2


Inventing Traditions

Eric Hobsbawm, Terence Ranger


Nothing appears more ancient, and linked to an immemorial past, than the pageantry which surrounds
British monarchy in its public ceremonial manifestations. Yet, as a chapter in this book
establishes, in its modern form it is the product of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
‘Traditions’ which appear or claim to be old are often quite recent in origin and sometimes
invented. Anyone familiar with the colleges of ancient British universities will be able to think
of the institution of such ‘traditions’ on a local scale, though some - like the annual Festival of
Nine Lessons and Carols in the chapel of King’s College, Cambridge on Christmas Eve - may become
generalized through the modern mass medium of radio. This observation formed the starting-point of
a conference organized by the historical journal Past & Present, which in turn forms the basis of
the present book.

The term ‘invented tradition’ is used in a broad, but not imprecise sense. It includes both
‘traditions’ actually invented, constructed and formally instituted and those emerging in a less
easily traceable manner within a brief and dateable period - a matter of a few years perhaps - and
establishing themselves with great rapidity. The royal Christmas broadcast in Britain (instituted
in 1932) is an example of the first; the appearance and development of the practices associated
with the Cup Final in British Association Football, of the second. It is evident that not all of
them are equally permanent, but it is their appearance and establishment rather than their chances
of survival which are our primary concern.

‘Invented tradition’ is taken to mean a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly
accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms
of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past. In fact, where
possible, they normally attempt to establish continuity with a suitable historic past. A striking
example is the deliberate choice of a Gothic style for the nineteenth-century rebuilding of the
British parliament, and the equally deliberate decision after World War II to rebuild the
parliamentary chamber on exactly the same basic plan as before. The historic past into which the
new tradition is inserted need not be lengthy, stretching back into the assumed mists of time.
Revolutions and ‘progressive movements’ which break with the past, by definition, have their own
relevant past, though it may be cut off at a certain date, such as 1789. However, insofar as there
is such reference to a historic past, the peculiarity of ‘invented’ traditions is that the
continuity with it is largely factitious. In short, they are responses to novel situations which
take the form of reference to old situations, or which establish their own past by quasi-obligatory
repetition. It is the contrast between the constant change and innovation of the modern world and
the attempt to structure at least some parts of social life within it as unchanging and invariant,
that makes the ‘invention of tradition’ so interesting for historians of the past two centuries.

‘Tradition’ in this sense must be distinguished clearly from ‘custom’ which dominates so-called
‘traditional’ societies. The object and characteristic of ‘traditions’, including invented ones, is
invariance. The past, real or invented, to which they refer imposes fixed (normally formalized)
practices, such as repetition. ‘Custom’ in traditional societies has the double function of motor
and fly-wheel. It does not preclude innovation and change up to a point, though evidently the
requirement that it must appear compatible or even identical with precedent imposes substantial
limitations on it. What it does is to give any desired change (or resistance to innovation) the
sanction of precedent, social continuity and natural law as expressed in history. Students of
peasant movements know that a village’s claim to some common land or right ‘by custom from time
immemorial’ often expresses not a historical fact, but the balance of forces in the constant
struggle of village against lords or against other villages. Students of the British labour
movement know that ‘the custom of the trade’ or of the shop may represent not ancient tradition,
but whatever right the workers have established in practice, however recently, and which they now
attempt to extend or defend by giving it the sanction of perpetuity. ‘Custom’ cannot afford to be
invariant, because even in ‘traditional’ societies life is not so. Customary or common law still
shows this combination of flexibility in substance and formal adherence to precedent. The
difference between ‘tradition’ and ‘custom’ in our sense is indeed well illustrated here. ‘Custom’
is what judges do; ‘tradition’ (in this instance invented tradition) is the wig, robe and other
formal paraphernalia and ritualized practices surrounding their substantial action. The decline of
‘custom’ inevitably changes the ‘tradition’ with which it is habitually intertwined.

A second, less important, distinction that must be made is between ‘tradition’ in our sense and
convention or routine, which has no significant ritual or symbolic function as such, though it may
acquire it incidentally. It is evident that any social practice that needs to be carried out
repeatedly will tend, for convenience and efficiency, to develop a set of such conventions and
routines, which may be de facto or de jure formalized for the purposes of imparting the practice to
new practitioners. This applies to unprecedented practices (such as the work of an aircraft pilot)
as much as to long-familiar ones. Societies since the industrial revolution have naturally been
obliged to invent, institute or develop new networks of such convention or routine more frequently
than previous ones. Insofar as they function best when turned into habit, automatic procedure or
even reflex action, they require invariance, which may get in the way of the other necessary
requirement of practice, the capacity to deal with unforeseen or inhabitual contingencies. This is
a well-known weakness of routinization or bureaucratization, particularly at the subaltern levels
where invariant performance is generally considered the most efficient.

Such networks of convention and routine are not ‘invented traditions’ since their functions, and
therefore their justifications, are technical rather than ideological (in Marxian terms they belong
to ‘base’ rather than ‘superstructure’). They are designed to facilitate readily definable
practical operations, and are readily modified or abandoned to meet changing practical needs,
always allowing for the inertia which any practice acquires with time and the emotional resistance
to any innovation by people who have become attached to it. The same applies to the recognized
‘rules’ of games or other patterns of social interaction, where these exist, or to any other
pragmatically based norms. Where these exist in combination with ‘tradition’, the difference is
readily observable. Wearing hard hats when riding makes practical sense, like wearing crash helmets
for motor-cyclists or steel helmets for soldiers; wearing a particular type of hard hat in
combination with hunting pink makes an entirely different kind of sense. If this were not so, it
would be as easy to change the ‘traditional’ costume of fox-hunters as it is to substitute a
differently shaped helmet in armies - rather conservative institutions - if it can be shown to
provide more effective protection. Indeed, it may be suggested that ‘traditions’ and pragmatic
conventions or routines are inversely related. ‘Tradition’ shows weakness when, as among liberal
Jews, dietary prohibitions are justified pragmatically, as by arguing that the ancient Hebrews
banned pork on grounds of hygiene. Conversely, objects or practices are liberated for full symbolic
and ritual use when no longer fettered by practical use. The spurs of Cavalry officers’ dress
uniforms are more important for ‘tradition’ when there are no horses, the umbrellas of Guards
officers in civilian dress lose their significance when not carried tightly furled (that is,
useless), the wigs of lawyers could hardly acquire their modern significance until other people
stopped wearing wigs.

Inventing traditions, it is assumed here, is essentially a process of formalization and
ritualization, characterized by reference to the past, if only by imposing repetition. The actual
process of creating such ritual and symbolic complexes has not been adequately studied by
historians. Much of it is still rather obscure. It is presumably most clearly exemplified where a
‘tradition’ is deliberately invented and constructed by a single initiator, as for the Boy Scouts
by Baden-Powell. Perhaps it is almost as easily traced in the case of officially instituted and
planned ceremonials, since they are likely to be well documented, as in the case of the
construction of Nazi symbolism and the Nuremberg party rallies. It is probably most difficult to
trace where such traditions are partly invented, partly evolved in private groups (where the
process is less likely to be bureaucratically recorded), or informally over a period of time as,
say, in parliament and the legal profession. The difficulty is not only one of sources but also of
techniques, though there are available both esoteric disciplines specializing in symbolism and
ritual, such as heraldry and the study of liturgy, as well as Warburgian historic disciplines for
the study of such subjects. Unfortunately neither are usually familiar to historians of the
industrial era.

There is probably no time and place with which historians are concerned which has not seen the
‘invention’ of tradition in this sense. However, we should expect it to occur more frequently when
a rapid transformation of society weakens or destroys the social patterns for which ‘old’
traditions had been designed, producing new ones to which they were not applicable, or when such
old traditions and their institutional carriers and promulgators no longer prove sufficiently
adaptable and flexible, or are otherwise eliminated: in short, when there are sufficiently large
and rapid changes on the demand or the supply side. Such changes have been particularly significant
in the past 200 years, and it is therefore reasonable to expect these instant formalizations of new
traditions to cluster during this period. This implies, incidentally, against both
nineteenth-century liberalism and more recent ‘modernization’ theory that such formalizations are
not confined to so-called ‘traditional’ societies, but also have their place, in one form or
another, in ‘modern’ ones. Broadly speaking this is so, but one must beware of making the further
assumptions, firstly that older forms of community and authority structure, and consequently the
traditions associated with them, were unadaptable and became rapidly unviable, and secondly that
‘new’ traditions simply resulted from the inability to use or adapt old ones.

Adaptation took place for old uses in new conditions and by using old models for new purposes. Old
institutions with established functions, references to the past and ritual idioms and practices
might need to adapt in this way: the Catholic Church faced with new political and ideological
challenges and major changes in the composition of the faithful (such as the notable feminization
both of lay piety and of clerical personnel);[1] professional armies faced with conscription;
ancient institutions such as law-courts now operating in a changed context and sometimes with
changed functions in new contexts. So were institutions enjoying nominal continuity, but in fact
turning into something very very different, such as universities. Thus Bahnson[2] has analysed the
sudden decline, after 1848, of the traditional practice of mass student exodus from German
universities (for reasons of conflict or demonstration) in terms of the changed academic character
of universities, the rising age of the student population, its embourgeoisement which diminished
town/gown tensions and student riotousness, the new institution of free mobility between
universities, the consequent change in student associations and other factors.[3] In all such cases
novelty is no less novel for being able to dress up easily as antiquity.

More interesting, from our point of view, is the use of ancient materials to construct invented
traditions of a novel type for quite novel purposes. A large store of such materials is accumulated
in the past of any society, and an elaborate language of symbolic practice and communication is
always available. Sometimes new traditions could be readily grafted on old ones, sometimes they
could be devised by borrowing from the well-supplied warehouses of official ritual, symbolism and
moral exhortation - religion and princely pomp, folklore and freemasonry (itself an earlier
invented tradition of great symbolic force). Thus the development of Swiss nationalism, concomitant
with the formation of the modern federal state in the nineteenth century, has been brilliantly
studied by Rudolf Braun,[4]^ who has the advantage of training in a discipline (‘Volkskunde’) which
lends itself to such studies, and in a country where its modernization has not been set back by
association with Nazi abuses. Existing customary traditional practices - folksong, physical
contests, marksmanship - were modified, ritualized and institutionalized for the new national
purposes. Traditional folksongs were supplemented by new songs in the same idiom, often composed by
schoolmasters, transferred to a choral repertoire whose content was patriotic-progressive (‘Nation,
Nation, wie voll klingt der Ton’), though it also embodied ritually powerful elements from
religious hymnology. (The formation of such new song-repertoires, especially for schools, is well
worth study.) The statutes of the Federal Song Festival - are we not reminded of the eisteddfodau?
- declare its object to be ‘the development and improvement of the people’s singing, the awakening
of more elevated sentiments for God, Freedom and Country, union and fraternization of the friends
of Art and the Fatherland’. (The word ‘improvement’ introduces the characteristic note of
nineteenth-century progress.)

A powerful ritual complex formed round these occasions: festival pavilions, structures for the
display of flags, temples for offerings, processions, bell-ringing, tableaux, gun-salutes,
government delegations in honour of the festival, dinners, toasts and oratory. Old materials were
again adapted for this:


The echoes of baroque forms of celebration, display and pomp are unmistakable in this new festival
architecture, And as, in the baroque celebration, state and church merge on a higher plane, so an
alloy of religious and patriotic elements emerges from these new forms of choral, shooting and
gymnastic activity.[5]^

^

How far new traditions can thus use old materials, how far they may be forced to invent new
languages or devices, or extend the old symbolic vocabulary beyond its established limits, cannot
be discussed here. It is clear that plenty of political institutions, ideological movements and
groups - not least in nationalism - were so unprecedented that even historic continuity had to be
invented, for example by creating an ancient past beyond effective historical continuity, either by
semi-fiction (Boadicea, Vercingetorix, Arminius the Cheruscan) or by forgery (Ossian, the Czech
medieval manuscripts). It is also clear that entirely new symbols and devices came into existence
as part of national movements and states, such as the national anthem (of which the British in 1740
seems to be the earliest), the national flag (still largely a variation on the French revolutionary
tricolour, evolved 1790-4), or the personification of ‘the nation’ in symbol or image, either
official, as with Marianne and Germania, or unofficial, as in the cartoon stereotypes of John Bull,
the lean Yankee Uncle Sam and the ‘German Michel’.

Nor should we overlook the break in continuity which is sometimes clear even in traditional topoi
of genuine antiquity. If we follow Lloyd,[6] English Christmas folk carols ceased to be created in
the seventeenth century, to be replaced by hymn-book carols of the Watts-Wesley kind, though a
demotic modification of these in largely rural religions like Primitive Methodism may be observed.
Yet carols were the first kind of folksong to be revived by middle-class collectors to take their
place ‘in novel surroundings of church, guild and women’s institute’ and thence to spread in a new
urban popular setting ‘by street-corner singers or by hoarse boys chanting on doorsteps in the
ancient hope of reward’. In this sense ‘God rest ye merry, Gentlemen’ is not old but new. Such a
break is visible even in movements deliberately describing themselves as ‘traditionalist’, and
appealing to groups which were, by common consent, regarded as the repositories of historic
continuity and tradition, such as peasants.[7] Indeed, the very appearance of movements for the
defence or revival of traditions, ‘traditionalist’ or otherwise, indicates such a break. Such
movements, common among intellectuals since the Romantics, can never develop or even preserve a
living past (except conceivably by setting up human natural sanctuaries for isolated corners of
archaic life), but must become ‘invented tradition’. On the other hand the strength and
adaptability of genuine traditions is not to be confused with the ‘invention of tradition’. Where
the old ways are alive, traditions need be neither revived nor invented.

Yet it may be suggested that where they are invented, it is often not because old ways are no
longer available or viable, but because they are deliberately not used or adapted. Thus, in
consciously setting itself against tradition and for radical innovation, the nineteenth-century
liberal ideology of social change systematically failed to provide for the social and authority
ties taken for granted in earlier societies, and created voids which might have to be filled by
invented practices. The success of nineteenth-century Tory factory masters in Lancashire (as
distinct from Liberal ones) in using such old ties to advantage shows that they were still there to
be used - even in the unprecedented environment of the industrial town.[8] The long-term
inadaptability of pre-industrial ways to a society revolutionized beyond a certain point is not to
be denied, but is not to be confused with the problems arising out of the rejection of old ways in
the short term by those who regarded them as obstacles to progress or, even worse, as its militant
adversaries.

This did not prevent innovators from generating their own invented traditions - the practices of
freemasonry are a case in point. Nevertheless, a general hostility to irrationalism, superstition
and customary practices reminiscent of the dark past, if not actually descended from it, made
impassioned believers in the verities of the Enlightenment, such as liberals, socialists, and
communists, unreceptive to traditions old or novel. Socialists, as we shall see below, found
themselves acquiring an annual May Day without quite knowing how; National Socialists exploited
such occasions with liturgical sophistication and zeal and a conscious manipulation of symbols.[9]^
The liberal era in Britain at best tolerated such practices, insofar as neither ideology nor
economic efficiency were at issue, sometimes as a reluctant concession to the irrationalism of the
lower orders. Its attitude to the sociable and ritual activities of Friendly Societies was a
combination of hostility (‘unnecessary expenses’ such as’ payments for anniversaries, processions,
bands, regalia’ were legally forbidden) and toleration of events such as annual feasts on the
grounds that ‘the importance of this attraction, especially as respects the country population,
cannot be denied’.[10] But a rigorous individualist rationalism dominated not only as an economic
calculus but as a social ideal. Chapter 7 will investigate what happened in the period when its
limitations became increasingly recognized.

These introductory notes may be concluded with some general observations about the invented
traditions of the period since the industrial revolution.

They seem to belong to three overlapping types: a) those establishing or symbolizing social
cohesion or the membership of groups, real or artificial communities, b) those establishing or
legitimizing institutions, status or relations of authority, and c) those whose main purpose was
socialization, the inculcation of beliefs, value systems and conventions of behaviour. While
traditions of types b) and c) were certainly devised (as in those symbolizing submission to
authority in British India), it may be tentatively suggested that type a) was prevalent, the other
functions being regarded as implicit in or flowing from a sense of identification with a
‘community’ and/or the institutions representing, expressing or symbolizing it such as a ‘nation’.

One difficulty was that such larger social entities were plainly not Gemeinschaften or even systems
of accepted ranks. Social mobility, the facts of class conflict and the prevalent ideology made
traditions combining community and marked inequality in formal hierarchies (as in armies) difficult
to apply universally. This did not much affect traditions of type c) since general socialization
inculcated the same values in every citizen, member of the nation and subject of the crown, and the
functionally specific socializations of different social groups (such as public school pupils as
distinct from others) did not usually get in each others’ way. On the other hand, insofar as
invented traditions reintroduced, as it were, status into a world of contract, superior and
inferior into a world of legal equals, they could not do so directly. They could be smuggled in by
formal symbolic assent to a social organization which was de facto unequal, as by the restyling of
the British coronation ceremony.[11] (See below pp. 282-3.) More commonly they might foster the
corporate sense of superiority of elites - particularly when these had to be recruited from those
who did not already possess it by birth or ascription - rather than by inculcating a sense of
obedience in inferiors. Some were encouraged to feel more equal than others. This might be done by
assimilating elites to pre-bourgeois ruling groups or authorities, whether in the
militarist/bureaucratic form characteristic of Germany (as with the duelling student corps), or the
non-militarized ‘moralized gentry’ model of the British public schools. Alternatively, perhaps, the
esprit de corps, self-confidence and leadership of elites could be developed by more esoteric
‘traditions’ marking the cohesiveness of a senior official mandarinate (as in France or among
whites in the colonies).

Granted that ‘communitarian’ invented traditions were the basic type, their nature remains to be
studied. Anthropology may help to | elucidate the differences, if any, between invented and old
traditional practices. Here we may merely note that while rites of passage are normally marked in
the traditions of particular groups (initiation, promotion, retirement, death), this was not
usually the case in those designed for all-embracing pseudo-communities (nations, countries),
presumably because these underlined their eternal and unchanging character - at least since the
community’s foundation. However, both new political regimes and innovatory movements might seek to
find their own equivalents for the traditional rites of passage associated with religion (civil
marriage, funerals).

One marked difference between old and invented practices may be observed. The former were specific
and strongly binding social practices, the latter tended to be quite unspecific and vague as to the
nature of the values, rights and obligations of the group membership they inculcate: ‘patriotism’,
‘loyalty’, ‘duty’, ‘playing the game’, ‘the school spirit’ and the like. But if the content of
British patriotism or ‘Americanism’ was notably ill-defined, though usually specified in
commentaries associated with ritual occasions, the practices symbolizing it were virtually
compulsory - as in standing up for the singing of the national anthem in Britain, the flag ritual
in American schools. The crucial element seems to have been the invention of emotionally and
symbolically charged signs of club membership rather than the statutes and objects of the club.
Their significance lay precisely in their undefined universality:


The National Flag, the National Anthem and the National Emblem are the three symbols through which
an independent country proclaims its identity and sovereignty, and as such they command
instantaneous respect and loyalty. In themselves they reflect the entire background, thought and
culture of a nation.[12]


In this sense, as an observer noted in 1880, ‘soldiers and policemen wear badges for us now’,
though he failed to predict their revival as adjuncts to individual citizens in the era of mass
movements which was about to begin.[13]

The second observation is that it seems clear that, in spite of much invention, new traditions have
not filled more than a small part of the space left by the secular decline of both old tradition
and custom; as might indeed be expected in societies in which the past becomes increasingly less
relevant as a model or precedent for most forms of human behaviour. In the private lives of most
people, and in the self-contained lives of small sub-cultural groups, even the invented traditions
of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries occupied or occupy a much smaller place than old
traditions do in, say, old agrarian societies.[14] ‘What is done’ structures the days, seasons and
life-cycles of twentieth-century western men and women very much less than it did their ancestors’,
and very much less than the external compulsions of the economy, technology, bureaucratic state
organization, political decision and other forces which neither rely on nor develop ‘tradition’ in
our sense.

However, this generalization does not apply in the field of what might be called the public life of
the citizen (including to some extent public forms of socialization, such as schools, as distinct
from private ones such as the mass media). There is no real sign of weakening in the
neo-traditional practices associated either with bodies of men in the public service (armed forces,
the law, perhaps even public servants) or in practices associated with the citizens’ membership of
states. Indeed most of the occasions when people become conscious of citizenship as such remain
associated with symbols and semi-ritual practices (for instance, elections), most of which are
historically novel and largely invented: flags, images, ceremonies and music. Insofar as the
invented traditions of the era since the industrial and French revolutions have filled a permanent
gap-at all events up to the present - it would seem to be in this field.

Why, it may be asked finally, should historians devote their attention to such phenomena? The
question is in one sense unnecessary, since a growing number of them plainly do, as the contents of
this volume and the references cited in it bear witness. So it is better rephrased. What benefit
can historians derive from the study of the invention of tradition?

First and foremost, it may be suggested that they are important symptoms and therefore indicators
of problems which might not otherwise be recognized, and developments which are otherwise difficult
to identify and to date. They are evidence. The transformation of German nationalism from its old
liberal to its new imperialist-expansionist pattern is more exactly illuminated by the rapid
replacement of the old black-red-gold colours by the new black-white-red ones (especially by the
1890s)among the German gymnastic movement, than by official statements of authorities or spokesmen
for organizations. The history of the British football cup finals tells us something about the
development of an urban working-class culture which more conventional data and sources do not. By
the same token, the study of invented traditions cannot be separated from the wider study of the
history of society, nor can it expect to advance much beyond the mere discovery of such practices
unless it is integrated into a wider study.

Second, it throws a considerable light on the human relation to the past, and therefore on the
historian’s own subject and craft. For all invented traditions, so far as possible, use history as
a legitimator of action and cement of group cohesion. Frequently it becomes the actual symbol of
struggle, as in the battles over the monuments to Walther von der Vogelweide and Dante in South
Tyrol in 1889 and 1896.[15] Even revolutionary movements backed their innovations by reference to a
‘people’s past’ (Saxons versus Normans, ‘nos ancêtres les Gaulois’ against the Franks, Spartacus),
to traditions of revolution (‘Auch das deutsche Volk hat seine revolutionäre Tradition’ as Engels
claimed in the first words of his Peasant War in Germany)[16]^ and to its own heroes and martyrs.
James Connolly’s Labour in Irish History exemplifies this union of themes excellently. The element
of invention is particularly clear here, since the history which became part of the fund of
knowledge or the ideology of nation, state or movement is not what has actually been preserved in
popular memory, but what has been selected, written, pictured, popularized and institutionalized by
those whose function it is to do so. Oral historians have frequently observed how in the actual
memories of the old the General Strike of 1926 plays a more modest and less dramatic part than
interviewers anticipated.[17] The formation of such an image of the French Revolution in and by the
Third Republic has been analysed.[18] Yet all historians, whatever else their objectives, are
engaged in this process inasmuch as they contribute, consciously or not, to the creation,
dismantling and restructuring of images of the past which belong not only to the world of
specialist investigation but to the public sphere of man as a political being. They might as well
be aware of this dimension of their activities.

In this connection, one specific interest of ‘invented traditions’ for, at all events, modern and
contemporary historians ought to be singled out. They are highly relevant to that comparatively
recent historical innovation, the ‘nation’, with its associated phenomena: nationalism, the
nation-state, national symbols, histories and the rest. All these rest on exercises in social
engineering which are often deliberate and always innovative, if only because historical novelty
implies innovation. Israeli and Palestinian nationalism or nations must be novel, whatever the
historic continuities of Jews or Middle Eastern Muslims, since the very concept of territorial
states of the currently standard type in their region was barely thought of a century ago, and
hardly became a serious prospect before the end of World War I, Standard national languages, to be
learned in schools and written, let alone spoken, by more than a smallish elite, are largely
constructs of varying, but often brief, age. As a French historian of Flemish language observed,
quite correctly, the Flemish taught in Belgium today is not the language which the mothers and
grandmothers of Flanders spoke to their children: in short, it is only metaphorically but not
literally a ‘mother-tongue’. We should not be misled by a curious, but understandable, paradox:
modern nations and all their impedimenta generally claim to be the opposite of novel, namely rooted
in the remotest antiquity, and the opposite of constructed, namely human communities so ‘natural’
as to require no definition other than self-assertion. Whatever the historic or other continuities
embedded in the modern concept of ‘France’ and ‘the French’ - and which nobody would seek to deny -
these very concepts themselves must include a constructed or ‘invented’ component, And just because
so much of what subjectively makes up the modern ‘nation’ consists of such constructs and is
associated with appropriate and, in general, fairly recent symbols or suitably tailored discourse
(such as ‘national history’), the national phenomenon cannot be adequately investigated without
careful attention to the ‘invention of tradition’.

Finally, the study of the invention of tradition is interdisciplinary. It is a field of study which
brings together historians, social anthropologists and a variety of other workers in the human
sciences, and cannot adequately be pursued without such collaboration. The present book brings
together, in the main, contributions by historians. It is to be hoped that others will also find it
useful.



In: Hobsbawm, Eric & Ranger, Terence. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1983. Introduction.







________________________________

[1] See for instance G. Tihon,’ Les religieuses en Belgique du XVIIIe au XXe siecle: Approche
Statistique’, Belgisch Tijdschrift v. Nieuwste Geschiedenis/Revue Beige d’Histoire Contemporaine,
vii (1976), pp. 1-54.

[2] Karsten Bahnson, Akademische Auszüge aus deutschen Universiläts und Hoch-schulorten
(Saarbrücken, 1973).

[3] Seventeen such exoduses are recorded in the eighteenth century, fifty in 1800-48, but only six
from 1848 to 1973.

[4] Rudolf Braun, Sozialer und kultureller Wandel in einem ländlichen Industriegebiet im 19. und
20. Jahrhundert, ch. 6 (Erlenbach-Zürich, 1965).

[5] Rudolf Braun, op. cit., pp. 336-7.

[6] A. L. Lloyd, Folk Song in England (London. 1969 ed.), pp. 134-8.

[7] This is to be distinguished from the revival of tradition for purposes which actually
demonstrated its decline. ‘The farmers’ revival (around 1900) of their old regional dress, folk
dances and similar rituals for festive occasions was neither a bourgeois nor a traditionalistic
feature. On the surface it could be viewed as a nostalgic longing for the old-time culture which
was so rapidly disappearing, but in reality it was a demonstration of class identity by which
prosperous farmers could distance themselves horizontally relative to the townspeople and
vertically from the cottars, craftsmen and labourers.’ Palle Ove Christiansen, ‘Peasant Adaptation
to Bourgeois Culture? Class Formation and Cultural Redefinition, in the Danish Countryside’,
Ethnologia Scandinavica (1978), p. 128. See also G. Lewis, ‘The Peasantry, Rural Change and
Conservative Agrarianism: Lower’ Austria at the Turn of the Century’, Past & Present, no. 81
(1978), pp. 119-43.

[8] Patrick Joyce, ‘The Factory Politics of Lancashire in the Later Nineteenth Century’, Historical
Journal, xviii (1965), pp. 525-53.

[9] Helmut Hartwig, ‘Plaketten zum 1. Mai 1934-39’, Aesthetik und Kommunik-ation, vii, no. 26
(1976), pp. 56-9.

[10] P. H. J. H. Gosden, The Friendly Societies in England, 1815-1875 (Manchester, 1961), pp. 123,
119.

[11]  J. E. C. Bodley, The Coronation of Edward the VIIth: A Chapter of European and Imperial
History (London, 1903), pp. 201, 204.


[12] Official Indian government commentary, quoted in R. Firth, Symbols, Public and Private
(London, 1973), p. 341.

[13] Frederick Marshall, Curiosities of Ceremonials, Titles, Decorations and Forms of International
Vanities (London, 1880), p. 20.

[14] Not to mention the transformation of long-lasting rituals and signs of uniformity and cohesion
into rapidly changing fashions - in costume, language, social practice etc., as in the youth
cultures of industrialized countries.


[15] John W. Cole and Eric Wolf, The Hidden Frontier: Ecology and Ethnicity in an Alpine Valley
(N.Y. and London, 1974), p. 55.

[16] For the popularity of books on this and other militant historical subjects in German workers’
libraries, see H.-J. Steinberg, Sozialismus und deutsche Sozial-demokratie. Zur Ideologie der
Partei vor dem ersten Weltkrieg (Hanover, 1967), pp. 131-3.


[17] There are perfectly sound reasons why participants at the bottom do not usually see historic
events they live through as top people or historians do. One might call this (after the hero of
Stendhal’s Chartreuse dc Parme) the ‘Fabrice syndrome’.

[18] E.g. Alice Gerard, La Révolution Française: Mythes el Interprétations, 1789-1970 (Paris,
1970).