The Afterlife of Idealism

Cultural distance sometimes enables a scholar to detect environments missed by those enveloped in them. Sometimes it raises barriers to understanding by leaving an observer outside the loop of familiarity with how people work, how they conceive their world, what makes them tick. On the most optimistic reading, it will prove hard, sadly, to rescue this misguided monograph from that second category. Conceived in Fiesole and nurtured in California, the perceptions offered here by the author, Admir Skodo, will feel, to those who knew some of the historians under review here, like a tumble into a parallel universe. The central argument has three components. First, philosophical Idealism is taken to have shifted from the 1930s from an ‘old’ form associated with well-known nineteenth-century figures in the generations of Green and Caird and Bosanquet to a ‘new’ configuration derived from Croce and popularised in Britain by Collingwood. Second, post-war British (actually English) historiography, mostly of the 1950s and 1960s, is depicted as a genre universally affected by a ‘revisionism’ of which previous generations had shown themselves incapable. Third, and the contention by which the book stands or falls, the first proposition is made to explain the second. ‘New’ Idealism supplied a crucial ‘revisionist potential’—the author likes to shout—that enables us to see its operation, apparently, among historians so disparate as Butterfield, Elton, Plumb, Cowling, Laslett, Trevor-Roper, Kitson Clark, E.H. Carr, E.P Thompson and several others. Thus the ‘new idealism’, as the author consistently calls it, informed the thought world of English historians in ways neglected in current scholarship as the feasible explanation for post-war ‘revisionism’

Afterlife · Epistemology · Idealism · Political science · Politics · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies