Èñòîðèê 20 âåêà è áðèòàíñêîãî ðàáî÷åãî êëàññà, ìàðêñèñò
Pre-eminent scholarly historian of Britain’s industrial working class whose writings were filtered through his Marxist sympathies
Long a committed Marxist, the historian and writer Eric Hobsbawm pioneered the study of popular protest, riot and revolt, and his writings were as important to social scientists as to historians. His later comprehensive histories ranged across the whole world since the Industrial Revolution and were translated into many languages.
Eric Hobsbawm was born in Alexandria in Egypt in 1917 the son of an English official in Posts and Telegraphs, Leopold Percy Hobsbaum (a clerical error altered young Eric’s name for ever), whose paternal grandfather had immigrated to London’s East End in the 1870s from Russian Poland. His mother, Nellie Grun, daughter of a moderately prosperous Viennese jeweller, was of similar Russian Jewish background. His parents had married in neutral Switzerland, unable to live in either Austria or Britain without being interned for the sake of the other’s nationality until after the war, when they soon moved to Vienna. His father proved unlucky and incompetent as a businessman; they lived poorly from hand to mouth; and when in 1929 he died suddenly, his widow with their son Eric and daughter Nancy were virtually destitute. Helped by relatives, the family survived until Nellie’s death two years later. Eric went to live with an uncle and aunt in Berlin and was for two years at the Prinz-Heinrich-Gymnasium before his uncle, in 1933, after Hitler became Chancellor, wisely moved on to London — he very nearly chose Paris. At the age of 14, however, Eric had been recruited by older schoolfriends into the student wing of the German Communist Party.
He remained in the Communist Party until the British Communists faded away, but always, it might be said, in that same Berlin student wing, never in Stalin’s. At that time in Berlin, with the failure of Social Democrats to prevent the Nazis gaining power and with the connivance or indifference of France and Britain, Communism and Soviet power could seem the only hope. In later years Hobsbawm said in an interview that, “To some extent I belong to the old Central European culture which disappeared completely after 1933.” He added that there had been nothing like growing up in Hitler’s Berlin to bring on “a premature political maturity”. He attended Marylebone Grammar School, the later abolition of which he lamented. A German gymnasium had taught him, Communist or not, to appreciate a good grammar school education.
He gained a scholarship to King’s College, Cambridge in 1935, entering in 1936 and becoming prominent in the Cambridge University Socialist Society, which was or became virtually a Communist front organisation. The “big five” spies (Blunt, Burgess, Cairncross, Maclean and Philby) were of an older generation than his, and no attempt was made to recruit him. Perhaps he was too obvious a target for suspicion, or perhaps his outspokenness and intelligence would not have made him reliable. Even in the days of his greatest celebrity and during the Cold War the party was happy to boast his membership but did not attempt to use more than his name, perhaps not risking dissent or even friendly criticism. Despite much student activity and a history faculty none too keen on Marxism, Hobsbawm gained a first in history and took a doctorate after war service. During the war he was at first in the Royal Engineers. He applied for the Intelligence Corps, but despite his German he was, perhaps not surprisingly, turned down, and found himself in the Education Corps instead.
Then, from 1947 until his retirement in 1982 he was at Birkbeck College, London, and from 1949 to 1955 simultaneously a Fellow of King’s, Cambridge. He was made a Reader at Birkbeck in 1959, but despite his scholarship and outstanding international reputation, he was not given a chair until 1970. Dislike of his Marxism and of social history ran strong among a majority of his colleagues on the then deeply divided University of London Board of Studies in History. The year before he took his chair, he received an honorary degree in Stockholm, and many others followed in several countries. He was to become a Fellow of the British Academy and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Hobsbawm had stayed at Birkbeck because he liked the mature evening students, and the time it gave him for research during the day. He denied having genially called it “the poor man’s All Souls”, but his collegues happily disbelieved him. The only indication of his anger at what he considered to be outrageous ill-treatment by the university, and some lack of support by his head of department, was by getting on with his teaching, research and writing but refusing all the customary university and college committee work. He also delayed his inaugural lecture for nine years. But when he did attend the college Academic Board, everyone knew that it was for some exceptional issue of principle and his influence was considerable. He was a rebel who yet carried the mark of authority on his brow.
His major book was Primitive Rebels (1959), a study of forms of protest among peasants in which he showed a deep grasp of a wide variety of sources in French, Italian, Spanish and Catalan. He found parallels between the social history of the Mediterranean world and that of South and Central America in a way quite alien to the methods and capabilities of most British historians of the time. He returned to the theme in Bandits in 1969. Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour (1964) established Hobsbawm’s pre-eminence in the scholarly history of Britain’s industrial working class — or “classes” as in later years he more often stressed. Some of Hobsbawm’s conclusions gave no comfort to orthodox Marxists who spoke of a unified working class who would, one day, act spontaneously.
He pointed to the special position of the skilled working man in the labour movement and, in a series of articles, both learned and popular, showed that a common working-class culture, sharing the same values and lifestyle only emerged very late in the Industrial Revolution, in the 1890s, under the influence of the popular press and cheap railway travel. He regarded as dogmatic and romantic the view of Edward Thompson in his The Making of the English Working Class that a unified class had emerged (or would have if not so oppressed) in the early years of that century. But the corollary of his thesis had great political relevance: that this late-arrived unity of working-class culture was breaking up by the 1950s. After uselessly appealing to “the working class”, he said that shapers of social policy and politicians must identify different working-class values and interests attached to regions, localities and trades. He spoke of the “new working classes”. Yet he defended the historical method of Thompson, even if he differed from his conclusions, against the fashionable “highbrow” theoretical Marxists of the New Left in the 1970s, those expounders of the theories of Nicos Poulantzas and Louis Althusser whom Hobsbawm regarded as planting their feet firmly in mid-air.
His changing view of class was the basis of his famous polemic “The Forward March of Labour Halted” in Marxism Today in 1978 and then as a short book, published even before Labour’s electoral defeat in 1979. It led him, although a lifelong Communist, to appear on a Fabian platform chaired by Neil Kinnock, who was much influenced by the book, at the first Labour Party Conference of his leadership. Hobsbawm argued that the Far Left of the Labour movement should call a truce on its civil war both for tactical reasons and because rigid theories of class were now a historical and sociological anachronism. Social transformation was only possible by deliberate but gradual steps, and by an understanding of the real attitudes of the British people. He saw the borderlines and consciousness of being working class or middle class become more and more fluid and ambiguous, even in some respects irrelevant. This view was called “the new realism”. Arthur Scargill obligingly denounced it as “Hobsbawmian deviationism” and a selling out, a view which suited both Hobsbawm and Kinnock who were each working, for different reasons, to discredit some of the hard Left of the Labour movement and to bring the rest into a new realism, almost a new common sense. But Hobsbawm also crossed swords with Tony Benn, if more gently, drawing out from him at a memorable debate at Birkbeck College that he considered himself to be, at heart, “a Chartist”, which drew applause from his followers and derisive jeers from Hobsbawm’s students. The clash was significant. Benn was a pure democrat, a believer in popular sovereignty, a populist; but behind Hobsbawm’s growingly flexible (or withering?) Marxism was a hard 18th-century rationalism that believed in leadership by an educated elite for the people, not by the people.
Most members of the Communist Party of Great Britain had moved to somewhat Hobsbawmian positions by then. He and they could for a while in the 1980s be identified as Euro-Communists, indeed he was well known and personally friendly with many of the reforming leaders and intellectuals of both the Italian and the French parties, as well as in Hungary. The famous Communist Party historians’ group had broken up much earlier after the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, with all its prominent figures like Christopher Hill, Edward Thompson and John Savile leaving the party, except Hobsbawm. He publicly denounced the Soviet action, but was not disciplined and remained in the party, if politically silent through most of the 1960s. When asked if he was still a member, he would say “yes, but very still”; and a decade or so later he would say ironically that if there was still a British Communist Party, he was a member. His sardonic sense of humour could be a distancing device; but membership of the Communist Party had not been everyone’s idea of a joke.
In his memoir, Interesting Times, he said of Stalin’s regime that, “These sacrifices were excessive ... should not have happened. In retrospect the project was doomed to failure, though it took a long time to realise this.” He might have noted that others at the time did not take so long — those whom he had criticised at the time. But he was brave to make the awesome historical judgment that some sacrifices are necessary: “I have lived through the First World War, when ten to twenty million people were killed. At the time, the British, French and Germans thought it was necessary. We disagree. In the Second World War, fifty million died. Was the sacrifice worthwhile? I frankly cannot face the idea that it was not. I can’t say it would have been better if the world was run by Adolf Hitler.”
His position became easier in the late 1970s. At heart he still believed in the prewar “Popular Front”. He scorned both the theoretical, abstract Marxism of the New Left Review and more specifically “Labour history”. He is said to have remarked: “One does not have to be a bad historian to be a good socialist.” As a historian, his Marxism was a method of economic interpretation, neither a dogma nor a conclusion. It was explicit enough to annoy self-styled “purely factual historians”, but not so doctrinaire as to affect his handling of evidence, although it did his choice of subject matter. The earliest of his widely translated books were The Age of Revolution (1962) and Industry and Empire (1968), both highly original textbooks with an almost unrivalled grasp of different periods and societies. This brought him fame and many postgraduate students from the Hispanic world, particularly Mexico. His breadth of comparison was more in the continental or the best American manner than in the British tradition, which did not endear him to parochial and often monoglot colleagues. But his meticulous empiricism and use of concrete examples was very much in the British grain. Yet knowing so many national histories, he was a stern critic not just of nationalism as a doctrine but also of the writing of not merely nationalist history but even of history based on a national state. He had little sympathy for what he called the obsession with “identity” that grew in the last decade of the 20th century.
Among colleagues he was warm and friendly, had unusual friends in many different callings, and though he habitually argued with a precision and strength, even at times fierceness, that some mistook for hostility or found distasteful, he exemplified Ernest Gellner’s dictum that an academic intellectual should be socially tolerant but intellectually intolerant. People with unusual views attracted his questioning curiosity and acquaintance more than would-be disciples.
After retiring from Birkbeck in 1982 he began to spend one of the two American semesters each year at the New School of Social Research in New York. This was not to enter into the mainstream of American academic life but to share the company and the tradition of many of the prominent socialist German Jewish scholars and their pupils — as well as the jazz haunts of Greenwich Village. For years he was jazz critic of the New Statesman under the pseudonym Francis Newton, and he published The Jazz Scene under that name in 1959. The New School was a congenial milieu in which he could think through the broad themes of what became, with his earlier The Age of Revolutions (1962), a great trilogy on the modern era. The Age of Extremes and The New Century (1999) must be among the masterpieces of historical writing, and, while fully scholarly, they were written for and accessible to the non-specialist, educated reader. The Age of Extremes was one of those books truly seminal in that they shape the thinking of all who read it. It was translated into 37 languages within a year of first publication. Hobsbawm’s explanation of total war was profound, as was his explanation of the postwar victory of capitalism over the socialist mode of production. But he had moved so far from belief in inevitable tendencies of history that he did not, like so many, change the inevitability of socialism into the inevitability of capitalism. His explanations were contingent, so other contingencies may arise. He traced the rise of global capitalism without attributing to it a complete cultural hegemony, and pointing to many ways in which different states and different cultures can modify its impact.
In 2007 he published Globalisation, Democracy and Terrorism.
But perhaps his finest book came in the somewhat unexpected form of a memoir, Interesting Times: A Twentieth Century Life (2002), most beautifully written as well as an impressively, awesomely objective and at times painfully honest narrative. Both his friends and his critics seemed united in praise of it. “The past is another country,” he wrote, but he brought it to life.
He was made a Companion of Honour in 1998.
In 1943 he had married Muriel Seaman, a fellow Communist. The marriage broke up in 1951. In 1962 he married Marlene Schwarz, which was a lastingly happy and close union. She survives him together with their son and daughter and a son from a much earlier relationship.
Professor Eric Hobsbawm, CH, historian and writer, was born on June 9, 1917. He died on October 1, 2012, aged 95
