An Autobiography

"I discovered this book fairly late in life, after I had written Virtual History , which was my first standard work of historical philosophy. It was only after I came to Harvard [to teach] that I sat down and read his wonderful autobiography. I can’t think of many experiences in my life more exciting than that. It’s a tremendously profound reflection on history and historical method. Collingwood was a very eclectic thinker. He did both archaeology and philosophy, and his insight that historians are re-enacting – even recreating – the past is very profound. He has a great line about historians seeing the tiger in the long grass. Collingwood’s other key point was that historical knowledge is connected to the present, and it’s good to be present minded – which of course was the very opposite of the philosophy of the time. I was taught at Oxford not to dabble in the present when you study history. So to read Collingwood, and understand that the whole point of understanding the past is to understand the present better, was very refreshing. I had found an intellectual justification for what I had been doing. Well that’s one of those counterfactuals that is a little hard to make work, because you would have to change more than just the old Chinese emperors’ longevity to make it happen, you would have to change the whole way in which the Orient was governed. A major obstacle to Western-style economic dynamism was that the large and monopolistic power of the emperor had the homogenising effect of imperial bureaucracy. Still, I think it’s a good question to ask. If the Yongle emperor had lived longer, or Zheng He had been able to carry on oceanic voyages, perhaps Chinese history would have taken a different direction. One obvious answer is that China had the potential, in all kinds of respects, to achieve rapid growth through trade. If only they had had different kinds of institutions, they could have been so much more economically successful – as we have seen in our own time. The point about Civilisation , and my philosophy of history, is that it’s all about the absence of regular, predictable cycles of history. To me, the historical process brings more to mind the life cycle of a human being, in which you can have dramatic discontinuities triggered by really quite small events. “My philosophy of history is that it’s all about the absence of regular, predictable cycles of history.” So out of all the thinkers whom I’ve engaged with in my life, I identify most with a philosophy of history which emphasises contingencies, and represents a complex world on the edge of chaos rather than something which is nice and predictable."