Abstract
This book has laid bare how the historical and political thought of the new idealist philosophers R.G. Collingwood, Michael Oakeshott, and Benedetto Croce impacted the thought of a prominent but ideologically and conceptually diverse group of post-World War II British revisionist historians and political thinkers. These include E.H. Carr, Isaiah Berlin, G.R. Elton, Peter Laslett, and George Kitson Clark. I have pursued three arguments to conceptually map this impact: first, the new idealists’ defense of a pluralist and perspectivist methodology along with their concepts of agency, sympathy, and historical imagination was taken up by the revisionists in developing a postwar philosophy of history which responded to challenges posed by persistent teleological philosophies of history and the social sciences. Second, this philosophy of history, conjoined to elements from the Fabian tradition of historiography, informed sustained revisions of the modern English past from the Tudors to the Victorians. These revisions successfully challenged the interpretive legitimacy and institutional dissemination of liberal-whig historiography, but were in turn premised on a ‘revisionist whiggism’ suffused with welfare state political values and beliefs.
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Notes
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Chris Lorenz, ‘If You’re So Smart, Why Are You Under Surveillance?: Universities, Neoliberalism, and New Public Management’, Critical Inquiry, 38 (2012), 599–629.
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Popularizing National Pasts: 1800 to the Present, ed. Stefan Berger, Chris Lorenz, and Billie Melman (New York and London: Routledge, 2012); The Contested Nation: Ethnicity, Class, Religion and Gender in National Histories, ed. Stefan Berger and Chris Lorenz (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); William H Sewell, Jr., Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago, Ill.: Chicago University Press, 2006); Richard A. Muller, ‘Reflections on Persistent Whiggism and Its Antidotes in the Study of Sixteenth—and Seventeenth-Century Intellectual History’, in Seeing Things Their Way: Intellectual History and the Return of Religion, ed. Alister Chapman, John Coffey, and Brad S. Gregory (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), 134–154.
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Susan Pedersen, ‘Festschriftiness’, London Review of Books, 33 (2011), 31–32, 31. See also Darrin M. McMahon and Samuel Moyn, ‘Introduction: Interim Intellectual History’, in Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History, ed. Darrin M. McMahon and Samuel Moyn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 3–13, 4: ‘intellectual historians can claim today no widespread agreement about how to conduct their work, and they often seem to lack the will to argue out the alternatives.’
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Skodo, A. (2016). Conclusion. In: The Afterlife of Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29385-1_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29385-1_6
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