Is "The Theory of History" (1914) Collingwood's First Essay on the Philosophy of History?

Abstract

Upon R. G. Collingwood's death in January 1943, his unpublished papers became the property of his estate, and were subsequently used by T. M. Knox in the preparation of two posthumous works, Idea of Nature (1945) and Idea of History (1946). In 1978 the collection was deposited in the Bodleian, and has since been catalogued and described by W. J. van der Dussen and Donald Taylor. 1 It was Collingwood's intention, expressed in his will and since respected by his executors, that none of his correspondence, lectures, or essays, those in preparation for the press at the time of his death being obvious exceptions, should be published. Bodleian collection nevertheless provides an invaluable scholarly aid to the interpretation of Collingwood's intellectual biography, and to this resource the papers at Magdalen form an important appendix. Collingwood manuscripts in the J. A. Smith collection at Magdalen College, Oxford consist of three letters to John Alexander Smith (1863-1939), Waynflete Professor of Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy from 1909 to 19342 and a typescript, unsigned but, I shall argue, probably Collingwood's, titled The Theory of History. Both the correspondence with Smith and the book-length typescript are important for any secure interpretation of the development of Collingwood's thought. letters clarify Collingwood's relation to J. A. Smith and explain his stance on several points, while The Theory of History, written in 1914, if Collingwood's, is his earliest essay on the philosophy of history. Smith papers at Magdalen archives, with the smaller collection at Balliol, are the literary remains of Oxford's last great professorial advocate of the syncretic classicism called by historians, with doubtful justice, idealism: Plato and