Rethinking R.G. Collingwood - by Gary Browning (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

'As well as revealing his familiarity with the unpublished manuscripts, Browning's discussion also demonstrates an impressive mastery of the growing body of secondary literature' - Collingwood Studies

'In his extensively researched and immensely detailed study Rethinking R.G. Collingwood Browning argues that Collingwood is a fully paid up if not altogether uncritical Hegelian.' - History of Political Thought

'This is a close, critical study of Collingwood's published and unpublished works and a comparison between Collingwood and post-Kantian and Hegelian thought.' - Choice

About the Author

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.