ABSTRACT
Ever since the narrativist turn in the philosophy of history, the view that the past must be re-written anew from the perspective of each generation of historians has become commonplace: Descriptions of the past change as the arrow of time moves forward, and since there is no such thing as a God’s eye view of the past there is no such thing as one historical past, but many, or so the argument goes. On this view, to imagine the past is to re-imagine it from the perspective and concerns of the narrator: Revisionism is the modus operandi of historical writing. This chapter explores a different conception of the historical imagination, one which argues that to understand the past historically is to imagine it from the perspective of the agents, not those of the interpreters. This conception of the historical imagination, which is found in the work of late British idealists such as R.G. Collingwood and Michael Oakeshott, does not aim to uncover a mythical past as it is in itself (the correlative of the view from nowhere), but the past as it was for the historical agents. We contrast these two views of the role of the historical imagination and assess the arguments given in support of the aprioristic commitment to historical revisionism that has dominated the philosophy of history since the narrativist turn.
