All thought exists for the sake of action: the historical and philosophical relations between R.G. Collingwood and classical pragmatism

Was R.G. Collingwood (1889-1943) an ‘undercover pragmatist’, as some have suggested? Or did he rather consider pragmatism to be one of his ‘least favorite varieties of philosophy’, as others have held? This book carves out a middle path between these opposing views. It shows that Collingwood argues that, for a variety of reasons, pragmatism fails to achieve its ostensible ideal of overcoming the dualism of theory and practice. In its stead Collingwood elaborates his own philosophy, in which thought and action are really united. Hence, instead of accepting or rejecting pragmatism wholesale, he would have regarded himself as more of a pragmatist than the pragmatists themselves.