Forensic History: Bestowing Infinite Pains on Discovering What Actually Happened
In his much quoted critique of medieval historiography, R.J. Collingwood noted that historians, … in their anxiety to detect the general plan of history, and their belief that this plan was God’s and not man’s, they tended to look for the essence of history outside history itself, by looking away from man’s actions in order to detect the plan of God; and consequently the actual detail of human actions became for them relatively unimportant, and they neglected that prime duty […]
Categories: Sources and Methods • Tags: academia, evidence, forensic history, historiography, R.J. Collingwood, Rankean history, wie es eigentlich gewesen
