Eric Hobsbawm


Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm was a British historian of the rise of industrial capitalism, socialism and nationalism. A life-long Marxist, his socio-political convictions influenced the character of his work. His best-known works include his trilogy about what he called the "long 19th century", The Age of Extremes on the short 20th century, and an edited volume that introduced the influential idea of "invented traditions".
Hobsbawm was born in Egypt but spent his childhood mainly in Vienna and Berlin. Following the death of his parents and the rise to power of Adolf Hitler, Hobsbawm moved to London with his adoptive family, then obtained his PhD in history at the University of Cambridge after serving in the Second World War. In 1998 he was appointed to the Order of the Companions of Honour. He was President of Birkbeck, University of London, from 2002 until he died. In 2003 he received the Balzan Prize for European History since 1900 "for his brilliant analysis of the troubled history of 20th century Europe and for his ability to combine in-depth historical research with great literary talent."

Early life and education

Eric Hobsbawm was born in 1917 in Alexandria, Egypt. His father was Leopold Percy Hobsbaum, a Jewish merchant from the East End of London of Polish Jewish descent. His mother was Nelly Hobsbaum, who was from a middle-class Austrian Jewish family. Although both of his parents were Jewish, neither was observant. His early childhood was spent in Vienna, Austria and Berlin, Germany. A clerical error at birth altered his surname from Hobsbaum to Hobsbawm. Although the family lived in German-speaking countries, he grew up speaking English as his first language.
In 1929, when Hobsbawm was 12, his father died, and he started contributing to his family's support by working as an au pair and English tutor. Upon the death of their mother in 1931, he and his sister Nancy were adopted by their maternal aunt, Gretl, and paternal uncle, Sidney, who married and had a son named Peter. Hobsbawm was a student at the Prinz Heinrich-Gymnasium Berlin when the Nazi Party came to power in 1933. That year the family moved to London, where Hobsbawm enrolled in St Marylebone Grammar School. His migration from Germany created the false belief that Hobsbawm was a refugee, which persisted throughout his life, while he was actually British by birth because of his father's nationality.
Hobsbawm attended King's College, Cambridge, from 1936, where he joined the Communist Party "in the form of the university's Socialist Club." He also took a double-starred first in History and was elected to the Cambridge Apostles. He received a doctorate in History from Cambridge University for his dissertation on the Fabian Society. During the Second World War, he served in the Royal Engineers and the Army Educational Corps. However, he was prevented from serving overseas after he attracted the attention of the security services by using the wall newspaper he edited during his army training to argue for the opening up of a Second Front, which was a demand made by the Communist Party of Great Britain at the time. He applied to return to Cambridge as a research student, and was released from the military in 1946.

Academia

opened a personal file on Hobsbawm in 1942 and their monitoring of his activities was to affect the progress of his career for many years. In 1945, he applied to the BBC for a full-time post making educational broadcasts to help servicemen adjust to civilian life after a long period in the forces and was considered "a most suitable candidate". The appointment was swiftly vetoed by MI5 who believed Hobsbawm was unlikely "to lose any opportunity he may get to disseminate propaganda and obtain recruits for the Communist party”. In 1947, he became a lecturer in history at Birkbeck College, University of London which, unusually at the time, lacked any inclination towards anti-communism among staff or students. He became reader in 1959, professor between 1970 and 1982 and an emeritus professor of history in 1982. He was a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, from 1949 to 1955. Hobsbawm said there was a weaker version of McCarthyism that took hold in Britain and affected Marxist academics: "you didn't get promotion for 10 years, but nobody threw you out". Hobsbawm was also denied a lectureship at Cambridge by political enemies, and, given that he was also blocked for a time from a professorship at Birkbeck for the same reasons, spoke of his good fortune at having got a post at Birkbeck in 1948 before the Cold War really started to take off. Conservative commentator David Pryce-Jones has questioned the existence of such career obstacles.
Hobsbawm helped found the academic journal Past & Present in 1952. He was a visiting professor at Stanford in the 1960s. In 1970s, he was appointed professor and in 1976 he became a Fellow of the British Academy. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1971 and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2006.
Hobsbawm formally retired from Birkbeck in 1982, becoming Emeritus Professor of History, and was appointed as president of Birkbeck in 2002. He remained as visiting professor at The New School for Social Research in Manhattan between 1984 and 1997. He was, until his death, professor emeritus in the New School for Social Research in the Political Science Department. A polyglot, he spoke German, English, French, Spanish and Italian fluently, and read Portuguese and Catalan.

Works

Hobsbawm wrote extensively on many subjects as one of Britain's most prominent historians. As a Marxist historiographer he has focused on analysis of the "dual revolution". He saw their effect as a driving force behind the predominant trend towards liberal capitalism today. Another recurring theme in his work was social banditry, which Hobsbawm placed in a social and historical context, thus countering the traditional view of it being a spontaneous and unpredictable form of primitive rebellion. He also coined the term "long nineteenth century", which begins with the French Revolution in 1789 and ends with the start of the Great War in 1914.
He published numerous essays in various intellectual journals, dealing with subjects such as barbarity in the modern age, the troubles of labour movements, and the conflict between anarchism and communism. Among his final publications were Globalisation, Democracy and Terrorism, On Empire and the collection of essays How to Change the World: Marx and Marxism 1840–2011.
Outside his academic historical writing, Hobsbawm wrote a regular column about Jazz for the New Statesman, and from time to time over other forms of popular music such as with his "Beatles and before" article. He had become interested in Jazz during the 1930s when it was officially frowned upon by the Communist Party.

Politics

Hobsbawm joined the Sozialistischer Schülerbund, an offshoot of the Young Communist League of Germany, in Berlin in 1931, and the British Communist Party in 1936. He was a member of the Communist Party Historians Group from 1946 until its demise and subsequently president of its successor, the Socialist History Society until his death. The Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 led thousands of its members to leave the British Communist Party – but Hobsbawm, unique among his colleagues, remained in the party, but was distrusted by its leadership and ceased political work by the end of the 1950s. Hobsbawm maintained some ties to former colleagues such as E. P. Thompson and John Saville who had left the CPGB at this time and became leading lights of the New Left in Britain, occasionally contributing to New Left publications but also providing intelligence reports on the dissidents to CPGB headquarters. He later described the New Left as "a half-remembered footnote". He signed a historians' letter of protest against the Soviet invasion of Hungary and was strongly in favour of the Prague spring.
Hobsbawm was later a leading light of the Eurocommunist faction in the CPGB that began to gather strength after 1968, when the CPGB criticised the Soviet crushing of the Prague Spring and the French CP failing to support the May students in Paris. In "The Forward March of Labour Halted?", he argued that the working class was inevitably losing its central role in society, and that left-wing parties could no longer appeal only to this class; a controversial viewpoint in a period of trade union militancy. Hobsbawm supported Neil Kinnock's transformation of the British Labour Party from 1983, and, though not close to Kinnock, came to be referred to as "Neil Kinnock's Favourite Marxist". His interventions in Kinnock's remaking of the Labour Party helped prepare the ground for the Third Way, New Labour, and Tony Blair, whom Hobsbawm later derisively referred to as "Thatcher in trousers". Until the cessation of publication in 1991, he contributed to the magazine Marxism Today. A third of the 30 reprints of Marxism Today feature articles that appeared in The Guardian during the 1980s were articles or interviews by or with Hobsbawm, making him by far the most popular of all contributors.
In addition to his association with the CPGB, Hobsbawm also developed close ties to the largest Communist Party in the western world, the Italian Communist Party, of which he declared himself a "spiritual member". He developed contacts with Italian left-wing academics and intellectuals in the early 1950s, which led to him encountering the work of Antonio Gramsci, whose writings were a key influence on Hobsbawm's work on the history of subaltern groups, emphasising their agency as well as structural factors. Hobsbawm spoke favourably about PCI general secretary Enrico Berlinguer's strategy of Historic Compromise in the 1970s, seeking rapprochement with the Catholic Church and the Christian Democrats, providing passive support to the latter in government in order to bring the Communists into the political mainstream by accepting Italy's position as a member of NATO, thus being able to build broader alliances and convince wider sections of society of its legitimacy as a potential governing force.
From the 1960s, his politics took a more moderate turn, as Hobsbawm came to recognise that his hopes were unlikely to be realised, and no longer advocated "socialist systems of the Soviet type". Until the day of his death, however, he remained firmly entrenched on the Left, maintaining that the long-term outlooks for humanity were 'bleak'. "I think we ought to get out of that 20th-century habit of thinking of systems as mutually exclusive: you’re either socialist or you’re capitalist, or whatever," Hobsbawm stated in 2009 in regards to the emergence of a new historical system. "There are plenty of people who still think so. I think very few attempts have been made to build a system on the total assumption of social ownership and social management. At its peak the Soviet system tried it. And in the past 20 or 30 years, the capitalist system has also tried it. In both cases, the results demonstrate that it won’t work. So it seems to me the problem isn’t whether this market system disappears, but exactly what the nature of the mixture between market economy and public economy is and, above all, in my view, what the social objectives of that economy are. One of the worst things about the politics of the past 30 years is that the rich have forgotten to be afraid of the poor – of most of the people in the world."

Communism and Russia

Hobsbawm stressed that since communism was not created, the sacrifices were in fact not justified—a point he emphasised in Age of Extremes:
Elsewhere he insisted: With regard to the 1930s, he wrote that
He claimed that the demise of the USSR was "traumatic not only for communists but for socialists everywhere".

Miscellaneous views

Regarding the Queen, Hobsbawm stated that constitutional monarchy in general has "proved a reliable framework for liberal-democratic regimes" and "is likely to remain useful". On the nuclear attacks on Japan in World War II, he adhered to the view that "there was even less sign of a crack in Japan's determination to fight to the end , which is why nuclear arms were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to ensure a rapid Japanese surrender". He also believed there was an ancillary political, non-military reason for the bombings: "perhaps the thought that it would prevent America's ally the USSR from establishing a claim to a major part in Japan's defeat was not absent from the minds of the US government either." Hobsbawm is also quoted as saying that, next to sex, there is nothing so physically intense as 'participation in a mass demonstration at a time of great public exaltation'.

Praise and criticism

In 1994, Neal Ascherson said of Hobsbawm: "No historian now writing in English can match his overwhelming command of fact and source. But the key word is 'command'. Hobsbawm's capacity to store and retrieve detail has now reached a scale normally approached only by large archives with big staffs". In 2002, Hobsbawm was described by right-leaning magazine The Spectator as "arguably our greatest living historian—not only Britain's, but the world's", while Niall Ferguson wrote: "That Hobsbawm is one of the great historians of his generation is undeniable ... His quartet of books beginning with The Age of Revolution and ending with The Age of Extremes constitute the best starting point I know for anyone who wishes to begin studying modern history. Nothing else produced by the British Marxist historians will endure as these books will." In 2003, The New York Times described him as "one of the great British historians of his age, an unapologetic Communist and a polymath whose erudite, elegantly written histories are still widely read in schools here and abroad". James Joll wrote in The New York Review of Books that "Eric Hobsbawm's nineteenth century trilogy is one of the great achievements of historical writing in recent decades". Ian Kershaw said that Hobsbawm's take on the twentieth century, his 1994 book, The Age of Extremes, consisted of "masterly analysis". Meanwhile, Tony Judt, while praising Hobsbawm's vast knowledge and graceful prose, cautioned that Hobsbawm's bias in favour of the USSR, communist states and communism in general, and his tendency to disparage any nationalist movement as passing and irrational, weakened his grasp of parts of the 20th century.
With regard to the impact of his Marxist outlook and sympathies on his scholarship, Ben Pimlott saw it as "a tool not a straitjacket; he's not dialectical or following a party line", although Judt argued that it has "prevented his achieving the analytical distance he does on the 19th century: he isn't as interesting on the Russian revolution because he can't free himself completely from the optimistic vision of earlier years. For the same reason he's not that good on fascism".
British historian David Pryce-Jones conceded that Hobsbawm was "no doubt intelligent and industrious, and he might well have made a notable contribution as a historian", but also charged that Hobsbawm, as a professional historian who has "steadily corrupted knowledge into propaganda, and scorns the concept of objective truth", was "neither a historian nor professional." After reading Age of Extremes, Kremlinologist Robert Conquest concluded that Hobsbawm suffers from a "massive reality denial" regarding the USSR, and John Gray, though praising his work on the nineteenth century, has described Hobsbawm's writings on the post-1914 period as "banal in the extreme. They are also highly evasive. A vast silence surrounds the realities of communism, a refusal to engage which led the late Tony Judt to conclude that Hobsbawm had 'provincialised himself'. It is a damning judgement".
In a 1994 interview on BBC television with Canadian academic Michael Ignatieff, he shocked viewers when he said that the deaths of millions of Soviet citizens under Stalin would have been worth it if a genuinely communist society had been the result. Hobsbawm argued that, "In a period in which, as you might imagine, mass murder and mass suffering are absolutely universal, the chance of a new world being born in great suffering would still have been worth backing" but, unfortunately, "the Soviet Union was not the beginning of the World Revolution". The following year, when asked the same question on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, if "the sacrifice of millions of lives" would have been worth the future communist society, he replied: "That's what we felt when we fought the Second World War". He repeated what he had already said to Michael Ignatieff, when he asked the rhetorical question, "Do people now say we shouldn't have had World War II, because more people died in World War II than died in Stalin's terror?".
Tony Judt was of the opinion that Hobsbawm "clings to a pernicious illusion of the late Enlightenment: that if one can promise a benevolent outcome it would be worth the human cost. But one of the great lessons of the 20th century is that it's not true. For such a clear-headed writer, he appears blind to the sheer scale of the price paid. I find it tragic, rather than disgraceful." Neil Ascherson believes that, "Eric is not a man for apologising or feeling guilty. He does feel bad about the appalling waste of lives in Soviet communism. But he refuses to acknowledge that he regrets anything. He's not that kind of person." Hobsbawm himself, in his autobiography, wrote that he desires "historical understanding ... not agreement, approval or sympathy".
The 1930s aside, Hobsbawm was criticised for never relinquishing his Communist Party membership. Whereas people like Arthur Koestler left the Party after seeing the friendly reception of Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop in Moscow during the years of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, Hobsbawm stood firm even after the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia. In his review of Hobsbawm's 2002 memoirs, Interesting Times, Niall Ferguson wrote:
Hobsbawm let his membership lapse not long before the party's dissolution in 1991. In his review of Hobsbawm's memoirs, David Pryce-Jones accuses him of actually supporting the invasion of Hungary:
In those memoirs, Hobsbawn wrote: "The dream of the October Revolution is still there somewhere inside me ... I have abandoned, nay, rejected it, but it has not been obliterated. To this day, I notice myself treating the memory and tradition of the USSR with an indulgence and tenderness." Reviewing the book, David Caute wrote: "One keeps asking of Hobsbawm: didn't you know what Deutscher and Orwell knew? Didn't you know about the induced famine, the horrors of collectivisation, the false confessions, the terror within the Party, the massive forced labour of the gulag? As Orwell himself documented, a great deal of evidence was reliably knowable even before 1939, but Hobsbawm pleads that much of it was not reliably knowable until Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin in 1956."
Reviewing Hobsbawm's 2011 How to Change the World in the Wall Street Journal, Michael Moynihan argued: Reviewing the same book, Francis Wheen argued in a similar vein: "When writing about how the anti-fascist campaigns of the 1930s brought new recruits to the communist cause, he cannot even bring himself to mention the Hitler-Stalin pact, referring only to 'temporary episodes such as 1939–41'. The Soviet invasion of Hungary and the crushing of the Prague Spring are skipped over."
David Evanier, in an article published in the American neoconservative magazine The Weekly Standard, called Hobsbawm "Stalin's cheerleader", writing: "One can learn almost nothing about the history of communism from Hobsbawm's Interesting Times—nothing about the show trials, the torture and execution of millions, the Communist betrayal of Spain."
An alternative conservative assessment of Hobsbawm came from Matthew Walther in National Review. While critical of Hobsbawm for his communist sympathies and his purported views about Israel, Walther wrote that "There is no denying his intelligence and erudition" and concluded that "if Hobsbawm is read 50 or 100 years from now, it will probably be despite rather than because of his politics."
In 2008, the historian Tony Judt summed up Hobsbawm's career thus: "Eric J. Hobsbawm was a brilliant historian in the great English tradition of narrative history. On everything he touched he wrote much better, had usually read much more, and had a broader and subtler understanding than his more fashionable emulators. If he had not been a lifelong Communist he would be remembered simply as one of the great historians of the 20th century".
After Hobsbawm died in October 2012, Mark Mazower wrote of his historical writings being "about trends, social forces, large-scale change over vast distances. Telling that kind of history in a way that is as compelling as a detective story is a real challenge of style and composition: in the tetralogy, Hobsbawm shows how to do it."

Personal life

Hobsbawm's friend, historian Donald Sassoon, wrote that: "Hobsbawm was not a Jewish historian; he was an historian who happened to be Jewish." His first marriage was to Muriel Seaman in 1943. They divorced in 1951. His second marriage was to Marlene Schwarz, with whom he had two children, Julia Hobsbawm and Andy Hobsbawm. Julia is chief executive of Hobsbawm Media and Marketing and a visiting professor of public relations at the College of Communication, University of the Arts London. He also had an out-of-wedlock son, Joshua Bennathan, who died in November 2014.

Death

In the early hours of 1 October 2012, Hobsbawm died at the Royal Free Hospital in London. His daughter Julia confirmed that he died of pneumonia, while suffering complications from leukemia. She said,
Following Hobsbawm's death reactions included praise for his "sheer academic productivity and prowess" and "tough reasoning" in The Guardian. Reacting to news of Hobsbawm's death, Ed Miliband called him "an extraordinary historian, a man passionate about his politics ... He brought history out of the ivory tower and into people's lives".
He was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium and his ashes were interred in Highgate Cemetery. A memorial service for Hobsbawm was held at the New School in October 2013.

Impact

Owing to his status as a widely read and prominent Communist historian, and the fact that his ideology had influenced his work, Hobsbawm has been credited with spreading Marxist thought around the globe. His writings reached particular prominence in India and Brazil in the 1960s and 1970s at a time of lively debate about these countries' political and social future. Emile Chabal, in an essay for Aeon, wrote: "In the period from the early 1960s to the late ’80s, Marxists in noncommunist countries were increasingly able to participate in a transnational discussion over the past and future of capitalism, and the most promising agents of revolutionary change. Hobsbawm played a starring role in these discussions – and, occasionally, set the agenda."

Partial publication list

Honours and awards