Eric Hobsbawm

Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm, CH, FBA, FRSL (9 June 1917 – 1 October 2012) was a British Marxist historian, public intellectual, and author. His best known works include the trilogy about the long 19th century (The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848, The Age of Capital: 1848–1875 and The Age of Empire: 1875–1914), The Age of Extremes on the short 20th century and an edited volume which introduced the influential idea of 'invented traditions'.

The Jewish family into which he was born in Egypt moved to Vienna, Austria two years later, and from there to Berlin, Germany. Following the death of his parents and the rise to power of the anti-semitic Nazi Party, in 1933 he moved to London, England, and obtained his PhD in History at the University of Cambridge, before serving in World War II. In 1947 he secured a job lecturing at Birkbeck College, London, but was not promoted till 1970, something that he considered to be due to his far-left political views.

Early life and education
Hobsbawm was born in 1917 at Alexandria, Egypt, to Leopold Percy Hobsbaum (né Obstbaum), a British colonial officer of Polish-Jewish descent, and Nelly Grün, who was from a middle-class Austrian Jewish family background, and his early childhood was spent in Vienna, Austria, and Berlin, Germany. A clerical error at birth altered his surname from Hobsbaum to Hobsbawm. Although the family lived in German-speaking countries, his parents spoke to him and his younger sister Nancy in English.

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 two years later (in 1931), he and 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 Hitler came to power in 1933; that year the family moved to London, where Hobsbawm enrolled in St Marylebone Grammar School (now defunct).

Hobsbawn attended King's College, Cambridge, where he was elected to the Cambridge Apostles. He received a doctorate (PhD) in History from Cambridge University for his dissertation on the Fabian Society. During World War II, he served in the Royal Engineers and the Royal Army Educational Corps.

Personal life
Hobsbawm's first marriage to Muriel Seaman in 1943 ended in divorce in 1951. His second marriage was to Marlene Schwarz, with whom he had two children, Julia Hobsbawm and Andy Hobsbawm. Julia is chief executive of Hobsbawm Media and Marketing and a Visiting Professor of Public Relations at the College of Communication, University of the Arts London. He also had a son, Joshua, from a previous relationship.

Hobsbawn was President of Birkbeck, University of London for ten years until his death. In 1998 he was appointed to the Order of the Companions of Honour, a UK national honour bestowed for outstanding achievement in the arts, literature, music, science, politics, industry or religion (fellow recipients included in 2011 Douglas Hurd, former British Foreign Secretary, Norman Tebbit, former Secretary of State of Employment under Margaret Thatcher, and former Conservative Prime Minister Sir John Major). In 2003 he was the recipient of the Balzan Prize for European History since 1900, "For his brilliant analysis of the troubled history of twentieth-century Europe and for his ability to combine in-depth historical research with great literary talent."

Death
In the early hours of 1 October 2012, at the age of 95, Hobsbawm died at the Royal Free Hospital, London after a long illness. His daughter Julia confirmed that he died of pneumonia. She said, "He'd been quietly fighting leukemia 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.""

Works
Hobsbawm wrote extensively on many subjects as one of Britain's most prominent historians. As a Marxist historiographer he has focused on analysis of the "dual revolution" (the political French Revolution and the British industrial revolution). He saw their effect as a driving force behind the predominant trend towards liberal capitalism today. Another recurring theme in his work was social banditry, a phenomenon that Hobsbawm tried to place within the confines of relevant societal and historical context, thus countering the traditional view of it being a spontaneous and unpredictable form of primitive rebellion. He also coined the term "long nineteenth century", which begins with the French Revolution in 1789 and ended with the start of The Great War in 1914.

Outside his academic historical writing, Hobsbawm wrote a regular column (under the pseudonym Francis Newton', taken from the name of Billie Holiday's communist trumpet player, Frankie Newton) for the New Statesman as a jazz critic, and time to time over popular music such as with his "Beatles and before" article. He published numerous essays in various intellectual journals, dealing with subjects such as barbarity in the modern age, the troubles of labour movements, and the conflict between anarchism and communism. Among his final publications were Globalisation, Democracy and Terrorism (2007), On Empire (2008), and the collection of essays How to Change the World: Marx and Marxism 1840–2011 (2011).

Academia
In 1947, he became a Lecturer in History at Birkbeck. He became Reader in 1959, Professor between 1970–82 and an Emeritus Professor of History 1982. He was a Fellow between 1949–55 of King's College, Cambridge. Hobsbawm spoke of the weaker version of McCarthyism that took hold in Britain and affected Marxist academics: "you didn't get promotion for 10 years, but nobody threw you out". Hobsbawm was also denied a lectureship at Cambridge by political enemies, and, given that he was also blocked for a time from a professorship at Birkbeck for the same reasons, spoke of his good fortune at having got a post at Birkbeck in 1948 before the Cold War really started to take off. David Pryce-Jones has questioned the existence of such career obstacles.

Hobsbawm helped found the academic journal Past & Present in 1952. He was a Visiting Professor at Stanford in the 1960s. In 1970, he was appointed Professor and in 1978 he became a Fellow of the British Academy. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1971 and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2006.

He retired in 1982 but stayed as Visiting Professor at The New School for Social Research in Manhattan between 1984–97. He was, until his death, President of Birkbeck (from 2002) and Professor Emeritus in The New School for Social Research in the Political Science Department. A most proficient linguist, he spoke German, English, French, Spanish and Italian fluently, and read Portuguese and Catalan.

Politics
Hobsbawm joined the Sozialistischer Schülerbund (Association of Socialist Pupils), an offshoot of the Young Communist League of Germany, in Berlin in 1931, and the Communist Party in 1936. He was a member of the Communist Party Historians Group from 1946 to 1956. The Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 led most of its members to leave the British Communist Party. Hobsbawm, uniquely among his notable colleagues, remained in the Party. He denounced the USSR's crimes and abuses as early as 1956 and characterised the Polish and the Hungarian uprisings as "revolts of workers and intellectuals against bureaucracies and pseudo-communist political systems". He signed a historians' letter of protest against the Soviet invasion of Hungary and was strongly in favour of the Prague spring.

Hobsbawm was later a leading light of the Eurocommunist faction in the CPGB that began to gather strength after 1968, when the CPGB criticised the Soviet crushing of the Prague Spring and the French CP failed to support the May students in Paris. 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 in Marxism 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. Hobsbawm supported Neil Kinnock's transformation of the British Labour Party from 1983 (the party received just 28% of the vote in that year's elections, just 2% more than than the Social Democratic Party/Liberal Alliance), and, though not close to Kinnock, came to be referred to as "Neil Kinnock's Favourite Marxist". His interventions in Kinnock's remaking of the Labour Party helped prepare the ground for the Third Way, New Labour, and Tony Blair, whom Hobsbawm later derisively referred to as "Thatcher in trousers". Until the cessation of publication in 1991, he contributed to the magazine Marxism Today. A third of the 30 reprints of Marxism Todays feature articles that appeared in The Guardian during the 1980s were articles or interviews by or with Hobsbawm, making him by far the most popular of all contributors. From the 1960s, his politics took a more moderate turn, as Hobsbawm came to recognize that his hopes were unlikely to be realized, and no longer advocated "socialist systems of the Soviet type". Until the day of his death, however, he remained firmly entrenched on the Left, and maintaining that the long-term outlooks for humanity were 'bleak'.

Miscellaneous views
Regarding the Queen, Hobsbawm stated that constitutional monarchy in general has "proved a reliable framework for liberal-democratic regimes" and "is likely to remain useful". On the nuclear attacks on Japan in WWII, 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", though 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."

Praise and criticism
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." In 2002, Hobsbawm was described by right-leaning magazine The Spectator as "arguably our greatest living historian—not only Britain's, but the world's", while Niall Ferguson wrote: "That Hobsbawm is one of the great historians of his generation is undeniable. . . . His quartet of books beginning with The Age of Revolution and ending with The 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." 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." James Joll wrote in The New York Review of Books that "Eric Hobsbawm's nineteenth century trilogy is one of the great achievements of historical writing in recent decades." Ian Kershaw said that Hobsbawm's take on the twentieth century, his 1994 book, The Age of Extremes, consisted of "masterly analysis". Meanwhile, Tony Judt, while praising Hobsbawm's vast knowledge and graceful prose, cautioned that Hobsbawm's bias in favour of the USSR, 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.

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 on fascism."

British historian David Pryce-Jones conceded that Hobsbawm was "no doubt intelligent and industrious, and he might well have made a notable contribution as a historian", but also charged that, as a professional historian who has "steadily corrupted knowledge into propaganda, and scorns the concept of objective truth", he was "neither a historian nor professional." Brad DeLong strongly criticised Age of Extremes: "The remains of Hobsbawm's commitment to the religion of World Communism get in the way of his judgment, and twist his vision. On planet Hobsbawm, for example, the fall of the Soviet Union was a disaster, and the Revolutions of 1989 a defeat for humanity. On planet Hobsbawm, Stalin planned multi-party democracies and mixed economies for Eastern Europe after World War II, and reconsidered only after the United States launched the Cold War." After reading Age of Extremes, Kremlinologist Robert Conquest concluded that Hobsbawm suffers from a "massive reality denial" regarding the USSR, and John 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".

Conquest has claimed that in 1994, in an interview with Canadian author and politician Michael Ignatieff on British television, Hobsbawm responded in the affirmative to the question of whether 20 million deaths may have been justified had the proposed communist utopia been created. The following year, when asked the same question on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, that is if "the sacrifice of millions of lives" would have been worth a communist utopia, he replied: "That's what we felt when we fought the Second World War". Hobsbawm has similarly 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".

Tony Judt opined 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." 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." Hobsbawm himself, in his autobiography, wrote that he desires "historical understanding . . . not agreement, approval or sympathy".

Hobsbawm stressed that since the utopia had not been created, the sacrifices were in fact not justified—a point he emphasised in Age 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)."

Elsewhere he has 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 the Volga famine of the early '20s, if not the 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." With regard to the 1930s, he has written 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." Gina Herrmann, in her 2010 study of Spanish communists' memoirs, claimed that "of the many myths that Western Communists lived by, perhaps the most abiding is that of Communist anti-Fascism of the 1930s and 1940s—one that was consolidated in Spain's Civil War of 1936–1939." However, the profound fascist/anti-fascist schism of the period described by Hobsbawm was real enough, as Yale historian Timothy Snyder notes:"For many Europeans and Americans, the show trials were simply trials, and confessions were reliable evidence of guilt. Some observers who were sympathetic to the Soviet Union saw them as a positive development: the British socialist Beatrice Webb, for example, was pleased that Stalin had "cut out the dead wood." Other Soviet sympathizers no doubt suppressed their suspicions, on the logic that the USSR was the enemy of Nazi Germany and thus the hope of civilization. European public opinion was so polarized by 1936 that it was indeed difficult to criticize the Soviet regime without seeming to endorse fascism and Hitler." Nevertheless, Snyder also claimed that "The Spanish Civil War revealed that Stalin was determined, despite the Popular Front rhetoric of pluralism, to eliminate opposition to his version of socialism", and that his determination was knowable and known even contemporaneously (Snyder cites George Orwell's analysis of, and dismay at, communist actions in Spain). On the communist role in Spain, Hobsbawm writes simply that "its pros and cons continue to be discussed in the political and historical literature", and refers to Orwell, not by his literary name, but as "an upper-class Englishman called Eric Blair". He also claimed that the demise of the USSR was "traumatic not only for communists but for socialists everywhere", a statement that led journalist Francis Wheen to retort: "Speak for yourself, comrade. I, like many other socialists, greeted the fall of the Soviet model with unqualified rejoicing; and I don't doubt that Karl Marx would have been celebrating. His favourite motto, de omnibus disputandum ('everything should be questioned'), was not one that had any currency in the realm of 'actually existing socialism'—a hideous hybrid of mendacity, thuggery and incompetence."

The 1930s aside, Hobsbawm was criticised for never relinquishing his Communist Party membership. Whereas people like Arthur Koestler left the Party after seeing the friendly reception of Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop in Moscow during the years of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (1939-1941), Hobsbawm stood firm even after the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, though he was against them both. In his review of Hobsbawm's 2002 memoirs, Interesting Times, Niall Ferguson wrote:

"The essence of Communism is the abnegation of individual freedom, as Hobsbawm admits in a chilling passage: "The Party. . . had the first, or more precisely the only real claim on our lives. Its demands had absolute priority. We accepted its discipline and hierarchy. We accepted the absolute obligation to follow 'the lines' it proposed to us, even when we disagreed with it. . . We did what it ordered us to do. . . Whatever it had ordered, we would have obeyed. . . If the Party ordered you to abandon your lover or spouse, you did so."

Consider some of the "lines" our historian dutifully toed. He accepted the order to side with the Nazis against the Weimar-supporting Social Democrats in the great Berlin transport strike of 1932. He accepted the order to side with the Nazis against Britain and France following the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact of 1939. He accepted the excommunication of Tito. He condoned the show trials of men like Laszlo Rajk in Hungary.

In 1954, just after Stalin's death, he visited Moscow as one of the honoured members of the Historians' Group of the British Communist Party. He admits to having been dismayed when, two years later, Khrushchev denounced Stalin's crimes at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party. When Khrushchev himself ordered the tanks into Budapest, Hobsbawm finally spoke up, publishing a letter of protest. But he did not leave the Party." Hobsbawm let his membership lapse not long before the party's dissolution in 1991. In his review of Hobsbawm's memoirs, David Pryce-Jones accuses him of actually supporting the invasion of Hungary:

"[H]e carefully makes sure not to quote the letter he published on 9 November 1956 in the Communist Daily Worker defending the Soviet onslaught on Hungary: "While approving, with a heavy heart, of what is now happening in Hungary, we should therefore also say frankly that we think the USSR should withdraw its troops from the country as soon as this is possible." Which is more deceitful, the spirit of this letter, or the omission of any reference to it [in his memoirs]?"

In those memoirs, Hobsbawn wrote: "The dream of the October 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." Reviewing the book, David Caute wrote: "One keeps asking of Hobsbawm: didn't you know what Deutscher and Orwell knew? Didn't you know about the induced famine, the horrors of collectivisation, the false confessions, the terror within the Party, the massive forced labour of the gulag? As Orwell himself documented, a great deal of evidence was reliably knowable even before 1939, but Hobsbawm pleads that much of it was not reliably knowable until Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin in 1956."

Reviewing Hobsbawm's 2011 How to Change the World in The Wall Street Journal, Michael Moynihan argued:"When the bloody history of 20th-century communism intrudes upon Mr. Hobsbawm's disquisitions, it's quickly dismissed. Of the countries occupied by the Soviet Union after World War II—"the Second World War," he says with characteristic slipperiness, "led communist parties to power" in Eastern and Central Europe—he explains that a "possible critique of the new [postwar] socialist regimes does not concern us here." Why did communist regimes share the characteristics of state terror, oppression and murder? "To answer this question is not part of the present chapter." Regarding the execrable pact between Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, which shocked many former communist sympathizers into lives of anticommunism, Mr. Hobsbawm dismisses the "zig-zags and turns of Comintern and Soviet policy," specifically the "about-turn of 1939–41," which "need not detain us here." In one sense, Mr. Hobsbawm's admirers are right about his erudition: He possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of Marxist thought, specifically Italian communism and pre-Soviet socialist movements. But that knowledge is wasted when used to write untrustworthy history." Reviewing the same book, Francis Wheen argued in a similar vein: "When writing about how the anti-fascist campaigns of the 1930s brought new recruits to the communist cause, he cannot even bring himself to mention the Hitler-Stalin pact, referring only to 'temporary episodes such as 1939–41'. The Soviet invasion of Hungary and the crushing of the Prague Spring are skipped over."

David Evanier, in an article published in the American conservative magazine The Weekly Standard, called Hobsbawm "Stalin's cheerleader," writing: "One can learn almost nothing about the history of communism from Hobsbawm's Interesting Times—nothing about the show trials, the torture and execution of millions, the Communist betrayal of Spain."

Honours and awards

 * 1973: Honorary Fellow, King's College, Cambridge
 * 1978: Fellow of the British Academy
 * 1995: Deutscher Memorial Prize; Lionel Gelber Prize
 * 1996: Wolfson History Oeuvre Prize
 * 1998: Companion of Honour, Order of the Companions of Honour
 * 1999: Buchpreis zur Europäischen Verständigung Leipziger Buchpreis zur Europäischen Verständigung (Hauptpreis)
 * 1999: Honorary degree from Universidad de la República Montevideo, Uruguay
 * 2000: Ernst Bloch Prize
 * 2003: Balzan Prize recipient
 * 2006: Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature
 * 2008: Honorary citizenship from Vienna
 * 2008: Honorary degree from University of Vienna
 * 2008: Honorary degree from Charles University in Prague
 * 2008: Bochum History Prize