Collingwood on Theory, Practice and Values in Historical Thinking
[A version of this will be published in the Journal of the Philosophy of History, vol.3, no.2 (2009). Please refer to that version if you wish to cite it.]
One of the more striking claims Collingwood makes in An Autobiography is that once his philosophy of history is properly grasped, a “rapprochement” between theory and practice will be effected, a claim that he then hardened in a manuscript written shortly after into the doctrine that “history” as he understood it “is the negation of the traditional distinction between theory and practice”.[1] In a complementary fashion, The Idea of History claims that one of the biggest errors of nineteenth-century positivism was its “crippling” emphasis on historians needing to abstain from making value judgements in their work, Collingwood reasoning that so far as historians do not “judge the facts”, they cannot comprehend the meaning or thought-sides of past events, and so, render themselves incapable of re-enacting the past.[2]
Put these claims together, and it would seem that Collingwood had a position on the relation between values and historical research strongly contrasting with that of (say) Michael Oakeshott’s or Max Weber’s, Oakeshott arguing in work such as “The Activity of Being a Historian” that any genuinely “historical” understanding of events cannot in principle support any given particular “practical conclusions” and Weber having famously argued that history and the social sciences are “value free” disciplines.[3] One aim of the present article, therefore, is to assess Collingwood’s position, seeing whether it offers the reply to Weber in particular that one might, on the face of it, think it could.[4]
More basically though, a second aim of the article is to simply discern what this position actually was, since in both An Autobiography and The Idea of History Collingwood offers next to no elucidation for his statements on the topic. Moreover, the text that would have provided the definitive statement of his views, namely The Principles of History, was left radically unfinished on his death, the manuscript as he left it breaking off well before he had intended to discuss questions of values and ethics.[5] Nevertheless, this is not to say he left no work on the topic. So, alongside the passages of An Autobiography and The Idea of History already mentioned, there is also a concise piece from 1936 entitled “Can Historians Be Impartial?”, which defends at much greater length the claims about history and “value judgements” cited earlier, and the combination of The New Leviathan and Collingwood’s last set of ethics lectures, “Goodness, Rightness, Utility”, which purport to develop a “historical” conception of “dutiful” action. Initially, my method will involve simply considering each in turn. Ultimately though, all is not what it may at first appear: for far from being antithetical towards each other, the views of Collingwood and Weber were in fact in substantive agreement, and so both about the relevance of values in historical thinking and the relevance of historical thinking in the reconciliation (or otherwise) of theory and practice.
The ‘Rapprochement’ of Theory and Practice
In An Autobiography, Collingwood declares his life’s philosophical work to have had two main aims, “the rapprochement between philosophy and history” and “a rapprochement between theory and practice”, the latter especially being the product of his inquires into history.[6] Contra in particular the “realist” philosophers who dominated Oxford at the time, he writes, “theory and practice” have a relation “of intimate and mutual dependence”, the “division of men into thinkers and men of action” being a “vulgar” error, a mere “survival from the Middle Ages”.[7]
How Collingwood immediately goes on to elucidate these claims is a bit odd however. For, this is to firstly retell how his inner “suppressed man of action” had found “very effective” release in the activities of his local antiquarian society, secondly celebrate Marx as a “fighting philosopher”, and thirdly assert the procedures of political liberalism to be the only proper mechanism for tackling the social problems of the present.[8] To be fair though, in saying this Collingwood wished to imply neither that Marx himself saw liberalism as anything other than a fraud, nor that the typical Cumberland antiquary would have been anything other than shocked at the suggestion that her pastime has some sort of positive relation to dialectical materialism. Nevertheless, read the rest of the chapter from which I have been quoting — a chapter entitled “Theory and Practice” — and it is not surprising that one prominent commentator has judged it to merely assert and not argue for its thesis of a “rapprochement” between theory and practice.[9]
Now while this judgement may be slightly unfair, the argument as Collingwood presented it in An Autobiography and related work is indeed rather skimpy. So, its pivot is simply the idea that the social world is constituted by “thoughts” in the shape of rules or norms.[10] A person’s moral, political and economic situation, then, exists solely in “the moral, political, and economic ‘theories’ generally accepted by the society in which he lives”, one consequence of this being that existing social conditions are changeable by definition, and so by persuasion and not (just) force.[11] Where historical thinking specifically comes into the picture is then with the notion that since to be a person in society requires thinking for oneself the “thoughts” constitutive of one’s social context, the ordinary agent practices a form of re-enactment on a day-to-day basis, with an intuitive form of historical “insight” being employed whenever the novelties of a concrete situation jar with the social norms that ostensibly define it.[12]
Now in elaborating this last point, Collingwood claims it to hold at the level of both individual and collective action. With respect to the former, a single person will typically participate in a whole range of social practices whose constitutive norms may clash.[13] In simply participating in the practices one does, however, one may be blind to such clashes as and when they arise. Taking a step back and doing an “historical” analysis of one’s overall situation, then, will (if done well) make explicit any tensions between the different practices one engages in. While thinking “historically” will not produce ready-made solutions to these tensions, it will at least identify what they are, rationally affording a motive to change affairs as they currently stand and then guiding one to a solution. A similar situation then holds at the level of collective action, or so Collingwood claimed, Collingwood here moving straight from the premise that the social world does not operate according to timeless laws to the conclusion that when “we set out to supersede” any given economic or political system, the main part of our task will be to re-enact the thoughts constitutive of the normal functioning of both the system and its would-be successor.[14]
As has been pointed out by commentators such as Stein Helgeby however, Collingwood is overly vague here about how employing historical insight is supposed to inform or at least assist a person or political movement in deciding what particular action or set of actions to take.[15] With respect to the individual actor case, consider as an example a person, born to immigrant parents, who subsequently feels torn between the cultural values of her family and those of wider society. Such a person cannot then resolve the tension by legislating new norms, since “norms” as such are a matter of tacit collective agreement, whatever that may be, not individual reflection per se. Indeed, Collingwood himself stresses (or at least assumes) the impersonal nature of norms in An Autobiography, in which one of his objections against the “realists” is that they had illegitimately “destroyed” political theory by “denying the conception of a ‘common good’, the fundamental idea of all social life, by insisting that all ‘goods’ were private”.[16] That the second-generation immigrant can “re-enact” her situation, then, hardly gets her close to solving her problem, since this will require changing the hearts and minds of others, not simply discerning what the concrete complexity of her situation actually is and then legislating revised norms for herself to personally live by.
A corresponding difficulty then arises in the collective praxis case, as Collingwood is not clear here as to why a re-enactive understanding of a political or economic system is supposed to help a group of people overcome or reform it. Indeed, prima facie, the sort of understanding which would be useful here is in fact a “positivist” grasp of statistical regularities, producing knowledge that will enable localised predictions about the effects of disrupting certain patterns of behaviour and so make possible a reasoned assessment of different policy options. In short, even if one accepts the thesis that society does not function deterministically according to universal “laws of nature”, it does not follow that a re-enactive understanding of it must be useful for a would-be social revolutionary or reformer.
In sum then, while Collingwood’s claims in An Autobiography and related work for the practical relevance of historical thinking are suggestive, they seem on reflection to be just too underdeveloped to be as significant as they might have been. So, how well do his arguments for the converse, of the relevance of the historian’s own normative values in her understanding of the past, stand up?
Partiality and Historical Inquiry
In “Can Historians Be Impartial?”, Collingwood’s aim is to establish a negative answer to the question of the piece’s title, and furthermore, demonstrate that good history actually requires some form of partiality on the part of the historian. To this end, he propounds not one but a small variety of arguments against what he terms the “eunuch-theory” of history. The first and perhaps least interesting argument is a pragmatic one that many a great historian has gone into his research seeking to defend a certain political position alive in his own time, with this very lack of dispassion at the outset serving as the driving force in his scholarly inquires. On the basis of this observation, Collingwood goes on to welcome the first stirrings of a committed Communist historiography in his own time, especially one that is “candidly and honestly partisan” about its prejudices.[17]
Intertwined with this pragmatic argument, however, is a more principled one concerning what Collingwood saw as the kernel of truth in Marxist historians” claims for setting forth a superior “proletarian” historiography. Collingwood’s reasoning here is that because all history is “a re-enactment in the historian’s mind of certain experiences which have happened to people in the past”, only those who have had roughly similar experiences to those whose activities are under study can entertain an historical account of their actions. Most prosaically then, to do an historical study of the machinations of Cardinal Richelieu (say) requires having had some experience of politics.[18] Put less prosaically though, Collingwood’s point here — given the reference to Marxism — may be interpreted as the sociologically “materialist” one that different values, to some significant degree, are a reflection of different social situations. Assuming the social situations of the past overlap with those of the present, then for history as a profession to welcome researchers with an array of different values would entail that the scope of the corporately re-enactable (and so corporately knowable) past will be much broader than otherwise.
As his analysis progresses, Collingwood then claims a further point in favour of Marxist historiography as it was emerging, one concerned with history’s intellectual development. For, while the nineteenth century saw fundamental improvements in historical technique concerning both “the discovery of isolated historical facts” and “historical scholarship and criticism”, historians found themselves not knowing what to make of the new facts so discovered. Nineteenth-century historiography, then, had “not taught us how to see what Henry James called the pattern in the carpet”. Marxist historiography, in contrast, sees a bold pattern repeated aplenty. While the pattern discerned may be discerned in error, and in error precisely because of the “prejudice” Marxist historians bring to their research, “it is only because of the same prejudice that they undertake the job at all, and the important thing is that it should be undertaken”.[19] The truth of historical materialism, one might say, is thus in it being a revolutionary and necessary, but as it matures, ultimately reactionary and superseded stage of a process both in and yet beyond itself. Why finding patterns in the carpet of historical happenings is “important” at the present time, however, is a point that Collingwood does not, alas, elaborate on.
Nevertheless, Collingwood’s most fundamental argument in favour of the thesis that “prejudice” is a necessary part of history has yet to come. What it then turns out to be is plausibly understood as a variant on Heinrich Rickert’s theory of the how the historian’s “values” determine the constitution of her subject-matter, Collingwood arguing that an event becomes historically significant only upon the investigator making value judgements about it.[20]
Now in reasoning for this conclusion, Collingwood employs two examples concerning deaths, the first a statement in the Annales Cambraie that “in the 126th year, Gildas died”, and the second an assertion of someone in the present that “Julius Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March, BC 44”. In the each case, historical knowledge of the event in question is only garnered upon coming to know the significance of the person or persons named; and any attribution of significance is itself a value judgement, indeed a complex of value judgements. With respect to the first example, one would therefore need to speak of the event being, for instance,
the death of a famous monk, a saint of the Celtic church, a turgid but forcible stylist, a notable pamphleteer who scourged the vices of the petty kings of Wales, the man who has given us a description, the best we possess, of Britain in the fifth and early sixth centuries, and so on.[21]
Concerning the second example, one might then speak of Caesar’s assassination as being one of a person
of brilliant gifts who realised more clearly than any of his contemporaries that the Roman Republic was dead past hope of revival. He saw, and saw quite rightly, that Rome needed a new constitution. The best idea he could think of was to give it one modelled on that of a Hellenistic monarchy. But others, far stupider men than he, had yet the sense to realise that this would not work, and their only way of preventing it was to make a plot and murder Caesar.[22]
In each case, the discernment of historical significance, and so statement of the historical facts, abounds with value-judgements, especially concerning the virtues and vices of the person or persons in question. Connecting the matter to his definition of an action as the unity of the inside and outside of an event, Collingwood infers that “[j]udgements of value are nothing but the ways in which we apprehend the thought which is the inner side of human action” — the reason being that it is judgements of this kind which “select from the infinite welter of things that have happened the things that are worth thinking about”.[23]
To truly disbar oneself from making value-judgements, then, is to disbar oneself from being able to perceive anything comprehensible in history whatsoever. So, to write a history of twentieth-century poetry, say, is to tacitly apply a standard of good poetry, as this will allow selecting a discrete subject-matter of works, each approaching the standard.[24] This does not preclude subjecting a particular poem to derision, of course; but any work so attacked must still approach the author’s tacit norm of what good poetry should look like, on pain of her not perceiving it to be part of the history of “poetry” at all. Now a “corollary” of this, Collingwood claims, is that “scales of value change”, albeit slowly. As a result, when one generation comes to realise their values to be different from its predecessor’s, history will need to be rewritten, as “what used to be thought failures it will think successes, what used to be thought lapses into barbarism it will think the victory of higher ideals, what used to be thought progress it will think degeneracy”. Lest the reader think he has capitulated to a simple relativism however, Collingwood then abruptly finishes both the argument and the lecture by asserting there to be nevertheless an “advancement of knowledge” over time, and one moreover not only of knowledge, but “in the whole moral attitude of humanity”.[25]
Now it would be idle to say much on Collingwood’s conclusion here, simply because it is drawn as quickly as his earlier praise for Marxists finding a bold pattern repeated aplenty in the carpet of past happenings. A criticism that may be made, however, is that it dubiously elides Rickert’s distinction between “value judgement” (Werturteil) and “value relevance” (Wertbeziehung).[26] So, political opponents, in opposing each other, must make contrary value-judgements; but they must also share certain presuppositions constituting their “general cultural values”, else they could not be arguing with each other — or so Rickert reasoned.[27] On Rickert’s view, it is thus such tacit “value-ideas” that inevitably determine what a historian selects, not the “value-judgements” constitutive of sectional politics. At heart, I suggest this was Collingwood’s position too. At least, he surely needs to have meant the weaker claim on pain of not being able to conclude as he actually did, since so far as one can perceive an “advancement” in the moral attitude of humanity over time, then the value judgements of different generations of historians cannot be incommensurable after all.
The value judgement/value relevance distinction, however, suggests trouble for Collingwood’s earlier arguments. In the first instance, it pushes his first two claims in favour of historical partiality in different directions. For, where the first, pragmatic one (that many a great historian has gone into his research seeking to defend a contemporary political position) clearly concerns value judgement, the second, more principled-sounding (and sociologically “materialist”) argument (concerning how different values typically reflect different types of social experience) clearly concerns value relevance. The first, then, seems to be saying it is who (or what) the historian consciously wants to “represent” that matters, the second who (or what) he actually does. Presumably, Collingwood’s conflation of the two was partly the result of his seeking to be generous to upcoming Marxist historians, who despite claiming their work to form a distinctly “proletarian” historiography were hardly of “proletarian” stock as a rule themselves. Even so, it is an conflation nonetheless, and one that would seem to imply that a son of the aristocracy could become able to re-enact the experiences of an ancient Roman proletarian simply by convincing himself that “the interests of the proletariat” are “the interests of humankind”, his new-found capabilities as an historian made properly secure by him becoming an enthusiastic activist in whatever Trotskyist sect has the liveliest newspaper stall in town.
Beyond that, the value relevance/value judgement distinction then also sheds critical light on Collingwood’s third argument, i.e. the one based around the examples of noteworthy deaths. So, recall that his claim there was that to attribute historical significance to such an event requires making value-judgements about the individual concerned. If the event’s significance only requires value relevance however, with this relevance itself analysable as some sort of overlap in social context between historian and historical agent, then making value judgements about that agent will be quite by-the-by. And indeed, surely the reason Caesar being killed was historically significant was not because Caesar was a man of “brilliant gifts” killed at the hands of others “far stupider” than he on everything excepting their understanding of the Republican constitution. Rather, it was because both Caesar and Brutus were leading figures in the military and political elites of their time and place, with the event itself then in retrospect being crucial for the socio-political transformation of Rome from republic to imperium. Consequently, the “gifts” of personal character exhibited by both men could be deemed boringly ordinary without the event’s genuinely “historical” significance being affected.
For what it is worth, I would suggest that Collingwood himself came to recognise this by The Principles of History; at least, one can find him there rejecting the idea that the historian should try to emotionally engage with the persons whose deeds she studies, a rejection he follows up by inferring history to be not essentially about named individuals at all.[28] Does his argument in “Can Historians Be Impartial?” amount to nought then? Notwithstanding what I have said so far, I propose not, since his critique of the “eunuch-theory” would work well enough if the conclusion was that historical descriptions have a necessarily retrospective nature, à la Arthur Danto’s later account of the nature of significance in history.[29] Collingwood’s “real” argument would then become thus: the historical meaning of an event at least partly concerns its significance for future events; what events the future will be constituted by cannot be accurately foreseen given even a perfect knowledge of the present and the past; therefore, the historical meaning of an event changes over time, necessitating the rewriting of history from one generation to the next. Replacing the idea of historical understandings being necessarily value-laden with that of them being necessarily retrospective, then, still allows reaching a conclusion similar to the one Collingwood himself did. That he drew the more striking conclusion was perhaps just partly a function of his examples being ones concerning deaths. Consider births instead: “on 20th April 1882, the future leader of the Third Reich was born”. Such is a sentence that could only be uttered in retrospect, a fact which by itself implies no “value judgement” on the part of anyone who utters the sentence in the present.
So, to summarise the argument of this section: in “Can Historians Be Impartial?”, Collingwood endeavours to prove the bold claim that historians both cannot, and should not be “impartial”, with this being so on various levels. To this effect, he offers four arguments. The first is a merely pragmatic one, that many a great historian’s values has inspired him to “go the extra mile” in his research. The second then adds to this the claim that the re-enactability of any given deed requires the re-enactor to have had “similar” experiences to the agent; hence, ideologies that emphasise the special experience of a certain sector of society in the present may bring forth historians of, or at least in some relation to, that sector, widening the sorts of past experiences that the historical profession as a corporate body may study. Thirdly, Collingwood avers that ideologically-driven history has, at the present juncture, usefully emphasised the need to make something of the treasure trove of miscellaneous facts produced by the previous generation of historians. And fourthly, he argues that value judgements are necessary to attribute historical significance to any happening. Against Collingwood, I myself have claimed arguments one and two to pull in different directions, argument three to be interesting but not really defended, and argument four to over-hastily simplify its Rickertian predecessor, having its force weakened further once one sees its “real” point to be that historical statements are not necessarily value-judgemental, but necessarily retrospective.
With respect to my criticisms though, one should bear in mind that I have been discussing a short lecture only published posthumously, and even then, published by the editors of The Principles of History several decades after it was written. As they themselves describe the piece, Collingwood in it “may perhaps be excused for trailing his coat”.[30] Given the apparent failure of Collingwood’s arguments for both the place of values in historical inquiry and the place of historical inquiry in the realisation of values, is perhaps part of the problem, however, myself in assuming Collingwood to be trying to say more than he actually was? For, if we allow that when speaking of “value judgement” he really meant “value relevance”, he would still be arguing for “values” and so “partiality” to significantly factor in the logic of historical inquiry, only that these “values” and this “partiality” is of an attenuated, one-cannot-but-help kind. Similarly, whilst his argument for history’s affecting a rapprochement between theory and practice encompassed a claim that in order to be successful, potential revolutionaries must be able to re-enact the social systems they seek to overcome, Collingwood was not then saying that all good historians are political radicals of some stripe. Indeed, if he were to claim his philosophy of history had a special kinship to a particular political position, then surely it would have been with his own, gently reformist political liberalism. Perhaps Collingwood’s self-styled “historical” conception of “duty” might shed light on matters?
An ‘Historical’ Conception of ‘Duty’
The first thing to note about Collingwood’s theory of “duty” is that it was something he developed in successive ethics lectures delivered right through his career, the theory in an early form being given a published summary in Speculum Mentis and its final form being given a published summary in The New Leviathan. For the present section I will just consider the latter, making use of Collingwood’s last set of ethics lectures, “Goodness, Rightness, Utility” as I do so (these having been published in the 1992 edition of The New Leviathan).
So, in those lectures, Collingwood begins his analysis of duty by observing that a still-common sense of the word is in speaking of the duties of a person qua fulfiller of a certain role in society. On this conception, an “officer’s duty”, for example, “means behaving according to the rules which regulate the conduct of an officer. So with the duty of a professor, or a signalman, or a wife”.[31] Such is a notion of “duty” that Collingwood then seeks to overcome however, as part of a sweeping critique of all generalist approaches to ethics. To that effect, he makes a basic conceptual distinction between duty proper and “right”. By the latter, he did not especially mean to allude to the titles of (say) Kant’s Doctrine of Right or Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Instead, he meant simply “acting according to rule”, whether the rule concerned is a socially-defined rule of conduct or one the individual made for herself. The so-called duties of an officer or wife, then, are really “regularian” pseudo-duties on Collingwood’s scheme.
So, against the idea that duty is “regularian”, Collingwood advances three criticisms relative to what he claimed to be our pre-theoretical understanding of dutiful action. The first is that “duty” must be completely determinate, but a rule only specifies merely the type of action required, and so, not one concrete option to take but (potentially) a whole range.[32] Secondly, in a concrete situation, different ethical maxims may conflict — yet “doing one’s duty” must be singular.[33] And thirdly, phenomenologically, a sense of “obligation” never arises from adherence to an abstract rule per se, but to the feeling of having to respond in a certain way to a certain situation one presently finds oneself in — or so Collingwood asserts.[34]
With respect to the last two criticisms, it must be said that Collingwood made matters easy for himself by conflating the idea of a moral principle as formulated by a normative theorist with that of a rule of conduct identified by a sociologist as constitutive of a particular “way of life”. Considering Kant’s (in)famous absolute prohibition on lying and the case of the intending murderer asking you where his intended victim is, Collingwood thus replies:
It depends upon what kind of a man you intend to be. A rule is a generalised purpose defining a certain type of conduct or way of life as the one you mean to adopt. If your rule is to tell the truth at all costs, which is what Kant and Fichte think it ought to be, you will tell the truth at the cost of human life, which in their opinion is of value only as providing a vehicle for “the moral law”. If your rule is to save human life, tell a lie. Kant and Fichte will be very shocked; but need you care?.[35]
Why you indeed need not care, Collingwood goes on, is because only “fanatical” Kantians “think that every man must live by the same rules, whether he lives in a monastery or in ‘the world’, whether he is a minister of religion or an officer in the army, whether he is an ancient heathen Greek or a modern European Christian”.[36]
Notwithstanding this criticism of Kant though, Collingwood still took from him that “duty” has two essential characteristics, namely determinacy and possibility.[37] Kant’s own elucidation of their meaning fundamentally erred, however. In particular, what he claimed as unifying apparently disparate ethical maxims, namely the categorical imperative, is a confused notion, says Collingwood. For, being itself a rule, the “categorical” imperative must really be a “disjunctive” imperative just like any rule; yet if so, then by definition, it cannot determine what particular action to take in a given situation, but only what kind of action.[38] If the word “categorical” here is to do any work, it must therefore implicate a form of action distinct from “right”, a form whereby “[t]he act which it is a man’s duty to do is always an individuum omnimode determinatum”, and thus falls under no “rule”.[39] Turning to Kant’s treatment of the idea of possibility, Collingwood then similarly claims that the phrase “ought implies can” is rendered “nonsense” when put in a regularian conception of morality, since if multiple rules apply to a situation where only one can actually be performed, then many a supposed “ought” will not actually imply “can”.[40]
From this, Collingwood defines a person’s “duty” as that which “on a given occasion, is the act which for him is both possible and necessary: the act which at that moment character and circumstance combine to make it inevitable, if he has a free will, that he should freely will to do”.[41] The consciousness of duty, therefore, is something felt in the moment of acting rather than during reflection beforehand or afterwards; and, furthermore, it is a feeling of “complete obligation” to do a certain action. In contrast, the consciousness of “utility” concerns only a feeling that the deed one performs is the best available means for an end held independently of it, and the consciousness of “right”, that it falls under a rule one respects.[42]
As for what a dutiful act positively entails, Collingwood writes that it has two stages. In the first, the agent in question gets a sense that she is obligated to do something at the present juncture. This consciousness of being obligated as such, however, does not tell her what she should actually do. To answer that question, then, “demands a process of logical thinking, over and above the intuitive or immediate process which answers the question: ‘Have I got any obligations, never mind what?’”.[43] As for what this “process of logical thinking” more concretely involves, Collingwood replies that it is simply the “asking and answering [of] successive questions in the form: ‘Is it this?’ ‘Is it this?’ ‘Is it this?’”.[44]
So, what more can one say about the nature of duty? Not a lot, replies Collingwood, because the dutiful consciousness is something fundamentally beyond theoretical description. The best one can do is to make an analogy with a person thinking about his lover, “I love you because I love you”, a statement that “expresses a consciousness of the discovery that love is not a thing for which reasons can be given”. The consciousness of duty, then, is “the agent’s consciousness of his action as a unique individual action relevant to a unique individual situation”, where consciousness of the situation as unique is the same as the consciousness of the action as unique.[45] At this point in his argument, Collingwood then abruptly announces that the morality of “duty”, as he understands it, is an “historical” morality. Why? Because the science of individual situations and individual actions is history; therefore history is the science that corresponds to the consciousness of duty; therefore the historical consciousness is the consciousness of the actuality of duty.[46] Having drawn this conclusion, Collingwood’s discussion of “duty” in both “Goodness, Rightness, Utility” and The New Leviathan then simply ends.
Decisionism and Value-Freedom
Generally speaking, arguments in favour of Collingwood’s account of duty are hard to find in the secondary literature.[47] An important exception, however, is James Connelly’s commentaries on the topic, commentaries that have unusually emphasised less what Collingwood says in “Goodness, Rightness, Utility” and The New Leviathan than what he had said in earlier ethics lectures from the mid-1930s.[48] From Connelly’s point of view, one benefit of emphasising the latter is that they allow minimising the semi-intuitionist nature of Collingwood’s final formulation, in which the consciousness of having some sort of duty to perform is immediate and non-inferential, with only the second stage, of determining what particular duty one has, being one that involves a process of rational thinking on the agent’s part. More positively, the earlier lectures also allow Connelly to bring out how central to Collingwood’s theory of duty is the thesis that the source of moral obligation lies solely in individual “conscience”, one consequence of this being that the ethical precepts a person generally sees as binding upon her are nevertheless liable to be overridden in the performance of a “dutiful” act.
Now this doctrine is clearly enough stated even in Collingwood’s final formulation of his theory.[49] What the earlier lectures provide as a gloss, however, is the claim that a dutiful act in the most ideal-typical case is performed as the agent feels herself to be in a state of “moral crisis”. In such a crisis, Collingwood goes on, rules are there to be broken, but so neither through a lack of will on the agent’s part, nor because she now thinks of the rules in question as invalid, but because breaking their letter is necessary to preserve their spirit. What makes an act “dutiful” is thus not what is done, but that it constitutes “the fact of victory in the moral struggle”, or so Collingwood concludes.[50]
Now Collingwood’s argument here, I suggest, is rather similar to Max Weber’s account of his “decisionist” ethics in “Politics as a Vocation”. For there, Weber argues that while the “ethics of responsibility” is to be preferred over an “ethics of ultimate ends”, in certain cases, the letter of the former must be overridden to preserve its spirit, cases such as Martin Luther’s when declaring, “Here I stand, and I can do no other”.[51] Weber’s justification for his claim here, congruent with Collingwood’s account of “dutiful” action, was that the demands of morality are concretely determined by individual conscience. In the Wertfreiheit essay, Weber then elucidated the point by saying that ethical maxims are essentially “formal” in the sense of not commanding in advance any particular act in any particular situation, a formality that also entails how in a concrete situation, the demands of one ethical maxim sincerely endorsed by a person may conflict with another.[52] Replace the terms “formal” and “ethical maxim” with “abstract” and “rule” respectively, and one has exactly what Collingwood says against “regularian” conceptions of morality.
This in mind, it seems opportune to return to the question of value judgements and their alleged necessity in Collingwood’s theory of historical inquiry, since a major aspect of Weber’s fame (or infamy), of course, is in his having argued that history and the social sciences are “value free” disciplines. Weber’s claim here, however, was premised upon Rickert’s distinction between value relevance and value judgement.[53] So, on Weber’s account, a “transcendental presupposition” of the “historical” or “cultural” sciences is that man is a valuating being, as this is what grants the possibility of delimiting distinct cultural objects. The ultimately only “formal” nature of this presupposition, however, is in how a study on the history of prostitution, say, is premised upon not the historian personally having a strong view on the morality of her subject-matter, but merely the fact that the term “prostitution” is to some degree “value-laden” in her society generally.[54] Now as I suggested earlier, it is reasonable to think that Collingwood’s “real” position was in fact similar to this — i.e., that he ultimately believed not that particular “value judgements” are essential to an historian’s narrative qua historical narrative, but that any such narrative must merely have a certain “value-relevance” to be “historical”. Indeed, the weaker claim is more needed for Collingwood than it is for Weber, since while Collingwood (as quoted earlier) wished to speak of an “advancement of knowledge” over vast stretches of time, Weber (much to Rickert’s disappointment) explicitly left open the possibility of genuine incommensurability between the “value-ideas” of different epochs.[55]
So, where does this leave Collingwood’s claim in An Autobiography that his theory of historical understanding implicates a “rapprochement” of theory and practice? For, on the face of it, this thesis would appear opposed to Weber’s stipulations about the value-free nature of historical and sociological explanation. In fact however, what Collingwood called the “rapprochement” of theory and practice in history is what Weber called the discipline’s “value-freedom”. That this is so relates to Collingwood’s rejection of Kant’s moral rationalism — recall Collingwood’s deflationary response to the infamous intending murderer example. In “Goodness, Rightness, Utility”, he then develops the point through the more mundane case of a doctor with a terminally ill patient. The problem here, then, is of what the doctor should do when asked by the patient, in a state of distress, whether she is going to die. Collingwood’s answer is to say that because any conflict of ethical precepts here “is in the physician’s consciousness […] it is in the physician’s consciousness that a solution for it must be found”. It is thus “of no use for the moral philosopher to invent a solution for the conflict”. To think of devising a system of universal precepts from which one can then deduce the correct response is fallacious, Collingwood goes on, because (pace Kant) “the validity of a rule is only a name for the fact that somebody’s moral consciousness recognises it as valid”.[56]
An underlying point of Collingwood’s theory of duty, therefore, is that any practical decision must ultimately be seen as a result of the workings of individual “conscience”. Yet this is precisely the meaning of Weber’s claim for the “value-freedom” of history and sociology. Weber thus argued that while history and the social sciences can engage in “technical criticism”, they cannot do any more, since to apply a criticism of practice is to will it in practice. While social science can judge whether this or that potential means is the best for a given end, then,
apply[ing] the results of this analysis in the making of a decision, however, is not a task which science can undertake; it is rather the task of the acting, willing person: he weighs and chooses from among the values involved according to his own conscience and his personal view of the world. Science can make him realise that all action and naturally, according to the circumstances, inaction imply in their consequences the espousal of certain values — and herewith — what is today so willingly overlooked — the rejection of certain others. But the act of choice itself is his own responsibility.[57]
This “act of choice”, I suggest, is what Collingwood calls an act of “dutiful” choice. That he terms it “historical” does not, then, imply any Weber-denying notion of the relation between “theory” and “practice”. Quite the converse, it effectively affirms Weber’s analysis: for Collingwood’s talk of the “rapprochement” of theory and practice in historical thinking simply means that by “historical” (verständlich) methods one can come to know a practical decision in itself. The point, therefore, is not that historical thinking is itself a decision-maker — for only the “will” or “conscience” of an acting person is that.
All in all then, one may draw the following conclusions. In An Autobiography, Collingwood makes the bold-sounding claim that his philosophy of history shows how to effect a “rapprochement” of theory and practice, “historical” thinking in the form of re-enactive understanding being crucial to any successful resolution of many personal and social problems alike. Actually examine his arguments for this claim, however, and they seem curiously undercooked. Elsewhere, in “Can Historians Be Impartial”, he then considered the relation of norms to history from the opposite angle of the logic of historical inquiry itself. In this, he sought to argue that historical understanding (and in particular, the attribution of historical significance) necessarily involves making value judgements, against which I suggested that Collingwood really meant to argue here that historical inquiry necessarily involves “value relevance” in the terms of Rickert and Weber, not “value judgement”. In the light of this, I then finally argued that the essence of Collingwood’s claim for the “rapprochement” of theory and practice in history is Weber’s argument for history and the social sciences’ “value freedom”, since the substance of Collingwood’s contribution to moral philosophy — his “historical” conception of “duty”, “historical” because it concerns the type of acts most explicable in re-enactive terms on his scheme — is the substance of Weber’s “decisionist” ethics, which is itself the flipside to Weber’s value-freedom argument.
Notes
[1] R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939), p.147; R. G. Collingwood, “Notes on Historiography, 1938-9” in The Principles of History and Other Writings on the Philosophy of History, eds. W. H. Dray and W. J. van der Dussen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), p.246.
[2] R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, rev. edn., ed. Jan van der Dussen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp.131-2.
[3] Michael Oakeshott, “The Activity of Being a Historian” in Rationalism in Politics (London: Methuen, 1962), p.166; Max Weber, “The Meaning of ‘Ethical Neutrality’” in The Methodology of the Social Sciences, trans. E. A. Shils and H. A. Finch (New York: Free Press, 1949), pp.1-49. For a comparison with Oakeshott on the topic, see David Boucher, “Human Conduct, History and Social Science in the Works of R. G. Collingwood and Michael Oakeshott”, New Literary History, 24 (1993), pp.697-717.
[4] Previous commentary on Collingwood’s views on the relation between history and ethics has centred upon not his methodological claims as such, but his wider concern with formulating a historically-minded liberal political philosophy on the basis of them. See David Boucher, The Social and Political Thought of R. G. Collingwood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); David Boucher, “Tocqueville, Collingwood, History and Extending the Moral Community”, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 2 (2000), pp.326-51; A. J. M. Milne, “Civilisation and the Open Society” in D. Boucher, J. Connelly and T. Modood (eds.), Philosophy, History and Civilisation (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1995), pp.296-326; James Connelly, Metaphysics, Method and Politics (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2003); and Gary Browning, Rethinking R. G. Collingwood (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004).
[5] Cf. his scheme for the book in Collingwood, “Notes on Historiography, 1938-9”, p.246.
[6] Collingwood, An Autobiography, p.147.
[7] Ibid., p.150.
[8] Ibid., pp.152-3.
[9] Connelly, Metaphysics, Method and Politics, p.162.
[10] Cf. Collingwood, “Outlines of a Philosophy of History” in The Idea of History, pp.474-5.
[11] Collingwood, An Autobiography, pp.147, 153-7.
[12] Ibid., pp.148, 101.
[13] R. G. Collingwood, The New Leviathan, rev. edn., ed. D. Boucher (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p.117.
[14] Collingwood, The Idea of History, pp.324, 334.
[15] Stein Helgeby, “Action, Duty and Self-Knowledge in R. G. Collingwood’s Philosophy of History”, Collingwood Studies, 1 (1994), p.104.
[16] Collingwood, An Autobiography, p.49.
[17] R. G. Collingwood, “Can Historians Be Impartial?” in The Principles of History and Other Writings on the Philosophy of History, pp.212-3.
[18] Ibid., p.211.
[19] Ibid., p.214.
[20] While Collingwood never actually mentions Rickert by name here, he does elsewhere, doing so with reference to a relevant text, namely Rickert’s book The Limits of Concept Formation in Natural Science — see R. G. Collingwood, “The Philosophy of History” in Essays in the Philosophy of History, ed. W. Debbins (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1965), pp.134-9, and Collingwood, The Idea of History, pp.168-9.
[21] Collingwood, “Can Historians Be Impartial?”, p.216.
[22] Ibid., p.216.
[23] Ibid., p.217 (the point is remade in Collingwood, “Notes on Historiography, 1938-9”, p.240). Collingwood famously defines an action as “the unity of the outside and inside of an event” in The Idea of History, p.213.
[24] Collingwood, “Can Historians Be Impartial?”, p.218.
[25] Ibid., p.218.
[26] Heinrich Rickert, The Limits of Concept Formation in Natural Science, trans. Guy Oakes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp.88ff.
[27] Ibid., p.92.
[28] R. G. Collingwood, “The Principles of History” in The Principles of History and Other Writings on the Philosophy of History, pp.70, 75, 111-2.
[29] Cf. Arthur C. Danto, Analytical Philosophy of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968); republished with supplementary essays as Narration and Knowledge (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
[30] W. H. Dray and W. J. van der Dussen, “Editors’ Introduction” to Collingwood, The Principles of History and Other Writings on the Philosophy of History, p.xxvi.
[31] R. G. Collingwood, “Goodness, Rightness, Utility” in The New Leviathan, p.463.
[32] Collingwood, The New Leviathan, pp.115, 122.
[33] Ibid., p.116.
[34] Ibid., pp.122, 128.
[35] Ibid., p.116.
[36] Ibid., p.117.
[37] Ibid., p.121.
[38] Ibid., p.115; Collingwood, “Goodness, Rightness, Utility”, p.466.
[39] Collingwood, “Goodness, Rightness, Utility”, p.470; cf. Collingwood, The New Leviathan, p.121.
[40] Collingwood, The New Leviathan, p.123.
[41] Ibid., p.123.
[42] Collingwood, “Goodness, Rightness, Utility”, p.472.
[43] Collingwood, The New Leviathan, p.122.
[44] Ibid., p.123.
[45] Collingwood, “Goodness, Rightness, Utility”, pp.474-5. Because of that, Collingwood infers that to speak of having a “duty” to return a book that one has borrowed is to speak of merely a regularian pseudo-duty, for such a “duty” does not specify at exactly what time, at exactly what place, and exactly how to return the book (ibid., p.470).
[46] Ibid., pp.475-9; Collingwood, The New Leviathan, p.128. Cf. Collingwood, An Autobiography, p.148.
[47] E.g., see the critiques in Alan Donagan, The Later Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), pp.242-5; A. J. M. Milne, “Collingwood’s Ethics and Political Theory” in M. Krausz (ed.), Critical Essays on the Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), pp.296-326; and Helgeby, “Action, Duty and Self-Knowledge in R. G. Collingwood’s Philosophy of History”, pp.103-5.
[48] Connelly, Metaphysics, Method and Politics, ch.6; James Connelly, “Character, Duty and Historical Consciousness” in W. Sweet (eds.), British Idealism: Moral, Social and Political Philosophy (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2008).
[49] Cf. Collingwood, The New Leviathan, pp.120, 117.
[50] R. G. Collingwood, “Lectures in Moral Philosophy 1932”, p.92, as cited in Connelly, Metaphysics, Method and Politics, p.204.
[51] Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), p.127.
[52] Weber, “The Meaning of ‘Ethical Neutrality’”, p.16.
[53] For the Rickert-Weber intellectual relation, see Thomas Burger, Max Weber’s Theory of Concept Formation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1976), and Guy Oakes, Weber and Rickert: Concept Formation in the Cultural Sciences (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1988).
[54] Weber, “The Meaning of ‘Ethical Neutrality’”, p.81. See also Max Weber, Roscher and Knies: The Logical Problems of Historical Economics, trans. G. Oakes (New York: Free Press, 1975), pp.141-2.
[55] Cf. Rickert’s brief discussion of Weber on the matter in The Limits of Concept Formation in Natural Science, pp.8-11.
[56] Collingwood, “Goodness, Rightness, Utility”, p.459f.
[57] Weber, “The Meaning of ‘Ethical Neutrality’”, pp.52-3.
