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Chapter 17

Politics of Nostalgia, Logical Fallacies, and


Cognitive Biases: the Importance of Epistemology
in the Age of Cognitive Historiography
Leonardo Ambasciano

The clearer we are about the theme of our own research, the clearer we
become about our own bias. And the clearer we are about our own bias,
the more honest and efficient we are likely to be in our own research.
Arnaldo Momigliano (1979, 372f.)


A Toxic Nostalgia1

In a landmark contribution published in 1991, Jeppe Sinding Jensen and Armin


W. Geertz wrote that “some historians of religion have advocated a person-
al and existentially relevant attitude to the world’s religious traditions. Fore-
most among these is Mircea Eliade, who presented modern man’s estrange-
ment from tradition as fundamentally detrimental to individual and social
balance, hence the politics of nostalgia which seeks, on the basis of a univer-
salist interpretation of religions, to restore Man as a complete and inherently
spiritual being” (Jensen and Geertz 1991, 13). Romanian-born historian of reli-
gions Mircea Eliade (1907–1986) is singled out by the two authors because he
was “the most influential comparativist and interpreter of the modern day”,
almost single-handedly responsible for the “establishment of the study of re-
ligions in North America” starting from the 60s of the past century (Strenski
2015, 142). And yet, as pointed out by Jensen and Geertz, his works carry with
them a burdensome and problematic legacy.

1 A partial and preliminary version of this chapter was presented during the conference
“Relazioni pericolose. La storia delle religioni italiana e il fascismo” organised by Roberto
Alciati and Sergio Botta and held at Sapienza Università di Roma (Italy) on December
3–4, 2015. The original draft has been re-elaborated during my 2016 visiting lectureship at
Masaryk University, Brno (Czech Republic).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004385375_019


Politics of Nostalgia, Logical Fallacies, Cognitive Biases 281

While the roots of the “politics of nostalgia” in Eliade’s works had been al-
ready noted by various historians (Ambasciano 2016a, 150, 159), Jensen and
Geertz’s definition has been specifically adopted to indicate the ideological
continuity between Interwar right-wing extremism and the Western inter-
play of academia and politics during the Cold War (McCutcheon 1997; cf.
Doležalová et al. 2001). More precisely, if “nostalgia” refers to the “sentimen-
tal longing or wistful affection for a period in the past” (Pearsall 1999, 972),
the Eliadean politics of nostalgia entailed the emic reading and/or conscious
manipulation of (mostly ancient) religious materials to advance and support
reactionary politics (McCutcheon 1997, 32–35). The underlying project encom-
passed the sympathetic and anti-modernist endorsement of specific dynamics
of social power extrapolated from ancient religious documents (Jensen and
Geertz 1991, 13; cf. Lincoln 1991, 123 and Dubuisson 2005).
This is not the place to discuss the interaction between nation-state build-
ing processes, historiography as a discipline, politics, and the academic study
of religions and folklore between 19th and early 20th century (403–411).2
Nonetheless, it should be noted that two of the most important concepts that
preceded Eliade’s politics of nostalgia were originally embedded in a precise
cultural landscape. The ideas of religion as an exit from history and history as
a corrupted repository of originally pure religious symbols (67; Ţurcanu 2007,
290f.) represented an apologetic answer to the perceived intellectual marginal-
ity of Interwar Romania and its apparent lack of prestigious historiographical
roots comparable to those of Western Europe (370). Like other coeval intellec-
tuals, Eliade combined those ideas with local ultra-nationalism, xenophobia,
and Orthodoxism, almost ticking all the boxes of what Umberto Eco defined
as Ur-Fascism (Eco 1995; additional bibliography in Ambasciano 2014). As a
result, Eliade’s conception of the history of religions (HoR henceforth) was
strictly tied to the extremist right-wing building of a “new (or renewed) man”
(301).
After the end of World War II, Eliadean concepts such as the “terror of his-
tory” and the “nostalgia for paradise” echoed the defeat of the Romanian far
right, conveying a sympathetic nostalgia for reactionary politics and tradition-
al mores (Ginzburg 2010). Such disciplinary labels were by then transfigured
as universal axioms according to which history (i.e., the profane) is a fall from
the primeval grace (i.e., the sacred) which homo religiosus, the spiritual and
religious human being, yearns for (Spineto 2006, 203–226).

2 For the sake of brevity, unspecified parenthetical referencing in Italics indicates bibliography
and documents gathered and discussed in Ambasciano (2014).

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