A Pain in the Arse for National Myths
Richard J. Evans, Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History
Little, Brown, 785pp, £35.00, ISBN 9781408707418
reviewed by Ian Birchall
Historians do not sit outside of history, dispassionately assessing the ‘facts’. How they perceive even the remote past is conditioned by the world they live in – and by the way they live in that world. Of no-one is this truer than Eric Hobsbawm, one of the 20th century's most successful historians, a prolific writer whose books have been translated into more than 50 languages. Seven years after his death, Richard Evans has given us the history of the historian. It is a long story – Hobsbawm lived 95 years and the book has 662 pages of text with 2239 footnotes (which contain many fascinating morsels of information). Happily Hobsbawm was untouched by the current fad for ‘decluttering’: a whole room in his home was packed with papers, correspondence, diaries, and unpublished short stories and poems, so the story is often told in his own words.
Evans is a distinguished historian, well known for his work as expert witness successfully defending Deborah Lipstadt when David Irving sued her for calling him a ‘Holocaust denier’. He knew Hobsbawm personally; while he does not share Hobsbawm's political allegiances, he treats them with sympathy and understanding. It would be difficult to write a book of this length without a few errors (George Orwell fought with the POUM in Spain, not with the International Brigades); but in general the presentation is scrupulously honest.
Hobsbawm lived a full life; his path crossed that of many of his contemporaries, from Sartre to Joan Bakewell. He produced a series of important historical works, ranging from specialised studies of economic and labour history to his remarkable four-volume history of the world from the storming of the Bastille to the collapse of Soviet communism. He was a ‘public intellectual’ who involved himself passionately in the controversies of his own time.
Hobsbawm's strength as a historian is that he was more than a historian. It was only comparatively late in life (after his Cambridge degree and six years of military service) that he rejected other career options to become a professional historian. He had scant sympathy with academics who cling to their specialities and ‘periods’, knowing little beyond. He was contemptuous of the boring conversation of other Cambridge dons. His reading from his teenage years on was impressively extensive, but his first engagement with history had come even earlier. As a schoolboy of 15 in Berlin he had seen Hitler's rise to power, and had been caught up in the risky activity of anti-Nazi propaganda. As he noted many years later, this marked him irrevocably, and he never forgot his loyalty to his comrades of those days, many of whom had not survived.
It seemed to Hobsbawm that the only alternative to the destructive threat of fascism was communism, embodied in Stalin's Russia. (He never had much time for alternative left currents such as anarchism or Trotskyism.) But there was a problem. The German Communist Party at this time argued there was nothing to choose between Nazism and the so-called ‘social fascism’ of the Social Democrats, allowing Hitler to seize power over a divided working-class movement. Hence Hobsbawm welcomed the subsequent volte-face of the international Communist movement in adopting the ‘Popular Front’ strategy of forming antifascist alliances with non-socialist parties. Though some have argued that the Popular Front approach ultimately facilitated Franco’s victory in the Spanish Civil War, Hobsbawm remained an advocate for it throughout his life. In 1968 Hobsbawm contributed to the revolutionary journal Black Dwarf, describing the French general strike as ‘marvellous and enchanting’ and criticising the French Communist Party's ‘feet-dragging’. But this was only a blip.
Hobsbawm remained a self-professed Communist and Marxist till his death; his historical writings were enhanced by the flexible use of Marxism. He remained a Communist Party member, not leaving like some of the best-known British historians – such as Edward Thompson and Christopher Hill – in the aftermath of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956-57. He never left the Party; it left him when it wound up in 1991 just before the dissolution of the USSR. Evans has discovered some fascinating material on MI5’s surveillance of Hobsbawm – his phone was tapped and the Communist Party headquarters were bugged – though there is little to suggest that Hobsbawm was any sort of threat, other than through the long-term influence of his books on his readers.
Hobsbawm's critics (like Michael Gove and AN Wilson) have tried to discredit his work by condemning his alleged sympathies with Stalinism. Certainly some of his positions were questionable, and he expressed himself badly when he said the creation of a genuinely socialist society would have been worth ‘the sacrifice of millions of lives’. But he became more critical of Stalinism as he grew older, and he continued to point to the crimes of international capitalism, which through war and starvation has killed more than Stalin ever did – and through climate change it will kill many more.
What I found fascinating,having myself been a long-term member of a far-left organisation, was what Hobsbawm was able to get away with, even in a party supposedly steeped in Stalinist discipline. After a brief period of student activism he seems to have done little party work; he did not sell Communist publications; when one of his students asked if he should join the Party, Hobsbawm firmly advised him not to. He wrote widely for non-Communist publications, and paid little heed to the prevailing party line. He became jazz critic for the New Statesman when the Party had denounced jazz as part of ‘the American threat to British culture’. After 1956 the Party leadership hoped he would resign, though they didn't push the matter to the point of expulsion. Evans claims the Communist Party ‘despised intellectuals’ – but fails to note that the worst anti-intellectualism came from those who were themselves intellectuals.
In the 1970s, as the Party began to disintegrate, Hobsbawm sided with the ‘Eurocommunists’ (who wanted to make the Party an openly social-democratic organisation) against the ‘tankies’ (who stayed loyal to Moscow). In particular he gave the influential lecture ‘The Forward March of Labour Halted’, arguing that the period in which the socialist movement was based on militant trade-union struggle was coming to an end. It was a controversial thesis at the time – only a few years earlier a miners' strike had brought about the fall of Edward Heath's Tory government. As against those of us who argued that there was merely a temporary ‘downturn’ in class struggle, Hobsbawm was right to see a historical turning-point. Yet he had little to say about where new forms of struggle and resistance could come from, and his dislike of miners' leader Arthur Scargill led him to to be almost indifferent to the long struggle of thousands of miners in 1984‑85. He had some influence on the Labour Party's rightward evolution, being praised as ‘sagacious’ by Neil Kinnock; though he despised Blair he became a friend of Gordon Brown. Meanwhile his success as a writer enabled him to find a comfortable berth within capitalist society ; thus he became a member of the Athenaeum Club.
Another significant aspect of Hobsbawm's work was his internationalism. While his contemporaries Thompson and Hill largely confined themselves to British topics, Hobsbawm wrote world history (though he has been accused,legitimately, of Eurocentrism). Born in Egypt with a British father, he went to school in Austria and Germany, where he was known as ‘the English boy’, then came to England (but continued to write poetry in German). He spoke various languages fluently and until his very last years travelled widely and frequently – to France, Italy, India, Latin America, and the USA. Though he had no religious sympathies, in the century of the Holocaust (in which some members of his family perished) his Jewish identity made itself felt.
In a 2008 interview Hobsbawm argued that the function of history was to be a ‘pain in the arse for national myths’. His later work recognised a deep contradiction in the modern world: with the advance of globalisation the traditional nation-state was becoming increasingly obsolete; he argued powerfully that nations were artificial constructs. But ideology does not automatically follow its economic roots, and nationalism remains a powerful, sometimes dangerous force. This contradiction has been only too evident in the Brexit débâcle, and if Hobsbawm had survived a little longer his analysis would have been more illuminating than most of the turgid commentary inflicted on us.
There is much that remains relevant and thought-provoking in Hobsbawm's work, even where open to criticism. By giving us such a detailed account of the personal and political context in which the work was produced, Evans has ensured that fruitful debate will continue.
Evans is a distinguished historian, well known for his work as expert witness successfully defending Deborah Lipstadt when David Irving sued her for calling him a ‘Holocaust denier’. He knew Hobsbawm personally; while he does not share Hobsbawm's political allegiances, he treats them with sympathy and understanding. It would be difficult to write a book of this length without a few errors (George Orwell fought with the POUM in Spain, not with the International Brigades); but in general the presentation is scrupulously honest.
Hobsbawm lived a full life; his path crossed that of many of his contemporaries, from Sartre to Joan Bakewell. He produced a series of important historical works, ranging from specialised studies of economic and labour history to his remarkable four-volume history of the world from the storming of the Bastille to the collapse of Soviet communism. He was a ‘public intellectual’ who involved himself passionately in the controversies of his own time.
Hobsbawm's strength as a historian is that he was more than a historian. It was only comparatively late in life (after his Cambridge degree and six years of military service) that he rejected other career options to become a professional historian. He had scant sympathy with academics who cling to their specialities and ‘periods’, knowing little beyond. He was contemptuous of the boring conversation of other Cambridge dons. His reading from his teenage years on was impressively extensive, but his first engagement with history had come even earlier. As a schoolboy of 15 in Berlin he had seen Hitler's rise to power, and had been caught up in the risky activity of anti-Nazi propaganda. As he noted many years later, this marked him irrevocably, and he never forgot his loyalty to his comrades of those days, many of whom had not survived.
It seemed to Hobsbawm that the only alternative to the destructive threat of fascism was communism, embodied in Stalin's Russia. (He never had much time for alternative left currents such as anarchism or Trotskyism.) But there was a problem. The German Communist Party at this time argued there was nothing to choose between Nazism and the so-called ‘social fascism’ of the Social Democrats, allowing Hitler to seize power over a divided working-class movement. Hence Hobsbawm welcomed the subsequent volte-face of the international Communist movement in adopting the ‘Popular Front’ strategy of forming antifascist alliances with non-socialist parties. Though some have argued that the Popular Front approach ultimately facilitated Franco’s victory in the Spanish Civil War, Hobsbawm remained an advocate for it throughout his life. In 1968 Hobsbawm contributed to the revolutionary journal Black Dwarf, describing the French general strike as ‘marvellous and enchanting’ and criticising the French Communist Party's ‘feet-dragging’. But this was only a blip.
Hobsbawm remained a self-professed Communist and Marxist till his death; his historical writings were enhanced by the flexible use of Marxism. He remained a Communist Party member, not leaving like some of the best-known British historians – such as Edward Thompson and Christopher Hill – in the aftermath of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956-57. He never left the Party; it left him when it wound up in 1991 just before the dissolution of the USSR. Evans has discovered some fascinating material on MI5’s surveillance of Hobsbawm – his phone was tapped and the Communist Party headquarters were bugged – though there is little to suggest that Hobsbawm was any sort of threat, other than through the long-term influence of his books on his readers.
Hobsbawm's critics (like Michael Gove and AN Wilson) have tried to discredit his work by condemning his alleged sympathies with Stalinism. Certainly some of his positions were questionable, and he expressed himself badly when he said the creation of a genuinely socialist society would have been worth ‘the sacrifice of millions of lives’. But he became more critical of Stalinism as he grew older, and he continued to point to the crimes of international capitalism, which through war and starvation has killed more than Stalin ever did – and through climate change it will kill many more.
What I found fascinating,having myself been a long-term member of a far-left organisation, was what Hobsbawm was able to get away with, even in a party supposedly steeped in Stalinist discipline. After a brief period of student activism he seems to have done little party work; he did not sell Communist publications; when one of his students asked if he should join the Party, Hobsbawm firmly advised him not to. He wrote widely for non-Communist publications, and paid little heed to the prevailing party line. He became jazz critic for the New Statesman when the Party had denounced jazz as part of ‘the American threat to British culture’. After 1956 the Party leadership hoped he would resign, though they didn't push the matter to the point of expulsion. Evans claims the Communist Party ‘despised intellectuals’ – but fails to note that the worst anti-intellectualism came from those who were themselves intellectuals.
In the 1970s, as the Party began to disintegrate, Hobsbawm sided with the ‘Eurocommunists’ (who wanted to make the Party an openly social-democratic organisation) against the ‘tankies’ (who stayed loyal to Moscow). In particular he gave the influential lecture ‘The Forward March of Labour Halted’, arguing that the period in which the socialist movement was based on militant trade-union struggle was coming to an end. It was a controversial thesis at the time – only a few years earlier a miners' strike had brought about the fall of Edward Heath's Tory government. As against those of us who argued that there was merely a temporary ‘downturn’ in class struggle, Hobsbawm was right to see a historical turning-point. Yet he had little to say about where new forms of struggle and resistance could come from, and his dislike of miners' leader Arthur Scargill led him to to be almost indifferent to the long struggle of thousands of miners in 1984‑85. He had some influence on the Labour Party's rightward evolution, being praised as ‘sagacious’ by Neil Kinnock; though he despised Blair he became a friend of Gordon Brown. Meanwhile his success as a writer enabled him to find a comfortable berth within capitalist society ; thus he became a member of the Athenaeum Club.
Another significant aspect of Hobsbawm's work was his internationalism. While his contemporaries Thompson and Hill largely confined themselves to British topics, Hobsbawm wrote world history (though he has been accused,legitimately, of Eurocentrism). Born in Egypt with a British father, he went to school in Austria and Germany, where he was known as ‘the English boy’, then came to England (but continued to write poetry in German). He spoke various languages fluently and until his very last years travelled widely and frequently – to France, Italy, India, Latin America, and the USA. Though he had no religious sympathies, in the century of the Holocaust (in which some members of his family perished) his Jewish identity made itself felt.
In a 2008 interview Hobsbawm argued that the function of history was to be a ‘pain in the arse for national myths’. His later work recognised a deep contradiction in the modern world: with the advance of globalisation the traditional nation-state was becoming increasingly obsolete; he argued powerfully that nations were artificial constructs. But ideology does not automatically follow its economic roots, and nationalism remains a powerful, sometimes dangerous force. This contradiction has been only too evident in the Brexit débâcle, and if Hobsbawm had survived a little longer his analysis would have been more illuminating than most of the turgid commentary inflicted on us.
There is much that remains relevant and thought-provoking in Hobsbawm's work, even where open to criticism. By giving us such a detailed account of the personal and political context in which the work was produced, Evans has ensured that fruitful debate will continue.