This is the first comprehensive study of the political philosophy of the British philosopher R. G. Collingwood, best known for his contributions to aesthetics and the philosophy of history. However his political thought, and in particular his book The New Leviathan, have been neglected, even dismissed in some quarters. Professor Boucher argues for the importance of this political theory and provides a perspicuous account of its development and originality. He contends that The New Leviathan is an attempt to reconcile philosophy and history, theory and practice. Collingwood's distinctive contribution to modern political and social thought is seen as his sustained project of distinguishing utility from right, and right from duty; the passion for history coincides with the ethical thought because Collingwood wishes to identify dutiful, or moral, action with a historical civilization. Drawing on a wealth of manuscript material, this book will prove invaluable to political philosophers and intellectual historians.

This book brings together for the first time R. G. Collingwood's political and related writings, in which he places political action in the context of action as a whole and addresses the substantive social and political issues - in particular Nazism and Fascism - which he perceived as a threatto European civilization. This is the first time that substantial philosophical arguments from the unpublished manuscripts have been reproduced since Malcolm Knox edited the posthumously published Idea of History.

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.

2014 Reprint of 1942 Edition. Exact facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. R. G. Collingwood (1889-1943) was a British philosopher and practicing archaeologist best known for his work in aesthetics and the philosophy of history. "The New Leviathan," originally published in 1942, a few months before the author's death, is the book which R. G. Collingwood chose to write in preference to completing his life's work on the philosophy of history. It was a reaction to the Second World War and the threat which Nazism and Fascism constituted to civilization. The book draws upon many years of work in moral and political philosophy and attempts to establish the multiple and complex connections between the levels of consciousness, society, civilization, and barbarism. Collingwood argues that traditional social contract theory has failed to account for the continuing existence of the non-social community and its relation to the social community in the body politic. He is also critical of the tendency within ethics to confound right and duty.

This book is volume one of a two-part series. Taken together, the two volumes of A Philosopher at War examine the political thought of the philosopher and archaeologist, R.G. Collingwood, against the background of the First and Second World Wars. Collingwood served in Admiralty Intelligence during the First World War and although he was not physically robust enough to play an active role in the Second World War, he was swift to condemn the policies of appeasement which he thought largely responsible for bringing it about. The author uses a blend of political philosophy, history and discussion of political policy to uncover what Collingwood says about the First World War, the Peace Treaty which followed it, and the crises which led to the Second World War in 1939, together with the response he mustered to it before his death in 1943. The aim is to reveal the kind of liberalism he valued and explain why he valued it. By 1940 Collingwood came to see that a liberalism separated from Christianity would be unable to meet the combined evils of Fascism and Nazism. How Collingwood arrived at this position, and how viable he finally considered it, is the story told in these volumes.

A central motif of R.G. Collingwood's philosophy of history is the idea that historical understanding requires a re-enactment of past experience. However, there have been sharp disagreements about the acceptability of this idea, and even its meaning.

I do not think of aesthetic theory as an attempt to investigate and expound eternal verities concerning the nature of an eternal object called Art, but as an attempt to reach, by thinking, the solution of certain problems arising out of the situation in which artists find themselves here and now. Everything written in this book has been written in the belief that it has a practical bearing, direct or indirect, upon the condition of art in England in 1937, and in the hope that artists primarily, and secondarily persons whose interest in art is lively and sympathetic, will find it of some use to them. Hardly any space is devoted to criticizing other people’s aesthetic doctrines; not because I have not studied them, nor because I have dismissed them as not worth considering, but because I have something of my own to say, and think the best service I can do to a reader is to say it as clearly as I can. Of the three parts into which it is divided, Book I is chiefly concerned to say things which any one tolerably acquainted with artistic work knows already; the purpose of this being to clear up our minds as to the distinction between art proper, which is what aesthetic is about, and certain other things which are different from it but are often called by the same name. Many false aesthetic theories are fairly accurate accounts of these other things, and much bad artistic practice comes from confusing them with art proper. These errors in theory and practice should disappear when the distinctions in question are properly apprehended. In this way a preliminary account of art is reached; but a second difficulty is now encountered. This preliminary account, according to the schools of philosophy now most fashionable in our own country, cannot be true; for it traverses certain doctrines taught in those schools and therefore, according to them, is not so much false as nonsensical. Book II is therefore devoted to a philosophical exposition of the terms used in this preliminary account of art, and an attempt to show that the conceptions they express are justified in spite of the current prejudice against them; are indeed logically implied even in the philosophies that repudiate them. The preliminary account of art has by now been converted into a philosophy of art. But a third question remains. Is this so-called philosophy of art a mere intellectual exercise, or has it practical consequences bearing on the way in which we ought to approach the practice of art (whether as artists or as audience) and hence, because a philosophy of art is a theory as to the place of art in life as a whole, the practice of life? As I have already indicated, the alternative I accept is the second one. In Book III, therefore, I have tried to point out some of these practical consequences by suggesting what kinds of obligation the acceptance of this aesthetic theory would impose upon artists and audiences, and in what kinds of way they could be met. This book is organized as follows: I. Introduction Book I. Art and Not Art II. Art and Craft III. Art and Representation IV. Art as Magic V. Art as Amusement VI. Art Proper: (1) As Expression VII. Art Proper: (2) As Imagination Book II. The Theory of Imagination VIII. Thinking and Feeling IX. Sensation and Imagination X. Imagination and Consciousness XI. Language Book III. The Theory of Art XII. Art as Language XIII. Art and Truth XIV. The Artist and the Community XV. Conclusion