I thought I would make an effort to transcribe some bits from Carr's "What is History" here, in particular as it relates to Collingwood and a couple other very interesting things.
First of all, Carr, writing in about 1960-61, talks about the period in which Collingwood was working as follows:
During the past fifty years a good deal of serious work has been done on the question 'What is history?' It was from Germany, the country which was to do so much to upset the comfortable reign of nineteenth-century liberalism {referring to the later manifestation of Naziism}, that the first challenge came in the 1880s and 1890s to the primacy and autonomy of facts in history.
Here, what he is talking about is the issue of how facts are used an mis-used in constructing history. The old view was that history consists of a corpus of fact that are available to the historian in documents, inscriptions etc, and all s/he has to do is collect them and arrange them to produce "history." The assumption is that there are certain basic facts which are the same for all historians, and that is the backbone of history. Carr points out that getting the facts right - such as the fact that the Battle of Hastings was fought in 1066 - but 'accuracy is a duty, not a virtue'. Yes, the historian must rely on archaeology, epigraphy, numismatics, chronology and so on and so forth, and these raw materials ARE all the same for every historian. Problems begin to appear, however, because of the decision of the historian about WHICH of these facts to select and arrange in his/her history. Obviously, every single fact known can't make the cut because such a text would be YUGE! So, the historian picks which facts are important. The fact that Caesar crossed the Rubicon is important, but the fact that millions of other people have crossed it is not important to history.
Thus, history is, necessarily, selective. Carr writes:
History has been called an enormous jig-saw with a lot of missing parts. But the main trouble does not consist in the lacunae. Our picture of Greece in the fifth century BC is defective not primarily because so many of the bits have been accidentally lost, but because it is, by and large, the picture formed by a tiny group of people in the city of Athens. ... Our picture has been preselected and predetermined for us, not so muc by accident as by people who were consciously or unconsciously imbued with a particular view and thought the facts which supported that view worth preserving. In the same way, when I read in a modern history of the Middle Ages that the people of the Middle Ages were deeply concerned with religion, I wonder how we know this, and whether it is true. What we know as the facts of medieval history have almost all been selected for us by generations of chroniclers who were professionally occupied in the theory and practice of religion, and who therefore thought is supremely important, and recorded everything relating to it, and not much else.
So, this problem of who was writing the materials that were being used as "facts" and what their agendas were came up.
The next point that was made by the Italian, Croce, who said that all history is contemporary history by which he meant that historians see the past through the eyes of the present and in view of its problems.
The practical requirements which underlie every historical judgement give to all history the character of "contemporary history", because, however remote in time events thus recounted may seem to be, the history in reality refers to present needs and present situaations wherein those events vibrate. (Croce, History as the Story of Liberty, Engl. transl. 1941, p. 19)
Another thing is that the historian sees his subject through the lens of his own psychological make-up. This is where Collingwood came in. Carr writes:
Croce was an important influence on the Oxford philosopher and historian Collingwood, the only British thinker in the present century who has made a serious contribution to the philosophy of history. He did not live to write the systematic treatise he had planned; but his published and unpublished papers on the subject were collected after his death in a volume entitled The Idea of History, which appeared in 1945.
The views of Collingwood can be summarized as follows. The philosophy of history is concerned neither with 'the past by itself' nor with 'the historian's thought about it by itself', but with 'the two things in their mutual relations'. ...'The past which a historian studies is not a dead past, but a past which in some sense is still living in the present.' But a pas act is dead, i.e. meaningless to the historian, unless he can understand the thought that lay behind it. Hence 'all history is the history of thought', and 'history is the re-enactment in the historian's mind of the thought whose history he is studying'. The reconstitution of the past in the historian's mind is dependent on empirical evidence. But it is not in itself an empirical process, and cannot consist in a mere recital of facts. On the contrary, the process of reconstitution governs the selection and interpretation of the facts: this, indeed, is what makes them historical facts.' ...
In the first place, the facts of history never come to us 'pure', since they do not and cannot exist in a pure form: they are always refracted through the mind of the recorder. It follows that when we take up a work of history, our first concern should be not with the facts which it contains but with the historian who wrote it.
Here we find pretty much a statement of my constant question: SEZ WHO? Because WHO says something is as important as what is said! Back to Carr:
But, in order to appreciate it at its full value {a given history}, you have to understand what the historian is doing. For if, as Collingwood says, the historian must re-enact in thought what has gone on in the mind of his dramatis personae, so the reader in his turn must re-enact what goes on in the mind of the historian. Study the historian before you begin to study the facts. This is, after all, not very abstruse. It is what is already done by the intelligent undergraduate who, when recommended to read a work by the great scholar Jones of St Jude's, goes round to a friend at St Jude's to ask what sort of chap Jones is, and what bees he has in his bonnet. When you read a work of history, always listen out for the buzzing. If you can detect none, either you are tone deaf or your historian is a dull dog.
Again and again the Cs have said that one must collect data from MANY sources and NETWORK. This isn't just directed at me, alone. Yes, I've carried the major part of the burden and have worked to narrow the field a bit, but it is still very important for each and every one of you to accumulate data, knowledge, awareness!
Carr discusses these points a bit more, but we will pass over that and move onto his next comment about Collingwood.
If, however, these are some of the insights of what I may call the Collingwood view of history, it is time to consider some of the dangers. The emphasised on the role of the historian in the making of history tends, if pressed to its logical conclusion, to rule out any objective history at all: history is what the historian makes. Collingwood seems indeed, at one moment, in an unpublished note quoted by his editor, to have reached this conclusion:
St Augustine looked at history from the point of view of the early Christian; Tillamont, from that of a seventeenth-century Frenchman; Gibbon, from that of an eighteenth-century Englisman; Mommsen from that of a nineteenth-century German. There is no point in asking which was the right point of view. Each was the only one possible for the man who adopted it.
This amounts to total scepticism, like Froude's remark that history is 'a child's box of letter with which we can spell any word se please'. Collingwood, in his reaction against 'scissors=and-paste history', against the view of history as a mere compilation of facts, comes perilously near to treating history as something spun out of the human brain, and leads back to the conclusion... that 'there is no "objective" historical truth'. In place of the theory that history has no meaning, we are offered here the theory of an infinity of meanings, none any more right than any other - which comes to much the same thing. The second theory is surely as untenable as the first. It does not follow that, because a mountain appears to take on different shapes from different angles of vision, it has objectively either no shape at all or an infinity of shapes. It does not follow that, because interpretation plays a necessry part in establishing the facts of history, and because no existing interpretation is wholly objective, one interpretation is as good as another, and the facts of history are in principle not amenable to objective interpretation.
But a still greater danger lurks in the Collingwood hypothesis. If the historian necessarily looks at his period of history through the eyes of his own time, and studies the problems of the past as a key to those of the present, will he not fall into a purely pragmatic view of the facts, and maintain that the criterion of a right interpretation is its suitability to some present purpose. {that is} Knowledge is knowledge for some purpose. The validity of the knowledge depends on the validity of the purpose."
This criticism of Collingwood is, IMO, very apt and in the last part, we see something like "the ends justify the means" which is an abomination to Truth.
So, that is a danger of taking Collingwood extraordinary work and giving it a twist and then pushing it TOO FAR. Carr discusses this but you will need to read the book for that exposition.
