Collective memory studies retain the emphasis of their founder, Maurice Halbwachs, by analyzing the many ways present conditions affect what we make of the past. Toward the end of the twentieth century, however, Halbwachs's “presentism” ran into neorealist opposition, largely in the fields of history and biblical scholarship, and to a lesser but significant extent in sociology. Corresponding to these emerging theoretical trends is an increasing reliance on survey research methods. The latter can never replace qualitative analyses, but its random sampling of unrelated individuals clarifies the question of what we mean when we refer to collective memory.

Individual minds are collective memory's building blocks, but collective memory is itself “superindividual.” Collective memory refers to the distribution throughout society of what individuals know, believe, and feel about past events and persons, how they morally judge them, how closely they identify with them, and how much they are inspired by them as models for their conduct and identity. Collective memory refers to neither a collection of individual ideas nor some “mysterious group memory” but to an emergent social fact which remains as individuals replace one another.