ARTICLES

Memory, history and the claims of the past

ROSS POOLE, New School for Social Research, New York, USA
Abstract
This article presents an account of collective memory which explains its relationship to
individual memory on the one hand and to history on the other. It argues that the role
of memory, both individual and collective, is not merely cognitive; it is also normative.
That is, memory does not simply transmit information from the past to the present; it
also transmits responsibilities. Insofar as collective memory has a cognitive aspect, it
makes claims about the past. These may be confirmed or disconfirmed by historical
research. This does not mean that collective memory is just bad history. It is more like
history written in the first person, and its role is to inform the present generation of its
responsibilities to the past.

Key words
Avishai Margalir; Friedrich Nietzsche; John Locke; myth responsibility

COLLECTIVE MEMORY: TWO CHALLENGES

Over the past 20 years or so there has been a veritable explosion of memory talk in
social, political and cultural studies. Some of this work is extremely important, and
philosophers, as well as psychologists and cognitive scientists, can only learn by critically engaging with it.1 But there are also grounds for caution. As Kerwin Lee Klein
(2000) has argued, the social sciences seemed to get on reasonably well for many years
with little appeal to the concept of memory, so we need some explanation apart from
fashion of why it is now so inescapable. There is a bewildering diversity in the ways
in which the notion of memory is deployed in recent literature. As Richard J. Bernstein,
a not unsympathetic observer, comments, We do not even seem to have a conceptual
map of the relevant issues (Bernstein, 2004: 165). My project here is to provide a preliminary survey of one area on that map.
By and large, I will be concerned with collective memory, that is, that form of
memory associated with social groups, e.g. nations, families, etc. Occasionally, I will
speak of cultural memory (I take the term from Jan Assmann, 1997, 2006), using that
term more broadly to refer to all forms of memory beyond the individual.2 While I will
MEMORY STUDIES SAGE Publications 2008, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore
www.sagepublications.com, ISSN 1750-6980, Vol 1(2): 149166 [DOI: 10.1177/1750698007088383]

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do something to clarify the application of these terms as the article proceeds, I do not
pretend that the distinctions will always be clear cut. But the more substantial issue
concerns the legitimacy of using the term memory at all. We all know that individuals
have memories, and in recent years cognitive scientists, psychologists and neuroscientists have made significant advances in explaining how individuals remember. But
it is not at all clear what the relationship is between the phenomenon they have been
studying, that is, the memory of individual human beings, and the alleged memory
of nations, families, cities, and so on. Do social groups have memories in the same
sense as individuals? If not, what is the gain except confusion of using the same term
memory for both phenomena?
A further issue concerns the relationship between memory and history. The concept
of collective memory points back to a time when pre-literate societies relied on more
or less institutionalized practices of memory for access to their past. With the development of literacy, however, these practices were challenged and eventually displaced
by what was to become the discipline of history (see Nora, 1989; Le Goff, 1992). The
epistemological advantages of this change are obvious. The claims of memory are
fallible. Because of this, memory stands in need of correction, and the corrective is
provided by the discipline of history. Of course, history too has its weaknesses. However, there are established procedures of reflection and criticism within the discipline,
so there is reason to hope that bias and errors will be corrected. We have the concept
of bad history, whether or not we are always adept in identifying it. Why then should
we try to resurrect the notion of collective memory? The practices by which collective
memory is constructed are very different in a world of mass media than in pre-literate
societies. And the all too obvious political agendas behind these practices give us
reasons to treat the deliverances of modern collective memory with a good deal of
skepticism. Why should we consider social memory as anything other than bad history
to be replaced when something better appears on the scene? If, as Klein (2000)
suggests, there are many cases where the term memory is little more than a terminological variant of history, what is gained by the substitution? The question of why
we need a concept of collective memory apart from history is inescapable.3
The concept of collective memory faces two challenges: the first, from the perspective
of individual memory, questions its status as memory; the second, from the perspective
of history, asks why it should not give way to its epistemologically superior rival. My
project in this article is to address these challenges.

MEMORY AND ITS TRACES

For most of us, our memory is the capacity we have to bring to mind past events in
which we were involved. In the most obvious cases, we remember an event that we witnessed or an action we performed. If few of us could give a reasonably accurate picture
of the physiological mechanisms through which memory works, most of us are persuaded that such mechanisms exist. Indeed, as C.B. Martin and Max Deutscher (1966)
argued many years ago, there is good reason to suppose that the everyday concept of

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memory presupposes the existence of an appropriate causal chain between the event
remembered and our present capacity to recall it. When I remember something, perhaps the rudeness of the customs officer on my first arrival in the USA, it is because the
past experience has left an internal trace and it is this which enables my later recall. The
concept of a trace plays a central role in this account: it is both the causal residue of
the remembered event, and also the representation the structural analogue of the
experience (see Martin and Deutscher, 1966: 189). As John Sutton (2004) summarizes
it, Martin and Deutschers account suggests that built into common sense concepts of
memory is a reliance on the existence of some kind of continuous memory trace as
a continuous bridge across the temporal gap, bridging past and present. Martin and
Deutscher say little about the actual mechanisms involved in the storage of memory.
Their concern was to provide an analysis of memory that made it possible that it was
a purely physical phenomenon; but they left it to science to identify the specific structures involved. In the near 50 years since their paper, there have been enormous steps
in this direction (for fascinating and personal accounts by leading contributors, see
Bourtchouladze, 2002 and Kandel, 2006; for overviews, see Tulving and Craik, 2000,
especially Chs 2931). Perhaps more to the point is that few theorists would now suppose that conceptual analysis, even of the common sense notions of memory, could
proceed in isolation from an understanding of the way in which memory works at the
level of brain structure.
If the everyday conception of memory seems to be securely located within the
individual, the notion of cultural memory seems to be located elsewhere. For most
theorists, cultural memory exists in artifacts, such as monuments, in rituals and other
social practices, in codes of dress and behavior, and in a range of other social objects. It
also exists in the rhetoric of politicians, editorials, opinion makers and those attempting
to mobilize public opinion in one direction or another. I will follow this usage, though
with one proviso (or clarification): that it is not sufficient for an artifact or practice to
have its origin in the past for it to count as cultural memory. Social objects count as
cultural memories, not merely because they are historical residues, but because they
have as part of their meaning a reference to some specific aspect of the past a person,
an achievement, or something of the sort. There are obviously borderline cases: forms
of architecture, styles of clothing and political practices may echo past fashions for
the architect, stylist or political historian, but not for those who work in the building,
wear the clothes or observe the practices. However, when social objects form aspects
of a collective memory, the past referred to is one that is, or perhaps ought to be, the
common heritage of all members of the group. It will be the aim of the education of
members of the group that they come to have access to this meaning, and will understand these objects in terms of the past that they commemorate.
On the face of it, the individual and the cultural phenomena are very different
kinds of memory. The former is grounded on experiences and its traces; the latter on
objects and practices; the former is a matter of causality and the neural structure of the
brain, while the latter is a matter of interpretation and (to put it bluntly) politics. What
then is the rationale for using the term memory for such different phenomena?

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On closer examination, however, the distance between the two phenomena lessens.
There are several considerations here. One, emphasized by Halbwachs (1980), is that
individual memories often, and perhaps always, have a social component. That I have
a vivid recollection of a childhood misadventure is due to the many family retellings of
the incident, and even photos of the people involved at the time. Those memories that
are not supported and confirmed by my friends, family members, colleagues and the
like tend to lapse. What is more fundamental is the fact that the terms in which we experience and recall an episode in our lives are provided by the language, conventions
and values characteristic of the social groups to which we belong. Memory, like every
other experience, is conceptually structured. On Halbwachss view, the most individual
of memories is as much a social he would say collective phenomenon as the rituals
and mores characteristic of different social groups. I will return to this point shortly.
A different kind of consideration is raised by the role of external objects in individual
memory. It may be, for example, that I remember the name and telephone number
of someone I met at a party because I have retained them in the appropriate file of
my mental apparatus; but it also may be that it is because I wrote them on the back
of my hand and later entered them in my Palm Pilot. All of us rely on the existence of
external traces entries in diaries, marks on calendars, records in filing cabinets, etc.
to provide access to the past; none of us could cope with the normal business of life if
we had to rely on unaided memory.4 But this means that our individual memory takes
on an aspect of its collective counterpart; it relies on the availability of representations
that are just as external as the rituals, monuments, etc., that are the repositories of
collective memories. We may insist that there be some internal residue of the original
event for the later recollection to count as memory; indeed, somewhat surprisingly,
Halbwachs takes this line (1980: 25; see also Martin and Deutscher, 1966). However,
as often as not, the internal residue is simply a cue: if we are to look for the trace of
the event, its structural analogue, it is more likely to be found in the Palm Pilot than
in the cerebral cortex. If this is right, then the apparent gap between individual and
cultural memory diminishes. It suggests that there is a continuum, rather than a chasm,
between the two kinds of memory.
I will return to the relationship between individual and cultural memory shortly.
But before I do so, I want to discuss a further aspect of memory, both in its individual
and social forms. I will argue that the role of memory is not simply to provide us with
cognitive access to the past; it is also to provide a route by which responsibility for past
events is transmitted to the present, and thus to identify a locus of present responsibility for these events. The role of memory is not, or not only, epistemological; that
is, to supply us with information about the past that we need to make our way in the
present. It is also normative; that is, it informs us of the obligations and responsibilities
we have acquired in the past, and that ought to inform our behavior in the present.
I will suggest that is through an understanding of the role of memory in our moral life
that we will discover an important part of the rationale for speaking of memory in both
the individual and the social cases.

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MEMORY AND THE INDIVIDUAL

Let us look briefly at individual memory. Suppose that I remember something. When
I make this claim, I place myself in the past: I performed the act, or I suffered from it,
or perhaps I merely witnessed it. That I was present gives me a certain epistemological
privilege: I will claim to know better than others precisely what happened. This privilege is not absolute. The most sincere memory claim may turn out to be false: I seem
to remember performing the act, but did not; or (more commonly) I fail to remember
doing what I in fact did. In some extreme cases, the horrifying or traumatic nature of
the experience stands in the way of accurate recall. Fortunately, there are usually other
ways in which we can gain knowledge of the past, and these may well override the
claims of memory. However, if my memory claim is correct, I can claim another privilege, or perhaps burden, with respect to the past. I, the person who now remembers,
am the person who was there. If I performed the action, I now bear responsibility for it
the praise or criticism, reward or punishment, that is due. If I suffered from the act, I
have a right of restitution. Even if my memory is simply that I was there, I must accept
the responsibilities that go with presence. Why did I not intervene? What steps did
I take afterwards? By putting my present self at the site of the past events, I am placing
those events on my current moral agenda. I am morally implicated for better or for
worse in the events recalled.
The responsibility of the witness is normally minimal.5 Our responsibility increases
when the event recalled is our own action. If we did something in the past, we are, all
things being equal, accountable for it now, and memory is the medium though much
more than a medium by which that accountability is transmitted to the present. Of
course, it is not the only medium. Sometimes, a person will be rightly held responsible
even though he or she has no memory of what he or she is held to have done. However, as both Locke and Nietzsche in their different ways recognized, the practice of
holding other people accountable for what they did in the past presupposes that
they could in principle recognize their own accountability (see Locke, 1979: Ch. xxvii;
Nietzsche, 1994: Essay Two; for discussion, see Poole, 1996). There could not be a
concept of third-person responsibility unless there was a first-person counterpart. For
Locke, this condition was quite strict. Even if it was not always available in ordinary life,
it was ultimately secured at the Last Judgment:
in the great day, wherein the secrets of all hearts shall be laid open [when] no
one shall be made to answer for what he knows nothing of; but shall receive his
doom, his conscience accusing or excusing him. (Locke, 1979: II, Section 22, 344)
For Nietzsche, the exemplary form of responsibility for the past derives from our
own promises: we perform an act that commits a future self to hold him- or herself
accountable.
Locke seems to have thought that the capacity to appropriate past acts as our own
was a more or less natural feature of consciousness: the natural man acquired this

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capacity in the course of its development and thus became a moral man or person,
i.e. a being that is morally accountable for its actions. For Nietzsche, to breed an animal
which is able to make promises [was] the paradoxical task which nature has set
itself; but he also recognized that there was very little that is natural in this process.
For humans to become morally accountable, an appropriate memory had to be made
(1994: II, Sections 13, 3842). This distinction is crucial. We have to learn to remember,
not merely that we have promised, but that we are now bound by that promise. We
might indeed, we often do recall the past, including our past promises, merely as
information that we need to take into account in carrying out our present projects.
But if this were the only way in which we remembered the past, we would not have
the right to make promises. To have this right we need to recognize that a past action
creates a present commitment, and is not something that we may keep or evade as
it suits our present purposes. It is a demand that we must meet independently of and
prior to our current projects. Our awareness of the past has the function of translating a past responsibility into a present will. It was the task of society by education
and acculturation, and above all, by the infliction of pain to provide a technique of
mnemonics so that the individual will have a memory of this kind (for relevant criticism, see Assmann, 2006: 57). It is only when society has completed its task that we
have the right to make promises. We have learned to act knowing that our future
selves will be held and will hold themselves responsible for what we have done.
Both Locke and Nietzsche were concerned with a rather narrow range of moral
issues, particular those involving guilt and punishment. Our moral life is a good deal
richer than this and our moral identity a good deal more complex. We are capable of,
and sometimes achieve, lasting and rewarding emotional relationships with others.
We have commitments to people, causes, and principles that enable us some of the
time to transcend our own perspectives and interests (see Wolf, 198586). These relationships and commitments are not defined by the intensity of a present experience,
but their endurance over time. That my present feeling for another is love rather than
lust is not, or not just, a matter of the quality of the experience; it is also a projection
of that experience into the future. That my present feeling is not merely one of anger
because my desires have been thwarted, but is righteous indignation at the flouting
of a moral principle commits me to responding in certain ways on future occasions.
We have the right to these emotions and moral responses, just as we have the right
to make promises, because we have or are capable of having a certain kind of
memory. Love and moral commitment, as much as promising, involve the capacity
to bind a future self, a capacity that presupposes that the future self will remember
the past and be bound by it. But unlike promising, these are not just matters of will
and performance; they concern the feelings that will inform our will and our actions.
There is a concept of emotional memory at work here, which is both important and
difficult to pin down. It is not simply that one will recollect a past emotion, as I may
now nostalgically bring to mind the experience of a first love. Nor is it a memory that
will retain the very emotion that I once felt: the future love to which I commit myself
will be different in many ways to that of the present. But in some sense, it will be the

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same emotion: it will retain its centrality in my life and the depth and range of responsibilities that go with long-term commitments.6
Memory often manifests itself as an isolated act in which we bring to mind a past
event. Something jogs our memory, and we find ourselves thinking about and in
some cases re-experiencing something that happened in the past. If we are to understand the role of memory in our moral and emotional lives, however, we must think of
other forms of memory. In its most pervasive form, memory informs the whole of our
experience. Its task is not so much to represent the past to us as it is to make the past
a presence in our moral and emotional life. It is through memory that we recognize
those aspects of the past that retain something of their original moral and emotional
force. Its role is to let us know what of the past we have to take into account in making
our present choices. It puts the past on our current moral agenda. Acquiring a memory
of this kind is a necessary part of learning to live within the various narrative structures that our society makes available to us. Some of these are relatively simple: we
learn that we ought to keep our promises. Others are much more complex: they involve
the meaning of various emotions, and the nature of the commitments we have, not
merely to those we know but to those we do not. Others involve our place in wider
social networks and understanding the meaning these have for those who participate
in them. In all these cases, we must learn what it is that we must remember. Unless we
learn this, we will be unable to participate in many of the practices that are central,
not just to social life, but for our own personal lives. Even when memory takes the
form of an apparently isolated act of recollection, as when, out of the blue, we recall
an incident that took place many years ago, memory strives to place the remembered
event in the overall structure of our lives. It seeks and often provides a framework in
terms of which events have or fail to have significance for us.
Considerations of this kind move us in the direction of Maurice Halbwachss claim
that individual memory presupposes a social framework. According to Halbwachs:
[T]here exists a collective memory and social frameworks for memory; it is to the
extent that our individual thought places itself in these frameworks that it is capable of the act of recollection. (1992: 38; see also 523, 1713, etc.)
Halbwachs, and here he follows Nietzsche, is right to insist that memory is not a natural
capacity of the human individual, but is socially constructed. We learn to remember
aspects of our own past only insofar as we learn that certain public objects and practices
represent a past that is common to those we are interacting with. It is only by learning to
place our experience in the framework of collective memory that we are able to remember
our own past. Clearly, we do not invent these structures of significance for ourselves; we
acquire them through acculturation, education and interaction with others. We learn
about promise making, and a range of much more complex commitments, by coming
to understand the meaning that certain actions have in the community of which we are
becoming members. The child will learn that a certain action, perhaps by its mother,
not only satisfies a need but also represents the keeping of a commitment made some
time before. Certain actions promise keeping and punishment are the most obvious
have a certain ritual quality. They have as part of their meaning a reference to a past

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to which they respond. It is only by coming to understand this that a child acquires the
capacity to make commitments of its own.
An aspect of the social formation of memory, one that is emphasized by Nietzsche
rather than Halbwachs, is that we learn what it is that we must remember. It is only
when we are able to bring to mind specific aspects of our own past capacity that we
acquire the capacity to make promises, to enter into commitments, and participate in
social life. We also, as Nietzsche rather grudgingly recognizes, find ourselves able to
participate in richer and fuller forms of individual life. As we acquire a memory, we learn
what it is that we have to remember. Often, of course, our memory fails: we do not
remember the name of the person we met at a party, or we forget our promise to meet
them for a drink. It is significant indeed crucial for social life that we hold our failure
to remember on these occasions as a moral failure: we ought to have remembered, but
did not. This might seem puzzling: that we remember is rarely a matter of conscious
intention; memory is not in any obvious sense under our control. In familiar cases, the
memory breaks into our consciousness: we suddenly realize what time it is and what we
should be doing. But if the operations of memory were as contingent, even random,
as they often seem, it is hard to explain why we should be held responsible, not just
by others, but also by ourselves, for failures of memory. In order to understand the
ascription of responsibility, we must assume that memory is, in some basic sense, an
act of the self, and that there is an implicit agency lurking within the apparently contingent and random nature of memory. That I forget is, at least sometimes, an act that
can be ascribed to me, and it is for that reason that I can be held responsible for my
forgetting (compare Margalit, 2002: 558). If social life means that we acquire certain
capacities and agendas of memory, it also means the risk indeed, the certainty of
the guilt that comes with failures of memory.
Although memory is not merely a source of propositional knowledge of the past, it
has a significant cognitive aspect. Memory involves a claim to truth, and it will not serve
its other functions if that claim fails. But it is, as we are aware, all too fallible: it needs
confirmation from, and is sometimes corrected by, other sources of information about
the past. Our memory is always hostage to the facts of biography (if that is not too
grand a term for most of us). Because we often fail to remember, or distort what we do
remember, it is important that there be other ways in which the identity of our present
and past selves can be established. Memory is not a self-sufficient ground of identity (as
Locke may have imagined). But it remains an inescapable part of the process through
which we claim or accept the burdens and responsibilities, rights and privileges, of any
complex form of human existence. As such, it is an essential part of the moral life.

COLLECTIVE MEMORY, MYTH AND HISTORY

Let us now consider cultural memory, and more especially collective memory. This is
embodied, not in specific human individuals, but in social practices and artifacts, as
well as in public discourse. Like its individual counterpart, collective memory has a
propositional content: this battle was fought and won, these men and women died,

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civilization was brought to this continent, and so on. So one aspect of collective
memory and, I will suggest, an essential aspect is a claim to historical truth.
Many theorists of collective memory are impressed with the all too obvious political
agendas, the oversimplifications, condensations and exclusions behind the consecration of certain events and interpretations as part of a groups memory. For them,
the claim to truth is too obviously bogus to be taken seriously. To some extent, this
is a matter of disciplinary focus: the most pressing tasks for contemporary social and
cultural theorists are to expose the political interests behind the ways in which events
are selected and presented for public consumption, political agendas are woven into
the presentation of these events, and competing narratives are ignored. (For striking
examples of this, see Gillis, 1994; Young, 2000; Rv, 2005) Collective memory is presented, not as an attempt to represent the past; but as the process in which a certain
past is constructed. This creates a strong temptation to ignore the reference to an actual
past in these artifacts and practices: the past is treated as if it were just a construction.
Mieke Bal, writing on behalf of the contributors to her co-edited collection, succumbs
to this temptation:
We view cultural memorization as an activity occurring in the present, in which
the past is continuously modified and redescribed even as it continues to shape the
future. (Bal, 1999: vii)
Of course cultural memorization is a present activity that offers new descriptions of
familiar pasts (and also, one hopes, recovers unfamiliar ones). But to think of this as
tantamount to modifying the past makes sense only if we conceive of the past as
nothing but a construction of the present. And this is no more plausible for the past of
many thousands of years ago than it is for the past of five minutes ago.
My point here is not simply to assert common sense realism about the past against
the more constructivist understanding characteristic of social and cultural studies. It
is rather that we will not properly understand what is at issue in various competing
memorizations of the past unless we take seriously their claim to be about a past
which exists independently of the activity of commemoration. If social memory is a
construction, its force depends on its claim to be more than this. Indeed, the critique
of dominant memory narratives often takes the form of marshalling historical evidence
that points to different readings of the past. We will not understand the debates
about what should or should not be part of public memory unless we take the claim
to historical truth seriously. Memory, in both its individual and social manifestation, is
about the past.
It is important to understand what this involves. Consider for example, Avishai
Margalits claim:
Modern shared memory is located between the push and pull of two poles: history
and myth. (2002: 63)
On the face of it, this seems uncontroversial. Collective memory has some of the
qualities of a myth: it provides stories that members of a group share and through
which they can identify salient characteristics of the kind of people they believe

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themselves to be. But it also has some of the qualities of history: it makes claims
about the actual past. A satisfactory account of collective memory must do justice to
both these polarities. Margalits own account does not do this. When it comes to the
point, he locates memory not in a place intermediate between the two poles, but much
closer to myth than to history. For Margalit, the power of memory rests on its capacity
to bind the members of a community together and, by constructing a common past,
to give meaning to their collective endeavors. However, on at least some occasions
(I would argue, all occasions) the common past also falls within the domain of history. If
we take seriously the claims of memory to represent the past, then we must recognize
not only that it competes with history, but that it is open to the same kinds of criticism,
correction and modification as history. Margalit is reluctant to draw this conclusion.
To subject these shared memories to the critical interrogation characteristic of history
would be to erode their bonding and meaning-creating capacity. Collective memories
are, he suggests, closed:
[T]he only line of memory leading to this event [his example is the Exodus in Jewish
memory] is the one authorized by the tradition of the community as its canonical
line of memory. Other historical links to the original event may be tolerated and
even welcomed as long as they confirm the version of the traditional memory, but
they are prohibited if they contradict or conflict with the traditional line of shared
memory. (Margalit, 2002: 60)
No doubt the exclusion of alternative modes of inquiry is one of the ways in which a
collective memory is preserved. But there is a cost. Once it is acknowledged that the
claims made in collective memory are protected from critical interrogation and that the
only admissible evidence for their truth are the memories themselves, then the events
recorded are moved from the actual past into a realm of mythology, a realm that is
outside history or, at best, located in the pretend history of once upon a time.7
No doubt some stories will survive the transition from memory to myth: there is no
reason to suppose that the English worried too much when the stories of King Arthur
and Robin Hood met this fate. But others perhaps those of Moses, the Exodus and
the Promised Land for Jews, and of Jesus, the Crucifixion and the Resurrection for
Christians might not. If memory claims to be about the past, then it makes itself
vulnerable to history. Though a communitys memories may treasure a specific line of
descent from the past to the present, the community cannot preclude the possibility
of other modes of cognitive access to the past. If, as Margalit recommends, the community protects its memory from historical criticism, it does so by dissolving it into
mythology.8
What then differentiates collective memory from history? It is not that it is immune
from historical revision, even if that revision often has a more explicit political agenda
than its historical counterpart. Part, though only part, of the answer is that collective
memory is not, any more than individual memory, just a collection of claims about the
past. It is also a source of group identity: it provides an account of the groups existence
up to and even beyond the present moment. It provides a narrative of struggle
and achievement, victory and defeat, in which members of the group can find their

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present identity. This suggests that the difference between memory and history is not
so much its content, but its perspective: what distinguishes memory from its historical
analogue is its first-person character. If the goal of history is that it be written in the
third person, memory is always written in the first person. Just as an individual memory
is my story, or perhaps it is yours, a collective memory is our story, or perhaps it is
theirs. In each case, the personal pronoun designates the individual or group who
finds its identity in terms of that memory.
We shall see in a moment that this suggestion is too simple. But it does capture
something important. The narratives of memory always have a certain teleological
character. In it crudest form, as in the national histories we were taught as school,
a collective memory provides a story of the nations struggles and eventual triumph.
However, even in more sophisticated forms, it is the travails of the nation its failures as
well as triumphs that are their inevitable centre of gravity. The first-person character
is not merely epistemological; it is also normative: it explains why collective memory
sets the moral agenda of the present. In this respect, the parallel with individual
memory is very close. It is because I did or failed to do certain things in the past, that
I now have a responsibility to act in certain ways now. So too with collective memory.
It is because certain things were done or not done in the name of the group that its
present members, the we who make up the group, now have a responsibility to do
certain things perhaps to carry out the commitments made in the past, or perhaps to
compensate for wrongs. Of course, in neither case are the responsibilities absolute.
They may be overridden by other and more urgent commitments. Or it may also be
that there are strong moral reasons why one should disassociate oneself from projects
and policies of ones predecessor self or group. However, even or perhaps especially
in these cases, the effects of these policies and projects remain on ones current moral
agenda (cp. Booth, 2006: 4953).
This suggests another contrast with history. History deals with the past. Indeed, as
Bernard Williams argued, the emergence of history as a discipline is associated with
a conception of time as an indefinitely extended temporal order in which every event
has a place:
Of any two real events in the past, it must be the case either that one of them
happened before the other, or that they happened at the same time. (Williams,
2002: 162)
A corollary of this strictly realist view of time is that it is the task of history to describe,
explain and understand what is no longer present. The concern of memory is also with
the past that is why it is always vulnerable to historical inquiry and research. John
Campbell has recently argued (Campbell, 1997) that autobiographical memory presupposes a conception of time that is strictly linear: every remembered event exists in
the same temporal sequence. There seems no reason why this argument should not be
extended to the autobiographical memory that is collective memory. If so, this provides sufficient reason to reject some of the more enthusiastic claims about memory, for
example, Pierre Noras assertion that as opposed to history, which is representation of
the past, memory is a bond tying us to the eternal present (Nora, 1989: 8). However,

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something of Noras claim can be retained. It is the project of memory to understand

the past as a source of present responsibilities. In memory, we reach into the past, and
make that past a presence in our current moral or political agenda (cp. Booth 2006:
Chs 2 and 4). If I make a promise, I have the responsibility to remember it, and to carry it
out at the appropriate time. The promise is past, but the responsibility remains. Though
memory is concerned with past events, it is especially concerned with those aspects of
the past that remain unfinished business. It is not just the fact that an act of memory (or
of commemoration, remembrance) of necessity takes place in the present; it is also the
case that the event or person remembered is also brought into the present. The time
of memory is not merely the rigid, determinate structure that Williams identified as
historical time; it is also, in Walter Benjamins words, time filled by the presence of the
now; it is time blasted out of the continuum of history (Benjamin, 1968: 2523). For
memory, an event only becomes past when the responsibilities associated with it have
been satisfied. Making an event past is always a project; never a given.
My reference to Walter Benjamin at this point is not quite kosher. For Benjamin
was drawing a distinction, not between memory and history, but between two conceptions of history, one he attributes (implausibly) to historical materialism, and the
other to reformist and ultimately reactionary social democracy. However, the project of
historical materialism as Benjamin conceived it is not (or not just) to provide a scientific
understanding of history, nor to point towards an inevitable and glorious future; it is
rather to provide the memory of the oppressed class. The working class will be moved
to action, Benjamin argues, not by fantasies of an inevitable progress towards an ideal
future, but by memories of past oppression by the image of enslaved ancestors
rather than that of liberated grandchildren (1968: 253).9 This brings out into the
open the extent to which the distinction between memory and history is not nearly as
straightforward as I have been pretending. Whether or not the materialist conception
of history was, or should have been, in the business of providing a common memory
for the working class, it is certainly true that much perhaps even most history is
engaged in the task of collective memory. The great expansion in the volume and
prestige of academic history occurred in the 19th century, especially in Germany, and
much of it was self-consciously engaged in the task of nation building. It was addressed to current members of the nation, and was designed to inform them of their
historical heritage. The nation the we that was both addressed and constructed
was the centre of gravity of the discourse; and more often than not, its history was
presented as the emergence, struggles and ultimate triumph of the nation. The moral
agenda for the present is the responsibility to continue and complete the struggles. As
I have already mentioned, national histories of this kind still constitute the main syllabus
of schools in most countries.
Pierre Nora argues that the role of history in providing a national memory is essentially unstable. At best, the national histories that emerged in the 19th century were a
substitute for true memory, the genuine memories of non-literate peasant societies,
where every gesture is experienced as the ritual repetition of a timeless practice in a
primordial identification of act and meaning (Nora, 1989: 8) Although history celebrated the nation, it also had an essential critical moment, and the nation could not

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remain its unchallenged center of gravity. Historians could not but think outside the
nation, that is, to find other objects:
But in disclaiming its national identity, it [history] also abandoned its claim to bearing
coherent meaning and consequently lost its pedagogical authority to transmit
values No longer a cause, the nation has become a given; history is now a social
science, memory a purely private phenomenon. The memory-nation was thus the
last incarnation of the unification of memory and history. (Nora, 1989: 11)
Noras story is a touch too dramatic. True memory functions as a nostalgic myth, not a
historical category. And there is little doubt that the memory-nation remains a strong
presence in the discipline of history. Still, Nora is right to point to a tension within historical practice. History has an academic existence: it wears the guise of disinterested
scholarship, treats the nation as just another historical contingency, and investigates
other social formation (classes, mentalities, geographical areas, etc.) that have equal
or greater historical interest. But it also has a public existence, in which it is at the
service of various projects to transform or preserve the nations understanding of itself:
it speaks to and for our country. In its academic existence, it often strives to speak in
the third person and to achieve a certain value neutrality. In its public role, however, it
adopts the first person, and cannot escape the values and commitments implicit in this
identification.
The ambivalence, and perhaps tension between these two perspectives is illustrated
in the debate between Jrgen Habermas and conservative German historians a few
years ago the so-called Historians Debate (see Habermas, 1989: Sections 9, 10; for
an overview, see Maier, 1988). Of course, the debate was not just about history. If it
were, it would be hard to explain the heat and animosity that it generated. It was about
German history, or as I am using the term German memory. The debate was sparked
off by a paper by Ernst Nolte (1985) in which he argued that it was time to reconsider
the Holocaust, especially in the light of the fact that it was only one of many instances
of mass murder that had occurred in the 20th century. In one sense, Noltes argument
might seem uncontroversial: historical comparisons of the kind that he recommended
must be a legitimate part of historical methodology (whatever one thinks of his claim
that the so-called annihilation of the Jews during the Third Reich was a reaction or a
distorted copy [of Stalinist atrocities] and not a first act or original). In terms of disciplinary practice, there is no reason to suppose that a historian should not seek to
understand the Holocaust by comparing it with other 20th-century horrors the mass
murders in Turkey, the Soviet Union, Cambodia, Rwanda, and so on in order better
to understand their different etiologies. Relativization in this sense plays an essential
role in historical inquiry. But Noltes project was not one of disinterested history. He
was concerned to argue that it was time for Germans to reconnect with their national
traditions and to return to a more normal conception of national identity. Nolte was
speaking on behalf of and to his fellow Germans; that is to say, his discourse was not
(or not just) history, but memory. For this audience and for this discourse, the issue
of relativization takes on a different meaning. The Holocaust was a crime committed
by and in the name of the German people. To relativize the Holocaust as part of an

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argument about the meaning of German national identity is to seek to evade the
special responsibilities that Germans have to deal with that awful event. This is not a
case of history taking second place to memory. On the contrary, critical history with
respect to the Holocaust or any other aspect of a nations past must play a key role in
transforming, expanding and correcting a nations memory. But the role of memory is
to locate aspects of the past that should remain a nations moral agenda. Comparison
may play a role here too. But in the final analysis, the comparability of the Holocaust
with other moral atrocities is only marginally relevant to the issue of German collective
memory. Of course, memory is concerned with historical truth; but it is truth in the
service of responsibility.

THE BURDENS OF THE PAST

Often enough, there are events in our own lives that we would rather forget. So too
there are events in the lives of the communities to which we belong that we would
rather not have to think about. Why not just forget? Do we have a responsibility to
remember the past? Why?
In the case of individuals, the answer is not difficult. Remembering what I did in the
past is a way of recognizing that it is I now who bears the burden or privilege of that
deed. It is the socially recognized mode in which past responsibilities are transmitted
to the present. Having the right to make promises is just a small aspect of the forms of
social life which having this kind of memory makes possible. A very similar answer can
be provided in the case of collective memory. Institutions, such as the state, the university, the family, and so on, have an existence through time, so it is important that
there be ways in which commitments made by the institution at one time are carried
at another time. Institutions, like humans, must acquire the right to make promises. In
some cases, for example, corporate bodies, legal requirements on office holders may
be sufficient. But in less tightly structured groups or those that require a high level of
commitment on the part of their members, some level of identification with the group
and its history is required. The formation of group memories is part of this process.
Ultimately, the justification of these memories and of the responsibilities they involve
must rest on the justification of the groups themselves.10
There remains the question of the individual. Why should a person value an identity
that will place burdens on him or her that, in most cases, he or she will have done
nothing to incur? Once again, the parallel between individual and group memory is
important. One might equally ask of a given individual why he or she should accept
responsibilities incurred by a previous self. Part of the answer here see Nietzsche
(1995) is that accepting these responsibilities provides entry into a form of life that is
richer, deeper and more interesting than its alternative. It is because I have the kind of
consciousness that places me in the past and also in the future, that a certain range of
emotions and commitments become possible; I can have deeper and more satisfying
relations with others than is possible for a being who does not have that kind of consciousness. But a price for entry into this form of life is that one acquires the burden

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of the past, responsibilities that remain in the present. So too with collective identity
and its associated memories. These provide the individual with access to emotions and
powers that are not otherwise available. In the nation, one becomes part of a story
that is much more exciting than anything otherwise available, and a participant in
achievements immeasurably greater than what is possible for the individual. Again,
there are costs. It may be that we find ourselves having to make considerable sacrifices
in order to appropriately respond to harms and wrong-doing that we, as individuals,
had nothing to do with, but accrue to us because of membership of a group in whose
name these harms and wrong-doing were committed. Perhaps it will not be clear to
the modern self-centered individual that the benefits outweigh the costs. However, for
most of us, acquiring the social memories that carry these costs and benefits is not a
matter of choice.

Acknowledgements
My thanks to Sue Campbell, Jeff Blustein, John Kleinig, John Sutton and the readers of Memory
Studies for comments on earlier drafts.

Notes
1 A few notable examples: Assmann (1997, 2006), Young (2000), Douglas (2001), Rv (2005),
Booth (2006).
2 While I believe my usage is broadly in agreement with Assmanns, I do not address his work
directly here. I plan to do so in the near future.
3 Jonathon Crewe (1999: 176) provides a striking example of the evasion of this question.
He writes that the distinction between cultural memory and history has proved difficult to
sustain because of significant resemblance, overlap, and intersection and concedes that
without that distinction the concept of cultural memory remains vacuous and ill-defined.
Despite the fact that he has raised the problem in such trenchant terms, Crewe simply
ignores it in order to concentrate on the relation between literature and cultural memory.
4 I here touch lightly on the extended mind theory developed by Andy Clark and others
(see Clark and Chalmers, 1998, and developments, responses to critics, etc., available at
http://www.philosophy.ed.ac.uk/staff/clark/publications.html). Clark argues that insofar
as external objects, e.g. the entry of the telephone number on the back of my hand or
in my Palm Pilot play precisely the same role as an internal object, e.g. a visual image of
the appropriate numerals, then for that reason they must also be counted as mental. An
implication of this view is, as John Sutton (2008) puts it, that the realm of the mental can
spread across the physical, social and cultural environments as well as bodies and brains.
If this is correct, the belief that there is clear divide between individual and social memory
involves a misconception of the nature of mind.
5 It may be that some events put a special burden on those who observe them, and that their
testimony provides a special insight into the nature of the event witnessed. However, I see
little point in Avishai Margalits attempt to single out a special category of moral witnesses.
Every witness has responsibilities and privileges with respect to the events witnessed, and
we should be wary of constructing a privileged category of those whose accounts are
attuned to our particular moral sensibilities. For me, Curzio Malaparte, whom Margalit

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10

excludes from the category, was an exemplary witness of the moral vacuum at the heart
of the Third Reich, even if his sardonic and cynical, not to say self-serving and unreliable,
account was not to Margalits liking. See Margalit (2002): Ch. 4, especially p. 151, and
Malaparte (2005).
My thanks to one of the readers for criticism of my original formulation here, though I
am not sure that I have met all his or her worries. There must be relevant psychological
literature on the different kinds of emotional memory, but most that I have seen is either
concerned with extreme cases (e.g. traumatic memories) or with the effects of emotions on
cognitive memory (see, for example, Bourtchouladze 2002; McGaugh 2003), not with the
kind of memory involved in the retention of emotions.
As Roland Barthes (1973: 151) observed: Myth deprives the object of which it speaks of
all History. It is instructive to consider the issues discussed here in the light of Bernard
Williams account (Williams 2002: Ch. 7) of the emergence of historical time in (as he
argues) Thucydides. Williams argues that history involves a linear concept of time, and
this means that stories about, e.g. gods, must either meet historical standards of truth or
leave the domain altogether: Once the structure of historical time is in place, the gods will
eventually bow out. Of course, they do not disappear altogether, because the stories about
them become fully acknowledged myth, and in myth they have a hold on us, but myth is
not a time or a place (2002: 168).
Margalit writes: Consider the Jews shared memory of their exodus from Egypt. Even if it is
true that we have such a memory, it does not follow that that dramatic event ever occurred
(2002: 59). Of course it does not follow from the fact that the Jewish people have a
collective memory of an event that it actually occurred (still less, that it occurred in the form
that it is remembered). However, it does follow that they are as a group committed to
the claim that it occurred. Of course, the story may change its status, and become a kind of
foundational myth. It may be that Margalit was influenced by the fascinating account of the
ways in which Moses has been remembered though the ages provided in Assmann (1997),
especially his claim that Moses is a figure of memory, but not of history (1997: 2).
Benjamins conception of historical materialism was no doubt influenced by Jewish tradition:
We know that the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future. The Torah and the
prayers instructed them in remembrance, however (1968: 255).
This cannot be the whole story, however. One might, like Habermas, be skeptical of the
value of the German nation, and yet accept that one has responsibilities that arise from
ones membership. This issue, and the tensions it creates in Habermass work, goes to the
heart of the theory of constitutional patriotism. For discussion, see Markell (2000), Booth
(2006), Poole (2008).

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ROSS POOLE is the author of Morality and Modernity (Routledge, 1991) and Nation
and Identity (Routledge, 1999). He is currently working on a book entitled Past
Justice. He was for many years Head of the Philosophy Department of Macquarie
University, Sydney, and remains an Adjunct Professor there. He now teaches in
the Departments of Political Science and Philosophy at the New School for Social
Research in New York City. Address: Department of Political Science,
New School for Social Research, 79 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10003, USA.
Email: pooler@newschool.edu

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