Collingwood, Robin George (1889–1943) | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

Both in suggesting questions that excavation might answer and in drawing together and interpreting the results of others' excavations, he was brilliant. The final monuments to his historical labors are his sections on Roman Britain in the first volume of the Oxford History of England (1936; 2nd ed., 1937) and in Tenney Frank's An Economic Survey of Ancient Rome (5 vols., New York, 1933–1940). To these must be added his extensive contributions to the revised edition of the British section of Theodor Mommsen's Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, begun by Haverfield, for which Collingwood drew each inscription from his own accurate rubbings.

The consensus of present-day archaeologists appears to be that Collingwood's "imperishably accurate" work on inscriptions will prove more valuable than his works of synthesis and interpretation. Collingwood himself expected that his interpretations would be superseded, but he was convinced that first-rate thinking in history, as in natural science, remains valuable even if further evidence requires that its conclusions be revised. In most of his work his willingness to propose hypotheses was fruitful. He knew something that cautious historians often forget—that nothing is evidence except for or against some hypothesis.

Collingwood's philosophical work falls roughly into three periods: (1) 1912–1927, his acceptance of idealism; (2) 1927–1937, his mature philosophy of the special sciences, conceived as resting on an idealist foundation; and (3) 1937–1943, his rejection of idealism.

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