The Politics of Regret: On Collective Memory and Historical Responsibility (review)

In the past two decades the study of social memory has burgeoned into a field of inquiry for a broad spectrum of scholars from the social sciences to the humanities. Underlying this trend since the 1980s is the notion that the past can no longer be monopolized by history and that traditional disciplinary boundaries need to be crossed creatively if we are to understand the complex relationship between the past and the present that is at the core of our collective and individual identity. This trend has led us to a rich array of studies in diverse fields, from studies of commemoration, nationalism and national identity, to the Holocaust, cultural trauma and retrospective justice. In sociology itself, much work has traced the contours of political and cultural memory in diverse times, places and sites, and shed light on how past legacies shape and are shaped by ongoing processes of negotiation that forge social solidarity and societal continuity.

The interdisciplinary growth of the field has also meant, however, that the conceptualization and methodological approaches to memory have diversified sometimes without clarity and cohesion. Memory can mean different things to different scholars who have different ways of conceptualizing and discussing memory. As a result, multifarious ideas, diverse classifications and conceptual stalemates have built over time, leading to sometimes disparate interpretations of empirical material and unproductive debates. Efforts toward synthesis have been much needed, yet few monographs have addressed this need in a comprehensive way that sorted out clearly the different issues and analytic categories, moving the discussion forward with coherence, while also keeping the main ideas accessible.

Jeffrey Olick's new volume arrives with welcome timing to make just that kind of critical contribution that the field needs. Politics of Regret is a valuable collection of his best essays published over the past years in different venues, now worked together into an ambitious volume that promises to take social memory research beyond the current state. In the course of nine chapters, the book makes many important contributions: it clarifies and explicates the key ideas, concepts and the ongoing processes of memory with rigor and theoretical lucidity while keeping them accessible to non-specialists; it builds an ambitious new theoretical framework for memory studies – a process-relational approach – postulating the structure of collective memory comprised of four components (field, medium, genre and profile); it situates and explicates the recent attention to memory in the broader context of shifting historical consciousness in postmodernity; and it extends memory studies to the growing political projects of retrospective justice and accountability, which he calls politics of regret.

Readers will appreciate Olick's sophisticated expositions on several levels. Tackling the persistent theoretical questions that permeate the field – e.g., what are the specific parameters, boundaries and constraints in which memory is made and remade at individual and collective levels? How can ongoing memory making represent both continuity and change? How can memory be fragmented and contested by groups while shared by the collective at the same time? – Olick formulates a process-relational approach that recognizes memory not as a thing but a continuous process that links the past and the present in dialogically contingent ways. Building on the work of Halbwachs, Elias, Bourdieu, Schwartz, and especailly Bakhtin, Olick focuses his analytic lens on the path-dependent and dialogic nature of memory – the notion that memory is possible only in dialogue with the accumulated succession of preceding memory. At the empirical level, Olick applies this framework to demonstrate sure-handedly how the political identity of postwar West Germany was shaped, confined and constrained by conditions of remembering the Holocaust, through analyzing the public discourses of German guilt over the postwar decades.

In the second part of the book, Olick makes a leap beyond the theoretical analysis of social memory, to build the conceptual foundations for the politics of regret, that is, the politics of retrospective justice and redressing past wrongs. The conceptual frame he develops – building on ethics, philosophy and the...