In 2021, months before his ‘special military operation’ to annex the Donbas, President Vladimir Putin published his essay on the historical unity of the Russian and Ukrainian peoples. As was soon pointed out by a number of eminent historians and essayists, the piece is historical nonsense. Yet, despite its dubious credentials, it is a key document for understanding contemporary Russian political thought, particularly its ‘grand strategy’. Beyond the spurious interpretations of Russian and Ukrainian political histories, it is a major statement on the ambitions and worldviews of the Russian leadership, stretching beyond Putin to include his likely successors, political elites, and senior commanders.

Such distortions of history have played a crucial role in Russia’s military campaign. Indeed, memory and politics have become integral to creating and sustaining Russian state mythology, legitimising the initial war aims while contributing to a culture in which war is, and continues to be, legitimised. This is not just a Russian anomaly. The Chinese Communist Party has recently been reinterpreting its historical memory of the Second World War, seeking out moral foundations for its national identity while attracting greater international recognition; an exercise in ‘self-legitimation, control and strategic posturing’. Such efforts are aimed at pressing the wider territorial political and legal goals of these states, such as the old Soviet ‘sphere of influence’ or China’s ‘nine-dash line’ in the Indo-Pacific, translating these myths into concrete foreign policy ambitions.

Herein lies a problem. While political actors can and should learn the lessons that history offers, they often adopt certain interpretations of history for their own ends. ‘History’ becomes subordinate to ‘historical interpretation’. This problem is germane beyond the autocratic war aims of the Russian Federation. Indeed, it gets to the heart of both statecraft and constitutional inquiry, for how we understand history forms the essence of the constitution. We all draw upon moments and narratives of an historical past to recall our place in the present, reaffirming fundamental truths and ideals of our society. This is evident across both authoritarian and democratic states, from those with uncodified constitutions, such as the United Kingdom, to those that have codified them, such as the United States. For history is not static. Our past, and how we draw upon it, constructs the very present in which we live.

In Britain today, this can often be seen in interpretations of Magna Carta, long venerated as the foundation of English law and liberty. In 2015, on the 800th anniversary of the charter’s acceptance by King John at Runnymede, the medieval historian and Law Lord, Jonathan Sumption, penned a piece on the many flawed, ‘mythological’ readings of this document. Sumption traces the abuse and misuse of the charter in English and British political history, charging Sir Edward Coke, an influential jurist in late-Tudor and early Stuart England, Attorney General to Elizabeth I and Chief Justice to James I, as the ‘chief sinner’ in this regard. He notes that the ‘lawyers view’ of the charter – articulated by Coke but ‘held by many people who are not lawyers’ – holds Magna Carta to be a major constitutional document, the ‘foundation of the rule of law and the liberty of the subject in England’. Conversely, the ‘historian’s view’ emphasises the ‘self-interested motives of the barons’, and is sceptical as to the charter’s constitutional significance.

Rubbishing the notion that early medieval England was an age of absolutist monarchs, Sumption chastises Coke for relying purely on legal documents in his analysis of the charter, and for sidelining the wider social and political history underpinning the events of 1215 to suit his own partisan, anti-royalist, political ends. While recognising some documents are ‘less important for what they say than for what people wrongly think that they say’, Sumption dismisses Coke’s distortions as ‘high-minded tosh’ and the ‘worst kind of ahistorical Whiggism’, projecting contemporary ideals and mores back onto the past.

Sumption’s critique, incisive and welcome as it is, too readily dismisses narrative and legend in political life, lamenting the notion that myths are needed to sustain one’s belief in ideals like democracy. One does not need to hold such myths with the fervour of Coke or the American Revolutionaries to recognise the role they play in political thinking. This kind of inquiry – looking to history for instrumental, practical purposes – is not properly called history at all. It is an appeal to what the historian and philosopher Michael Oakeshott once called a legendary past; a poetic, rhetorical understanding of an event (or series of events) that forms a kind of mythical narrative about the past itself. Somewhat ironically for an historian, Oakeshott views this sort of thinking as perfectly legitimate, at least in a philosophical sense. His point is not that Coke is using history illegitimately; he is simply not doing ‘history’ at all.

Oakeshott confined the activity of being an historian to conducting historical investigation into the past, contingent on ‘historical understanding’ as a distinct mode of inquiry. This method may be the mere ‘invention of historians’, but he nevertheless defends it as a valuable one, with characteristics that mark it out as distinct. This sort of inquiry is necessarily divorced from ‘the present’. Indeed, in historical understanding, the ‘present’ is itself a form of historical past. By contrast, the so-called ‘living past’ is not really the past at all. Rather, it is formed of the ‘present contents of a vast storehouse into which time continuously empties the lives, the utterances, the achievements and the sufferings of mankind’. It lives in the realm of myth, and carries with it a political function.

As Oakeshott stresses, this ‘legendary past’ is not an inferior or illegitimate kind of understanding. By his own admission, pursuing the practical past is an indispensable ingredient of an articulate, civilised life; establishing this relationship between ‘present moods’ and ‘past events’ is ‘a perennial practical necessity’ for both constructing, and then confirming, a social identity and consciousness. Indeed, such legends are drawn upon continuously in political life, often for reasons that are more salient to practical experience than what one might call ‘history proper’. Indeed, they are integral to the constitution itself.

The political theorist Natalie Riendeau provides a pithy summary, writing that, for Oakeshott, political legends are ‘poetic constructs’ that ‘transmit an explicit moral message’. They provide the ‘authority for the political’, endowing societies with an ‘identity and sense of self-consciousness’. The legend of Magna Carta tells a story of ‘freedom’, through the moral message that authority is subject to the law. As such, when Coke applied his lawyerly, barrister’s eye to the Charter, he was searching for ‘a relevant and persuasive analogy to support his case’, using it to join an ‘intractable present’ with a ‘known and unproblematic past’. In so doing he provided stability as to the meaning of the law and liberty, creating a world of sense for his audience.

Unlike Sumption, Oakeshott did not discredit or diminish this kind of thinking per se. He acknowledges the legendary past to have a far more powerful and pervasive grip upon the popular and political imagination than historical thinking ever will. To his mind, problems only arise when myths are mistaken or misrepresented as history proper, distorting historical understandings through their practical, political significance. The legendary past is not the enemy of mankind, but only the enemy of ‘the historian’. His point is that we should recognise the ‘practical past’ as a philosophically different mode of inquiry from doing ‘history’; an interpretation of history, but one that is not historical as such.

Oakeshott’s distinction between the historical and practical past may be stark, yet its severity serves to emphasise the broader point; there is a distinction between these two ways of approaching the past, and that distinction ought to be clearly recognised. Vehemently opposed to conflating the former with the latter in either public or academic life, he spent his later years exploring this at length, drawing out the subtleties at play in different modes of inquiry, distinguishing these two modes of thinking in constitutional thought. Such musings led Oakeshott to enter, albeit tacitly, into a heated public debate between the historians E.H. Carr and Geoffrey Elton over the nature of historical inquiry itself. Carr’s 1961 work, What is History?, was a pointed critique of objectivity in historical inquiry, asking the question ‘what is an historical fact?’. It remains a divisive though influential book, advancing a relativistic reading of history as contingent on what the historian believes are ‘historical facts’, important to their work, and what were mere ‘facts of the past’, of no use to their work at all. The popularity of Carr’s book, coupled with its perceived intellectual thinness, prompted Elton to write a rejoinder of his own. Six years later, Political History: Principles and Practice set out to shred the relativism espoused by Carr and others, which Elton believed was destroying the foundations of history as a discipline.

Keenly aware of these tensions, Oakeshott had drawn up his own lengthy and withering review of Carr’s work in the year of its printing, but refrained from publishing it. Had he done so, perhaps it would have borne fruit. For Elton, much like Sumption, makes the mistake of confusing political argument for political history, or of mythological significance for historical inquiry. Oakeshott’s philosophical distinction plays a vital role in separating these two views, preventing them from speaking past one another. His point is not to legitimise ‘false narratives’, but to help us see such practical readings of history for what they are. True, he recognises the legendary past as a legitimate mode of understanding, but only because he understands what so many are unwilling to admit; most people are not historians, nor do they strive to be. The use and abuse of history is as commonplace in conversation as it is in a constitutional crisis. The key is to understand and acknowledge the philosophical distinction between the pursuit of history as an historian, and the practical use of history for political or personal ends. Only by appreciating this divide can we recognise when one is using the former in service of the latter.

Moreover, as his essay on Carr’s historiography reveals, Oakeshott was deeply opposed to the ideological pursuit of the past; he would not endorse such readings. His sought to draw attention to this cynical practice, showing that, whether it be Carr’s methodologies, the misreading of Magna Carta, or Russia’s justifications behind the annexation of Ukraine, legendary pasts masquerading as history proper are nothing but political arguments, hypocritically advanced by self-interested partisans, whose aims are often anything but the presentation of the past.

Here is Oakeshott’s most critical point. To combat such narcissism, we do not just need to do ‘better history’, or to be ‘more informed’, but to marshal better arguments, ones that are drawn from the substrate of genuine historical understanding. Recognising that the legendary past is not just a pervasive form of historical interpretation, but that it is legitimate in itself, is not to give in to the nihilistic relativism of authors such as Carr, who use this to justify the weaponisation of history as a practice. Rather, it is the first step toward admitting that pure historical fact alone is not enough to preserve ‘historical understanding’. Spurious interpretations of history dressed up as the ‘historical past’ must be dispelled by a truly historical narrative. To do so, one needs a narrative command of their own. As Elton writes, whatever else history may be, it ‘must at heart, be a story, a story of the changing fortunes of men, and political history therefore comes first because, above all the forms of historical study, it wants to, even needs to, tell a story’.

This is relevant to a number of disciplines, including the broad field of ‘applied history’. A sub-discipline with much to offer, those pursuing applied history must be careful to toe the line between an historically informed approach to policy and myth-making. For, as some have rightly noted, while history does have lessons, they don’t present as easily as we’d like. The concern is that, in an effort to apply history to present problems, we end up obfuscating as much as we illuminate, creating new myths or propagating old ones without even realising it. Such disciplines would do well to consider the philosophical problems that Oakeshott and others raise regarding the interpretation of history in the cause of policy and politics, and apply them to their own methodologies.

This sort of confusion is particularly germane to the process of legal interpretation. Sumption is far from alone when he critiques, for example, the deep bifurcation in contemporary US jurisprudence between the opposing philosophical ‘schools’ of originalism and progressivism. This is due, in no small part, to the various interpretive methods held to be sacrosanct by a broad array of constitutional actors. Recent landmark judgements on executive power by the United States’ Supreme Court have seen the justices rely, to a non-trivial degree, on mythological interpretations of the American Revolution and the dangers of a ‘King who could do no wrong’. These historical references are far more than mere window dressing; they were integral to how the court viewed executive power in one of the most consequential rulings in its history, and will frame its jurisprudence moving forward.

This is a dangerous misunderstanding. If the Justices had been alluding to the life and times of Charles I, they may have been on stronger ground, but George III was far from the tyrannical, arbitrary monarch that firebrand American pamphleteers held him up to be. Such myths have long been disposed of by serious historical scholarship, and references to it in judicial proceedings undermine it. On the contrary, the constitutional nature of George III’s kingship, delineated by the 1689 Bill of Rights Act, demanded that he refuse to exercise his prerogative powers to satiate disgruntled American revolutionaries, who, in a deeply unconstitutional move, petitioned him to override laws passed by Parliament after resistance in Boston to the Tea Act. This is not to pass judgement on the case itself, merely to recognise how mythological understandings continue to animate even the highest elements of some contemporary jurisprudence.

Equally, one might consider the myriad interpretations and meanings that were attached to Britain’s ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688, both within Parliament and among the society at large. The bloodless coup, staged by Whig parliamentarians aghast at the autocratic rule of the last Stuart king, James II, was held up throughout the 18th century to embody the exemplar of popular, nonviolent political change. Such interpretations, whatever their merits, often played an important role in shaping society, on a par with the intentions of ruling elites and members of key political institutions. Whatever these arguments for ‘enlightened progress’ lacked in accuracy, they made up for in rhetorical force.

Myths such as these form and sustain the very substance of the constitution. As the American historian William McNeill put it, to pilot ‘between this Scylla and Charybdis’ of myth and absolute truth, the ‘art of the serious historian’ makes history a most ‘high and serious calling’. For such narratives can be dangerously misleading if fully unmoored from the truths on which they claim to be based. Elton knew that, and Sumption senses it as well.

Yet it is Oakeshott who understands what others have only grasped at. We cannot prevent the legendary past from being mistaken for history proper. It is integral to our political and social present. It shapes, consciously or unconsciously, the very essence of the political, fashioning the present by repurposing the bric-a-brac of the past. In his own idiosyncratic style, Oakeshott reminds us to acknowledge the philosophical distinction between the legendary and the historical, and to steel ourselves against myth masquerading as fact.