Despite the widely remarked indifference to philosophy of history that has characterised most British historians, important things were said in Britain from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth about historical knowledge and the nature of human history. This is a study of that distinctively English, Idealist, tradition. It connects Coleridge and Carlyle, whose writings have been the focus predominantly of literary scholarship, to thinkers who have been the subjects of philosophers’, rather than historians’, interest - John Stuart Mill, F.H. Bradley and R.G. Collingwood. It also draws striking parallels between Idealist thinking about history and Postmodernism.

Introduction;

Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the revolt against empiricism and materialism;

Thomas Carlyle: a ‘Chaos of Being’ and heroism; History in Mill’s system of logic;

The rationality of history: the Oxford idealists;

Bernard Bosanquet, historical knowledge, and the history of ideas;

F.H. Bradley and the presuppositions of critical history; Oakeshott: the experience of history and the construction of the past;

The development of Collingwood’s philosophy of history;

The Collingwood achievement; Idealism and postmodernism;

Bibliography;

Index.