Eric Hobsbawm: The Consolations of History

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Eric Hobsbawm is a very influential historian. Quite like him.

👍︎︎ 3 👤︎︎ u/[deleted] 📅︎︎ Dec 11 2021 🗫︎ replies

My favorite history books, worth seeing

👍︎︎ 3 👤︎︎ u/Trasymachos 📅︎︎ Dec 11 2021 🗫︎ replies

I have an identical cat.

👍︎︎ 2 👤︎︎ u/FunKick9595 📅︎︎ Dec 11 2021 🗫︎ replies
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On a weekend in October 1955, MI5 agents  raided this house in north London. One of its occupants, Ronald Berger,   was known to be storing a large number  of files for the British Communist Party. While Berger was away for the weekend, a team  swooped in, removed the documents from the house,   took them to their headquarters in Mayfair, copied  them, and returned them before Berger came home. Over 48,000 documents were copied in what  became known as ‘Operation Party Piece’.   Among the documents were questionnaires  completed by British Communist Party members.   And among those, the  autobiography of a young academic. This is a copy of Eric Hobsbawm's 'autobiography',  as it's called, which was submitted to the   Communist Party. We don't have the questions  but we can work them out, because the answer   to question 11 is 'petty bourgeois'. He states in  this questionnaire that he joined the Communist   Party in Cambridge in 1936 and says: 'I expect  the combination of Berlin just before Hitler came   to power and rebelling against the family got  me to think of myself as a red'. He then goes   on to say that he feels rather cut off from the  masses, and even from ordinary party work in his   professional life. 'On the whole I don't feel that  I've done what I might for the party or that I’ve   been advancing in my capacity to do so. My sort of  professional work is probably the best I can do,   but I'd quite like if possible to have more  to do with factory workers'. His frustration   seems to be echoed and to a degree mocked by by  MI5, who write in a report shortly after this   that he is a 'tireless and tiresome organiser of  petitions and champion of lost causes', and that   probably pretty accurately, you know, reflects  what he was thinking of himself in this period. Eric Hobsbawm was an unusual historian.  For a start he sold millions of books. Well Eric Hobsbawm was in the end, I think,  the world's most widely read historian. He's a great writer, he's not just a  great historian he's a great writer. It can have the effect I feel when you're  reading him of making you feel a bit cleverer   than you normally think you are. You're kind of  raised up a level. You hold on: 'ah yes, I see!'. He specialised in being a generalist.  His work ranging from studies of jazz,   Balkan banditry and Peruvian peasant movements, to  an entire history of the world from 1789 to 1991. He was easily bored, yes. I  mean my mother used to say   I don't know how you can live with a man who every  day, you know, you've got to say something new. For Hobsbawm, being a historian was not  just a way of coming to terms with the past,   but also being part of, perhaps even  shaping, the history he saw being   made around him. A history he was written  into before he started writing it himself. This is about a thousand pages of data   and intelligence collected  on Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm. And I remember, I said Eric, should  I join the British Communist Party?   And he looked at me and said:  'You must be completely mad,   of course not! I joined back in the 30s when,  you know, it was the threat of fascism, but now   you'll be just wasting your time fighting  against the Stalinist for no reason at all.’ Basically a sort of unofficial biography of  one of the 20th century's most dazzling and   accomplished historians. I've been conscious of, as it were, living  in history for a very long time, but that is   essentially because at a crucial stage, you know,  when I was, whatever it is, a young teenager,   I was lucky, yes lucky enough to live in Berlin  just in the last years when Hitler came to power,   and if you don't feel that you are part of  world history at that time you never will. Hobsbawm's path to Berlin began in Egypt in  1917. His father, Percy, on the left here,   was English and working in Alexandria for  the British-run Postal and Telegraph Service.   His mother, Nelly, in the middle, was Austrian  and on holiday with her parents when she met   Percy at the Sporting Club. They married  in 1915 and Eric was born two years later. Well his parents were absolute diametric  opposites. His father was a man who liked sport,   and he didn't get on very well with Eric, who  was always reading, and he didn't like that. His   mother was wonderful, adored him right from the  word go. Like a mother she bonded with her son. 1917 was the year the first jazz  record was produced in New York,   The Original Dixieland Jazz Band  playing the 'Livery Stable Blues'.   As Hobsbawm was to write many years later,  it provides a convenient historical marker   for the birth of the Jazz  Age. And it was also the year   of the October Revolution in Russia,  the defining event of Hobsbawm's times. One of the crucial consequences of  the crisis whose incubation I study   was indeed the Russian Revolution, coming  partly out of that, partly out of the war.   As it were the centrepiece of an era of social  revolution, of potential social revolution, which   for one thing determines the  international scene to this day. In 1919, Egypt too was on the brink of revolution,   so the Hobsbawms moved to Vienna  to be near Nelly's family. But things began to go really badly wrong, the  economy was not doing well, there was massive   inflation after the war, his father found it  very difficult to get a job and make a living,   and then suddenly died of a heart attack. Yes, hasn't changed much. When we first came to  Vienna we used to live up in that second floor,   the big flat. Then my father died,  grandparents moved in to a smaller   flat. We were in the spare room, my mother and  my sister and myself. Much the same as before. Nelly was barely able to support Eric and his  sister Nancy with her work as a translator,   and her health deteriorated. In 1931 she was  admitted to a sanatorium with tuberculosis. Often his visits to his mother were in hospital,   and Eric sort of adjusted, is what I get  from our conversations, adjusted to the   fact that he was the strong one, even though  he was a little boy, and she was the weak one. Nelly died in 1931, and Eric and Nancy moved  to Berlin to live with Nelly's sister, Gretel,   and her husband, Sydney. Hobsbawm looked back  at this period in a piece for the LRB in 2008. I spent the most formative time  of my life, the years 1931-33,   as a Gymnasiast and would-be Communist  militant, in the dying Weimar Republic. He came into a situation in 1931 where the whole  political system of the Weimar Republic was   in complete meltdown. There was  a deep, deep economic depression   triggered by the great crash, capitalism  looked as if it was on the skids. The trouble about the period when Hitler came to  power, what people don't understand is the feeling   that we lived, really, in an interim. There  wasn't a world, the old world had gone to pieces   at the end of World War One, and  what is more, between 1929 and 1933,   what remained of the world was visibly breaking  down. There didn't seem to be the slightest   alternative to, I mean, either a revolutionary  solution or the world simply going down the drain. For young people in Berlin in particular, as  others have told me, who went through that, the   choice seemed to be only between the Communists  and the Nazis. The Social Democrats, the middle of   the road, left-wing party, had been discredited by  their tacit support for the government that made   austerity measures and cuts and so on, and so  Eric decided he was going to be a Communist. He   couldn't be a Nazi, he was Jewish by origin for  one thing, and then he was English and couldn't   share in the, in the nationalist extremism of the  Nazis. So he started reading Communist literature. I went and told one of my teachers I was  communist and he asked me some questions.   He said you don't know what you're talking  about go into the library and read some stuff. And you did. And I did, that's how it started. It was extremely exciting. The Communist Party  could throw a hundred thousand people onto the   streets at a couple of hours notice. And Eric,  in fact, went on the last big demonstration   of the Communists in Berlin just  before Hitler came to power. Adolf Hitler, leader of the  German national movement,   is made chancellor of Germany and Berlin  goes wild in celebration of his victory. I can still see myself walking home from school  with my sister on the cold afternoon of the   30 January 1933, reflecting on what the news  of Hitler's appointment as chancellor meant. And even as the Hitler victory was  announced and the torchlight parades began,   communist agitators began milling in the streets  in protest. They posted handbills calling for a   nationwide general strike. As they posted their  bills, violence erupted on the streets of Berlin. Hobsbawm was among those posting pamphlets  through people's letterboxes. He wrote:   'We would go into the apartment buildings and,  starting on the top floor, push the leaflets into   each flat until we came out the front door panting  with the effort and looking for signs of danger.' In the spring of 1933, Hobsbawm's  uncle moved them all to London. The first thing that I thought when i came to  England, frankly, England was an enormous bore.   After the extraordinary excitement of living  in Germany. I tried to explain it in school   to my English school fellows many years later, I  said: supposing you were a journalist who had been   reporting on Manhattan and your editor said,  now from tomorrow you'll be getting to Omaha.   That's how I felt when I came to England, you see. But Hobsbawm soon settled into English  life. He attended Marylebone grammar school,   where he thrived, and was already producing  Marxist interpretations for his history classes. But the fact is I'm not sure that if I had stayed  in the continent I would have become a historian.   I got an interest in history because I became  communist and so I read the communist manifesto,   and anybody reads the first pages of this  is bound to develop an interest in history.   But it was coming to England, where history  was an important part of the teaching,   it was in an English secondary school and in an  English university that I became a historian. As he wrote in his diary when he was  17: ‘I do my best to live intensely,   and with success. So i'm training myself to get  as much as possible out of my limited personal   experience, aesthetically and otherwise, and  to enlarge my small experience through books.’ It wasn't just through books,  though. In the school holidays   he accompanied his uncle Sidney  on business trips to Paris. And one of those trips in 1936 was the first  Bastille Day celebrations after the popular front,   a kind of left liberal and socialist combination,  a coalition with communist support, had come to   power, and this is a period of immense  hope and rejoicing for the left. Eric's uncle Sidney, who worked in film, was  there with a crew to capture the occasion, and   Eric was with him. As he wrote to his cousin Ron:  'Can you imagine, a million people on the streets   quite crazy with joy, absolutely dead drunk  with their consciousness of unity and strength!' So I think France was very important to him in  those years, and the Popular Front I think for   him in the 30s and 40s remained – popular  in the sense of the anti-fascist front,   the front of the left – remained something of a  political ideal within which communism could work. In 1936 Hobsbawm won a place at King's College,  Cambridge to read history. He was the first   person in his family and from his school to go to  university, and it was at Cambridge that he joined   the Communist Party of Great Britain. The Soviet  Union's interventions to help the Republican   forces against Franco in the Spanish Civil War  were drawing many students to the Communist Party,   but for Hobsbawm it was also a time when his  differences with the party became apparent. He felt that the communists in Cambridge  were focusing much too narrowly on   political issues, and so he gave up editing  the Communist Part student party newsletter   and edited The Granta instead (it was called 'The'  Granta in those days), which is a general sort of   non-political student paper and in that capacity  he had a whale of a time. So when he graduated   with a double starred First, top degree, in  1939 he had this enormous breadth of experience. After taking his degree, Eric intended to carry  on researching for a PhD, but history intervened. So Eric did not have what's generally known  as a 'good war'. He was drafted into the   Royal Engineers, and as a terribly impractical man   it was about the worst possible place for  him, building bridges and that kind of thing. Hobsbawm managed to get himself  transferred to the army educational corps,   where as a fluent German speaker with experience  of Hitler's Germany, he felt he could be of more   use. It was here that he first came to  the attention of British Intelligence. This is where Eric Hobsbawm first gets stuck  on the flypaper of the secret state. It's here   in this letter. Hobsbawm in 1942 is serving in the  army in the educational corps and he's organising,   and because he's a fluent German speaker  obviously he's giving lectures about Germany,   and to that end he writes to a German friend of  his: My dear Kahle – he writes to Hans Kahle,   who's running something called the Free German  Brigade in England, which is suspected by MI5   to be a front for espionage activities. But he's  invited by by Hobsbawm to give a lecture, simply,   to the local army units. This is what  gets Hobsbawm onto the radar of MI5,   he writes this letter to somebody whose letters  are being intercepted as a matter of course.   So immediately MI5 want to look for the  reasons for Hobsbawm links to Kahle. MI5 discovered that Hobsbawm was  already a Communist Party member,   which wasn't illegal, of course. So they  decided to investigate his family in London. Ah yes, the occupants of the suspect's home,  note that he's become a suspect already.   One Broadfields, Headstone Lane, Harrow. R.  Henry Birkwood Hobsbawm and his wife Isobel.   As to Henry what they have to say is that  'he's been described by a reliable informant   as a sneering critical type of person,  harsh of speech half Jew in appearance.'   Not uncommon language for this period, I have  to say. We should remember that, of course,   during the war the Soviet Union was our  ally, and indeed there were many people in   the secret services who were doing all they could  to produce propaganda to the effect of, you know,   Uncle Joe is really a very avuncular, kindly  figure and we can't win the war without him. Despite this, MI5 were anxious  to keep tabs on Hobsbawm. MI5 had started checking on him because he'd been  using his position in the army educational corps   to make propaganda for the opening up of a second  front, which was Stalin's demand for the West to   invade, already in 1942, to relieve the pressure  on the Soviet forces in the east. And this was   felt to be interfering in the political direction  of the war, so he was moved about by MI5. This is where he was, he'd asked for a posting  abroad in 1944, and this is what comes back to   the army. 'The security service is of the opinion  that from the internal security angle it would be   very much better if he remained in this country  where watch on his activities can much more easily   be kept than anywhere abroad.' The only thing  they could find for him to do for the rest of   the war was to send him to Cheltenham to  teach handicrafts in a military hospital. After the war Hobsbawm began  a PhD back in Cambridge,   but despite his glittering academic  record, he failed to get a teaching   job there and was forced to pursue less  conventional avenues for his career. He got himself a job in  1947 at Birkbeck in London,   which was and is London's college for  part-time, evening mature students. He started pitching ideas to  BBC Radio's Third Programme,   and they commissioned him,  again much to the horror of MI5. MI5 were appalled that they hadn't managed to  stop him entering the BBC and so they write   immediately to the BBC saying, 'you may care to  know for future reference that this man has a   communist history dating from 1936'. He's  on a list of speakers and scriptwriters   which is filed by MI5, so they're keeping constant  surveillance on who's taking the microphone   at the BBC. But it's clear that doors  were closing and there were areas   of British public life in which Eric  Hobsbawm would not be allowed to enter. Confined by the establishment to what they  hoped would be a harmless corner of academia,   Hobsbawm focused on becoming a historian. I've had luck to belong to a generation which  transformed the teaching of history, and the   practice of history. Essentially it was by trying  to fertilise traditional history, historical and   institutional narrative, by marrying it to or  getting inspiration from the social sciences.   In the 1930s and 40s the new generation  went for this, and after the war we won. He came to history through Marxism. Marxism is  above all a historical doctrine, it's a set of   ideas and theories about history, but he also had  this much broader approach to it and for that he I   think had to thank the influence of the French  Annales school. Now, like Marxism, the Annales   school – Marc Bloch, Lucien Febvre in particular –  were social scientists. They conceived of history   as the central social science in which would  gather together all the other social sciences.   You had to approach history in a very  broad way, nothing was off limits. The battleground for one of Hobsbawm's first  big historical debates was the Economic History   Review. In 1957 he wrote an article there arguing  that, contrary to the orthodox view, the standard   of living of the British working class declined  in the early years of the industrial revolution. And this aroused a lot of controversy  because he was now in the Cold War   and so Cold War historians thought of this  as a kind of Soviet-Marxist-Communist line,   which in many ways it was, though Eric's  writing is more sophisticated, I think. Hobsbawm thought there was no good evidence to  support the idea that living standards improved   for the working class in these decades. Quite  the opposite. He argues, for example, that meat   consumption went down based on the weight of beef  sold at Smithfield Market, and that unemployment   went up based on, among other things, the number  of vagrants recorded along the Great North Road. He got into an enormous controversy with,  in particular, the Oxford economic historian   R.M. Hartwell, and this then ranged on through  the pages of the Economic History Review for   quite a long time. Immensely fruitful, still  being debated today. I think, ultimately,   he won in some ways. So I think it's quite widely  accepted now that insofar as you can prove it,   the standard of living of the working class did  decline in the early decades of the industrial   revolution, but then when you look in the  late 19th century there's no question that it   was actually improving, and there all sorts of  ways in which I think the kinds of evidence he   relied on were only a  smallish part of the picture. I've always thought this is such  an odd thing, I mean, no Marxist   thesis is entailed in that. I mean, if  anything, Marx was always clear that   capitalism is better than feudalism You  know, not terribly original but certainly   something, you know, it would be very  difficult to sustain the opposite. Just after the war, Hobsbawm joined a  number of fellow left-wing historians,   such as E.P. Thompson and Christopher Hill, in  forming the Communist Party Historians Group,   to put into practice their new methods of  Marxist history. And in 1952 some of them   started a new historical journal, Past and  Present. Hobsbawm was in search of big ideas,   and in the 1950s, as in later  in life, he found them in Italy. Hobsbawm went out to Italy in the 1950s, and at the same  time became interested through   Communist Party intellectuals in some of the  struggles that took place in the south, not just   at the time, there were struggles going on, but  also going back to the 1890s and the 19th century. Through conversations with intellectuals,  local leaders, peasants, anyone he could find,   Hobsbawm started thinking about the diverse  local struggles and revolts of the common people,   spread across different regions, countries  and centuries, as a single area of study. Some of those struggles were what we might call  socialist struggles, like the Fasci Siciliani,   which was a great collective struggle in the  1890s over land and democracy which was crushed   by the Italian state, but left a legacy.  And some of those were different kinds of   struggles against the state, which he called  'social banditry', and often individual crime,   struggles against the  centralisation of the Italian state. In his 1959 book, Primitive Rebels,  Hobsbawm describes the social bandit,   the outlaw who becomes a hero for the oppressed  and enters popular mythology. He writes:   'In one sense banditry is a rather primitive  form of organised social protest, perhaps the   most primitive we know. At any rate, in many  societies it is regarded as such by the poor,   who consequently protect the bandit, regard him as  their champion, idealise him and turn him into a   myth: Robin Hood in England, Janosik in Poland  and Slovakia, Diego Corrientes and Andalucia. One of Hobsbawm's recurring examples is Salvatore  Giuliano, who was shot and killed in Sicily the   year before Hobsbawm's first visit there. Hobsbawm  liked to use films as a cultural reference point,   and he particularly admired this one about  Giuliano by Francesco Rosi, made in 1962.   It tells the story of the Sicilian bandit's  brief but dramatic life and its complex local   political entanglements with him scarcely  appearing on screen as a living character.   Giuliano was a black market olive oil  trader who went on the run during the war,   stole lavishly from the rich, paid the poor  handsomely for their goods, but ended up   under the wing of the Mafia, on whose behalf he  helped perpetrate the notorious May Day massacre   at Portella della Ginestra in 1947. As Hobsbawm  says, brilliantly reconstructed in Rosi's film. 'Bandit heroes are not expected to  make a world of equality,' he writes,   'they can only right wrongs and prove that  sometimes oppression can be turned upside down.   Thus the bandit is helpless before  the forces of the new society,   which he cannot understand. The future  lay with political organisation.' He was also pushing the boundaries  of what Marxism was. Marxists   don't really or didn't really study bandits.  They're interested in the working class. These   were things that were going to disappear. They  weren't going to change the world, the peasants.   And it was original in the sense of that subaltern  studies, looking at the people that Gramsci said   were kind of the outsiders. And I think that  interest was very original, at that time. Eric had a huge passion and compassion for  peasants. It was really very serious, I think   he thought of it a little bit as they should be a  separate political class and they would be, that   he hoped they would be the future  and they would make the revolution.   I think once in a tremendous row I think I  probably said, 'well you only like peasants   anyway', something like that. Things  people say when they're in a rage. By the end of the 1950s, Hobsbawm had  established a reputation as a historian. But   behind this professional success, it had  been a tough decade in his personal life.   He had married his first  wife, Muriel Seaman, in 1942,   but after the war their relationship fell apart. That marriage had failed in 1952  and we even find in the files here   references to Hobsbawm having  some kind of emotional breakdown.   As Hobsbawm wrote in his diary at the time: 'now  I'm unhappy, for the first time in a long time,   real frenzied unhappiness, that makes me weep  and causes me sleepless nights. That's new.   My only maxim was: you can survive everything,   you won't feel sorry for yourself.  And now I do feel sorry for myself.' And then in 1956 came two blows which shook  the communist movement around the world.   Stalin had died in 1953, and in 1956   his successor, Khrushchev, finally  admitted his predecessor's crimes. In 1956 first of all the international communist  movement was sent into turmoil as Khrushchev gave   his famous speech at the 20th Party Congress,  denouncing Stalin, his crimes, his cult of   personality. And Eric led a movement within the  Communist Party in Great Britain to try and get   the leadership, which was rigidly Stalinist and  didn't want to know about this stuff, to confront   its past, to admit its mistakes and to have a  more democratic structure of decision-making. In an article in the Daily Worker in July 1956,   Hobsbawm urged unity and a  much broader appeal to voters.   'This is the time for rethinking', he declares.  Let's not waste it! But the situation got worse. And then in the Autumn of 1956,   when a liberal communist regime in Hungary had  been established in the wake of Khrushchev’s   revelations, the Red Army invaded, put it  down at a considerable loss of life, executed   some of the leaders. And this threw the British  Communist Party into a further state of turmoil. Hobsbawm recalled the moment 50 years later in  an article for the LRB: 'For Communists outside   the Soviet empire, especially intellectuals,  the spectacle of Soviet tanks advancing on our   people's government headed by Communist  reformers was a lacerating experience.' Thousands left Communist parties across Europe,  including Hobsbawm's fellow Marxist historians,   E.P. Thompson and Christopher Hill.  But Hobsbawm didn't leave the party. His friend Isaac Deutscher once said to him, he  must have talked to him about leaving the party,   and he said: don't leave the party, you'd be very   very unhappy afterwards, you won't  be able to take it emotionally. Instead he pushed for change from within. In the  Daily Worker he urged the withdrawal of Soviet   troops from Hungary. MI5 noted that 'Eric-sim' was  becoming an undermining force within the party,   that there was talk of his wanting  to overthrow the leadership. And yet, his decision to remain in the party cost  him difficult questions for the rest of his life,   not least after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Why didn't you leave? And why  didn't you leave for so long after? I, in the first place, I never wanted  to belong to the people who had left   and turned against. I don't want to be in that  company, I didn't want to be in that company.   In the second place, I did not want to  betray the people I knew who had actually   sacrificed their lives, and lost. You  see, a lot of people, people like myself,   had very easy lives, by and large. But there are  others of my friends and comrades who haven't. He didn't want to be an ex-communist. He  didn't want to betray, in a sense, the comrades   who were with him in the 30s and the 40s and  the 50s, the ones he knew were sincere people.   He would have felt embarrassed about it.  He did not stay because of any feeling of   loyalty to either the British Communists,  and certainly not the the Soviet Union. I think he was emotionally too closely bound up  in the communist movement after all the other   members of the Communist Party Historians  Group and others had largely joined it   over the issue of the Spanish Civil War,   but Hobsbawm joined it earlier on. So the  reason, when the Spanish Civil War was over,   for most of them, staying in had kind of pretty  well gone, in many ways. But for him it wasn't. People think that he thought the same because  he didn't leave the party, so he must have not   minded that they killed so many people or did  this and that. But his views evolved the same   as everybody else's, but he just didn't want  to leave the party and he wanted just to keep   his card. All the party meant to him was that he  had this pink card, I think it was, in his desk.   That's what it meant. That's all. He  was as horrified as everybody else, and   ashamed and all sorts of things, like everybody  else, but he didn't want to leave the party. In the late 50s, Hobsbawm was living alone in  London, teaching at Birkbeck in the evenings,   and at night going to the jazz clubs of Soho.  He had developed a taste for jazz as a teenager   from his cousin Dennis, and now he was captivated  by it. In need of money, Hobsbawm started looking   for journalism work, and approached the New  Statesman about being their jazz critic. And so he went to the editor  Kingsley Martin and said,   I know a lot about jazz you don't have  a jazz correspondent, other papers and   magazines do and one of them is Kingsley Amis  who doesn't know anything at all about jazz.   So the editor, Kingsley Martin, said, alright,  you can become the New Statesman's jazz critic. He took the pen name Francis Newton,  after the trumpeter Frankie Newton,   and he wrote about it years later in the LRB. But what did being Francis Newton mean to me?   The attraction was not so much the  opportunity to review jazz performances and   the records now flooding in, or even to fit this  extraordinary music into 20th century society.   It was the chance to understand the musicians  and their world. In short, the jazz scene. He gave lectures on jazz in his spare  time, helpfully documented by MI5. I was present on 24 May 1962 at the small  Conway Hall, Red Lion Square WC1, where a   meeting entitled 'Jazz and Society in Britain'  was held under the auspices of the music group   of the Communist Party of Great Britain.  Hobsbawm then spoke for approximately 70 minutes.   He outlined the beginning of jazz in the  New Orleans district and its increase   in popularity both in this country  and in the United States of America,   including the strong revival of traditional  jazz which followed World War II.   He interspersed his speech with recordings of jazz  in the traditional and modern idioms. Proposing   a vote of thanks to Hobsbawm, the chairman  said it had been a most interesting talk. By the early 1960s, things were looking up. It was 1962 and I met him at my brother's  house, my brother Walter's house.   His wife was a mature student at Birkbeck College,  and guess who was her supervisor? Eric Hobsbawm.   And that's how we met, at that dinner party.  There was chemistry straight away, I think,   with Eric. He looked at me pretty well through  the evening, even when he was talking to other   people he still knew where I was in the room. So  it was a bit mutual. When it was the end of the   party and I went home – my home was then  in the flat of my other brother, Victor,   and I lived there with two girlfriends,  and when I came back from the party I said,   why don't we we give a dinner party? All invite  a male friend, that'll be six of us then,   so it was me that phoned Eric first. So I was  not a crushed violet or anything, and he said   he would be delighted to come in a week's time  for dinner, and that's how it all got going. But a few months in, Hobsbawm was given a grant by  the Rockefeller Foundation to spend three months   in South America developing his work on 'Primitive  Rebels'. The prospect of a lengthy absence clearly   focused his mind, as Marlene writes in her  recent memoir, 'Meet Me in Buenos Aires'. One evening I accompanied Eric to the George  Shearing Jazz Quintet at the Royal Festival Hall,   which he was covering for the New Statesman. He  said something very unromantic, like I think we   should take out our diaries and find time for a  wedding, before I have to leave for this trip.   That was the proposal and there  was certainly no bent knee. Time was short so they decided to take their  honeymoon first, in Bulgaria, and get married   second, back in London. This was all happening  in the middle of the Cuban missile crisis. But Eric's last words to me before he flew  off were: should things go wrong and war   does break out, then buy a  one-way ticket to Argentina.   There's enough money in the bank  and I'll meet you in Buenos Aires.   Oh, heart pumping! I had not reckoned with that!  Did I really know my man well enough? Well,   life had fallen into my lap and I was just  going to live it, I think that was how I felt. So Hobsbawm set off for a three-month  Rockefeller-funded tour of South America. As he   wrote on his return: In the next decade or so the  most explosive region of the world is likely to be   Latin America. Forty percent of the population of  Lima or Rio, half the population of Recife, live,   if that is the right word, like refugees fleeing  an earthquake in shanty towns and encampments.   In a traditional society, millions of peasants  do not start to stream away from the hinterland   unless some profound changes are taking  place in their lives. And so they are. Hobsbawm's studies in Latin America took in  the failed insurrection in Colombia in 1948,   the origins and international appeal of  Bossa Nova, and the semi-feudal condition   of the peasants in the Cusco region of  Peru, and their subsequent rebellion. He writes: ‘To call much of rural Latin America  medieval is not a metaphor but the strict truth.   For in many cases there is still substantially  the mental world of the European middle ages   which is after all the world the 16th  century conquerors brought with them.   All this has been deeply disturbed by  the rise of commercial agriculture.   There is a sense of oppressive tension, a  feeling that things can't go on this way,   everywhere. Like so much else in this continent,  it recalls the mood of Russia before 1917.’ 1962 was the first of many trips  Hobsbawm made to Latin America,   where his work gained enduring  popularity, particularly in Brazil.   He was to be disappointed, of course. As he wrote  40 years later: 'None of the political experiments   I have watched from near or far since the Cuban  revolution has made much lasting difference.' But in the early 60s he returned to London to  a new life with Marlene. They started a family   and enjoyed a more settled existence,  albeit still under the watch of MI5. Yes there was a little click on the phone  when I knew they'd listen to the phone call.   I was sorry for the people who had to listen to   to all our phone calls. I mean, especially  when I gave birth to my first child, I was   rambling to my mother about nappies and things  like that and some poor chap had to sit and   listen to all this, and so we rather laughed it  off. He was quite an easy chap really, a 'bon   coucheur', as the French say. He just took things  in his stride. I was the one that made the dramas. 1962 was also the year Hobsbawm published his  landmark work, 'The Age of Revolution', the first   book in what would eventually become a series of  four describing the making of the modern world. 'The Age of Revolution' covers the period  from the French Revolution up to the 1848   revolutions, in a way that reflects both  his Marxist thinking. So, for example,   there are sections in it on the falling rate  of profit in capitalism and things like that,   and there's a definite class interpretation.  But he also has this influence of the French   Annales school and the enormous breadth of  the coverage of the book and the knowledge he   portrays in it, the interpretations he gives  of culture, literature, the arts, science. So the structure of 'The Age of Revolution'  of course takes its foundation on two   revolutions, on the French, which is a  political one in which the economic side is not   terribly important. I mean, it is not a capitalist  revolution, although Marxists in the past have   tended to say, ah, this is the bourgeoisie  taking power. He says no it's not really the   bourgeoisie taking power, it's an exponent of  the professional middle classes taking power   at a particular moment in French history. And  similarly, the British industrial revolution   is a bourgeois revolution where  the bourgeoisie doesn't take power.   It becomes powerful, economically, but  it does not produce a class which takes   power. There's a sort of compromise in which the  aristocracy says, well if that's what you want,   why not, you know, it makes the country more  prosperous and bigger, you know, so it's fine. One of the many strands Hobsbawm  follows through 'The Age of Revolution'   is the emergence of nationalism and national  identity. 'Nationalism,' he writes, 'like   so many other characteristics of the modern  world is the child of the dual revolution.' The growth of countries, specifically Britain and  France, was a growth in the power of a state. A   growth in the power of a state must have some kind  of ideological basis, it must unite the nation.   It cannot be a class, it cannot be a region,  it's got to be the whole, the whole country,   which is the territorial entity upon which the  the state rules. And so the combination of a state   must create a nation and therefore a nation-state,  that is the origin of modern nationalism. The examples of France and Britain inspired  movements of young radical liberals across   Europe to imagine their own national  sovereignty. The Young Italy of Mazzini,   Young Ireland, Young Germany.   But it was through the advance of mass education  that their nationalist ideals really took hold. The development of education is central,  in Hobsbawm's view, to the construction   of nationalism, because you need to figure  out what it is that you're going to teach   the kids in schools. And that is the business  of a state, in most European countries.   It is a state that controls what is being taught,  and the language in which it is going to be   taught. So you have a solidification of a national  language, and once you have the decision to have   a centralised state education sector, the most  important element in it is not the obvious stuff,   like maths, because two plus two is four  throughout the world. No, it's history.   It's, well, the national literature is  important, but history is the important one.   Where do we come from? What is our  history? And nearly all the invention   of national history occur in the 19th century. The Age of Revolution was the era in which  the construction of national identities began,   a process which was central to Hobsbawm's  understanding of the 19th century. Nationalism is manufactured out of the past,   and, on the contrary, I mean the past is the  raw material for nationalism. And I'm bound to   say that virtually everything that nationalists  say about the past is wrong. As a famous 19th   century French expert once put it, Ernest Renan,  in his great lecture on 'What is Nationalism',   saying: getting your history wrong, or indeed  even forgetting history, is part of the element   of becoming a nation. Which is why nationalism  is not compatible with the progress of history. Citizenship is more than a piece  of paper, more than a passport.   However, citizenship is something for all  inhabitants of the territory. The danger   in a nation-state which is based on ethnicity or  something like that is that the inhabitants of   that particular state, as it were, the  state belongs to one of these groups,   and the others are less important. As, for  instance, in Slovakia. Slovakia is not a state   of everybody who lives in Slovakia, it belongs to  the Slovaks, and others are, as it were, guests   or tolerated, or this case might be not tolerated.  And that's, once again, where the trouble starts. In 1975, Hobsbawm followed up his 'Age  of Revolution' with 'The Age of Capital',   continuing the story of the modern world  up to 1875. He writes: 'In the 1860s,   a new word entered the economic and political  vocabulary of the world: capitalism. The global   triumph of capitalism is the major theme  of history in the decades after 1848.' And underpinning this triumph of  capitalism was the further evolution   of nationalism, and the  formation of nation-states. So in 'The Age of Capital' you have the  construction of capitalism as a wider system,   and that requires nationalism as well. So,  Bismarck is not a nationalist to begin with but,   my god, when it is necessary to use nationalism  to unify Germany, or at least a part of Germany,   he certainly uses it. And then in the United  States you have what would be the achievement   of American nationalism, namely the Civil War.  It's paradoxical to talk about the Civil War   being an achievement of nationalism, but the  Civil War was fought for a number of reasons.   Freeing the slaves is one of them. But another  way of looking at the Civil War was to establish   the victory of the capitalist north, and therefore  to be able to construct an American nationalism   without a country deeply divided between  two social systems, one based on slavery but   integrated in the world economy, and one much less  integrated in the world economy, but capitalist,   namely the ever-growing industrial north.  And 1861, the emancipation of the serfs   in Russia, when the Russian authorities realised  that they were defeated in Crimea because they   were not advanced, and one of the ways of being  advanced was to become more capitalist, and one   of the ways of becoming more capitalist was to  free the serfs so they could become a labour   force. So you can see, in Hobsbawm's construct  ideologies play a role but it's a subordinate role   to other imperatives which are not just economic  in the sort of traditional Marxist way, you know,   classes and so on, but actually 'materialistic'  would be a better, Marxist way of defining it. By 1876, Germany, Italy, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia  had all become independent sovereign states.   But there was an in-built tension in these  developments. National identity was largely   a constructed artefact dependent on the liberal  institutions of the state to impose uniformity.   Most notably through an official language. Those  who happened not to speak the official language   were required either to assimilate or to accept an  inferior position. Hobsbawm writes: 'The paradox   of nationalism was that in forming its own nation  it automatically created a counter-nationalism.   The age of liberalism did not grasp  this paradox. A world of nations would,   it was believed, be a liberal world, and  a liberal world would consist of nations.' By the 1970s Hobsbawm was on his way to becoming  a public intellectual. And not just in Britain. Italy was an ongoing inspiration  for Hobsbawm, in large part   because it was the only European country where  the Communist Party had found mass support. The Italian Communist Party, you know, that he  came across when he went to Italy in the 50s was   a mass party. I mean, it had two million members,  at least. And it wasn't just the members. This was   an organic organisation, it had football  teams, it had bars, it had housing projects,   it had newspapers, it had magazines, it had  publishers. Having come from Britain where the   Communist Party was a marginal organisation,  and he's suddenly: 'this is my world,   this is my politics'. Which were moderate,  not revolutionary. Cultural. And which were   much more war of position than war of  movement, that he takes from Gramsci,   this idea of the organic intellectual slowly  building your trenches in civil society. In the late 70s, these ideas from moderate  Italian communism inspired an article   Hobsbawm had published in Marxism Today,  on the 'Forward March of Labour Halted',   which turned out to be surprisingly  influential on the course of British politics. And although Hobsbawm himself said afterwards  that he didn't intend it to be principally a   political intervention, he thought of  it as a re-thinking of the history of   the social supports of the Labour Party, what it  had been built on and how that was now changing,   would have to be built on something else. But of  course, at the time it really did have a great   topical resonance. It was when the Labour Party  was starting in those years between '79 and '82 to   tear itself apart, in some ways, and Hobsbawm  was therefore made very prominent by that debate. The debate that's now raging between  Communists is of such fundamental importance   that it's now spread to the Labour  Party, and indeed the whole of the   labour movement. A key figure is the  distinguished historian Eric Hobsbawm,   who's called in Marxism Today for a  new approach to defeat Thatcherism. The industrial working class itself, the  manufacturing working class, the old-fashioned,   blue-collar factory worker is a declining  force. Not just in England, in most countries.   So to that extent the idea of a movement based  primarily on the male, blue-collar factory worker   working in vast works like Longbridge, you know,  is no longer totally true, and is likely to get   less true. These are a minority, and now getting  to be quite a small minority of the population. In the 1980s, Eric's advocacy of a cross-class  coalition for progressive causes was seized   upon by Neil Kinnock, and then later on by Tony  Blair, as an argument for a moderate Labour Party,   particularly the end of the 70s the early 80s  Labour Party moved very sharply to the left under   the influence of Tony Benn, in particular, and  Michael Foot. Eric thought that Benn was dividing   and splitting the Labour Party, and if there's one  thing he disliked it was politicians who split the   labour movement. The task was not to be pure  but to have a coalition with other groups. And   so I think that played an influential role in the  creation of New Labour, because he was well-known   as a very left-wing thinker and intellectual,  and Neil Kinnock thought if you cited him   in support of the view of a kind  of social, political popular front   then that would give his views more legitimacy. I, without apology, used and told him I was  using him, deliberately, as an instrument   to combat the Bennite left and the entryists and  militants and all the rest of it, for the sake of   realistic, progressive, democratic socialism,  and Eric thought that was a very good idea. Later on, of course, after Tony  Blair came to power and pursued   a policy that was so moderate it  was hardly left-wing at all anymore,   then Eric Hobsbawm came to regret this. He  described Blair as 'Thatcher in trousers'. In 1987 Hobsbawm followed up his Ages of  Revolution and Capital with 'The Age of Empire'.   Together the three books present  an overview of what Hobsbawm called   'the long 19th century', with The Age  of Empire taking the story up to 1914.   As he writes: 'This book surveys the moment  in history when it became clear that the   society and civilisation created by and for the  western liberal bourgeoisie represented not the   permanent form of the modern industrial world,  but only one phase in its early development.' There we get one of the basic contradictions  of of the liberal era, the liberal   bourgeoisie. Liberalism and democracy in the 19th  century were not the same things. We think of it   as going together like, you know, bacon and eggs,  but bacon and eggs are not naturally connected   either. So liberalism, on the contrary, worked  best when democracy wasn't there, because how the   devil could you rely on the ignorant and selfish  and brutalised masses to understand the logic of   what their betters were saying? Particularly the  economic logic. But at the same time, you see,   the ideas of liberalism meant that sooner or  later these things would have to be extended. The expansion of the electorate brought an  era of mass political awakening both for the   working class and the new socialist parties which  represented them, and the lower middle class,   the so-called 'little men', threatened by  big property above and collectivism below.   In this arena of democratised politics,  nationalism became a potent political tool. 'The basis of nationalism of all  kinds was the same', Hobsbawm writes.   'The readiness of people to identify themselves  emotionally with their nation. The democratisation   of politics and especially elections provided  ample opportunities for mobilising them.   When states did so, they called it patriotism, and  the essence of the original right-wing nationalism   which emerged in already established nation-states  was to claim a monopoly of patriotism for the   extreme political right, and thereby brand  everyone else as some sort of traitor.' By the early years of the 20th century, the  economic rivalry between the European powers   had expanded into imperial rivalry. The  balance of power was becoming unmanageable. People drew a parallel between political and  military power and economic power. They thought   that one has got to be proportionate to the other.  So if the Germans rise they think they've got to   be not merely richer but also more powerful,  and also in a military sense more dominant.   And it is this, it seemed to me, this principle  of proportionality which made it impossible   to manage international relation as they had  previously been managed, because there was no way   in which you could actually negotiate permanent  arrangements. They tried to, but they couldn't. The world Hobsbawm describes at the end of 'The  Age of Empire' is the one he was born into in   1917. But it wasn't until over 70 years later  that Hobsbawm came to write about his own times.   'Age of Extremes', published in 1994,  covers the period from 1914 to 1991,   what Hobsbawm called 'the short 20th century’.  And he divides that century into three periods.   The first of which he calls  'The Age of Catastrophe'. I think what we're talking about and  what gives gives a unity, if you like,   to the history of this period, from 1914 until the  present, is in the first place the breakdown of   19th century civilisation. You can call it  different things you can call it bourgois   liberal you could call it liberal capitalism, but  at all events that kind of civilisation broke,   and for thirty odd years it was by  no means clear that it would survive. Thirty-one years of world total war in which  the number of people killed, scattered,   murdered, all the rest of it,  runs into tens of millions. The most appalling business for instance is   the breakdown in war in the distinction between  combatants and non-combatants, which was,   after all, the core of civilised values. If  you wanted to do anything to limit what is,   in essence, a barbarous and inhuman activity, the  one thing you had to do is to distinguish between   people whose business it is to kill and get  themselves killed, and the innocent bystanders. But this 'Age of Catastrophe' gave  way, in the decades after 1945,   to what Hobsbawm describes as 'The Golden Age'. And then for 25 years you get what is a  mysterious but unquestionably extraordinary age,   roughly the third quarter of the 20th century,  in which all the problems which previously   appeared to have existed disappeared,  or that's that's what it looked like. Sometime around the middle of this century,  10,000 years of human history ended.   The change – social, economic, technical  change – accelerated at an incredible rate.   For instance, until the middle of the 20th  century the great majority of the human   race lived on the countryside and lived off  various kinds of agriculture and livestock.   This is no longer the case, and moreover it's  gone down at a rate which is unbelievable,   within the lifetime of people  that aren't particularly old. Then it happens from the early 70s on,   once again, if not a breakdown but  a slide into an uncertain future. Hobsbawm calls the final decades of his short 20th  century ‘The Landslide’. He describes a period,   beginning with the oil crisis in 1973, during  which, for much of the world, across Africa,   South America and Western Asia, economic  growth stopped and most people got poorer.   While in the West, the foundations of  the Golden Age were rapidly crumbling. 'The historic tragedy of the crisis decades,'  he writes 'was that production now visibly   shed human beings faster than the market  economy generated new jobs for them.' The trend for dividing the world into  ever smaller nation states continued   just as the globalised economy became increasingly  dominated by powerful transnational corporations,   which in turn increased the power and  importance of supranational political bodies. While in theory we now live in a world of free  nation states, in practice we live in what we can   now recognise as a deeply unstable form of global  disorder, both internationally and within states.   A number, possibly, probably, a growing  number, of these political entities   appear incapable of carrying on the  essential functions of territorial states   or they are threatened with  disintegration by secessionist movements.   What's more, since the end of cold war, we live in  an era when uncontrollable or barely controllable   armed conflict has become endemic in large areas  of Asia, Africa, Europe and parts of the Pacific.   Massacre amounting to genocide,  the mass expulsion of populations,   for which we have invented the term ethnic  cleansing, are once again taking place on a scale   not seen since the aftermath of WorldWar II.  But no return to the old system is possible. I believe that particularly the last 20, 30 years,  which has been globalisation under the sign of   a complete lack of control, free market,  complete free market, has produced   not only inequality but also enormous  instability. Rapid booms, dramatic slumps   and transformations unpredicted and rapid.  And this also, it seems to me, creates   even greater instability. Now  what makes me afraid is that the   people who are likely to benefit from this  instability, politically, are the reactionaries.   Xenophobia, racism, economic and particularly  religious fundamentalism, which is rising   in all major religions. I fear that the cause  of reason and progress and improvement for which   all of us stood in different ways, whether it's  liberals or socialists or communists or what,   is now being weakened, and that is what,  in a sense, I look forward therefore,   if anything, to the political advance of  the people who created enormous tragedies in   the 20th century. It won't be fascism but it would  be the same sort of family of ultra right wing,   nationalist or fundamentalist things.  That is enough to be afraid of. In 2005, in the London Review of Books,   Perry Anderson offered a lengthy  critique of the 'Age of' series.   In it he points out that Hobsbawm seems to present  two contradictory views of the 20th century.   The first places the October Revolution  as the defining event of the period,   which divides the world into opposing systems  whose antagonism benefited each other.   When one fell away, the world was left in crisis  and everyone lost. Anderson calls this a 'strategy   of consolation'. The other view was shaped by  Hobsbawm's experience of the Popular Front.   It sees communism and liberalism on the same side,   both descendants of the enlightenment, fighting  together against the darkness of fascism,   and ultimately both were winners, in a sense, of  the 20th century. Another kind of consolation. if you look at the history of the 20th  century not in terms of a permanent   war between God and the Devil, defined according  to taste, but if you just look at it, as it were,   as somebody in a century may look  at it, you won't necessarily see   a zero-sum game between two alternatives, one  is capitalism and the other is communism of   the Soviet kind. What you see is probably a  continuum of economic systems which at one   extreme are represented by the Soviet Union, which  attempted to operate everything through a command   economy based on centralised, not very effective  planning. And the other extreme, pure free market   economy such as Mrs Thatcher and Reagan tried to  introduce, or pretended they tried to introduce. In between, try and put yourself in the  position of somebody in 50 years, 60 years time.   Would you necessarily regard, I don't  know, countries such as Britain,   Sweden, South Korea, Ireland and Portugal as  necessarily the same kind of identical economies,   rather than as different versions, different  stations, stopping places, on this continuum?   And yet, if I, having lived my life, think  about the 20th century, it's still very   hard for me not to think of the economy as a  dichotomy between capitalism and socialism,   and only one kind of socialism and one kind of  capitalism. I've got to try very hard to do it. No i don't know where that one is, i'm sorry.  This one is in a tent at a Welsh agricultural   show where we had to look at carrots and other  vegetables and and then decide which was the best. From the 1960s onwards, Hobsbawm led a peaceful,   happy and highly productive life with  Marlene and his family in North London. And there he's, yes, the turkey at Christmas.  Yes, he was slow, he did it, well he did it,   but it was a bit slow. My cousin said, whatever,  you know, in spite of your good German, everybody   would know, you couldn't be a spy, everybody  would know you were an Englishman from the   way he carved a leg of lamb, whereas normally the  French and the continentals just sort of stab in. He enjoyed worldwide fame as  a historian, and in Britain,   despite being tracked by MI5 for much of his life,  was even made a Companion of Honour by the Queen. I think he remains, in some sense, always a child  of the Enlightenment. He believes in rational,   objective analysis, he's not very taken by some  of the more post-modern styles of analysis,   but he's also not altogether in tune with, as it  were, the counter-cultural aspects of the 1960s   and 70s. They come a bit late in his life,  I mean he's already in his forties by then.   He remains loyal to the view that there  is objective evidence which, if analysed   impersonally enough, objectively enough, can yield  a true understanding of the sequence of events.   And that’s, of course, a point of view that's been  challenged from all points of the compass, left   and right, and also from different philosophical  and theoretical positions. Also, of course,   with the rise of a stronger sense of identity  and identity politics, people challenge that for   different reasons again. And I think Hobsbawm, he  understood all these things very well, of course,   he noted them, he observed them, but observed them  a little bit from outside, and I don't think they   fundamentally undermined his confidence that  there was a story which rational analysis could   uncover and that was what we needed to learn  about history to understand where we were now. In his autobiography, ‘Interesting  Times’, published in 2002   he makes it clear that it won't be an apologia.   'History may judge my politics', he writes, 'in  fact it has substantially judged them. Readers may   judge my books. Historical understanding is what  I'm after, not agreement approval or sympathy.' To be a historian was a  consolation in itself, perhaps,   to the man who wrote a very different  autobiography many years earlier. Does it make you feel like  you understand him better? I don't feel from having read those files that  I understand more about Hobsbawm. It was only in   his own voice when you look at the questionnaire  that they got by burgling that house and stealing   48,000 files of the Communist Party of Great  Britain, there he's confessing to a kind of   a sense of frustration and limitation. What he  wants to do is to involve himself more directly   in communist practice rather than just dealing  with the theory of it, and I think as an   intellectual he's in one of those classic, he's  got this sort of hyphenated identity which is   that he is using his position as an academic and  an intellectual, and as a writer and journalist   to air some of these ideas and critiques. But, you  know, he's never going to be there with a hammer   and sickle, you know, actually sort of forging  the new Marxist reality, the New Jerusalem.   So I think that's probably the one document in the  thousand pages I've looked at that that struck me   as something that was really genuinely heartfelt,  and a representation an expression, of him. The last evening I felt that he  had begun the process of dying.   He was nearly deaf so I had to get into his bed  and talk right into his ear. I knew he didn't   want to die so I told him, 'another fine  mess you've got us into', and he smiled.   When I got out of his bed and stood at the end  of it he pointed at me looked at me and repeated,   'you, you, you, you'. I knew he was  trying to thank me for everything,   and then he slept and that  would be our final goodbye.   He died in the very early hours of the next  morning in his sleep on October 1, 2012. I thought memoirs are the sort of things written  by people who have contributed to history in   a sort of positive way, like ex-generals and  ex-politicians, who think they want to record   what they've done for the whole thing. Well  I haven't done anything, I've written things   and I've kept my eyes open and I've tried to  be as curious as I can about what happens,   but I don't like calling it a memoir because – It sounds like 'With Rod and  Gun Through the Punjabi.' It sounds much more like 'How  I Won World War Two', What? Yes.
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Published: Thu Apr 08 2021
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