Idea of History

One of the results of this is that to understand what the "idea of history" is, it is necessary to trace what it has been, and such indeed was the practice of Benedetto Croce (1866–1952) and his disciple Collingwood, for whom historical understanding had to be not a search for general or logical causes but a concern for individual motives—a kind of contemporary reenactment of past events in the fashion of Agatha Christie's sleuth, Hercule Poirot, and along the lines of modern hermeneutics. In any case Collingwood concludes his review of the "idea of history" (1946) by reducing it, in modern terms, to the Greek view that history was a unique form of inquiry into human behavior, proceeding through the interpretation of evidence, aiming at self-knowledge. One of the dangers of this view was the "Whig interpretation of history," denounced by Herbert Butterfield in 1931, but there seems no avoiding this sort of parochialism in a general sense.

In the twentieth century the idea of history took a number of forms, beginning with the old scientific ideal, encouraged by interdisciplinary studies and especially the methods and aims of the social sciences. One example of this was Marxist history, in which economic conditions and class struggle furnished the motor and revolution the goal of historical change, but in fact many political, social, and economic conditions have in their own ways preserved the search for the mechanisms of cause and effect underlying the historical process. This applies also to the adjacent field of the philosophy and theology of history, which has continued in the old Hegelian form, but which has diverged as well into the modern tradition of analytical philosophy, which is traceable back at least to F. H. Bradley's Presuppositions of Critical History (1874), but which became a major project in the third quarter of the twentieth century, when philosophers of history focused on published historical accounts and the examination of propositions and explanations with little or no attention to problems of research and heuristics but with great interest in the propositional analysis of stable terms and in assigning of causes and determining the "covering laws" to be extracted from the discourse of historians. Yet this abstractive focus on the "logic" of historical inquiry in the style of F. H. Bradley, Maurice Mandelbaum, William Dray, and Morton White seems to have run its course, or at least outlived its usefulness for historians.