'Humans make their own history, but they do not make it as they please;they
do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances
existing already, given and transmitted from the past.
The tradition of all dead generations weighs like an Alp on the brains of
the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing
themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before,
precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up
the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle
slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history
in this time-honored disguise and this borrowed language.'
What is this if not cultural-historical psychology?
Bruce Robinson