essentially concrete and contingent experience, and history as obeying only the direction that concrete minds, or ‘agents’, provide for it, intentionally and unintentionally, consciously and unconscio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Revisionist Potential: Historical Thought from Absolute to New Idealism
• 3. The Philosophical Moment in Postwar Historiography
• 4. Revisionist Whiggism: Revisions of the English Past from the Tudors to the Victorians
• 5. The Political Thought of Revisionism
• 6. Conclusion
• Backmatter