Nostalgia and Ideology

While this brief chronology of nostalgia evidences the vicissitudes of medical and social science, the shaping of national ideology through sense, myth, and a particular conception of human nature is clearly nothing new. For Thomas Hobbes, man’s nature directed him towards violent competition, against both one another and his natural environment, thus leading him to subject himself to the will of the sovereign in exchange for protection from violent death. Adam Smith’s work too hinged on a particular conception of human nature, but rather on the primitivist myths espoused in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. While its realist stylings led many contemporary readers to interpret the text as travelogue, its realisation as fiction did nothing to dispel the myths of Crusoe as man in his true mould, as homo-economicus. Man in this mould is of course not man in general. By counterposing Crusoe to the ‘savages’ he encounters, Defoe sought to frame his protagonist’s endeavours as reflective of the ‘natural’ impulses and logics of English colonists. Human nature here is again hinging on an implied binary between the civilised, entrepreneurial English man, and the savages of a fictionalised South America. It is this fiction that Karl Marx sought to reframe in Capital, seeking to reveal the political underpinnings of Smith’s use, alongside David Ricardo, of the individualist entrepreneur as paradigmatic of man’s true nature. 

Marx however does not take issue with the use of a fiction in the exposition of a political theory. He rather reframes the common reading of Crusoe a la Smith, Ricardo, and acolytes, as simply the fictional portrayal of a core tenet of capitalism: the permeation of economy into all social relations. Not only does Defoe implicitly frame a fictional barter economy as the origin of capitalism, thus normalising man’s propensity for economic exchange. He in fact weaves into Crusoe’s thought the calculative mores of a contemporary entrepreneur, one who understands the world through its exchange rather than its use values. In this way, for Marx, Robinson Crusoe remains an object of valid interpretation, however not as a document of historical veracity. Defoe’s work is a harbinger of Britain’s colonial endeavours, a fable that attempts to evidence the persevering, and benevolent, British spirit and thus attempts to legitimise any past or future imperial enterprise. Where Marx’s reading of Defoe understands his work as historical artefact, expressive of a context through the ideologies embedded in its literature, its use in Smith or Ricardo cannot rise to this level of reflection when considering it an authentic portrayal of man’s nature. For all, however, the power of fiction to construct ideology remains unquestioned. 

It comes as no surprise then that in his lecture The Secular Messiah, literary critic George Steiner levies a similar accusation at Marx himself.⁴ In the malaise of a post-religious world, Steiner finds in Marx—alongside Freud and Claude-Levi Strauss—a latent tendency toward prophecy and pseudo-religious mythologising that they themselves claim to have disavowed. Despite professing it as the opium of the masses, the void left in Marx’s work by the absence of religion Steiner found filled by two seemingly contradictory phenomena. The first, a veneration of the culture and society of Ancient Greece. The second, his conceptualisation of the fall of (a strikingly Crusoean) man; his alienation by the permeation of money into all social relations. 

Between his abstraction of unalienated man, and his voguish understanding of Ancient Greece as the height of political culture, Marx drew on cultural depictions, images, and techniques from the past as a means to project his imagined future.⁵ In this way, the two function in parallel: Ancient Greece holds for Marx a series of ethical and political ideals (slavery notwithstanding); the alienated homo-economicus of Smith’s Robinson Crusoe only shows how far he has fallen. Like Defoe’s imaginary Englishman, Marx’s longing for Ancient Greece cannot severe the tie between nation, nostalgia, and the construction of a political imaginary.

The elements that Steiner finds present in the unacknowledged mythologies of Marxism—cultural or political idolatry, a literary canon, seemingly teleological predictions of the future—naturally bore themselves out further across the twentieth century, both in its heritage and its opposition. If myth-making is not simply inevitable, but inherent, in the constitution of political ideology, rather than concerning ourselves with veracity—which itself opens up a wormhole of subjective interpretations—we must instead brace this discussion in terms of efficacy. For Walter Benjamin, “every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.”⁶ He saw in the early twentieth-century struggle against fascism a new definition of the role of the historian. For the materialist historian, history must be unearthed and interpreted as a means to draw from the annals of the past images, tools, and sensations that can work to reframe our constitution as historic subjects within and beyond the notion of the nation-state. If nostalgia—in its social mode—both emerges from and is an expression of the idiosyncratic problems of modernity, particularly in the constitution of identity, claims to objective truth wither away, lending agency to all those who seek to use history as a tool, as a political weapon. Against the idlers of bourgeois history that Nietzsche identifies, a true and proper model of historical interpretation is the prerequisite for political action.

4 George Steiner, Nostalgia for the Absolute (Toronto: CBC Enterprises, 1974).
5 It is well understood, and as Marx would have known, that Athens in its prime had a slave to citizen population of 2 or 3 to 1.

6 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations (New York: Random House, 1969), 255.

Make Nostalgia Great Again

Benjamin’s moment, of course, was defined by the constitution of historic propaganda which saw both National Socialist and Bolshevik reframings of their respective cultural and historical pasts. Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf acknowledged the necessity of a simplistic, lucid framing of propaganda as the only tool by which to address the new body politic of modernity, while Soviet Constructivists sought entirely new tools—particularly within the arts—through which to project the state’s self-understanding as a historical entity. It is not hard to read the parallels of this moment to our own, in which political discourse has been sanded down into the kernels of abstract significations, and its central tools of dissemination being those of an ever-intensifying media-scape of partisan news broadcasts, social media, hats, and bumper stickers.

The phrase that emblematises the last 5 years of U.S. politics, ‘Make America Great Again’, is itself an empty signifier. It calls instead toward an abstracted, undefined, infinitely interpretable image of the halcyon days of American freedom: a nostalgic imaginary whose potency grows as the object of longing becomes less clearly defined.

Perhaps most fittingly, the phrase was not new. As is well known, it was lifted from Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign, only to be used again by Bill Clinton in 1992: a Greatness so abstract and undefined that both Republicans and Democrats can ride its wave to electoral victory, despite supposedly embodying fundamentally different political values. For Reagan, the actor, America was a fiction to be performed; an imagined state, cleansed of its historic brutality, a vessel for the emblematisation of a series of ambiguous ideals. The multifaceted experience of history here becomes flattened out into a singular triumphalist perspective, framing the nation-state as the only means to mete out justice and maintain control of the global political apparatus, and the only vehicle around which to rally in the construction of political ideals.

Across the Atlantic, Reagan’s partner in crime, Margaret Thatcher, used her own abstracted definition of Greatness rather to imagine—in lieu of any deeper points of historical reference—Victorian Britain as the apex of cultural, moral, and social values. Against the oppressive arm of the state, the ‘greatness’ Thatcher found in Victorian Britain was a consequence of individual industriousness and para-state systems of welfare and support. Thatcher’s nostalgia for a Victorian Britain—which she champions in the same breath as acknowledging the deep social inequality and poverty that defined the late eighteenth century—rather serves as an anti-state vehicle. By harkening back to a Britain made powerful by a global network of colonial and imperial power, while simultaneously ignoring this fact, Thatcher purports an imaginary of England as a moralistic, benevolent, and fundamentally powerful nation. Like Adam Smith’s understanding of homo economicus, Thatcher imagined a world of self-sufficient individuals, acting in their own rational self-interest, as an objective element of a historical past. This is, of course, to totally misrecognise the role of the state in Victorian Britain, which provided the legislative and economic support that allowed for the colonisation of 25% of the world’s population. This abstract subject of history—and its relationship to the state—ossified into a system of political values, values used to justify the rolling back of the state, the destruction of the post-war consensus, and the dissolution of hard-earned welfare provisions and again historical imagination materialized in its present.

Then and Now

Under the cyclical movement of history, we can see clearly these conditions remerging. Parallel with the particularly American brand of nostalgia that fuelled Trump’s campaign of Greatness, the last 10 years of British parliamentary politics can be understood to have the same Thatcherite-Reaganist reverie for an imagined nation. The appointment of George Osborne, former Conservative chancellor of the exchequer, as director of the British Museum is perhaps the most patent cultural expression of this.

In Osborne’s appointment, the constitution of history is recognised as integral in providing a legitimising backdrop for the contemporary Conservative Party’s ideals. As this nostalgia for a Britain past becomes further entrenched in its institutions, the position of the state to reproduce this mythologised past continues to develop momentum. While Osborne’s appointment may be more symbolic than practical, it is at the very least emblematic of the understanding of the importance of holding authority over the definition of one’s political and cultural heritage. As Benjamin states, Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate.

From its inception, even as a medical condition, nostalgia emerged as a politicised phenomenon. In binding it to a space, notably to that of an imagined homeland, rather than a specific body, nostalgia was made geo-politically efficacious. As its medical definition dissolved, its social power rose.

We must recognise then, against moralising, that political myth is not simply a tool in the battle for legitimacy. Political myth is the tool by which both hearts and minds are captured, and its binding to the conceptualisation of the nation-state and its civil subject has proven efficacious. Against any claims to a post-truth age, in this mode, history provides no evidence to be presented in a debate of veracity, but rather a framework in which to read events through a political lens. Benjamin’s enemies are those with control over the framing of history, which of course is always written by its victors, the holders of state (and thus discursive) power. It is the function of history to intervene in these debates, to produce myths and imaginaries beyond their binding to the nation-state. We must maintain, construct, and distribute images of the past in which we can find the agency of those who would lead us to a less barbarous future.