British academic historian and Marxist historiographer (1917–2012)
"Hobsbawm" redirects here. For the British businessman, son of Eric Hobsbawm, seeAndy Hobsbawm. For the British academic, daughter of Eric Hobsbawm, seeJulia Hobsbawm.
Hobsbawm was born inAlexandria, Egypt, and spent his childhood mainly inVienna andBerlin. Following the death of his parents and the rise to power ofAdolf Hitler, Hobsbawm moved to London with his adoptive family. After serving in theSecond World War, he obtained his PhD in history at theUniversity of Cambridge. In 1998, he was appointed to theOrder of the Companions of Honour. He was president ofBirkbeck, University of London, from 2002 until his death.[2] In 2003, he received theBalzan Prize forEuropean 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."
Eric Hobsbawm was born in 1917 inAlexandria,Egypt. His father was Leopold Percy Hobsbaum (né Obstbaum), aJewish merchant from theEast End of London ofPolish Jewish descent.[3] His mother was Nelly Hobsbaum (née Grün), who was from a middle-classAustrian Jewish family. Although both of his parents were Jewish, neither was observant.[4] His early childhood was spent inVienna, Austria, andBerlin, Germany. A clerical error at birth altered his surname from Hobsbaum to Hobsbawm.[5] Although the family lived inGerman-speaking countries, he grew up speakingEnglish as his first language.[6]
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 (today Friedrich-List-School) when theNazi Party came to power in 1933. That year the family moved to London, where Hobsbawm enrolled inSt Marylebone Grammar School.[5] He didn't consider himself a refugee, given that he was British by birth because of his father's nationality.[6][7]
Hobsbawm attendedKing's College, Cambridge, from 1936,[8] where he joined theCommunist Party of Great Britain "in the form of the university's Socialist Club."[6] He took a double-starred first inhistory and was elected to theCambridge Apostles. He received a doctorate (PhD) in history from theUniversity of Cambridge for his dissertation on theFabian Society. During theSecond World War, he served in theRoyal Engineers and theArmy Educational Corps. He was prevented from serving overseas after he attracted the attention of the security services by using thewall newspaper he edited during his army training to argue for the opening up of aSecond 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.[4]
MI5 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.[7] 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".[6] In 1947, he became alecturer in history atBirkbeck College, University of London which, unusually at the time, lacked any inclination towards anti-communism among staff or students.[7] He becamereader in 1959,professor between 1970 and 1982 and anemeritus professor of history in 1982. He was a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, from 1949 to 1955.[5] Hobsbawm said there was a weaker version ofMcCarthyism that took hold in Britain and affected Marxist academics: "you didn't get promotion for 10 years, but nobody threw you out".[9] According toNoel Annan in hisOur Age, Hobsbawm was denied a lectureship at Cambridge by political enemies, and blocked for a time from a professorship at Birkbeck for the same reasons. Hobsbawm spoke of his good fortune at having got a post at Birkbeck in 1948 before the Cold War really started to take off.[9] Conservative commentatorDavid Pryce-Jones has questioned the existence of such career obstacles.[10]
He published numerous essays in various intellectual journals, dealing with subjects such asbarbarity in themodern age, the troubles oflabour movements, and the conflict betweenanarchism and communism. Among his final publications wereGlobalisation, Democracy and Terrorism (2007),On Empire (2008) and the collection of essaysHow to Change the World: Marx and Marxism 1840–2011 (2011).
Outside his academic historical writing, Hobsbawm wrote a regular column aboutjazz for theNew Statesman (under the pseudonym Francis Newton, taken from the name ofBillie Holiday's communist trumpet player,Frankie Newton). He had become interested in jazz during the 1930s when it was frowned upon by the Communist Party.[6] Hobsbawm occasionally wrote about other forms of popular music, such as in his 1963 article "Beatles and before", in which he predicts thatthe Beatles "are probably just about to begin their slow descent" and that "[i]n 29 years' time nothing of them will survive".[19]
Hobsbawm joined theSozialistischer Schülerbund (Association of Socialist Pupils), an offshoot of theYoung Communist League of Germany, in Berlin in 1931,[9] and theCommunist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) 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. TheSoviet 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 mistrusted by its leadership and ceased political work by the end of the 1950s.[7] Hobsbawm maintained some ties to former colleagues such asE. P. Thompson andJohn 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 theNew Left as "a half-remembered footnote".[4] He signed a historians' letter of protest against the Soviet invasion of Hungary and was firmly in favour of thePrague Spring.[5]
Hobsbawm was a leading light of theEurocommunist faction in theCommunist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) that began to gather strength after 1968, when the CPGB criticised the Soviet crushing of thePrague Spring and theFrench Communist Party's failure to support theMay 68 movement in Paris.[20] In "The Forward March of Labour Halted?" (originally a Marx Memorial Lecture, "The British Working Class One Hundred Years after Marx", that was delivered to a small audience of fellow Marxists in March 1978 before being published inMarxism Today in September 1978), 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.[20][21] Hobsbawm supportedNeil Kinnock's transformation of the BritishLabour Party from 1983 (the party received 28 per cent of the vote inthat year's elections, 2 per cent more than the Social Democratic Party/Liberal Alliance), and, though not close to Kinnock, came to be referred to as "Neil Kinnock's Favourite Marxist".[20] His interventions in Kinnock's remaking of the Labour Party helped prepare the ground for theThird Way,New Labour, andTony Blair,[20] whom Hobsbawm later derisively referred to as "Thatcher in trousers".[22] Until the cessation of publication in 1991, he contributed to the magazineMarxism Today. A third of the 30 reprints ofMarxism Today's feature articles that appeared inThe Guardian during the 1980s were articles or interviews by or with Hobsbawm, making him their most popular contributor.[20]
In addition to his association with the CPGB, Hobsbawm developed close ties to the largest Communist Party in the western world, theItalian Communist Party (PCI), 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 ofAntonio Gramsci, whose writings were a key influence on Hobsbawm's work on the history ofsubaltern groups, emphasising their agency as well as structural factors. Hobsbawm spoke favourably about PCI general secretaryEnrico Berlinguer's strategy ofHistoric Compromise in the 1970s, seeking rapprochement with theCatholic Church and theChristian 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 ofNATO, thus being able to build broader alliances and convince wider sections of society of its legitimacy as a potential governing force.[23]
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".[24] Until the day of his death, however, he remained firmly entrenched on the Left, maintaining that the long-term outlooks for humanity were 'bleak'.[25][26][27][28][29] "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 regard 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."[30]
Hobsbawm stressed that since communism was not created, the sacrifices were in fact not justified—a point he emphasised inAge of Extremes:
Still, whatever assumptions are made, the number of direct and indirect victims must be measured in eight rather than seven digits. In these circumstances it does not much matter whether we opt for a "conservative" estimate nearer to ten than to twenty million or a larger figure: none can be anything but shameful and beyond palliation, let alone justification. I add, without comment, that the total population of the USSR in 1937 was said to have been 164 millions, or 16.7 millions less than the demographic forecasts of the Second Five-Year Plan (1933–38).[31]
Elsewhere he insisted:
I have never tried to diminish the appalling things that happened in Russia, though the sheer extent of the massacres we didn't realise ... In the early days we knew a new world was being born amid blood and tears and horror: revolution, civil war, famine—we knew of theVolga famine of the early '20s, if notthe early '30s. Thanks to the breakdown of the west, we had the illusion that even this brutal, experimental, system was going to work better than the west. It was that or nothing.[5]
With regard to the 1930s, he wrote that
It is impossible to understand the reluctance of men and women on the left to criticise, or even often to admit to themselves, what was happening in the USSR in those years, or the isolation of the USSR's critics on the left, without this sense that in the fight against fascism, communism and liberalism were, in a profound sense, fighting for the same cause. Not to mention the more obvious fact ... that, in the conditions of the 1930s, what Stalin did was a Russian problem, however shocking, whereas what Hitler did was a threat everywhere.[32]
He claimed that the demise of the USSR was "traumatic not only for communists but for socialists everywhere".[33]
Regarding QueenElizabeth II, Hobsbawm stated that constitutional monarchy in general has "proved a reliable framework for liberal-democratic regimes" and "is likely to remain useful".[34] On thenuclear 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 [compared with that of Nazi Germany], which is why nuclear arms were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to ensure a rapid Japanese surrender".[35] He 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."[36] Hobsbawm is 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'.[8]
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".[9] In 2002, Hobsbawm was described by right-leaning magazineThe Spectator as "arguably our greatest living historian—not only Britain's, but the world's",[37] whileNiall Ferguson wrote: "That Hobsbawm is one of the great historians of his generation is undeniable ... His quartet of books beginning withThe Age of Revolution and ending withThe 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."[38] 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".[39]James Joll wrote inThe New York Review of Books that "Eric Hobsbawm's nineteenth century trilogy is one of the great achievements of historical writing in recent decades".[40]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."[41]Ian Kershaw said that Hobsbawm's take on the twentieth century, his 1994 book,The Age of Extremes, consisted of "masterly analysis".[42] Meanwhile,Tony Judt, while praising Hobsbawm's vast knowledge and graceful prose, cautioned that Hobsbawm's bias in favour of theUSSR,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.[43]
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 onfascism".[5] In a 2011 poll byHistory Today magazine, he was named the third most important historian of the previous 60 years.[44]
After readingAge of Extremes, KremlinologistRobert Conquest concluded that Hobsbawm suffers from a "massive reality denial" regarding the USSR,[39] andJohn 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".[45]
In a 1994 interview on BBC television with Canadian academicMichael Ignatieff, Hobsbawm said that the deaths of millions of Soviet citizens underStalin would have been worth it if a genuinely communist society had been the result.[3][46][47] 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".[46][48] The following year, when asked the same question onBBC Radio 4'sDesert 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".[5] He repeated what he had already said to Ignatieff, when he asked therhetorical question, "Do people now say we shouldn't have hadWorld War II, because more people died in World War II than died in Stalin's terror?".[46]
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."[5] 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."[5] Hobsbawm himself, in his autobiography, wrote that he desires "historical understanding ... not agreement, approval or sympathy".[49]
The 1930s aside, Hobsbawm was criticised for never relinquishing his Communist Party membership. Whereas people likeArthur Koestler left the Party after seeing the friendly reception of Nazi foreign ministerJoachim von Ribbentrop inMoscow during the years of theMolotov–Ribbentrop Pact (1939–1941),[50] Hobsbawm stood firm even after the Soviet interventions of theHungarian Revolution of 1956 and thePrague Spring.[5][39] Hobsbawm let his membership lapse not long before the party's dissolution in 1991.[5] In his memoirs, Hobsbawm wrote: "The dream of theOctober 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."[51]
One of Hobsbawm's friends, historian Donald Sassoon, wrote: "Hobsbawm was not a Jewish historian; he was an historian who happened to be Jewish".[52] His first marriage was to Muriel Seaman in 1943. They divorced in 1951.[3] His second marriage was to Marlene Schwarz (in 1962), with whom he had two children,Julia Hobsbawm andAndy Hobsbawm. He had an out-of-wedlock son, Joshua Bennathan, who was born in 1958[53] and died in November 2014.[3][54]
Hobsbawm died from complications of pneumonia and leukaemia at theRoyal Free Hospital in London on 1 October 2012, aged 95.[55] His daughter, Julia, said: "He'd been quietly fighting leukaemia for a number of years without fuss or fanfare. Right up until the end he was keeping up what he did best, he was keeping up with current affairs, there was a stack of newspapers by his bed".[56]
Following Hobsbawm's death reactions included praise for his "sheer academic productivity and prowess" and "tough reasoning" inThe Guardian.[57] 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 theivory tower and into people's lives".[55]
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.[1] His writings reached particular prominence inIndia andBrazil in the 1960s and 1970s at a time of lively debate about these countries' political and social future.[1]Emile Chabal, in an essay forAeon, wrote: "In the period from the early 1960s to the late '80s, Marxists in non-communist 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."[1]
^abcdSaunders, Frances Stonor (9 April 2015)."Stuck on the Flypaper".London Review of Books. Vol. 37, no. 7.Archived from the original on 25 March 2020. Retrieved25 March 2020.
^Perry Anderson (3 October 2002)."The Age of EJH".London Review of Books. Vol. 24, no. 19.Archived from the original on 30 September 2007. Retrieved11 January 2012.
^Eric Hobsbawm (24 January 2008)."Diary".London Review of Books. Vol. 30, no. 2.Archived from the original on 4 February 2012. Retrieved11 January 2012.
^"Eric Hobsbawm".032c Workshop. 032c. July 2009.Archived from the original on 17 December 2013. Retrieved17 December 2013.
^Tony Judt (20 November 2003)."The Last Romantic".The New York Review of Books. Vol. 50, no. 18.Archived from the original on 24 August 2011. Retrieved9 January 2012.
^Nathan, John (14 January 2010)."Interview: Joss Bennathan".The Jewish Chronicle. Archived from [thejc.com/arts/arts-interviews/26016/interview-joss-bennathan the original] on 24 February 2010. Retrieved27 December 2021.{{cite web}}:Check|url= value (help)
^Walther, Matthew (25 November 2013)."Eric the Red".National Review. pp. 27–28.Archived from the original on 11 November 2013. Retrieved10 November 2013.
Bounds, Philip (2012). "From Folk to Jazz: Eric Hobsbawm, British Communism and Cultural Studies".Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory. Vol. 40, no. 4. pp. 575–593.
Campbell, J. (12 February 1988). "Towards the Great Decision: review ofThe Age of Empire".Times Literary Supplement. Vol. 4428. p. 153.
Cronin, J. (1979). "Creating a Marxist Historiography: the contribution of Hobsbawm".Radical History Review.1978–79 (19):87–109.doi:10.1215/01636545-1978-79-19-87.
Elliott, Gregory,Hobsbawm: History and Politics, London: Pluto Press, 2010.
Genovese, Eugene "The Squandered Century: review ofThe Age of Extremes" from TheNew Republic, Volume 212, 17 April 1995, pp. 38–43
Hampson, Norman. "All for the Better? review ofEchoes of the Marseillaise" fromTimes Literary Supplement, Volume 4550, 15 June 1990, p. 637.
Judt, Tony. "Downhill All the Way: review ofThe Age of Extremes" fromNew York Review of Books, 25 May 1995, Volume 49, Issue # 9, pp. 20–25.
Kershaw, Ian (2001) [1998].Hitler: 1889–1936: Hubris. London: Penguin.ISBN978-0-14-013363-9.
Landes, David "The Ubiquitous Bourgeoisie: review ofThe Age of Capital" fromTimes Literary Supplement, Volume 3873, 4 June 1976, pp. 662–664.
McKibblin, R. "Capitalism out of Control": review ofThe Age of Extremes fromTimes Literary Supplement, Volume 4778, 28 October 1994, p. 406.
Mingay, G. E. "Review of Captain Swing" fromEnglish Historical Review, Volume 85 (337), 1970, p. 810.
Samuel, Raphael &Jones, Gareth Stedman (editors)Culture, Ideology and Politics: essays for Eric Hobsbawm, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982.
Seton-Watson, H. "Manufactured Mythologies: review ofThe Invention of Tradition" fromTimes Literary Supplement, Volume 4207, 18 November 1983, p. 1270.
Smith, P. "No Vulgar Marxist: review ofOn History"fromTimes Literary Supplement, Volume 4917, 27 June 1997, p. 31.
Snowman, Daniel. "Eric Hobsbawm" fromHistory Today, Volume 49, Issue 1, January 1999, pp. 16–18.
Thane, P.; G. Crossick & R. Floud (editors)The Power of the Past: essays for Eric Hobsbawm, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
Thane, P., & E. Lunbeck. "Interview with Eric Hobsbawm", in:Visions of History, edited by H. Abelove, et al., Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983; pp. 29–46.
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TheEric Hobsbawm BibliographyArchived 22 December 2020 at theWayback Machine, which contains a complete listing of Hobsbawm's published books, journal articles, book chapters, reviews, newspaper articles and pamphlets, as well as his unpublished work and his private papers.
