William M. Johnston

The Social and Political Thought of R. G. Collingwood.

Preface 1. Collingwood in context 2. The New Leviathan in context 3. The two Leviathans and the criteria of rational action 4. The development of the European mind 5. Collingwoods liberal politics 6. The state and the body politic 7. The process of civilization 8. Conclusion: civilization and its enemies Notes Index.

Introduction: A Sketch of R. G. Collingwood’s Career and Major Interests

The study of R. G. Collingwood properly begins with the study of his father. For like many other outstanding thinkers, R. G. Collingwood (1889–1943) was profoundly influenced by his father, both during childhood and later life. Unlike some others, such as John Stuart Mill or Karl Marx, Collingwood did not openly rebel against the older man, except perhaps in the mild form of hostility to Rugby. The influence of Collingwood’s father looms larger still when one considers that the father survived until the son was forty-three (1932) and that the two men collaborated in editing a journal when the son was in his midthirties. This is but one of many instances of intimacy between father and son which justify opening this study with a portrait of the older man.

John Ruskin as an Inspiration for W. G. Collingwood and R. G. Collingwood

The difficulties of intellectual biography are enormous, even for a thinker who lived a relatively short life and wrote little. The difficulties multiply the longer a thinker lived and the more he wrote. One might cite as a limiting case the difficulties which confront the biographer of John Ruskin. Not only did he live eighty-one years and not only did he publish voluminously, but he wrote thousands of letters, kept a diary, and wrote an autobiography when he was almost seventy. This staggering quantity of material by Ruskin has never been fully collated; much less has it served as underpinning for a definitive biography.1

The Literae Humaniores Program at Oxford and R. G. Collingwood’s Response to It

The Oxford to which Collingwood came in the fall of 1908 was to exert a profound influence upon his entire life. An institution of some twenty-one colleges, with about two thousand undergraduates, many of them wealthy, Oxford combined life of lordly ease, such as that satirized in Zuleika Dobson (1911),1 with dedicated pursuit of academic excellence by some.

General Characteristics of Speculum Mentis

Speculum Mentis was sent to the publisher in August, 1923. With it, Collingwood reached the culmination of his early philosophy of culture. It is a work remarkable for fluency and vividness, as well as scope and boldness. Whatever its merits, Collingwood’s attitude toward it altered as the years went by. He remarks in An Autobiography that at the time he was disappointed at how reviewers were misinterpreting his meaning. He adds in a footnote, written in 1938, the following characteristic piece of self-portraiture: Since writing that sentence [“Speculum Mentis … is a bad book in many ways”] I have read Speculum Mentis for the first time since it was published, and find it much better than I remembered. It is a record, not so very obscure in expression, of a good deal of genuine thinking. If much of it now fails to satisfy me, that is because I have gone on thinking since I wrote it, and therefore much of it needs to be supplemented and qualified. There is not a great deal that needs to be retracted.1

Conclusion: R. G. Collingwood’s Intellectual Loneliness after 1924 and its Roots in His Ruskinian Education

Speculum Mentis marks a culmination and a turning-point in Collingwood’s thought. In some ways, it achieves an excellence which its author never surpassed. For subtlety of reasoning and interweaving of parts, it is probably his most remarkable work. Perspicuity of style tends to camouflage the fact that ideas are being woven back and forth into a complex pattern of dialectic. What is first posited gets revised over and over again, until the book arrives at the conclusion that this process of continual revision constitutes the truest picture of the mind. The mind lives by striving always to correct its own errors, although it never will overcome them entirely. The claim that it can do so derives from philosophical dogmatism, and it is precisely dogmatism of this kind which Collingwood rejects most decisively.

R. G. Collingwood’s Religion and Philosophy (1916)

R. G. Collingwood published his first book in 1916 under the title Religion and Philosophy, and an interesting book it is. In it, he tries to rescue the philosophy of religion from inroads of empirical psychology. By the latter he means the effort of psychologists to explain the human mind by recourse to laboratory techniques, such as measuring responses to stimuli. Empirical psychology also includes interviews to solicit descriptions of experiences and the practice of collating these descriptions into a survey. A notable instance of the latter procedure was William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience, a work which Collingwood heaps with abuse.1

R. G. Collingwood’s Research in the Archaeology of Roman Britain

R. G. Collingwood did his historical research in a field which required technical expertise of a very specialized kind. Due to the lack of documents, historians of Roman Britain had long been forced to rely on techniques of excavation for the most elementary information. The man who put this enterprise on a scientific basis in Britain was F. J. Haverfield (1860–1919), who had been inspired by Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903).1

Two Pivotal Essays: “The Devil” (1916) and Ruskin’s Philosophy (1919–1922)

In the same year that saw the publication of Religion and Philosophy, Collingwood contributed an essay on the devil to a symposium entitled Concerning Prayer.1 This work was written at Oxford at a time when Collingwood was an active member of a group centered around Lily Dougall (1858–1923) and B. H. Streeter (1874–1937), Praelector of Queens College. B. H. Streeter was doing much to introduce the ideas of Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) to Oxford. Schweitzer’s Von Reimarus zu Wrede (1906) was attracting much attention, and its discussion of the relation between history and theology was not to be lost upon Collingwood.2 Unfortunately scarcely any material exists on Collingwood’s personal relations with Streeter’s group.3

R. G. Collingwood’s Place in the History of Ideas (1900–1925)

In order to place early Collingwood in his century, it will be useful to bring together comparisons with other thinkers scattered throughout this study. By reviewing what Collingwood endorsed and what he rejected, we can plot more precisely where he stood amid intellectual currents of his time.