Two Ways of Presenting the Past, or How Worldview and Behavioral Patterns Transform History Into Ideology

Abstract

The article examines the phenomenon of “sponsored history,” understood as a representation of the past shaped by political, social, or ideological interests and distinguished from scholarly history by its reliance on emotional, dramatic, symbolic, and mythical modes of presentation. The article asks why such representations, despite their departure from factual historiography, can acquire considerable psychological and social influence. It argues that the effectiveness of sponsored history cannot be explained solely by its manipulation of historical facts. Rather, its viability derives from its capacity to activate dimensions of the past that are preserved through experience, memory, emotion, and recurrent patterns of human perception and behavior. To develop this argument, the article employs an operational distinction between factual and experiential presentations of the past and, correspondingly, between its substantive and formal dimensions. Drawing on Ortega y Gasset, Collingwood, Mead, Waters, Cassirer, Eliade, and, most extensively, Jung, it proposes that scholarly history primarily articulates the unique and contingent content of past events, whereas sponsored history can reactivate recurrent psychological forms and invest them with particular historical content. In this sense, ideology gives emotionally and symbolically charged representations of the past renewed concrete meaning, helping explain their enduring capacity for identification and mobilization.