All history is the re-enactment of past thought in the historian’s own mind

According to R. G. Collingwood, ‘the history of thought, and therefore all history, is the re-enactment of past thought in the historian’s own mind’.

Collingwood’s ‘doctrine of re-enactment’ became a target for authors writing about methodology in the history of ideas in the 1960s and ’70s, and Collingwood scholars became split over what exactly their man had meant by it. This paper explains how these attacks and confusions are resolved by restoring the doctrine of re-enactment to the context of Collingwood’s ‘logic of question and answer’, which is (he argues) the essence of the ‘Baconian method’ proper to all modern science.