  What is distinctive about Oakeshott’s conception of historical inquiry can be brought out by comparing it with R.G. Collingwood’s claim that the historian’s proper task is to reenact the past (Collingwood 1993 [1946]: 282–302). That claim makes historical truth subjective by requiring that the historian reconstruct past events as they were experienced by those who participated in them. But this privileges the understandings of the participants, who may not have understood or even known what was happening. Their ideas are important in constructing a past but are not everything we need to know to understand it. To argue otherwise is to argue that the historian is barred from having any ideas about a given past that “would have been impossible for anyone who lived in that past” (Oakeshott 2008: 49). Oakeshott also rejects Collingwood’s claim that “all philosophy is the philosophy of history” (Collingwood 1993 [1926]: 425) because it makes philosophy, and by implication all knowledge, subservient to historical knowledge (Oakeshott 2007: 199). Collingwood’s argument for the primacy of history (historicism) is as reductionist as arguments for the primacy of science (scientism) or practice (pragmatism). The argument that one kind of understanding is the foundation of other kinds assumes the truth of what it sets out to prove. Historical inquiry constructs knowledge from what it concludes to be evidence. It does not provide knowledge of a given, pre-modal reality. If historical pasts are intellectual constructions, there is no access to these pasts except through historical inquiry.