Eric Hobsbawm’s Long Century. By JOSEPH FRONCZAK
One long century ago,
on June 9, 1917, not quite halfway between the February Revolution and the
October Revolution, Eric Hobsbawm was born in Alexandria, Egypt. The lifelong
communist died only five years ago, in 2012 at the age of ninety-five. He spent
his final years placidly convinced that socialism belonged still to the future,
to the twenty-first century. A founding member of
the legendary British Communist Party Historians’ Group that fashioned “history
from below,” Hobsbawm was a titanic figure among the twentieth-century
intelligentsia. Prodigiously active as an intellectual, scholar, and, as he put
it, “participant observer” in political life, he was, ironically, defined by
the time of his death by what he did not do: he was the one
who did not leave the Communist Party.
In the wake of the
1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary, the other prominent British communist
historians, like Christopher Hill and E. P. Thompson, all resigned. Likewise their
French counterparts like François Furet, who called quitting the French
Communist Party the most intelligent thing he ever did. But Hobsbawm, the most
intelligent of the lot, never left the party.
The Great
Transformation
Instead, Hobsbawm
stayed in the party but retreated from active everyday politics. He poured
himself into his academic labors and spent the rest of the Cold War writing an
unparalleled body of historical work, all the while his career in academia —
most of all, his chances for a prestigious post in the United States — remained
hampered by his obstinate communism.
Even without his
masterpiece four-volume history of the modern world, Hobsbawm would rank among
the most accomplished historians ever to write. In 1952, he co-founded the
still glorious academic journal Past & Present; he wrote a
classic history of the British industrial revolution (Industry and Empire)
and co-wrote a classic history of workers’ direct-action resistance against it
(Captain Swing); Primitive Rebels of 1959 and Bandits of
1969 offered readers a rogues’ gallery of heroic Robin Hoods, Rob Roys, and
Pancho Villas; the subversive premise — that as a general rule things that
appear timeless custom are really modern “invented traditions” meant to prop up
the powerful — behind the 1983 book he co-edited with African historian Terence
Ranger, The Invention of Tradition, has permeated contemporary
culture and made it a bit more healthily cynical about the pomp and pageantry
of authority.
Beginning in 1956,
Hobsbawm also moonlighted as an acerbic jazz critic for the New
Statesman and Nation, writing under a pen name (Francis Newton) taken from
the communist trumpeter who had played on Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit.” But it was his
tetralogy of “Age” books that endowed Hobsbawm with his oracular glow.
Influenced by the French Annales historians’ epic ambitions of
total, all-encompassing history, these four books were world history from
below, the middle, and above. With rare imagination, intelligence, and
erudition, Hobsbawm not only synthesized the history of the modern world, he
intensely conveyed a concentrated world-in-words capable of changing how the
reader would thereafter see the larger world, having read Hobsbawm.
The project began as a
trilogy of what Hobsbawm influentially labeled “the long nineteenth century.”
Then, shortly after the Cold War ended, Hobsbawm added a massive history of
“the short twentieth century,” extending his analysis through the 1991 collapse
of the Soviet Union. Taken as a whole, the four books charted out the
dialectical acts of creation and destruction that made up the modern world.
More than that, they spun a mythology of modernity, filled with godlike
abstract forces — liberalism, socialism, democracy, nationalism, imperialism,
capitalism — wrestling over the fate of humanity.
read more: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/06/eric-hobsbawm-historian-marxism-communist-party-third-reich-stalingrad
