Eric Hobsbawm, dead.

[Syt]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13980324

Eric Hobsbawm was one of the UK's leading historians and one of the most significant intellectuals of the past half century. His life and works were shaped by his emotional commitment to radical socialism.

In his autobiography, published when he was 85, Eric Hobsbawm said: "I belong to the generation for whom the October Revolution represented the hope of the world."

He was born into a middle-class Jewish family in 1917, the year of the Russian Revolution, at Alexandria in Egypt, then a British protectorate.

But his father, a British tradesman, and his mother, an Austrian writer, both died during the Depression in central Europe.

Eric Hobsbawm was a 14-year-old orphan, living with his uncle in Berlin, when he joined the Communist Party.

In his 80s, he reflected: "Anybody who saw Hitler's rise happen first-hand could not have helped but be shaped by it, politically. That boy is still somewhere inside, always will be."
Jazz lover

He came to Britain in 1933, went to school in London and won a scholarship to Cambridge, where the Soviet Union had many admirers.

There was a wartime marriage which did not last but Hobsbawm reckoned he was lucky to secure his first post as a history lecturer, at Birkbeck College in London, just before the Berlin crisis of 1948 and the height of the Cold War.
Eric Hobsbawm as a young man Eric Hobsbawm as a young man

But it was partly because of his political affiliation that he had to wait until 1970 before he was promoted to professor.

He published his first major work, Primitive Rebels, in 1959, about southern European bandits, while, under the pseudonym Francis Newton, he was also the New Statesman's jazz critic for several years and later wrote The Jazz Scene.

In the 1960s, Eric Hobsbawm married again and began to establish an international standing as a historian.

This reputation rests largely on four works; The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital, Empire, and his 1994 History of the 20th Century, The Age of Extremes, which has been translated into about 40 languages.
Hungary

His books focused not on kings, queens and statesmen, but on the economic and social forces underpinning them.

Hobsbawm said he had lived "through almost all of the most extraordinary and terrible century in human history".

But, in a startling assertion, he argued that Communism was of "limited historical interest" compared to the gigantic success of the capitalist "mixed economy" from the mid-1950s to 1973, which he described as "the most profound revolution in society since the Stone Age".

Eric Hobsbawm came under fire for his reluctance to condemn the excesses of Communist totalitarianism.

Although he was still a card-carrying member of the British Communist Party until shortly before it was wound up in 1991, he said he had effectively ceased to be a member in 1956 when Soviet tanks crushed the uprising in Hungary and Khrushchev laid bare the evils of Stalinism.

But rejecting the ideal in which he had invested so much emotion was clearly a painful experience.

In 1998, the Blair government made him a Companion of Honour and while Hobsbawm said it was "better to have a Labour government than not," he was critical of the conduct of the "war on terrorism" and accused the United States of trying to "recolonise" the world.

Eric Hobsbawm said Communism had done the world a service by defeating fascism and to the end of his days he insisted that criticising capitalism was as important as ever.

"Social injustice still needs to be denounced and fought," he said. "The world will not get better on its own."

[Solmyr]

  Even though he was a commie.

[Razgovory]

Wasn't a fan.

[Valmy]

RIP pinko historian dude.

[Sheilbh]

RIP pinko historian dude.

He was several shades darker than pink.

RIP.  Great historian, a far less great man.

[Viking]

An unrepentant Marxist apologist for the USSR who was a Materialist Marxian historian? The world is better off without him. If anything he should serve as a warning for anybody who is tempted to try and explain away evil.

The problem with Marxian analysis is that it does away with ideas, ideals, values and spirit when studying the most human of all the humanities; history. It is certain never to get anything right because it rules out at least half of the reasons people do things. It is also infantilizing of at least one of the participants in each of it's "conflicts" simply because it takes away human agency by turning them into mindless automatons driven by impersonal forces.

The worst thing about it is how it explains every single human event in terms of a class conflict. Every act is a battle between the oppressors and the oppressed, by this very definition those with power are always the oppressors and thus always morally culpible, those who are oppressed are always the ones without power and because the material causes of the conflict not responsible for whatever horror they might commit.

This is how genocide happens. This is how genocide is justified.

[Valmy]

I got a kick out of his 'Age of Capital'.  His dislike of the Capitalists was almost personal and it made the book silly at times.  Like somebody writting a book about why they hate their exes.

[Gups]

As commies go, there have been much worse. I quite liked Age of Extremes. I read after it came out and I don't remember it being a particularly Marxist analysis but my memory may be playing tricks. Wiki summarises:

The Russian Revolution of 1917 was not the revolution of the most advanced capitalist societies predicted by Karl Marx. As Hobsbawm puts it, "Capitalism had proved far easier to overthrow where it was weak or barely existed than in its heartlands."[6] Even within Russia, Hobsbawm doubts the ostensibly "progressive" effects of the revolution: "What remained [after revolution and civil war] was a Russia even more firmly anchored in the past... [W]hat actually governed the country was an undergrowth of smaller and larger bureaucracy, on average even less educated and qualified than before."[7]

It is a central thesis of Hobsbawm's book that, from the start, State Socialism betrayed the socialist and internationalist vision it claimed to uphold. In particular, State Socialism always dispensed with the democratic element of the socialist vision: "Lenin... concluded from the start that the liberal horse was not a runner in the Russian revolutionary race."[8] This anti-liberalism ran deep. In 1933, with Benito Mussolini firmly in control of Italy, "Moscow insisted that the Italian communist leader P. Togliatti withdraw the suggestion that, perhaps, social-democracy was not the primary danger, at least in Italy."[9]

As for support for international revolution, "The communist revolutions actually made (Yugoslavia, Albania, later China) were made against Stalin's advice. The Soviet view was that, both internationally and within each country, post-war politics should continue within the framework of the all-embracing anti-fascist alliance.... There is no doubt that Stalin meant all this seriously, and tried to prove it by dissolving the Comintern in 1943, and the Communist Party of the USA in 1944.[10] "[T]he Chinese Communist regime, though it criticized the USSR for betraying revolutionary movements after the break between the two countries, has no comparable record of practical support for Third World liberation movements."[11]

On the other hand, he is no friend of the Maoist doctrine of perpetual revolution: "Mao was fundamentally convinced of the importance of struggle, conflict and high tension as something that was not only essential to life but prevented the relapse into the weaknesses of the old Chinese society, whose very insistence on unchanging permanence and harmony had been its weakness."[12] Hobsbawm draws a straight line from this belief to the disastrous Great Leap Forward and the subsequent Chinese famine of 1959-1961[13]

Socialism, Hobsbawm argues, ultimately fell because, eventually, "...hardly anyone believed in the system or felt any loyalty to it, not even those who governed it."

[Richard Hakluyt]

Nothing wrong with Socialism as long as people are socialists, unfortunately we are not socialists, not even those who claim to be so.

[Sheilbh]

I got a kick out of his 'Age of Capital'.  His dislike of the Capitalists was almost personal and it made the book silly at times.  Like somebody writting a book about why they hate their exes.

His history was never entirely, tediously Marxist in his histories though.  A lot of what was daring Marxism then is now standard historical practice.  I broadly agree with Oliver Kamm here:
http://timesopinion.tumblr.com/post/32664967630/eric-hobsbawm-a-talented-historian-who-outshone-his

This review of his autobiography by Tony Judt is very good:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2003/nov/20/the-last-romantic/?pagination=false

[CountDeMoney]

As commies go, there have been much worse.

The study of history, particularly of the 20th century, needs writers like Hobshawn.  Don't have to accept him, don't even have to like him, but you have to allow him at the table.

[Valmy]

His history was never entirely, tediously Marxist in his histories though.  A lot of what was daring Marxism then is now standard historical practice.

Oh no they were not.  I enjoyed 'The Age of Revolutions' 'The Age of Capital' and 'The Age of Empire' a great deal.  I just thought it was funny his Marxist showed up most obviously in a revulsion for the Bourgeoise personally.  Like he thinks they suck as humans.  But he was entirely fair I thought discussing the impact of their impact on society and the economy and technology and so forth.  But after awhile I was like 'ok I get it Bourgeoise are boorish and their values fill you with a simmering rage'.

[CountDeMoney]

I just thought it was funny his Marxist showed up most obviously in a revulsion for the Bourgeoise personally.  Like he thinks they suck as humans.

Well, they sorta do.

[Gups]

This review of his autobiography by Tony Judt is very good:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2003/nov/20/the-last-romantic/?pagination=false

It really is. Now Judt is a brilliant historian. Post-War is one of the finest works of history I've read.

[Viking]

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3388/eric-hobsbawm

Is the Response to Totalitarianism More Totalitarianism?
by Douglas Murray
October 8, 2012 at 5:00 am

The competition may be pretty intense, but if I were asked to name the single worst idea in the twentieth century it would be the one adopted by people who believed that the response to totalitarianism was totalitarianism. The twentieth century is littered with these people: those who became fascists because they were fearful of communists, or communists because they were fearful of fascists. Both had reason to fear the other, but both ended by propelling the other and in the process sucking nearly all air out of the decent center ground.

Of course those who took the fascist cause to their heart have not heard the end of it. Even those who played no active part in the horrors of Nazism find themselves rightly excoriated if they ever acted as apologists for, or deniers of, the crimes of that wicked ideology. When Diana Mosley went on the BBC radio program, "Desert Island Discs," and reminisced about how amusing her friend Adolf Hitler had been, it went down very badly indeed. Alas for her, had she only made the right type of friends on the other side of the totalitarian spectrum she might have gone to her grave a national treasure.

For certainly that is how the news was received in Britain after the death of Eric Hobsbawm on 1st October at the age of 95. A prize-winning and highly decorated historian, Hobsbawm was lauded in death, as in life, by colleagues from academia and the world of left-wing politics. Former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair released a personal tribute. His predecessor, Neil Kinnock, reminisced about what a guru Hobsbawm had been to him while Kinnock was leader of the Labour party. The current Labour leader, Ed Miliband, himself the son of a famous Marxist, mourned, "An extraordinary historian, a man passionate about his politics and a great friend of my family."

Britain's main left-wing newspaper, The Guardian, cleared the front-page and much of its inside pages for the obsequies. An uncritical leader was published by the ordinarily centrist Times, and the BBC altered its broadcast schedule to make room for special programming once the news had been announced. All of which would ordinarily be rather nice to see. There are not very many thinkers, writers or historians who receive such popular acclaim, or are ever credited with practical political influence.

Unfortunately, whatever Hobsbawm's skills as a historian – and these are certainly open to question – the ideology to which he subscribed for his entire life was one which if anything outdid even Nazism in the devastation it wrought on our planet. For Hobsbawm was a life-long Marxist and a member of the Communist Party from his schooldays and all the way through. I imagine that if Diana Mosley had been offered the opportunity to acquire and retain Nazi Party membership from 1945 right up until her death, she may well have taken it. But the popular reaction to the fact would not have been joshing. Not so with Hobsbawm. A former Labour Party speech-writer explained that, "His decision never to leave the Communist party was quixotic - prompted by loyalty to old comrades, the way he told it." A writer in the Times recalled the dead Communist to have been – "a man of deep intellect, humility and charm" – on his only meeting with him; going on to claim that the talent the man had shown had "superseded" the ideology.

I do not see how this could be so. This man's career was spent whitewashing, minimizing, excusing and stooging for some of the worst crimes in human history. Having been given ample years to recant his views, he resisted the call, instead holding them to the end. The system he supported prevented many people reaching even a quarter of the age he was fortunate enough to live to. But for him human life always took an – at best – secondary importance. The really crucial thing was communist ideology – surely, along with Nazism, the most bankrupt and destructive ideology the world has ever seen? Asked in a BBC television interview in 1994 whether the creation of a communist utopia would be worth the loss of "15, 20 million people," he replied clearly, "Yes."

It should not need to be said that this man, with his lifelong actions, teachings and propagation of a disgusting ideology would not have been celebrated had his crime been support of Nazism. Had he joined the Hitler youth voluntarily in 1933 and stayed inside fascist movements until his death; had he denied the Holocaust and said that the death of six million Jews and many millions of others would have been worth it for the achievement of the ideal Nazi state he would have died in ignominy. He would not have been celebrated in his life and he would not have been celebrated after death. Irrespective of any consideration of his works he would not have had plaudits from politicians of any stripe, let alone the leaders of political parties of the right.

And this, forgetting (as people will) the appalling Hobsbawm is the truly, seriously, deeply wrong thing.

Today the crimes of Nazism are recognized and reviled enough for us to be confident – not wholly confident, but fairly confident – that such crimes will not be allowed to recur. Can the same be confidently said of its twin ideology?

If a Nazi had just died and the main newspapers, the national broadcaster, leading right-wing politicians and others broke out into a wave of mourning, regret and "we shall not see his like" routines, you would worry that this could come back, wouldn't you? Most of all you would worry that no lessons at all appeared to have been learned. We do not have to imagine the dread of such a scenario, for we have just seen it. And the sight of it should freeze our blood, whether we believe ourselves on the "right" or on the "left."