In Part 1 of this book, originally published in 1980, the focus is on
certain claims of R. G. Collingwood regarding the nature of historical
understanding, of Charles Beard about the possibility of an objective
reconstruction of the past, and of J. W. N. Watkins concerning the
reducibility of what historians say about social events and processes to
what could have been said about relevant human individuals. Part 2
analyses the way certain historians have distinguished between causes
and other explanatory conditions in disputing A. J. P. Taylor's account
of the origins of the Second World War. Part 3 discusses the attempt of
Oswald Spengler in Decline of the West to determine the meaning or
significance of the historical process as a whole, in the criticism of
which many themes of the earlier chapters recur.