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THE SOCIAL FUNCTION OF THE PAST:SOME QU ESTION S *ALL HUMAN BEINGS ARE CONSCIOUS OF THE PAST (DEFINED AS THE PERIODbefore the events directly recorded in any individual's memory) byvirtue of living with people older thnn themselves. All societieslikely to concern the historian have a past, for even the mostinnovatory colonies are populated by people who come from somesociety with an already long history. T o be a m em ber of anyhuman community is to situate oneself with regard to one's (its) past,if only by rejecting it. T h e past is therefore a perm ane nt dim ensionof the human consciousness, an inevitable component of theinstitutio ns, values and other patte rns of hu m an society. T heproblem for historians is to analyse the nature of this "sense of thepa st " in society and to trace its changes and transform ations. T h epresent paper suggests some possible lines of discussion.

For the greater part of history we deal with societies and communi-ties for which the past is essentially the pattern for the present.Ideally each generation copies and reproduces its predecessor so faras is possible, and considers itself as falling short of it, so far as it failsin this endeavo ur. Of course a total dom ination of the past wou ldexclude all legitimate changes and innovations, and it is improbablethat there is any human society which recognizes no such innovation.It can take place in two ways. F irs t, what is officially defined as " th epast" clearly is and must be a particular selection from the infinityof what is remem bered or capable or being rem em bered. How greatthe scope of this formalized social past is in any society, naturallydep end s on circums tances. But it will always have interstices, tha tis matters which form no part of the system of conscious history intowhich men incorporate, in one way or another, what they considerim po rtan t abo ut their society. Inno vation can occur in these inte r-stices, since it does not automatically affect the system, and thereforedoes not automatically come up against the barrier: "This is not howthings have always been don e" . It would be interesting to inquire* Th is paper is based on my paper to the 1970 Past and Present Conferenceon "The Sense of the Past and History".

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4 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 5 5what kinds of activities tend to be thus left relatively flexible, apartfrom those which appear to be negligible at one time, but may turnou t no t to be so at a later date . O ne may suggest tha t, other th ingsbeing equal, technology in the widest sense belongs to the flexiblesector, social organization and the ideology or the value system to theinflexible. Ho wever, in th e absence of com parative historical studiesthe question must be left open. Certainly there are num erou sextremely tradition-bound and ritualized societies which have in thepast accepted the relatively sudden introduction of new crops, newmeans of locomotion (such as horses among N or th A merican Indians)and new weapons, without any sense of disturbing the pattern set bytheir past. O n the other ha nd ther e are probab ly oth ers, insufficientlyinvestigated, which have resisted even such innovation.

The "formalized social past" is clearly more rigid, since it sets thepattern for the pres en t It tends to be the court of appeal for presen tdisputes and uncertainties: law equals custom, age wisdom inilliterate societies; the documents enshrining this past, and whichthereby acquire a certain spiritual authority, do the same in literateor partly literate ones. A comm unity of Am erican Indians may baseits claim to communal lands on possession from time immemorial,or on the memory of possession in the past (very likely systematicallypassed on from one generation to the next), or on charters or legaldecisions from the colonial era, these being preserved with enormouscare : bo th h ave value as records of a past w hich is considered th e no rmfor the present.

This does not exclude a certain flexibility or even de facto innova-tion, in so far as the new wine can be poured into what are at least inform the old containers. D ealing in secon d-ha nd cars appears to bea quite acceptable extension of dealing in horses to gypsies, who stillmaintain nomadism at least in theory as the only proper mode of life.Students of the process of "modernization" in twentieth-centuryIndia have investigated the ways in which powerful and rigidtraditional systems can be stretched or modified, either consciouslyor in practice, without being officially disrupted, that is in whichinnovation can be reformulated as non-innovation.In such societies conscious and radical innovation is also possible,

but it may be suggested that it can be legitimized in only a few ways.It may be disguised as a return to or rediscovery of, some part of thepast which has been mistakenly forgotten or abandoned, or by theinvention of an anti-historical principle of superior moral forceenjoining the destruction of the present/past, for example a religiousrevelation or prop hecy. It is no t clear w hether in such con ditions

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even anti-historical principles can lack all appeal to the past, that iswhether the "new" principles are normally or always? thereassertion of "old" prophecies, or of an "old" genre of prophecy.The historians' and anthropologists' difficulty is, that all recorded orobserved cases of such primitive legitimization of major socialinnovations occur, almost by definition, when traditional societies arethrown into a context of more or less drastic social change, that iswhen the rigid normative framework of the past is strained tobreaking-point and may therefore be unable to function "properly".Though change and innovation which comes by imposition andimportation from outside, apparently unconnected with internalsocial forces, need no t in itself affect the system of ideas abo ut noveltyheld within a comm unity since the problem whether it is legitimateis solved by force majeure at such times even the extremetraditionalist society must come to some sort of terms with thesurr oun ding and encroaching innovation. It may of course decideto reject it in toto, and withdraw from it, but this solution is rarelyviable for lengthy periods.The belief that the present should reproduce the past normally

implies a fairly slow rate of historic change, for otherwise it wouldneither be nor seem to be realistic, except at the cost of immensesocial effort and the sort of isolation just referred to (as with theAm ish and similar sectarians in the m ode rn U.S .A .). So long aschange demographic, technological or otherwise is sufficientlygradual to be absorbed, as it were, by increments, it can be absorbedinto the formalized social past in the form of a mythologized andperhaps ritualized history, by a tacit modification of the system ofbeliefs, by "st re tch ing " the framework, or in other ways. Eve n verydrastic single steps of change may be so absorbed, though perhaps atgreat psycho-social cost, as with the forced conversion of Indians toCatholicism after the Spanish conquest. If this were not so it wouldbe impossible for the very substantial amount of cumulativehistorical change which every recorded society has undergone to havetaken place, without destroying the force of this sort of normativetraditionalism. Yet it still dom inated m uc h of rura l society in thenineteenth and even twentieth centuries, though "what we havealways done" must plainly have been very different, even amongBulgarian peasants in 1850 from what it had been in 1150. T h ebelief that "traditional society" is static and unchanging is a mythof vulgar social science. Neverth eles s, up to a certain poin t ofchange, it can remain "traditional": the mould of the past continuesto shape the present, or is supposed to.

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6 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 55Admittedly to fix one's eyes upon the traditional peasantry, however

great its numerical importance, is somewhat to bias the argument.In most respects such peasantries are often merely one part of a morecomprehensive socio-economic or even political system within whichsomewhere changes take place uninhibited by the peasant version oftradition, or within the framework of traditions allowing for greaterflexibility, for example urban ones. So long as rapid changesomewhdre within the system does not change the internalinstitutions and relations in ways for which the past provides no guide,localized changes can take place rapidly. They may even be absorbedback into a stable system of beliefs. Peasants will shake their headsover city-dwellers, notoriously and proverbially "always seekingsomething new", the respectable city dwellers over the nobility atcourt, dizzily pursuing an ever-changing and immoral fashion. Thedominance of the past does not imply an image of social immobility.It is compatible with cyclical views of historic change, and certainlywith regression and catastrophe (that is failure to reproduce the past).What it is incompatible with is the idea of continuous progress.

IIWhen social change accelerates or transforms the society beyond

a certain point, the past must cease to be the pattern of the present,and can at best become the model for it. "We ought to return to theways of our forefathers" when we no longer tread them automatically,or can be expected to. This implies a fundamental transformationof the past itself. It now becomes, and must become, a mask forinnovation, for it no longer expresses the repetition of what has gonebefore, but actions which are by definition different from those thathave gone before. Even if the literal attempt to turn the clock backis made, it does not really restore the old days, but merely certainparts of the formal system of the conscious past, which are nowfunctionally different. The most ambitious attempt to restore thepeasant society of Morelos (Mexico) under Zapata to what it had beenforty years earlier to expunge the era of Porfirio Diaz and return tothe status quo ante demonstrates this. In the first place it couldnot restore the past literally, since this involved some reconstructionof what could not be accurately or objectively remembered (forexample the precise boundaries of common lands in dispute betweendifferent communities), not to mention the construction of "what oughtto have been" and was therefore believed, or at least imagined, tohave actually existed. In the second place, the hated innovation was


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not a mere alien body which had somehow penetrated the socialorganism like some bullet lodged in the flesh and which could besurgically rem ove d, leaving the organism substantially as it was. Itrepresented one aspect of a social change which could not be isolatedfrom others, and consequently could be eliminated only at the cost ofchanging far more tha n the operation envisaged. In the thi rd place,the sheer social effort of turning the clock back almost inevitablymobilized forces which had more far-reaching effects: the armedpeasants of Morelos became a revolutionary power ou tside their state ,tho ug h their horizons were local or at best regional. Resto ration u nd erthe circumstances turn ed into social revolution. W ithin th e bordersof the state (at least so long as the power of the peasants lasted) itprobably turned the hands of the dock back further than they hadactually stood in the 1870s, cutting links with a wider marketeconomy wh ich had existed even the n. Seen in the national pe rsp ec-tive of th e M exican revolution, its effect was to prod uce a historicallyunprecedented new Mexico.1

Granted that the attempt to restore a lost past cannot literallysucceed, except in trivial forms (such as the restoration of ruinedbuildings), attempts to do so will still be made and will normally beselective. (T he case of some backward peasant region attem ptin g torestore all of what still existed in living memory is analyticallycomparatively uninteresting.) W hat aspects of th e past will besingled ou t for th e effort of resto ration? Historian s are likely to notethe frequency of certain calls for restoration in favour of the oldlaw, the old morality, the oldtime religion, etc. and might well betem pted to generalize from th is. But before they do so they o ugh tperhaps t o systematize their ow n observations an d seek guidan ce fromsocial anthropologists and others whose theories might be relevant.Moreover, before taking too super-structural a view of the matter,they might recall that attempts to restore an actual dying or deadeconomic structu re are by no means unkn ow n. T h e hope of areturn to an economy of petty peasant proprietorship, though itmight be little more than a big-city pastoral in nineteenth-centuryBritain (it was no t, at least initially, shared by th e actual landless rurallabou rers), was nevertheless an im po rtant eleme nt in radicalpropaganda, and occasionally more actively pursued.

A distinction ought nevertheless to be made, even in the absence ofa useful general m odel of such selective restoration , between symbo lic

1 1 am indebted to John Womack's splendid biography of Zapata (New York,1969) for the details of the Morelos movement.



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8 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 5 5and effective attem pts of this kind . T he call for a restoration of oldmorality or religion is intended to be effective. If successful, the nideally no girl will have, say, premarital sexual intercourse oreveryone will attend chu rch. On the other han d the desire torestore, literally, the bombed fabric of Warsaw after the second worldwar, or conversely to pull down particular records of innovation suchas the Stalin monument in Prague, is symbolic, even allowing for acertain aesthetic element in it. One mig ht suspect that this is sobecause what people actually wish to restore is too vast and vague forspecific acts of restoration, for example past "greatness" or past"free do m ". T h e relationship between effective an d symbolicrestoration may indeed be complex, and both elements may always beprese nt. T h e literal restoration of the fabric of Parliam ent on whichW inston Ch urch ill insisted could be justified on effective gro un ds, thatis the preservation of an architectural scheme which favoured aparticular pattern of parliamentary politics, debate and ambienceessential to the functioning of the British political system . N ev er-theless, like the earlier choice of the neo-gothic style for the buildings,it also suggests a strong symbolic element, perhaps even a form ofmagic which, by restoring a small but emotionally charged part ofa lost past, somehow restores the whole.Sooner or later, however, it is likely that a point will be reachedwhen the past can no longer be literally reproduced or even restored.At this point the past becomes so remote from actual or evenremembered reality that it may finally turn into little more than alanguage for defining certain not necessarily conservative aspirationsof today in historical term s. T h e Free Anglo-Saxons before th eNorman Yoke, or Merrie England before the Reformation arefamiliar examples. So, to take a contem porary illustration, is the"Charlemagne" metaphor, which has been used, ever sinceNapoleon I, to propagate various forms of partial European unity,whether by conquest from the French or German side or by federa-tion, and which patently is not intended to recreate anything evenremotely like the Europe of the eighth and nint h centuries. H ere(whether its proponents actually believe in it or not), the demand torestore or recreate a past so remote as to have little relevance to thepresent may equal total innovation, and the past thus invoked maybecom e an artefact, or in less flattering ter m s, a fabrication. T h ename "Ghana" transfers the history of one part of Africa to another,geographically rem ote and historically quite different. T h e Zion istclaim to return to the pre-diaspora past in the land of Israel was in

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THE SOCIAL FUNC TION OF THE PAST 9practice the negation of the actual history of the Jewish people formore than 2,000 years.

1Fabricated history is familiar enough, yet we ought to distinguishbetween those uses of it which are rhetorical or analytic and thosewhich imply some genuine concrete "restor ation". T he E nglishradicals of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries hardly intendedto return to pre-conquest society; the "Norman Yoke" for them wasprimarily an explanatory device, the "Free Anglo-Saxons" at best ananalogy or th e search for a genealogy, such as will be considered below .On the other hand modern nationalist movements, which can almost

be denned, in Renan's words, as movements which forget history orrather get it wrong, because their objectives are historicallyunprecedented, nevertheless insist on defining them to a greater orlesser extent in historical terms and actually attempt to realize partsof this fictitious history . T hi s applies mo st obviously to the definitionof the national territory, or rather to territorial claims, but variousforms of deliberate archaism are familiar enough, from the Welshneo-druids to the adoption of Hebrew as a spoken secular languageand the Ordensb urgen of National-Socialist Germ any. All these ,it must be repeated, are not in any sense "restorations" or even"reviv als". Th ey are innovations using or purp orting to useelements of a historic past, real or imaginary.

What kinds of innovation proceed in this manner, and under whatconditions? Nationalist movements are the most obvious, sincehistory is the most easily worked raw material for the process ofmanufacturing the historically novel "nations" in which they areengaged. W hat other mov ements operate in this way? Ca n wesay that certain types of aspiration are more likely than others toadopt this mode of definition, for example those concerning the socialcohesion of human groups, those embodying the "sense of thecommuni ty" ? The question must be left open.

1 Such pseudo-historical aspirations must not be confused with the attemptsto restore historically remote regimes in traditional societies, which are almostcertainly literally meant: for example the Peruvian peasant risings up to the1920s which sometimes aimed to restore the Inca Empire, the Chinesemovements, last recorded in the middle of this century, to restore the Mingdynasty. Fo r Peruvian peasants the Incas were in fact not historically remote.They were "yesterday", separated from the present merely by a readily tele-scoped succession of self-repeating peasant generations doing what theirancestors had done in so far as the gods and the Spaniards let the m . T o applychronology to them is to introduce anachronism.

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10 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 55

IIIThe problem of systematically rejecting the past arises only wheninnovation is recognized both as inescapable and as socially

desirable: when it represents "progress". This raises two distinctquestions, how innovation as such is recognized and legitimized, andhow the situation arising from it is to be specified (that is how amodel of society is to be formulated when the past can no longerprovide it.) The former is more easily answered.

We know very little about the process which has turned the words"new" and "revolutionary" (as used in the language of advertising)into synonyms for "better" and "more desirable", and research isbadly needed here. However, it would seem that novelty or evenconstant innovation is more readily accepted as far as it concerns thehuman control over non-human nature, for example science andtechnology, since so much of it is obviously advantageous even to themost tradition-bound. Has there ever been a serious example ofLuddism directed against bicycles or transistor radios ? On the otherhand, while certain socio-political innovations may appear attractiveto some groups of human beings, at least prospectively, the socialand human implications of innovation (including technical innovation)tend to meet with greater resistance, for equally obvious reasons.Rapid and constant change in material technology may be hailed bythe very people who are profoundly upset by the experience of rapidchange in human (for example sexual and family) relations, and whomight actually find it hard to conceive of constant change in suchrelations. Where even palpably "useful" material innovation isrejected, it is generally, perhaps always, because of the fear of thesocial innovation, that is disruption, it entails.

Innovation which is so obviously useful and socially neutral that itis accepted almost automatically, at all events by people to whomtechnological change is familiar, raises virtually no problem oflegitimation. One would guess (but has the subject actually beeninvestigated?) that even so essentially traditionalist an activity aspopular institutional religion, has found little difficulty in acceptingit. We know of violent resistance to any change in the ancient holytexts, but there appears to have been no equivalent resistance to, say,the cheapening of holy images and icons by means of moderntechnological processes, such as prints and oleographs. On the otherhand certain innovations require legitimation, and in periods when thepast ceases to provide any precedent for them, this raises very gravedifficulties. A single dose of innovation, however great, is not sotroublesome. It can be presented as the victory of some permanent


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THE SOCIAL FUNCTION OF THE PAST I Ipositive principle over its opposite, or as a process of "correction" or"rectification", reason prevailing over unreason, knowledge overignorance, "nature" over the "unnatural", good over evil. But thebasic experience of the past two centuries has been constant andcontinued change, which cannot be so dealt with except sometimes,at the cost of considerable casuistry, as the constantly necessaryapplication of permanent principles to circumstances ever changing inways which remain rather mysterious, or by exaggerating the strengthof the surviving forces of evil . '

Paradoxically, the past remains the most useful analytical tool forcoping with constant change, but in a novel form. It turns into thediscovery of history as a process of directional change, of develop-ment or evolution. Chan ge thu s becomes its own legitimation, butit is thereby anchored to a transformed "sense of the past" .Bagehot*s Physics and Politics (1872) is a good nineteenth-centuryexample of this ; current concepts of "modernization" illustrate moresimple-minded versions of the same approach. In brief, whatlegitimates the present and explains it is not now the past as a set ofreference-points (for example Magna Carta), or even as duration(for example the age of parliamentary institutions) but the past as aprocess of becoming the present. Faced with the overriding realityof chan ge, even conservative tho ug ht becomes historicist. Pe rha ps ,because hindsight is the most persuasive form of the historian'swisdom, it suits them better than most.

But what of those who also require foresight, to specify a futurewhich is unlike anything in the past? To do so without some sort ofexample is unusually difficult, and we find those most dedicated toinnovation often tempted to look for one, however implausible,including in the past itself, or in what amounts to the same thing,"prim itive society" considered as a form of m an 's past coexisting w ithhis present. N inete enth - and twentieth-century socialists doubtlessused "primitive communism" merely as an analytical prop, but thefact that they used it at all indicates the advantage of being able tohave a concrete precedent even for the unprecedented, or at least anexample of ways of solving new problems, however inapplicable theactual solutions of the analogous problems in the past. There is, ofcourse, no theoretical necessity for specifying the future, but in* The mode of argument of revolutionary regimes after the triumph of theirrevolutions would be worth analysing in this manner. It might throw light onthe apparent indestructibility of "bourgeois survivals" or such theses as theintensification of the class struggle long after the revolution.

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12 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 5 5practice the demand to predict or to set up a model for it is too strongto be shrugged off.Some sort of historicism, that is the more or less sophisticated andcomplex extrapolation of past tendencies into the future, has been themo st convenient and popular me tho d of prediction . At all eventsthe shape of the future is discerned by searching the process of pastdevelopment for clues, so that paradoxically, the more we expectinnovation, the more history becomes essential to discover what itwill be like. Th is proced ure may rang e from t he very naive t heview of the future as a bigger an d b etter pres ent, or a bigger and worsepresent so characteristic of technological extrapolations or pessimisticsocial anti-utopias to the intellectually very complex and high-powered; but essentially history remains the basis of both. Howeverat this point a contradiction arises, whose nature is suggested by KarlMarx's simultaneous conviction of the inevitable supersession ofcapitalism by socialism, and extreme reluctance to make more thana few very general statements about what socialist and communistsociety wou ld actually be like. T hi s is not merely com mo n sen se:the capacity to discern general tendencies does not imply the capacityto forecast their precise outcome in complex and in many respectsunk now n circumstances of th e futur e. It also indicates a conflictbetween an essentially historicist mode of analysing how the futurewill come about, which assumes a continuing process of historicalchange, and what has so far been the universal requirement ofprog ram m atic models of society, nam ely a certain stability. U top iais by nature a stable or self-reproducing state and its implicitahistoricism can be avoided only by those who refuse to describe it.Even less Utopian models of "the good society" or the desirablepolitical system, however designed to meet changing circumstances,tend also to be designed to do so by means of a relatively stable andpredictable framework of institutions and values, which will not bedisru pted b y such chang es. T he re is no theoretical difficulty indenning social systems in terms of continuous change, but in practicethe re seems little dem and for th is, perha ps becau se an excessive degreeof instability and unpredictability in social relations is particularlydisorienting. In Comtean terms "or de r" goes with "pro gres s", bu tthe analysis of the one tells us little about the desirable design of theother. History ceases to be of use at the very mo men t when weneed it most.4

4 Of course if we assume that "whatever is becoming, is rifjht", or at leastinevitable, we may accept the results of extrapolation with or without approval,but this does not eliminate the problem.

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THE SOCIAL FUNCTION OF THE PAST 1 3We may therefore still be forced back upon the past, in a way

analogous to the traditional use of it as a repository of precedents,though now making our selection in the light of analytical models orprogram m es which have noth ing to do w ith it. T his is particularlylikely in the design of "t he good soc iety", since mo st of what we knowabout the successful functioning of societies is what has beenempirically learned in the course of some thousands of years ofliving together in human groups in a variety of ways, supplementedperhaps by the recently fashionable study of the social behaviour ofanimals. The value of historical inquiry into "what actuallyhappened" for the solution of this or that specific problem of presentand future, is undoubted, and has given a new lease of life to somerather old-fashioned historical activities, provided they are teamedwith rather new-fangled problem s. T hu s what happened to thepoor displaced by the massive railway building of the nineteenthcentury in the hearts of great cities can and oug ht to throw light on thepossible consequences of massive urban motorway building in thelate twentieth century, and the various experiences of "studentpower" in medieval universities6 are not without bearing on projectsto change the constitutional stru ctur e of m od ern universities. Yetthe nature of this often arbitrary process of dipping into the past forassistance in forecasting the future requires more analysis than it hasso far received. By itself it does no t replace the con struction ofadeq uate social m odels, with or w ithou t historical inqu iry. Itmerely reflects and perhaps in some instances palliates theirpresent inadequacy.

IVThese casual remarks are far from exhausting the social uses ofthe past. How ever, tho ug h no attem pt to discuss all other aspectscan be m ade h ere, two special prob lem s may be m entioned briefly:those of the past as genealogy and as chronology.The sense of the past as a collective continuity of experienceremains surprisingly important, even to those most dedicated toinnovation and the belief that novelty equals improvement: as witnessthe universal inclusion of "history" in the syllabus of every moderneducational system, or the search for ancestors (Spartacus, More,Winstanley) by modern revolutionaries whose theory, if they areM arxis ts, assumes their irrelevance. W hat precisely did or do

See, for example, Alan B. Cobban, "Medieval Student Power", Past andPresent, no. 53 (Nov. 1971).

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1 4 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 5 5modern Marxists gain from the knowledge that there were slaverebellions in ancient Rome which, even supposing their aims to havebeen communist, were by their own analysis doomed to failure or toproduce results which could have little bearing on the aspirations ofmodern communists ? Clearly the sense of belonging to an age-oldtradition of rebellion provides emotional satisfaction, but how andw hy? Is it analogous to th e sense of continu ity which infuseshistory syllabuses and makes it apparently desirable for school-children to learn of the existence of Boadicea or Verdngetorix, KingAlfred or Joan of Arc as part of that body of information which (forreasons which are assumed to be valid but rarely investigated) theyare "supposed to know ab ou t" as Englishmen or Frenchm en? T hepull of the past as continuity and tradition, as "our ancestors", isstrong. Even the patte rn of tourism bears witness to it. O urinstinctive sympathy with the sentiment should not, however, lead usto overlook the difficulty of discovering why this should be so.

This difficulty is naturally much smaller in the case of a morefamiliar form of genealogy, that which seeks to buttress an uncertainself-esteem. Bourgeois parve nus seek pedigre es, new nation s ormovements annex examples of past greatness and achievement totheir history in proportion as they feel their actual past to have beenlacking in these things whether this feeling is justified or not.*The most interesting question concerning such genealogical exercisesis , if or when they becom e dispensable. T he experience of m oderncapitalist society suggests that they may be both permanent andtransitional. On th e one han d late twentieth-century nou veaux -riches still aspire to the characteristics of the life of an aristocracywhich, in spite of its political and economic irrelevance, continues torepresent the highest social status (the country chdteau, the Rhinelandmanaging director hunting elk and boar in the implausible surround-ings of socialist repub lics etc.). O n the other, the neo-m edieva l,neo-Renaissance and Louis XV buildings and d6cor of nineteenth-century bourgeois society gave way at a certain stage to a deliberately"m od er n" style, which no t only refused to appeal to the pas t, bu tdeveloped a doubtful aesthetic analogy between artistic and technicalinnov ation. U nfortuna tely th e only society in history which so fargives us adequate material for studying the comparative pull ofancestors and novelty, is western capitalist society in the nineteenth* The stress of Russian historical popularization on the priority of Russianinventors during the later Stalin years, so excessive as to provoke foreignridicule, actually concealed the altogether remarkable achievements ofnineteenth-century Russian scientific and technological thought.

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THE SOCIAL FUNCTION OF THE PAST 1 5and twen tieth centuries. It would be unw ise to generalize on thestrength of a sample of one.Finally, the problem of chronology, which takes us to the oppositeextreme of possible generalization, since it is hard to think of anyknown society which does not for certain purposes find it convenientto record the dura tion of time and the succession of events. T h er e is,of course, as M oses Finley has pointed ou t, a fundam ental differencebetween a chronological and a non-chronological past: betweenHomer's Odysseus and Samuel Butler's, who is naturally and quiteun-Homerically conceived as a middle-aged man returning to anageing wife after twen ty years' absence. Chronology is, of cour se,essential to the modern, historical, sense of the past, since history isdirectional chang e. An achronism is an imm ediate alarm-b ell forthe historian, and its emotional shock-value in a thoroughlychronological society is such as to lend itself to easy exploitation in thearts : Macbeth in modern dress today benefits from this in a way inwhich a Jacobean Macbeth obviously did not.

At first sight it is less essential to the traditional sense of the past(pattern or model for the present, storehouse and repository ofexperienc e, wisdom and mo ral prec ept). I n such a past events arenot necessarily believed to exist simultaneously, like the Romans andMoors who fight one another in Spanish Easter processions, or evenout of time: their chronological relation to each other is merelyirrelevant. W heth er H oratius of the Bridge con tribu ted his exampleto later Romans before or after Mucius Scaevola, is of interest onlyto peda nts. Similarly (to take a m ode rn example) the value of theMaccabees, the defenders of Masada and Bar Kokhba for modernIsraelis has nothing to d o with their chronological distance from the mand from one another. T h e mo men t wh en real time is introducedinto such a past (for example when Homer and the Bible are analysedby the methods of modern historical scholarship) it turns into some-thing else. T hi s is a socially disturbin g process and a sym ptom ofsocial transformation.

Yet for certain purposes historical chronology, for example in theform of genealogies and chronicles, is evidently important in many(perhaps in all?) literate, or even illiterate, societies, though theability of literate ones to maintain perm anen t w ritten records makes itpossible for them to devise uses for them which would seem to beimp racticable in those relying on purely oral transm ission. (H ow -ever, though the limits of oral historical memory have beeninvestigated from the point of view of the requirements of the modernscholar, historians have given less attention to the question how far

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l 6 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 5 5they are inadequate to the social requirements of their own societies.)

In the broadest sense all societies have myths of creation anddevelopment, which imply temporal succession: first things werethus , the n they changed th us . Conversely, a providen tial conceptionof the universe also implies some kind of succession of events, forteleology (even if its objects have already been achieved) is a kind ofhistory . M oreov er, it lends itself excellently to chronology, wheresuch exists: as witness the various millennial speculations or thedebates about the year 1000 A.D., which pivot on the existence ofa system of daring.7 In a more precise sense, the process ofcommenting on ancient texts of permanent validity, or of discoveringthe specific applications of eternal truth implies an element ofchronology (for example the search for prec ede nt). It is hardlyworth mentioning that even more precise calculations of chronologymay be req uired for a variety of econom ic, legal, bu reau cratic, po liticaland ritual purposes at least in literate societies which can keep arecord of them, including, of course, the invention of favourable andancient precedents for political purposes.

In some instances the difference between such chronology and thatof m odern history is clear enough. T he lawyers' and bu reauc rats'search for preced ent is entirely prese nt-orie nted. Its object is todiscover the legal rights of today, the solution of modern administra-tive problems, whereas for the historian, however interested in theirrelation to the present, it is the difference of circumstances which issignificant. On the other hand this does no t seem to exhaust thecharacter of traditional chronology. H istory , the unity of pa st,present and future may be something that is universally apprehended,however deficient th e hu m an capacity to recall and rec ord it, and somesort of chronology, however unrecognizable or imprecise by ourcriteria, may be a necessary measure of it. Bu t even if this should beso, where are the demarcation lines drawn between the coexistingnon-chronological and chronological past, between the coexistinghistorical and non-historical chronologies? T h e answers are by nomeans clear. Perha ps they might throw light no t only on the senseof the past of earlier societies, but on our own, in which thehegemony of one form (historical change) does not exclude thepersistence, in different milieux and circumstances, of other forms ofthe sense of the past.

' The number-magic which seems to be a natural by-product of at leastwritten chronologies, even in very sophisticated societies, may be worthinvestigation: even today historians find it hard to escape from the "century"or other arbitrary unit of dating.


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THE SOCIAL FUNCTION OF THE PAST 17It is easier to formulate questions than answers, and this paper has

taken the easier way rath er tha n the mo re difficult. An d yet, per hap sto ask questions, especially about the experiences we tend to take forgra nted, is no t a valueless occup ation. W e swim in the past asfishdoin water, and canno t escape from it. But our modes of living andmoving in this m ediu m req uire analysis and discussion. T h e objectof this paper has been to stimulate both.Birkbeck College, ' E. J. HobsbawmUniversity of London

OPEN MEETINGSATURDAY, 8JULY, 1972 at 10.30 a.m. in

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LONDONProfessor Lawrence Stone (Princeton University) willread a paper o n :MARRIAGE, SEX AND THE FAMILY INEARLY MODERN ENGLANDThe paper will be followed by a general discussion on thesubject.Anyone interested is invited to attend. There is no registrationfee.

THE AN NU AL GENERAL MEETING OFTHE PASTAND PRESENT SOCIETY will be held on the occasionof the Open Meeting.

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past and present 1972 hobsbawm 3 17

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