The philosopher R. G. Collingwood, in his seminal work
The Idea of History (1946), discusses the notion of re-enactment in the modern philosophy of history.
1 As early as 1928 he had already introduced his idea of re-enactment as a valid concept and method in the work of an historian. The historian’s work is incomplete if reliant solely on documents and artefacts from the past:
How, or on what conditions, can the historian know the past? […] The first point to notice is that the past is never a given fact which he can apprehend empirically by perception. Ex hypothesi, the historian is not an eyewitness of the facts he desires to know. Nor does the historian fancy that he is; he knows quite well that the only possible knowledge of the past is mediate or inferential or indirect, never empirical. (1946: 282)
Collingwood’s philosophical enquiry was motivated by what he considered to be practical problems. He strongly believed that the study of history leads historians to ask questions that have practical application as a basis for laying the foundations for the future (1939: 88).
2 Margot Browning attributes the inception of Collingwood’s ideas to his wartime experience working in the Admiralty Intelligence in London between 1914 and 1918, and later as part of the team preparing the post-war peace conference (1993: 21–2).
3 A survivor of the war, Collingwood witnessed the trauma of a generation of young men killed on the battlefields. His entrenched resentment of the British establishment’s failure in times of crisis is manifest in his autobiographical writings.
4 ‘I completed my answer to the question that had haunted me ever since the War’, he writes, reflecting back on his work in the 1920s.
5 ‘How could we construct a science of human affairs, so to call it, from which men could learn to deal with human situations as skilfully as natural science had taught them to deal with situations in the world of Nature’ (1939: 115). Collingwood questions the usefulness of a simple acceptance of testimony, concluding that this is not satisfactory in order to arrive at full knowledge of an historical event. Collingwood proposes that the historian re-enact the past in his own mind. In his study, the historian must go beyond the examination of relics; he must endeavour to discover the thoughts and motivations of historical actors at the time of the event’s unfolding. That is, to think it again for himself: to re-enact the experience (1946: 282).
6Thus ‘historical knowledge becomes more like a condition of human understanding than an explanation of the past’ (Johnson 1998: 80).
7 Collingwood refers to the old school of ‘scissors-and-paste’ history in which the past is inert and knowledge of it corresponds to a compilation of past authorities (see, for example, 1939: 99). The understanding of historical events must be from within the present, as the past is not dead. Collingwood developed this idea already in 1920 as his first principle of the philosophy of history: ‘At the time I expressed this by saying that history is concerned not with “events” but with “processes”; that “processes” are things which do not begin and end but turn into one another’ (1939: 97–8). Past and present don’t occupy separate worlds but partly ‘overlay’ each other as evidence from the past is always available to us in the present: ‘The historian cannot answer questions about the past unless he has evidence about it. If there was a past event which had left no trace of any kind in the present world, it would be a past event for which was no evidence and … no historian … could know anything about it’ (1939: 96). A modern-day historian, Raphael Samuel, has put it in similar terms: ‘We are in fact constantly reinterpreting the past in the light of the present, and indeed, like conservationists and restorationists in other spheres, reinventing it. The angle of vision is inescapably contemporary, however remote the object in view’ (1994: 430).
8 The historian, according to Collingwood, uses imagination, based on evidence, to reconstruct and understand the past but ‘the past can be reconstructed only on its own terms. Historical claims are truth claims and, as such are subject to challenge by appeal to evidence. Imagination in history, therefore, is substantially different from imagination in art’ (Johnson 1998: 84). Leon Pompa seeks to clarify Collingwood’s method by adding his observation that it is valid if we also accept the fact that the historian operates within ‘a context of known historical facts which cultures acquire in the course of their historical development and which, as members of these cultures, historians must accept as true in advance of their more specialised research which they carry out as historians’ (1995: 181).
9Re-enactment is a process of critical thinking. For the historian’s experience is of course different from the events in the past; ‘it is not a passive surrender to the spell of another’s mind; it is a labour of active and therefore critical thinking. The historian not only re-enacts past thoughts, he re-enacts it in the context of his own knowledge and therefore, in re-enacting it, criticises it, forms his own judgement of its value’ (Collingwood 1946: 215). According to William H. Dray Collingwood’s notion of re-enactment is based on a thought process, which involves continuous testing (1995: 55–6).
10 Collingwood himself brings the example of writing a history of a battlefield or a war. The historian must ‘see the ground of the battlefield as the opposing commanders saw it, and draw from the topography the conclusions that they drew’ (quoted in Dray 1995: 56n).
As re-enactment is a process of critical thinking, does the desire to re-create experiences, as authentic as they might be, shut the door to questions of representation and interpretation? Forms of representation and interpretation of traumatic or violent events in history are crucial to the notion of re-enactment. Does the present day re-enactment bear no responsibility to the past? Past and present don’t occupy separate worlds but do overlap each other, according to Collingwood’s idea of re-enactment.
Alongside the development of the idea of re-enactment in the field of philosophy of history, re-enactment became a much wider, popular, method of studying history by using theatre, live historical public re-enactment events, museum work, ‘live museum exhibits’, film and television, to name but few of modern-day forms of re-enactment. Most of the various forms of re-enactment work concern battles, wars, colonial history, invasions, local conflicts and disputes. Because of the nature of battlefield re-enactments (the most popular form of re-enactment today) they are performed on a massive scale with often the participation of thousands of ‘actors’ and as such attract considerable interest from the paying public or from enthusiasts and ‘heritage followers’. What all the above forms of re-enactment add to Collingwood’s notion of the method is ‘a body-based discourse in which the past is reanimated through physical and psychological experience’ (Agnew 2004: 330).
11 The degree of ‘body-based discourse’ varies – some of the public re-enactments don’t capture the feelings of war (for example, the participants aren’t ‘scared’) but they rather ritualise a commemoration of the past in the present; others like museum-created re-enactments, for example colonial Williamsburg in Virginia (see below) attempt to do just that. Vanesaa Agnew continues by arguing that ‘re-enactments ought to make visible the way in which events were imbued with meanings and investigate whose interests were served by those meanings … Its broad appeal, its implicit charge to democratise historical knowledge and its capacity to find new and inventive modes of history representation suggest that it also has a contribution to make to academic historiography’ (2004: 335).
Pre-cinema battlefield re-enactment spectacle shows took place in London and Paris as early as during the Crimean War, 1853–56 (see Keller 2001: 65–70).
12 The Crimean War was the first modern war which was frequently relayed back home by war correspondents. William Howard Russell, considered to be the first modern war correspondent (Roger Fenton, the first war photographer also reported back from the Crimean War), sent regular dispatches to the
Times in London reporting in detail the battlefield movements and the general conditions on the front line as they were unfolding. Crimean War battle re-enactment shows became immensely popular and were performed with the help of large cast of army personnel and others in front of thousands of spectators in Surrey Zoological Gardens, in Astley Amphitheatre in Lambeth and in Cremorne Gardens in Chelsea. Tickets were cheap and in what can only be described as Victorian ‘pre-cinema spectacles’ the live re-enactments re-staged the newspaper reports from Crimea in front of large-scale painted canvas backdrops (of the city of Sebastopol, for example) to illustrate the landscape and the physical environment of the far away country. Alongside the enormous backdrops and the live re-enactments by hundreds of ‘troops’, giant model fortifications were built on the show ground and dramatic illumination and pyrotechnic effects were used to give as accurate as possible account of the events in Crimea. Although the shows’ entrepreneurs used some soldiers as ‘extras’, these re-enactment events were not part of a propaganda machine; rather, a commercial ‘news’ spectacle, striving to bring to the people of London ‘life as it is’ in the Crimea. To increase the sense of reality and in order to represent accurately the reports from the frontline injured soldiers who came back from Crimea played themselves on stage (2001: 66). Remarkably, the shows were altered and updated regularly, requiring a quick turn around of the production of new painted canvas backdrops and newly-built models in order to stay ‘in sync’ with the war reports from Crimea. The shows’ organisers prided themselves in bringing to London the latest, most accurate historically ‘images and sounds’ from the battlefield. Similar, and even larger and more ambitious re-enactment spectacle shows of war scenes, were taking place simultaneously in Paris.
Live re-enactments became an even more popular industry during the 1880s with the travelling re-enactment show of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. The shows were promoted as ‘factual history’ (see Whissel 2002: 227).
13 These re-enactments defined American ‘history’ through a mixture of an elaborate production of a spectacle and the collaboration of a ‘participant observer’ crowd ‘primarily through violent conflict between (morally superior) agents of civilization and (morally inferior) obstacles to civilization’ (2002: 230). Cinema was not far behind it to cash on the growing appetite for re-enactment. During the 1899 Spanish-American War, the Buffalo Bill’s Wild West re-enactment shows started to include scenes from the war which in turn were filmed by Edison:
In these superior films can be seen the dead and wounded and the dismantled canon lying in the field of battle … you think you can hear the huge cannon belch forth their death dealing missiles, and can really imagine yourself on the field witnessing the actual battle. (From Edison Catalogue, cited in Whissel 2002: 233)
Another early record of filmed re-enactment of battlefield is the work of the Chicago based inventor/filmmaker Edward H. Amet who pioneered around 1895 the production of film cameras and projectors. It is reported that he was refused permission in 1898 to go to Cuba and film the Spanish-American War. Instead, he set out to produce films about the war around his Chicago workshop. Using local residents and following the newspaper reports from the war front, Amet produced a series of short war re-enactment films including the famous battle of San Juan Hill. (He also filmed re-enactments of naval battles using miniature replicas of American and Spanish ships). During the Boer War in South Africa, Amet hired fifty local men and built a battlefield scene comprising campsites. He dug trenches and issued uniforms and guns to the participants the filmed reenactments. In 1900, during the Boxer uprising in China, Amet continued with the production of battle re-enactments films (based on contemporary newspaper reports), only this time the local authorities stopped his production from being screened on the ground that it was ‘too real’ as it included scenes of ‘beheadings’ and other bloody war images (see Kekatos 2002: 410–14).
14Are historical events re-enacted through modern public entertainment methods become just another form of Collingwood’s ‘scissors-and-paste’ history? Reenactment is a process of critical thinking, as defined by Collingwood. Many of the major re-enactment events of battlefield clashes and other acts of violence are performed (and marketed) as enjoyable and fun-filled entertainment events.
15 Yet one of the dangers of modern-day re-enactments, as observed by a regular participant of large-scale American Civil War re-enactment events, is that although an enormous amount of historical knowledge is presented in these events, they tend to perpetuate ideologies rather than question them and examine issues like racism or the ethics of war (see Turner 1990: 134–5).
16 Does participation in a public re-enactment imply collusion with an historic event? Does it imply a desire to celebrate or commemorate an event or can it produce a critical view of history? A well documented controversy is the re-enactment of slave auctions in Williams-burg, New York in the late 1990s:
This edgy new representation of Colonial life casts costumed actors as slave leaders and slave owners while paying tourists find themselves in the roles of slaves. The re-enactments are so realistic that some audience members have attacked the white actors in the slave patrol, who have had to fight to keep their decorative muskets. […] One visitor even attempted to lead his own revolt against the slave handlers. ‘There are only three of them and a hundred of us!’ he yelled. The actors had to step out of character to restrain him. At an attraction that historically has appealed almost exclusively to whites, the skits have stoked particularly strong emotions among African Americans, some of whom welcome frank discussion of a topic often given short shrift, even as they and others are discomfited by repeated images of subjugation. Several black actors have refused to portray slaves because they find it demeaning and emotionally wrenching. (
The Washington Post, 7 July 1999: A1)
Williamsburg’s decision to stage slave auctions can be seen as an effort to subvert the largely racist nostalgia for colonial America. Remarkably, a museum that normally appeals to white senior citizens and school kids chose to re-enact the brutality of US history in a form that usually is commemorative and seeks to glorify the past.
Can re-enactment as a method for the production of a documentary film, rather than simply filmed records of re-enactment events, offer a better solution? In fiction film, for example, films can create illusions but not easily criticise or destroy them. In asking viewers to repress critical reserve, indeed to become part of the illusion, David Herlihy argues that ‘films make history seem too easy and our knowledge of the past appear too certain’ (1998: 1188).
17 Herlihy continues by asking: ‘Can [a film] through the same sights and sound, install both belief in the narrative and critical disbelief in its total accuracy?’ (ibid.).
18Re-enactment in documentary film can take two forms: first, filmed re-enactment, similar to historical fiction films, in which the cinematic language of the common formats of documentary films – filmed lectures, expository and observational forms – offer mainly linear story rather than complex analysis; second, re-enactment as a method in documentary filmmaking, closer to Collingwood’s ideal as well as to re-enactment as an artistic method.
19 For the historian Robert Rosenstone a film should be regarded as a form of history in its own right as the screen evokes a sense of involvement with the past. According to Rosenstone, filmmakers ask questions of the past that are more like the questions traditional historians have wanted to answer: how did we (the state, this people) get where we are and what does it mean to be here? (1995: 4–8).
20 Re-enactments as a method in making documentary film can be seen as opposition to the public reenactment events, as they are interested in the performative re creation of historical events as relevant to present day. These re-enactments question the present through performing the past and are not merely interested in the ‘authenticity’ of the historical facts.
Probably one of the earliest and more curious examples of using re-enactments as a method of documenting history is
The Storming of the Winter Palace in 1920 in Petrograd in the Soviet Union. The re-enactment went beyond the re-creation of the authentic event – here re-enactment (this time executed by the state) was used to offer the public an interpretation of the history of the Revolution. The mass spectacle took place on the third anniversary of the storming of the palace in 1917 and was directed by the theatre director Nikolai Evreinov.
21 The storming of the winter palace in 1917 was in a fact a ‘non event’ in the history of the Revolution, compared with other much more crucial moments that year. Unlike the real events in 1917 when a modest number of men and women took part in the actual storming of the palace, the 1920 re-enactment involved 10,000 participants and over 100,000 spectators; ‘the mass performance would distil and improve the historical event’ (von Geldern 1993: 203). As a revolutionary artistic project, three years after the Revolution, the re-enactment of the storming of the winter palace had a clear political and artistic brief: ‘The re-enactment of the Revolution in the precise place of the original events brought the past into the present directly’ (Buck-Morss 2000: 14).
22 Re-enactment was used here to ‘create’ the collective memory of the audience. The event was simultaneously produced as a theatre performance and as a film. It was designed as a grand theatrical and film performance, with elaborate lighting set-ups and minute-by-minute choreography of movements and actions by different groups of ‘actors’ (mostly soldiers and workers). The idea was to create a series of cinematic shots in the palace windows’ frames to be viewed by the participating crowd in the street (2000: 147). As there were no film material in existence of the original event, the filmed version of the re-enactment quickly became the ‘authentic’ ‘historical’ documentary archive image of the storming of the winter palace, neatly conforming to the contemporary revolutionary ethos (today, only four minutes of the film survived in the archives).
23 As one of the iconic images of the 1917 Revolution, Sergei Eisenstein based the scenes in his film
October – a film produced in 1927 to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution – on the filmed re-enactment scenes from Evreinov’s 1920 spectacle in Petrograd as act of appropriation. The scenes in
October – a feature film – themselves became the main source of information and one of the definitive ‘documentary’ images of the 1917 events for generations to come in the Soviet Union and outside the country.
24In the past fifty years, one of the most important documentary filmmakers who has been using re-enactment as his main method of documentary filmmaking is the British director Peter Watkins, who used re-enactment in two of his major films on war, violence and conflict:
Culloden (BBC, 1964) and the
La Commune (La Sept/Arte, 1999).
The National Trust of Scotland describes the battle of Culloden in the Scottish Highlands in 1746 inside the Visitor Centre built on the grounds of the battlefield as follows:
Towards one o’clock, the Jacobite artillery opened fire on government soldiers. The government responded with their own cannon, and the Battle of Culloden began. Bombarded by cannon shot and mortar bombs, the Jacobite clans held back, waiting for the order to attack. At last they moved forwards, through hail, smoke, murderous gunfire and grapeshot. Around eighty paces from their enemy they started to fire their muskets and charged. Some fought ferociously. Others never reached their goal. The government troops had finally worked out bayonet tactics to challenge the dreaded Highland charge and broadsword. The Jacobites lost momentum, wavered, and then fled. Hardly an hour had passed between the first shots and the final flight of the Prince’s army. Although a short battle by European standards, it was an exceptionally bloody one. (Text from the National Trust for Scotland Culloden’s home page –
www.nts.org.uk/Culloden/PPF/TheBattle)
In the tradition of ‘scissor-and-paste’ public entertainment battle re-enactment event, a filmed version of the battle is screened in Culloden Visitors Centre and is on view on YouTube.
25 ‘We are trying to portray the brutality of war through realistic and powerful film. It will be screened across the four walls of the theatre and we’re putting the visitor right into the middle of the battle’, says Craig Collinson, the film’s director. He continues: ‘Attempting to dramatically reconstruct the Battle of Culloden for film – giving an impression of scale, accuracy and, above all, sense of visceral bloodiness, was always going to be a challenge.’
26 Visitors to the Centre are recommended to watch two films on the battle of Culloden:
Battlefield Britain: The Battle Of Culloden 1746 – part of a BBC series by Peter Snow and his son Dan Snow (2004) and BBC Scotland’s
Around Scotland: The Jacobites (2008) (this three-part series is aimed at pupils aged 9–14). Separately, a computer graphics animation re-enactment of the Battle of Culloden can also be accessed on the Internet.
27Huw Wheldon, head of documentary and music programmes at the BBC who commissioned Watkins to make his documentary film Culloden wrote in the Radio Times (10 December 1964) to announce the first screening of the film on TV on 15 December 1964:
The battle and its aftermath will be re-created in tonight’s programme which constitute something new in documentary filmmaking. […] Bringing the techniques of news reel cameras, for example, to bear on carefully reconstructed events has been done before but only within very definite limits. Again, there is here virtually no ‘dramatic dialogue’ of the kind used in main historical narratives and what Peter Watkins has done, using modern documentary methods indeed, is to make what happened a long time ago happen with the urgency, the sense of vivid occasion, we associate with brilliant coverage of contemporary events. Even to attempt such a thing is to try something very difficult. To succeed (and this is my claim) is to achieve a definite moment of originality.
On the following morning after the TV transmission of the film the Times reviewer added: ‘heroic legend stripped of Glamour. […] it is easier to love an historical legend than an historical fact … compulsory viewing of historical reconstruction’. The Sun described the film as ‘One of the bravest documentaries’; and the Guardian wrote: ‘an unforgettable experiment … that was new and adventurous in technique’.
On the surface, with its meticulous attention to detail and with the help of a large number of participants, the film resembles a traditional battle re-enactment public event but in reality the film uses re-enactment as a method and strategy to inaugurate a complex and critical analysis of the Battle of Culloden. The ‘traditional’ re-enactment of the battle forms only part of the film and it is used to build a much larger historical picture about the causes and the consequences of the battle. The film, relying partly on the work of the historian John Prebble (who published
Culloden in 1962) was announced as a BBC documentary film and as such uses a variety of modes of documentary film production.
28 Employing a mixture of voice-over narration, on- and off-camera commentary, interviews and sync-sound scenes, the film seeks to explore, through the construction of detailed forensic-like re-enactment scenes one of the most bloody events in British history. The main players in the drama and the modes of historical analysis are presented in the film in frank, often brutal modes of descriptions, using modern-day language. The result is a detailed outline of the political, economic and military background to and the aftermath of the events in 1746. The film adopts Prebble’s approach as far as it tells the story of the ordinary men and women (and children) who took part in the battle and offers rich biographical details concerning a large number of soldiers and rebels. Many characters in the film are identified by name and are used to build, throughout the film, a dramatic framework to the re-enactment. Like Prebble’s book, this is not the history of kings and generals but of the ‘small’ people of history. Using re-enactment in documentary film offers a suitable strategy to tell the story of people at war. To achieve it the film breaks down the barriers between subject and camera using techniques of reflexivity, extensive use of hand-held camera in extreme close proximity to the faces of the people in the killing field and asks the soldiers to stare at the camera and address the viewer directly.
29 By including lengthy direct-to-camera commentary by a large number of participants of the re- enactment, the film goes beyond the attempt to reproduce an authentic image of the battle as it delivers a contemporary critical view of the events. The film is shot from behind both battle lines, thus alternating the story and the perspectives of the battle. It includes post-battle interviews and reflections with soldiers, civilians and family members on the effects of the battle on families, the community and the political developments. Throughout the interviews the re-enactors are challenged about their actions and ideas. As a result, viewers identify with various characters and the changes in their actions and the wider consequences of the battle. Watkins also cites his motivation to produce
Culloden at the time of the Vietnam War, where the US army was engaged in ‘pacifying’ the Vietnam highlands, as one of his reasons to embark on an historical re-enactment of the events that led to the ‘pacification’ of the Scottish Highlanders by the British army (see
http://pwatkins.mnsi.net/culloden.htm). Ina Rae Hark observes that in its visual style and depiction of atrocities,
Culloden ‘eerily prefigure those images which reporting from Vietnam would saturate the screen in the years immediately following
Culloden’s release’ (1985: 294).
30 The Vietnam War was the first ‘TV war’ and in one sense it was ‘preceded’ by TV images of a war in the seventeenth century – a century with no photographic record.
Culloden is not a film about the battle in 1746 – it presents the re-enactment of the battle as a platform for an in-depth historical analysis of events prior but mainly post the battle itself. The film is about the destruction of the Highlanders in Scotland. By putting the battle in a wider context, re-enactment is used as a tool, a method to critically understand historical events. Re-enactment as a method is particularly useful within documentary dealing with events of violence and war as it offers a complex reading of history. In this film re-enactment really comes into its own as a vehicle for exploring how the present understands the past. The use of traditional observational or evidence-based documentary methods (for example, through the use of interviews, photographs, maps, archive material) offers an incomplete and limited view of history. In Culloden ‘a body-based discourse in which the past is reanimated through physical and psychological experience’ (as described above), coupled with the critical discourse gained by the method of re-enactment, can offer a rich and detailed account of history of violence.
The historian Natalie Zemon Davies commented on Watkins’
La Commune:
[It is] an example of a re-enactment film that can present the qualities and experience of the past as efficaciously as prose, even if the truth status of re-enactment film is different from written recital. The historical richness of cinematic suggestion lies in its connection with evidence, its balance, and its willingness to suggest where the story comes from. (Quoted in Toplin 2002: 24)
31
La Commune, Watkins’ most ambitious documentary re-enactment film project to date (the film is over five hours long) tells the story of the uprising and the bloody demise of the communards of Paris in 1871. As in Culloden the film tells the story from both sides of the barricades, offering a comprehensive view of the events. Watkins took re-enactment as a method of production of a documentary film even further by organising mass meetings to attract participants to his film. In these meetings in Paris he briefed the potential participants in detail and worked with each individual on his/her historical character. The participants in the re-enactment were asked to research and collect detailed evidence about their character in preparation of the action of re-enactment in front of the camera (these pre-production activities are not presented in the film). In fact, the participants imagined their life and built their own history based on evidence (a practice very much congruent with Collingwood’s understanding of re-enactment). As in Culloden, the history of violence and bloodshed in 1871 (when more than 30,000 Parisians were killed by government troops at the end of the uprising of the commune) is told through actions re-enacted by more than two hundred members of the ’cast’; the past is retold from ‘below’, by the people, not by generals and politicians.
The film goes further than
Culloden in so far as it presents to the viewer the process of the filmed re-enactment of the conflict 1871. Watkins takes the viewer step by step through the different stages of setting up the events in front of the camera, the working of the filming process itself and the role of the journalists who are fronting the film. In addition to the use of intertitles to deliver the historical information throughout the film, Watkins introduces as part of the re-enactment a modern-day journalistic reporting element to bring history to the present day, namely the repeated use of modern contemporary news reporting by journalists and TV crews. These fulfil an important function in collecting evidence for history as part of the historically-filmed documentary re-enactment. The anachronistic use of modern tools of collecting and delivering history gives Watkins the chance to comment on the media’s role in times of violent upheavals in 1871 or today.
32 In addition, every once in a while, the characters in the re-enactment would step out of character and reflect on the significance of the violent events on the streets of 1871 Paris, delivering detailed historical and modern analysis. As Parisians, living in the same streets where the 1871 events took place, they ultimately express their opinions about life in Paris 1999. This deconstruction of the re-enactment process allows the viewer the critical space to consider how the past may always be already implicated in the present (à la Collingwood). Thus, the viewer is constantly asked to make connections between past and present, between the traumatic historical events and contemporary conditions in France.
History is an argument about the past, as well as the record of it, and its terms are forever changing, sometimes under the influence of developments in adjacent fields of thought, sometimes – as with the sea-change in attitudes followed the First World War – as a result of politics. (Samuel 1994: 430)
Using re-enactment as a method in the production of documentary film can significantly advance our understanding of history and in particular enhance our insight into acts of violence and war. More urgently, Watkins’ work – Culloden produced in the years of the Vietnam War and La Commune during social upheavals in Paris – mirror and demonstrate Collingwood’s pragmatism and desire to use history to understand the present. In a moving contribution to the journal Philosophy early in World War II, April 1940, Collingwood calls upon on his fellow philosophers of history to respond the challenges of the time when he writes:
No facts, in my opinion, are of greater practical importance at the present time than Fascism and Nazism. Our own country is fighting Nazi Germany. […] The most urgent theme I can think of is the necessity of taking Fascism and Nazism seriously; to stop flattering ourselves with the belief that they are baseless follies indulged by unaccountable foreigners, or the alternative belief that they are good examples, which we should be wise to follow. What our soldiers and sailors and airmen have to fight, our philosophers have to understand. (1940: 176n)
33
NOTES