ABSTRACT
All societies have a collective memory, a storehouse of experience that is drawn on for a sense of identity and a sense of direction. Professional historians commonly deplore the superciality of popular historical knowledge, but some knowledge of the past is almost universal; without it one is effectively excluded from social and political debate, just as loss of memory disqualies one from much everyday human interaction. Our political judgements are permeated by a sense of the past, whether we are deciding between the competing claims of political parties or assessing the feasibility of particular policies. To understand our social arrangements, we need to have some notion of where they have come from. In that sense all societies possess ‘memory’. But ‘historical awareness’ is not the same thing as social memory. How the past is known and how it is applied to present need are open to widely varying approaches. We know from personal experience that memory is neither xed nor infallible: we forget, we overlay early memories with later experience, we shift the emphasis, we entertain false memories, and so on. In important matters we are likely to seek conrmation of our memories from an outside source. Collective memory is marked by the same distortions, as our current priorities lead us to highlight some aspects of the past and to exclude others. In our political life especially, memory is highly selective, and sometimes downright erroneous. It is at this point that the term ‘historical awareness’ invites a more rigorous interpretation. Under the Third Reich those Germans who believed that all the disasters in German history were the fault of the Jews certainly acknowledged the power of the past, but we would surely question the extent of their historical awareness. In other words, it is not enough to invoke the past; there must also be a belief that getting the story right matters. History as a disciplined enquiry aims to sustain the widest possible denition of memory, and to make the process of recall as accurate as possible, so that our knowledge of the past is not conned to what is immediately relevant. The goal is a resource with open-ended application, instead of a set of mirror-images of the present. That at least has been the aspiration of historians for the past two centuries. Much of this book will be devoted to evaluating how adequately historians achieve these ends. My purpose in this opening chapter is to explore the different dimensions of social memory, and in so doing to arrive at an understanding of what historians do and how it differs from other sorts of thinking about the past.
