INTRODUCTION: THE LEGITIMACY OF HISTORY

Oakeshott once said he was ‘more grateful for having been brought up to read history than for almost anything else’. But he was always more interested in the philosophical problems raised by historical knowledge than in practising the historian's craft. One such problem was the need, as the French historian Marc Bloch put it, for history to ‘prove its legitimacy as a form of knowledge’. Assuming this sceptical challenge could be answered, what were the conditions of historical knowledge, and how did it resemble, and differ from, other forms of knowledge like science and common sense? Oakeshott's contribution was to establish philosophically that history really was an autonomous, distinctive and irreplaceable form of thinking about the past.

The most important sources for Oakeshott's philosophy of history are his first and last books, Experience and its Modes and On History and OtherEssays; the essay ‘On the Activity of Being an Historian’ in Rationalism inPolitics; and the first essay in On Human Conduct, ‘On the Theoretical Understanding of Human Conduct’, which identified history as the theoretical means of understanding human action. All these writings consistently rejected scepticism about historical knowledge and insisted that historical understanding was a unique and autonomous type of intellectual inquiry. They differed, however, in their accounts of the precise conditions or categories presupposed by historical thought, and of how history was related to other kinds of knowledge.