ABSTRACT
E.H.Carr contended that R.G.Collingwood was ‘the only British thinker in the present century who has made a serious contribution to the philosophy of history’ (What is History?, p. 21). We should be clear here to what form of philosophy of history Collingwood made a contribution. Certainly not to the philosophy of history in the sense of an explanatory scheme which seeks to rationalise the whole of history as a necessary story. Rather, Collingwood was concerned to account for the practice of historical writing, to theorise the activity of historians. For him history is a distinct field of investigation with its own object and methods. In The Idea of History, he produced a fundamental critique of positivist conceptions of historiography and a defence of history as an ‘autonomous’ science. History as a fully autonomous domain of investigation is a relatively recent development, long predated by other practices of historical writing which he calls ‘scissors and paste’ history.
