Jonathan Derbyshire

This review of Fred Inglis’s biography of R.G. Collingwood appears in the current issue of the Literary Review.

Fred Inglis
History Man: The
Life of R.G. Collingwood
Princeton University Press, 400pp, £23.95

Gilbert Ryle, the grey eminence of Oxford philosophy during its heyday in the 1950s, used to say that the correct way to read the great philosophers of the past was to treat their work as if it had appeared in the previous month’s edition of the journal Mind. Read in this fashion, Plato’s Parmenides, for example, turns out to have been an attempt at a theory of types of the sort perfected two millennia later by Bertrand Russell. And lurking in the “transcendental idealist” undergrowth of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is a modest little essay in what Ryle’s colleague Peter Strawson called “descriptive metaphysics”.

The widespread acceptance of this method of “rationally reconstructing” philosophical classics so as to make them speak to contemporary concerns -often at considerable cost to the internal coherence of the works concerned- completed a process described by the late Bernard Williams as the “complete obliteration … from the collective local consciousnes” of Ryle’s predecessor as Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford, R.G. Collingwood. For it was one of Collingwood’s most fiercely held intellectual principles that to attribute to a historical author views he never actually held (or, alternatively, to chastise him for failing to hold views one held oneself) was like “planting treasonable correspondence” in someone’s coat pocket.

Despite the existence today of a thriving academic cottage industry devoted to his work, Collingwood’s reputation has never really recovered from the damage done to it after his death in 1943. The hegemony of Ryle, J.L. Austin and the other “linguistic philosophers” in the years following the Second World War was confirmed in 1958, when a survey of English Philosophy Since 1900, written by Austin’s ammanuensis Geoffrey Warnock, contained not a single reference to Collingwood.

Fred Inglis’s vividly written biography is devoted, therefore, to “bring[ing] up the light” on its subject. However, it is also a reminder that, despite his academic achievements (he acceded to the Waynflete in 1935, having been narrowly beaten seven years earlier, at the age of only 39, to the White’s Chair in Moral Philosophy), Collingwood had in fact begun to fade from the “collective local consciousnes” long before he died.

In what Inglis rightly describes as his “best-known and surely classic work”, An Autobiography, published in 1939, Collingwood frankly acknowledged that the corollary of his considerable social and professional success was more or les complete intellectual isolation. As Inglis observes, Collingwood was cut off from both the group of philosophical revoltés that in the mid -’30s had gathered around Austin (and which included Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire and A.J. Ayer) and an older generation of “realist” philosophers loyal to the shade of John Cook Wilson.

Collingwood began his career attacking Cook-Wilsonian realism for its indifference to the history of philosophy. He developed in its place something he called the “question-and-answer” method, the gist of which was that in order to grasp the meaning of a proposition, or a historical text for that matter, one must know the question to which it is an answer. In other words, propositions and linguistic utterances do not wear their meanings on their sleeves.

The implications of this method for the study of historical texts were obvious. When a philosophical treatise, say, becomes a “classic” -when, that is, the author’s contemporaries are long dead- the question to which it is an answer is forgotten. Excavating that question requires, Collingwood thought, the “exercise of considerable historical skill”. The alternative to such hard labour is to treat the the author as one’s contemporary - or else to take it for granted that philosophical questions are eternal and unchanging; that our preoccupations are the same as Plato’s.

Inglis’s great achievement in this book is to apply the question-and-answer method to Collingwood’s biography, the “interpreted life” being no more susceptible to instant appraisal than the interpreted text. (With attractive modesty, he describes History Man as merely an “extended gloss” on the story Collingwood himself tells in his autobiography.) He recreates not only the long-forgotten intellectual milieu of Oxford in the 1920s, but also the circumstances of Collingwood’s extraordinary upbringing: until the age of 13, he was educated at home in the Lake District by his artist parents, who were friends and devotees of Ruskin. That “alternative education”, Inglis argues, goes some way to explaining the isolation and marginalisation that Collingwood would feel so keenly later in life.

Collingwood’s separateness was partly self-imposed, however, as Inglis recognises when he considers the remarkable final chapter of An Autobiography. That “ringing sermon” against the political accomodations and complacencies of his contemporaries, delivered in the midst of the “gravest crisis” in the country’s history, reveals Collingwood as, in the words of his biographer, “one of Britain’s best, lost intellectuals of the 1930s”. But as Oxford prepared to vote in the “appeasement” by-election of October 1938, this intellectual manqué was leaving Birkenhead aboard a steamer bound for Java - and leaving Britain “to the care of appeasers with every appearance of eager anticipation of his first extended departure from Europe.”

From last week’s New Statesman:

Fifty years ago, the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch wrote a rather gloomy essay about the state of the “socialist movement” in Britain. There was, she said, a “moral void in the life of the country”, and on the left in particular. Where the left had once been the source of an animating vision of the good society, now it was the repository of a drearily technocratic utilitarianism. An obsession with central planning and the streamlined organisation of social relations had triumphed over older, more explicitly ethical traditions: Christian socialism, say, or the critique of injustice that had driven early Marxism (before it, too, had gone technical and scientific).

Read the rest here.

Recently in this magazine, Holger Czukay recalled attending the first performance, in Bremen in 1968, of Kurzwellen (“short waves”), Karlheinz Stockhausen’s work for piano, electronium (an early monophonic synthesiser), tam-tam gong, viola and four short-wave radio receivers.

Read the rest of my review of Holger Czukay’s recent show at the Roundhouse in this week’s New Statesman.

This review Ben Wilson’s book What Price Liberty appears in the May issue of the Literary Review:

At the centre of St George’s Circus, in a traffic-choked corner of south London close to the Elephant and Castle, stands an obelisk. On one side, and rather crammed in beneath the date the structure was built (’The XIth year of the reign of King George the Third’), is inscribed the name ‘Brass Crosby Esquire/Lord Mayor’. Aside from a blue plaque affixed to Crosby’s former home near Bromley in Kent, this is the only public commemoration of a man whom Ben Wilson describes in his splendid new book as a ‘liberty-loving guerrilla’ - one of a band of ’seedy adventurers’ to whom we owe the civil liberties we enjoy today.

The fact that most of those who pass the obelisk on the Number 63 bus each day won’t have heard of Crosby tells us, Wilson argues, something important about liberty in this country: about how it was achieved and about our attitudes towards it.

Brass Crosby merits a place in Wilson’s pantheon of ‘bloody-minded’ heroes of British liberty for a provocation he colluded in with John Wilkes in 1770. Wilkes was an alderman of the City of London and Crosby Lord Mayor. The two men decided to test those provisions in the Bill of Rights protecting parliament from criticism by encouraging a printer based in the City to flout them.

When the Speaker sent the Serjeant at Arms to arrest the printer, Crosby had him arrested and ruled that the emissaries of the Commons had no jurisdiction within the Square Mile. Crosby was sent to the Tower of London for his trouble. His eventual release was met with public rejoicing, however, and, according to Wilson, parliament subsequently learned to ignore, or at least to endure, newspaper reports of its activities.

It is one of the many merits of What Price Liberty? that its author has excavated forgotten stories like Crosby’s - and that of John Entick, a journalist who sued the King’s Messengers when they raided his home in 1762 looking for evidence of seditious libel, prompting the Lord Chief Justice to rule that ‘every invasion of property’, even when committed with government sanction, ‘is a trespass’.

For Wilson, the significance of such episodes is twofold. First, they remind us of the close connection in British history of what today we call ‘civil liberties’ with private property rights. Second, they show that, historically, such liberties have been arrived at in Britain inductively, read off from the experience of obscure and chippy individuals like Entick and Crosby, as opposed to being deduced from abstract principles.

In reading the history of political freedom in this way, as a story of uneven and laborious struggle rather than a serene and ineluctable convergence on a set of inalienable rights, Wilson is being decidedly un-Whiggish. For him, liberty in this country has always been hard won, the fruit not of some providential design but of what he describes as ‘calculated provocation and opportunism’. And in this respect, Wilson is closer in temperament and method to Hume than he is to great Whig historians of liberty like Macaulay or Henry Hallam. For Hume, moral and political gains were always to be regarded as precarious and vulnerable - not only to despotic usurpation, but also to benign neglect or indifference.

This last point is particularly important for Wilson, who believes that we have become dangerously insouciant about our liberties, and clearly intends his book as an intervention in current political debates. He writes approvingly, for example, of David Davis’s resignation from the Shadow Cabinet over the proposed extension of detention without charge to forty-two days, and observes, with some justification, that the debate over the Counter-Terrorism Bill was unhelpfully polarised as a choice between the rights of the individual on the one hand, and security on the other.

Wilson cites more than once Milton’s famous line about people preferring ‘bondage with ease’ to ’strenuous liberty’. And this is a reminder that many of the struggles over liberty have been struggles over its meaning. For Milton, the word ’strenuous’ referred to the nature of liberty itself, as well as to the way in which it was won.

Milton was writing in the ‘civic republican’ or ‘neo-Roman’ tradition, in which, as Wilson points out, ‘freedom is given meaning by one’s participation in the political life of the nation’. Republicans like Milton, and his contemporary James Harrington, valued ’strenuous’ civic engagement over slothful apathy, and government through popular deliberation over deference to crown or state. Drawing on the work of intellectual historians such as J G A Pocock and Quentin Skinner, Wilson brings out very sharply the difference between this neo-Roman conception of civic participation and the idea of liberties as ‘desiccated rights’ bestowed by some benevolent authority or other.

Instead of the Whiggish story that the English have liked to tell themselves, in which ‘liberty always triumphed in the end’, Wilson tells a much more complicated tale of how, after the Restoration, the republican association of freedom with civic virtue gave way to what he calls ‘licentious liberty’ - an idea of liberty as consisting merely in the absence of external interference in the lives of individuals. As John Stuart Mill put it, by the middle of the eighteenth century the ‘cry of the people was not “help us”, “guide us” … the cry was “let us alone”.’

Republican freedom didn’t disappear altogether, though: it crossed the Atlantic and ran like a red thread through the arguments of the American colonists. And for all that the word ‘liberty’ has been traduced in the intervening two centuries or more, the republican inheritance survives, not least in the rhetoric of President Obama, who won a historic victory in November with the promise of a politics of public participation and the common good.

Of course, redeeming that promise is another matter altogether - especially in countries like the US and Britain, where, Ben Wilson reminds us, an etiolated notion of ‘economic liberty’ has hollowed out the structures of ‘meaningful participation and public service’.