Rethinking R.G. Collingwood

Rethinking R.G. Collingwood reviews Collingwood's thought via his own rethinking of Hegel. It establishes the revisionary character of Collingwood's defence of liberal civilization in theory and practice. Collingwood is seen as avoiding the pitfalls of Hegel's teleological historicism by developing an open and contestable reading of the rationality of liberal civilization, which neither reduces practice to theory nor philosophy to history. The contemporary relevance of Collingwood's standpoint is demonstrated by comparing it with those of recent defenders and critics of liberalism Rawls, Lyotard and MacIntyre.

GARY K. BROWNING is Professor of Politics at Oxford Brookes University. His previous monographs are Plato and Hegel: Two Modes of Philosophising about Politics (1991), Hegel and the History of Political Philosophy (1999) and Lyotard and the End of Grand Narratives (2000). He has co-written Politics: An Introduction (1997 and 2002) and co-edited Understanding Contemporary Society - Theories of the Present (2000) as well as editing Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit: A Reappraisal (1997). He is currently General Editor of the journal Contemporary Political Theory, which is published by Palgrave Macmillan.