Hobsbawm

Gregory Elliott

Description

From the early rumblings of the French revolution, at the start of the long nineteenth century, to the fall of the Soviet bloc at the close of the short twentieth century, historian Eric Hobsbawm is possibly the foremost chronicler of the modern age.



Hobsbawm was a chronicler of revolutions, labour history, Empire, and conflicts; whose writings have informed the historical consciousness of scholars and general readers alike. From colonialism to capitalism, his trilogy of histories, The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital and The Age of Empire, evidence his skill for identifying the plurality of forces at play in major historical events. Tracing his intellectual and political journey, and encompassing the extraordinary historical events that marked his life, Gregory Elliot fills an analytical gap on Hobsbawm's scholarship and Marxist historiography.
Preface

Acknowledgements

1. Formative Experiences, Refounding Moments

2. The International and the Island Race

3. Enigmatic Variations

Conclusion: The Verdict of the World

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Sujets

• Political
• HISTORY
• Lettres et linguistique
• Biography
• World
• Autobiography

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 05 octobre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781783716784
• Langue: English

Extrait

HOBSBAWM
HOBSBAWM
History and Politics
GREGORY ELLIOTT
First published 2010 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010
www.plutobooks.com
Distributed in the United States of America exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010
Copyright © Gregory Elliott 2010
The right of Gregory Elliott to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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CONTENTS
Abbreviations
Preface
Acknowledgements
1.
Formative Experiences, Refounding Moments
2.
The International and the Island Race
3.
Enigmatic Variations
Conclusion: The Ways of the World
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ABBREVIATIONS
CPGB
Communist Party of Great Britain
CPSU
Communist Party of the Soviet Union
CPUSA
Communist Party of the United States of America
HSWP
Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party
PCE
Spanish Communist Party
PCF
French Communist Party
PCI
Italian Communist Party
UP
Unidad Popular / Socialist Party of Chile
PREFACE
In one sense – one only – Eric Hobsbawm is last among equals. At the time of writing, he is virtually the sole surviving member of the remarkable group of Marxist historians – Christopher Hill and V. G. Kiernan, Rodney Hilton and George Rudé, John Saville and E. P. Thompson – formed in the British Communist Party from the mid 1930s; and it has been his sad duty, as well as privilege, to record the passing of these and other colleagues over the last two decades. 1
In his obituary of Thompson in 1993, Hobsbawm generously observed:

He was the only historian I knew who had not just talent, brilliance, erudition and the gift of writing, but the capacity to produce something qualitatively different from the rest of us, not to be measured on the same scale. Let us simply call it genius, in the traditional sense of the word. … The loss to intellectual life, history and the British Left cannot yet be calculated. 2
Unlike Thompson, Hobsbawm has not been taken from us prematurely. In the 16 years he has outlived his friend, he has consolidated a cumulative contribution to intellectual life, history and the left well beyond Britain which, if less immediately outstanding than Thompson’s, will prove equally enduring. Not a great writer – albeit a very fine one – and a Marxist of a very different temperament, if no single book by Hobsbawm has the éclat of The Making of the English Working Class , it is likely that Age of Extremes is the one text, aside from the classics, that any educated Marxist anywhere will – certainly should – have read.
Since the appearance of Hobsbawm’s history of the ‘short twentieth century’ in 1994, and its more or less rapid translation into dozens of languages, it has become commonplace for its author to find himself characterised as one of the world’s most famous living historians, if not quite simply the most famous. Since then, he has made the transition from the status of academic historian to ‘public intellectual’ (not to be confused with TV don); and as such is regularly invited to employ his professional authority to pronounce on the issues of the day. His name and work are as familiar in Italy or Brazil, the USA or India, as they are in the UK. If age has wearied him as he approaches his 93rd birthday, neither his productivity nor his topicality shows any obvious sign of flagging, with Globalisation, Democracy and Terrorism released in March 2007, regular articles published in the London Review of Books and elsewhere thereafter, and a collection on Marx and Marxism promised for January 2011.
In the course of a career stretching back to the 1940s, Hobsbawm has become an inescapable reference-point in an extraordinary variety of subjects that cut across national and disciplinary boundaries. The best known of these is doubtless his survey of the making of modernity in the ‘Ages’ tetralogy. But he has also been a major protagonist, for example, in debates over the transition to capitalism in Europe; working classes and labour movements, peasants and bandits; the vicissitudes of communism and nationalism; receptions of the French Revolution and questions of historiography.
Given his fertility and celebrity, the relative dearth of in-depth writing on Hobsbawm is striking. There are, of course, countless reviews of individual texts, some of them incisive. To date, however, no more than a single short book in Spanish – an undemanding primer – appears to have been devoted to him. 3 In English perhaps only Harvey Kaye’s now dated chapter in his British Marxist Historians , and an authoritative two-part review article by Perry Anderson, have begun to range over anything like Hobsbawm’s oeuvre as a whole. 4
One day, an attempt will have to be made to take the cue provided by Hobsbawm’s autobiography, Interesting Times , and venture a full-scale historical and critical study. Here, meanwhile, something much more modest has been prompted by the fact that the pro forma plaudits of recent years, downplaying Hobsbawm’s Marxism and communism, have begun to be countered by voices from the centre and right. These go to prove the justice of Hobsbawm’s claim that, as someone who remained in the Communist Party until its dissolution in 1991, and who has ‘systematically refused to abjure his past’, he possesses ‘not only the interest of scarcity but of incomprehensibility’. 5 Thus, Interesting Times attracted several highly critical reviews (and at least one hysterical rant) on account of that refusal. 6 Globalisation, Democracy and Terrorism was taken to task for its criticism of capitalism and deflation of the holy of holies, liberal democracy. 7 And in 2009 Hobsbawm’s application to see the file held on him by MI5 afforded an opportunity for populist fulminations in the Daily Mail impressive for their iniquity and inanity alike. 8
Hobsbawm: History and Politics endeavours to capture something of its subject’s ‘scarcity’ and ‘incomprehensibility’, rendering him more comprehensible but no less scarce for that. Unusual, if not unique, among his comrades in publishing memoirs, Hobsbawm’s were written from the left, but not (unlike Saville’s) for it. 9 Adjusting the balance, Chapter 1 explores the making of a communist militant and Marxist historian from 1917–56, complementing and (where necessary) qualifying Hobsbawm’s own depiction of ‘a twentieth-century life’. Chapter 2 turns to three key topics in the work of the mature historian – his ‘progressivist’ conception of history, his observation of international developments in Marxism and communism post-1956, and his participation in debates over the British labour movement. A third chapter, which elaborates at length on a previous short text, 10 undertakes a detailed examination of Hobsbawm’s account of the twentieth century and its immediate aftermath, in the light of the preceding trilogy on the ‘long nineteenth century’.
Much has been reluctantly omitted from this brief profile – most obviously, investigation of Hobsbawm’s writings on nationalism and his interventions on historiography, which belie his sometime self-description as ‘a sufficiently British historian to wish to concentrate on brass tacks, namely, what happened and why’. 11 (Readers interested in trends in history as an academic discipline since the 1960s can do no better than turn to Geoff Eley’s consistently illuminating A Crooked Line . 12 ) The present book will have served a purpose if it provokes others to remedy its omissions and misinterpretations, and provides some pointers for the intellectual biography which, if anyone does, Eric Hobsbawm surely warrants.
Hobsbawm once wrote that ‘the historian’s business is not praise and blame, but analysis’. 13 It is a self-denying ordinance its author has honoured as much in the breach as the observance, and for the better – crisp parenthetical judgements being one of his invariably pleasurable trademarks. As a work of intellectual history, Hobsbawm: History and Politics , whose title is intended as a passing tribute to Louis Althusser’s little gem of a book on Montesquieu, prioritises synthesis and analysis. But it does not abstain from evaluation, the overall tenor of which will soon become evident to readers to whose judgement these pages must now in turn be submitted.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am grateful to Anne Beech and her colleagues at Pluto Press for their patience and encouragement; to Geoff Eley, Keith McLelland and an anonymous referee for their constructive reports; and to Keith McLelland again for allowing me sight of his as yet unpublished, up-to-date bibliography of Hobsbawm’s writings. Once more, my family generously allowed me the time, and my neighbour Ian Horobin the space, to write.

Gregory Elliott Edinburgh, 10 December 2009
1 FORMATIVE EXPERIENCES, REFOUNDING MOMENTS

A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.
Thomas Mann,