The Shaping of Popular Consent: A Comparative Study of the Sovie ...

In essence, Suny is urging historians to place the elements of political history, ideology and personality, and the elements of social history into a wider, cultural context. He argues that doing so would allow us to attach genuine meaning to a society’s total body of behaviour. Thus, as a corollary, we might better understand how and why social norms are formed, perpetuated and developed.

William G. Doty’s Mythography, which discussed Suny’s paradigm (though before he had expressed it) from a philosophical/semiological perspective, attempted to illustrate how the polyfunctionality of cultural myths gave meaning to social norms and created what one may call a social moral code. Doty’s theory advances work on the meaning of myths by challenging the assumption of their apolitical origins.⁵¹ In his view, it is the myth which provides the truth of facts, events and epochs: not the other way around. “Living myths”, wrote Doty,

More importantly though, Doty argues, in a model clearly influenced by Durkheim’s theory of social cementing, that myths provide socio-functional opportunities to “perform the world”. In other words, to engage with a “sacred text”, to recite it, to re-enact it, is to be an active agent in the perpetuation of the “world’s” social norms and social moral code. In Antonio Gramsci’s terms, this kind of myth was designed to provide an attractive and compelling meta-narrative so that the hegemonic culture would be accepted from below as “normal reality”.⁵³ Or put more simply, be accepted (go unquestioned) as common sense. This is not to proclaim the all-encompassing hypnotic power of the myth. Not all myths “take” and, indeed, whether the myths endorsed by the establishment and promoted by cultural producers “took” in the USSR and the US is not tested in this study. But the desire to shape popular culture, inclusive of myths, successfully inculcated or otherwise, is specifically relevant here and, moreover, a very important area of investigation because the study of popular culture has the potential to reveal the connective tissue between politics, ideology, personality and society.