Ideology versus Collective Historical Memory? To the History of Discourse

Collective perceptions of the historical past and their assessment are an integral part of any culture. By transmitting historical experience from generation to generation, collective historical memory is the basis for the formation and preservation of national identity, especially in times of serious social upheavals and transformations. The study of collective historical memory is the focus of modern social and humanitarian knowledge. Despite the fact that the concept “collective historical memory” has thoroughly entered the socio-philosophical and political discourse in the second half of the twentieth century, one can find quite a lot of uncertainties and disagreements related to its content and use. In modern socio-philosophical discourse, there is a skeptical attitude to its use. Some researchers declare this concept a metaphor, a fiction, a meaningless construction, and claim that the concept of collective historical memory has replaced the concept “ideology”. According to the author, the concept “collective historical memory” has its own semantic content and essential features, and can be used as an independent concept. As a semantic concept, it does not replace the concept “ideology”, it has theoretical and heuristic value. Collective historical memory is the ability of social groups and the nation as a whole to symbolically reconstruct collectively significant historical events in the collective memorization and oblivion, giving them a certain value-based interpretation. According to the author, collective historical memory as a living dynamic system exists according to its own laws, different from individual memory. The most unique laws that require philosophical reflection are: 1) the “delayed memory” syndrome; 2) the conventionality of memories; 3) the specific mechanism of memory distortion; 4) the communicative and generational nature of collective historical memory. An important aspect of understanding collective historical memory should be the problem of manipulation of memory by official ideology, as well as the problem of contradictions and conflicts between memory preserved in families and small social groups and official (public) memory. According to the author, the significant differences between collective historical memory and ideology allow us to show that there was no substitution of concepts in modern discourse, which is explained by the paradigm shift from deideologization to collective memory.

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