Niall Ferguson: evaluation

Transcript context

…Why? Because Collingwood brilliantly captured what it is that historians are engaged in doing and put it better than anybody I’ve read. He was part-time archaeologist, part-time philosopher of history, a very Oxford kind of person. Collingwood says that the historical — and here I’ll paraphrase rather than try to quote from memory — the historical act is essentially one of reconstitution of past thought, that you are reconstituting past thought from such relics of thought survive. Then you’re juxtaposing that past thought with your own thought, the thought of your own time — in order to be informed by it, you’re not studying it for its own sake; you’re interested in its implications, in the light that it sheds on your own predicament. This is put best in his autobiography, another thing that should be required reading, which he published in 1939. When I discovered it — which was only after I’d crossed the Atlantic and started teaching at Harvard — it was a kind of sudden illumination. That’s exactly the kind of approach to history that I favor because, as Collingwood says, we’re doing this for a purpose, which is to understand our own predicament better by that juxtaposition of past and present thought. On philosophy of history, what did you take from A. J. P. Taylor?…

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