R.G Collingwood and the Second World War by Peter Johnson

Author:Peter Johnson [Johnson, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy, History & Surveys, Modern, Political, Political Science, History & Theory
ISBN: 9781845406646
Google: 0a-7BAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited
Published: 2013-06-05T01:13:26+00:00

The relevance of this to Collingwood’s original question is easy to see, but such congruity did not last. After Churchill’s galvanizing ‘blood, toil, tears, and sweat’ speech on 13 May duty pointed in only one direction, ‘Victory’. In June Bertrand Russell announced in The New Statesman that he had abandoned pacifism so conforming to the changed public mood (Monk 2000: 241). Russell’s pacifism was not shared by Collingwood, and may have been exceptional, but the overall reaction was the same. With this realization came a new atmosphere and tone. Such was the nature of Britain’s enemy that the war would have to be fought to a finish. For a time in the summer of 1940 Collingwood’s liberal worries about Nazism within remained but, with the bombing of London in September, when the implications of Churchill’s speech were readily apparent, he saw that his second fear was as groundless as his first. The British people were united in their determination to preserve their way of life. With his fears removed Collingwood’s fifth question was not shelved completely. As a total war against barbarism became unavoidable Collingwood saw that a refocused question five remained relevant.

With the involvement of America and the Soviet Union the Second World War shifted from a European conflict to a global one. Indeed, the larger meaning of Collingwood’s book reaches beyond nations: civilization is not the property of one nation or one way of life but of the world. In the later sections of Part II of The New Leviathan Collingwood talks in this way, and his reason is not hard to grasp. Like Hobbes before him Collingwood saw little point in an account of political life which ignored human nature in its most basic and rawest form. It is true that they differ substantially over the philosophy of mind, but both write about politics on the assumption that, as Collingwood puts it, ‘the Yahoo is always with us’ (NL 30.8). Neither liberal internationalism nor the prospect of a perpetual peace is capable of expressing the ideas at stake here. Nor is there any role for world history, at least one in which the future is determined from outside as representing some sort of universal pattern. Collingwood states, ‘Eschatology is always an intrusive element in history’ (IH 54). What is much more important to Collingwood is the idea that human beings make their own history, even if in circumstances not of their own choosing, or in contexts which are both barbarous and evil. And so Collingwood wrote fatefully in the autumn of 1939: ‘If he lives among wolves, as the saying is, he must howl. If he thinks howling barbarous, he must find a way of not howling. That involves teaching his neighbours not to howl; so he must find a way of teaching them’ (WCM, NL 499).

It seems then that the mystery of the missing Part V in The New Leviathan is solved by history. It was history in the shape of the changing ideas, events and

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