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This chapter reviews how R. G. Collingwood, a noted British Idealist philosopher, interpreted Hegel. Collingwood (1889–1943) was a prolific and innovative thinker, who worked in a number of fields. He was a distinguished historian of Roman Britain, a practising archaeologist and a philosopher with interests in the history of philosophy and in episte-mology, metaphysics, cosmology, ethics, aesthetics and politics. He is perhaps best known for The Idea of History, a retrospectively produced volume, which contains an account of the development of history as a form of knowledge and essays on the nature of historical understanding. Collingwood's theory of history takes an historian to evoke the past by rethinking the thoughts of past actors from the evidence that can be assembled in the present. Collingwood's particular interest in the philosophy of history and his sense of the interdependence of philosophy and history signal his affinity with Hegel. Collingwood expressly valued Hegel's historical conception of reality and in The Idea of History, he recognizes his debt to Hegel while also criticizing the sweep of Hegel's teleological understanding of history.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137309228_11

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