Patrick Gardiner

Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History

7 min readMar 17, 2023

Today is the 101st anniversary of the birth of Patrick Gardiner (17 March 1922–24 June 1997), who was born on this date in 1922.

In his role as editor of Theories of History: Readings from Classical and Contemporary Sources, Gardiner needed to take a comprehensive — if not a cosmopolitan — view of historical thought, and, in doing so, he offered a number of cautions about what he included in this collection and why:

“The term ‘philosophy of history’ has been applied somewhat indiscriminately to all speculative schemes of the type that have been mentioned. In making selections for the first half of this volume I have on the whole attempted to comply with this vague usage; but it is in many ways an unsatisfactory one, and a few warnings are in place. What projects customarily referred to as ‘philosophies of history’ frequently have in common is the aim of giving a comprehensive account of the historical process in such a way that it can be seen to ‘make sense.’ Yet the notion of ‘making sense’ of the past is itself unclear, and is open to a range of different interpretations. To make an obvious distinction: it is one thing to suppose that history has a meaning in the sense that all that has happened or is going to happen has been (or is) preordained or intended by some ‘hidden hand’ — whether this hand be the hand of Providence or that of Hegel’s ‘cunning of Reason’; it is quite another to suggest merely that its course up to date has shown a trend in a certain direction and (perhaps) to prophesy on the basis of this observed tendency what its future development will be; and it is another thing again to claim that historical events conform to particular causal laws, in terms of which past occurrences can be explained and future changes predicted. Further, while some theories of the historical process have been propounded, as it were, ‘in isolation,’ others can only be understood as forming part of a wider scheme in which they have a definite place: Hegel’s theory, for example, falls into the latter category.”

These are all sensible observations that anyone seeking a survey of the field would want to make. However, the distinction above between a preordained course of history on the one hand, and, on the other, a mere tendency of development, both still lie on the speculative side of the philosophy of history. When Gardiner had to again assume this comprehensive perspective as the editor of the anthology of contemporary papers, The Philosophy of History, Gardiner spends more time on Collingwood, his research focus, and also makes the familiar distinction between speculative (here called “an all embracing interpretation of the historical process as a whole”) and analytical historical thought, though he presents these two orientations as historical periods in historical thought: speculative thought dominated through the nineteenth century, then, beginning in the twentieth century, analytical thought begins to dominate:

“The writings included in the present anthology will be found in general to reflect this altered perspective. Yet, in acknowledging the extent and importance of the change, it should not be supposed that there are no significant continuities between traditional views of the subject and the modern notion of it as a predominantly critical discipline. As has already been implied, classical theorists were by no means at one in their opinion of the kind of interpretation to which historical phenomena are susceptible. Alongside those who, like Comte and Buckle, were inspired by the example set by the natural sciences, there were others who insisted that the scientific paradigm was not appropriate to history and who claimed that an altogether different framework was called for if historical evolution and development were to be rendered intelligible. Thus men like Vico, Herder, and Hegel tended to stress the contrasts rather than the similarities between the sphere of natural events and processes and the sphere of human thought and action, rejecting the assumption that, because natural scientists had been conspicuously successful in applying generalizing principles and abstract quantitative categories to the former, it followed that the latter could be tidily fitted into the same theoretical mould. From this point of view their attempts to explain the past in its entirety appeared to have a distinguishable methodological aspect and to embody specific claims about the actual character and scope of historical thought. It is worth noting, moreover, that a number of the procedural suggestions they advanced within an overridingly speculative setting later re-emerged, at the turn of the present century, in the work of certain Continental writers who expressly eschewed speculative ambitions in favour of purely epistemological concerns.”

Here the distinction between speculative and analytical philosophies of history is not exhaustive or mutually exclusive; the two overlap, and themes pioneered by speculative philosophy re-appear in the work of analytical philosophers of history. It is implied here that one could begin with “an all embracing interpretation of the historical process as a whole” and one would eventually come to the questions of analytical philosophy of history, but is it also implied that if one could begins with the analytical philosophy of history, one will eventually arrive at the problems of the speculative philosophy of history?

In his introductions to both of the above volumes he considers the “autonomy of history” as a philosophical problem. In the Introduction to The Philosophy of History, Gardiner wrote:

“The initial attitude adopted by analytical philosophers to such attempts to vindicate the autonomy of history was a sceptical one. By some, for instance, Collingwood’s ‘inner-outer’ conception of historical events was regarded as incorporating the relics of a discredited Cartesian dualism; it was also treated as encouraging the unplausible view that the historian possesses a mysterious power of empathetic identification with the minds of historical agents which sets his interpretations of their behaviour beyond the reach of empirical appraisal or criticism. Others were content simply to argue that Collingwood’s account of historical understanding, like the associated Verstehen doctrines of Dilthey and Max Weber, was in fact irrelevant to the main question at issue. For to claim that such understanding required the re-enactment of past thinking was merely to direct attention to the method, admittedly familiar among historians, of imaginatively putting oneself in another’s position in order to arrive at an explanatory hypothesis.”

In the Introduction to Theories of History, Gardiner wrote:

“Towards the end of the nineteenth century, philosophers began to take seriously questions of criticism and appraisal which speculative projects and systems left in their wake; questions concerning the nature of historical knowledge, the relations between history and science, and the theoretical and practical possibility of providing comprehensive schemes within which the material of history can be systematically arranged. In tackling them, philosophers like Dilthey, Croce and, later, Collingwood were chiefly influenced by a desire to vindicate the ‘autonomy of history’ as a branch of study in its own right, eliciting and emphasizing features of historical inquiry which, in their view, conclusively showed that it was fallacious to think that history either could, or should, emulate methods analogous to those adopted in the natural sciences. Their opinions on this score were often obscurely phrased: at the same time there can be little doubt that they raised a number of points of considerable importance concerning the implications of notions like understanding and explanation as these are used in the context of historical investigation. What is more, they saw how history may be a subject for philosophical examination in a sense quite different from that envisaged by the speculative philosopher-historians. They did not set themselves the task of trying to uncover a ‘meaning’ or pattern in the historical process as a whole, but concentrated instead upon discussing the ways in which practicing historians in fact interpret their subject matter, attempting to reveal the presuppositions that underlie any piece of genuinely historical thinking.”

There is more than one way that we might conceptualize the “autonomy of history.” Autonomy could mean a methodological branching, such that the natural sciences took one fork, while the historical sciences (perhaps even the whole of the social sciences) took the other fork. This kind of distinction, formalized by Windelband as the distinction between the nomothetic (natural sciences) and the idiographic (the historical sciences) limits the possibilities of interdisciplinary research that might offset the deficits of any one science by the insights of another science.

However, we could also view methodology as a continuum, in which the many special sciences are range along some varying degrees of rigor, or quantification, or emergence, or dependence, etc., in which latter case history would be nested within some other science, and some other specialized science nested within history. In this interpretation of the autonomy of the special sciences, autonomy is a function of a degree of a continuum or the level of a hierarchy, and insofar as the points on a continuum or the levels of a hierarchy can interact, there can be interdisciplinary collaboration and the expansion of knowledge through scientific integration.

What would it mean to deny the autonomy of history? A non-autonomous history could be fully assimilated to the natual sciences, and pursued in consonance with the methodological presuppositions of natural sciences. However, a non-autonomous history could also be located entirely outside natural science, and not be conceptualized as a science at all, not even an aspirational or imperfect science. If history is an art, not a science — perhaps a literary genre — its autonomy follows from different principles and presuppositions than the autonomy of being an autonomous science.

Further Resources

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