Collingwood in context

Introduction It has now become commonplace to refer to R. G. Collingwood as an unduly neglected thinker. Agnes Heller, for instance, expressed this view only a few years ago in dedicating her book A Theory of History to the memory of Collingwood. Collingwood may still be undervalued among Heller's sociological colleagues, but philosophers of history and historians of ideas have come to acknowledge his significance. However, it is still essentially correct to suggest that aspects of Collingwood's work suffer relative neglect. One such area is his political philosophy. This is all the more surprising when one considers that in the early days of the Second World War Collingwood put aside his lifelong ambition to bring to fruition his mature thoughts on the philosophy of history and instead decided to devote his remaining energies to ‘recovering the hard boiled Hobbesian attitude to politics’, in an endeavour to make sense of the crisis in twentieth-century European civilization. In a letter to O. G. S. Crawford, Collingwood made it clear that he regarded it as a ‘public service’ to articulate and publish his thoughts on ‘the first principles of politics’. The result was the publication of The New Leviathan , which, of all the books published in his own lifetime, received the most favourable and enthusiastic reviews. Very little attention has been given to Collingwood's political philosophy subsequent to the initial responses to the publication of one of the few attempts in the first half of the twentieth century to expound a ‘grand theory’ of politics.