The afterlife of idealism : the impact of new idealism on British historical and political thought, 1945-1980 / Admir Skodo. [electronic resource]

Includes bibliographies and index.

This book examines the legacy of philosophical idealism in twentieth century British historical and political thought. It demonstrates that the absolute idealism of the nineteenth century was radically transformed by R.G. Collingwood, Michael Oakeshott, and Benedetto Croce. These new idealists developed a new philosophy of history with an emphasis on the study of human agency, and historicist humanism. This study unearths the impact of the new idealism on the thought of a group of prominent revisionist historians in the welfare state period, focusing on E.H. Carr, Isaiah Berlin, G.R. Elton, Peter Laslett, and George Kitson Clark. It shows that these historians used the new idealism to restate the nature of history and to revise modern English history against the backdrop of the intellectual, social and political problems of the welfare state period, thus making new idealist revisionism a key tradition in early postwar historiography.

Acknowledgments; Contents; Chapter 1: Introduction; New Idealism and British Intellectual Life; Philosophy of History, Revising the English Past, and Welfare State Humanism: Themes in Postwar Revisionism; Notes; Chapter 2: Revisionist Potential: Historical Thought from Absolute to New Idealism; Metaphysical History: The Historical Thought of the British Absolute Idealists; The Varieties of Italian New Idealism; Croce's Philosophy of History; Croce's New Humanism; Nuova Rivista Storica: Croce and Professional Italian Historiography.

Professionalization, Technocracy, and Whiggism: The First Uses of Italian New Idealism in British HistoriographyBritish New Idealism, Socio-political Pluralism, and Professional Historiography; Oakeshott's Philosophy of History; Collingwood's Philosophy of History; Notes; Chapter 3: The Philosophical Moment in Postwar Historiography; The Salience of the Philosophy of History in Early Postwar Anglo-American Historiography; University Expansion, the Growth of the Social Sciences, and the Persistence of Teleological Philosophies of History; The Need for a New Philosophy of History.

The Autonomy of HistoryMethodological Pluralism and Perspectivism; The Trinity of Historical Interpretation: Sympathy, Imagination, Revision; Notes; Chapter 4: Revisionist Whiggism: Revisions of the English Past from the Tudors to the Victorians; Revisionist Whiggism: Pluralist, Redeeming, and Defeatist; Prewar and Postwar Revisionism; Postwar Revisionism: Anti-socialist and Irrationalist Toryism?; The Sixteenth Century: G.R. Elton's Tudor Revolution and the Conservative Origins of Welfare State Administration.

The Seventeenth Century I: J.H. Plumb and the Violent Origins of Political StabilityThe Seventeenth Century II: Peter Laslett, the Demythologizing of John Locke, and the Reviving of Sir Robert Filmer; The Nineteenth Century: The Irony of the Victorian Origins of the Welfare State; Notes; Chapter 5: The Political Thought of Revisionism; New Idealism and Postwar Political Thought; Revisionist Historians and Government Policy-Making; The Origins of Totalitarianism and Authoritarianism; Historicizing Human Rights; The Death of Political Philosophy or Political Philosophy in a Historical Key?

Welfare State HumanismNotes; Chapter 6: Conclusion; Appendix: Short Biographies of Key New Idealists and Early Postwar British Historians; Bibliography; Papers of Robin George Collingwood, Bodleian library, Oxford; Papers of Peter Laslett, St John's college's Archives, Cambridge; Unpublished works of J.W. Burrow; Journals and Magazines; Primary Published Sources; Secondary literature; Unpublished Ph. D. Theses; Index.

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