SOURCE: "Collingwood's Ethics and Political Theory," in Critical Essays on the Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood, edited by Michael Krausz, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1972, pp. 296-326.

In the following essay, Milne focuses on ethical and political ideas advanced in Collingwood's works.

Collingwood touched briefly on ethics in Speculum Mentis and in his Autobiography had some hard things to say about contemporary British politics. But it is to his last completed book, The New Leviathan, that we must go for a systematic exposition of his ideas in ethics and political theory. These ideas had apparently been maturing long before the writing of The New Leviathan was begun soon after the outbreak of the Second World War. In the Preface, speaking of his return to Oxford after the First World War, Collingwood wrote:

It was now that I began to think out the fundamental ideas of the present book...