David Boucher. “The Creation of the Past: British Idealism and Michael Oakeshott's Philosophy of History,” History and Theory 23, no. 2 (1975): 193-214.

Excerpt:

Michael Oakeshott shared the general concerns of British idealists and leaned heavily upon their conclusions. As with any mode of understanding, history creates its own object of inquiry. History is an activity built upon postulates and capable of generating conclusions appropriate to itself. The past in history is different from any other past. It can only be evoked by means of subscription to the historical present in which each artifact is recognized as the vestige of a performance which is transformed into circumstantial evidence of a past which has not survived. A great deal of what Oakeshott has to say, especially about coherence, continuity, and identity in difference, stands in sharp contrast to Collingwood’s ideas on the reenactment of the past. A living past, relevant to the present or evocative of a future state of affairs, is modally irrelevant to history.

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