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Hobsbawm's Long Century 8/20/2018 Hobsbawm’s Long Century Hobsbawm’s Long Century BY JOSEPH FRONCZAK The historian Eric Hobsbawm would have turned 100 today. During his life, he never lost faith that the future belonged to socialism. One long century ago, on June 9, 1917, not quite halfway between the February Revolution and the October Revolution, Eric Hobsbawm was born in Alexandria, Egypt. The lifelong communist died only five years ago, in 2012 at the age of ninety-five. He spent his final years placidly convinced that socialism belonged still to the future, to the twenty-first century. A founding member of the legendary British Communist Party Historians’ Group that fashioned “history from below,” Hobsbawm was a titanic figure among the twentieth-century intelligentsia. Prodigiously active as an intellectual, scholar, and, as he put it, “participant observer” in political life, he was, ironically, defined by the time of his death by what he did not do: he was the one who did not leave the Communist Party. In the wake of the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary, the other prominent British communist historians, like Christopher Hill and E. P. Thompson, all resigned. Likewise their French counterparts like François Furet, who called quitting the French Communist Party the most intelligent thing he ever did. But Hobsbawm, the most intelligent of the lot, never left the party. The Great Transformation Instead, Hobsbawm stayed in the party but retreated from active everyday politics. He poured himself into his academic labors and spent the rest of the Cold War writing an unparalleled body of historical work, all the while his career in academia — most of all, his chances for a prestigious post in the United States — remained hampered by his obstinate communism. Even without his masterpiece four-volume history of the modern world, Hobsbawm would rank among the most accomplished historians ever to write. In 1952, he co-founded the still glorious academic journal Past & Present; he wrote a classic history of the British industrial revolution (Industry and Empire) and co-wrote a classic history of https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/06/eric-hobsbawm-historian-marxism-communist-party-third-reich-stalingrad 1/8 8/20/2018 Hobsbawm’s Long Century workers’ direct-action resistance against it (Captain Swing); Primitive Rebels of 1959 and Bandits of 1969 oered readers a rogues’ gallery of heroic Robin Hoods, Rob Roys, and Pancho Villas; the subversive premise — that as a general rule things that appear timeless custom are really modern “invented traditions” meant to prop up the powerful — behind the 1983 book he co-edited with African historian Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition, has permeated contemporary culture and made it a bit more healthily cynical about the pomp and pageantry of authority. Beginning in 1956, Hobsbawm also moonlighted as an acerbic jazz critic for the New Statesman and Nation, writing under a pen name (Francis Newton) taken from the communist trumpeter who had played on Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit.” But it was his tetralogy of “Age” books that endowed Hobsbawm with his oracular glow. Influenced by the French Annales historians’ epic ambitions of total, all-encompassing history, these four books were world history from below, the middle, and above. With rare imagination, intelligence, and erudition, Hobsbawm not only synthesized the history of the modern world, he intensely conveyed a concentrated world-in-words capable of changing how the reader would thereafter see the larger world, having read Hobsbawm. The project began as a trilogy of what Hobsbawm influentially labeled “the long nineteenth century.” Then, shortly after the Cold War ended, Hobsbawm added a massive history of “the short twentieth century,” extending his analysis through the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. Taken as a whole, the four books charted out the dialectical acts of creation and destruction that made up the modern world. More than that, they spun a mythology of modernity, filled with godlike abstract forces — liberalism, socialism, democracy, nationalism, imperialism, capitalism — wrestling over the fate of humanity. Hobsbawm organized his “long nineteenth century” into three distinct ages, each addressed in its own book: The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848; The Age of Capital, 1848–1875; and The Age of Empire, 1875–1914. The “age of revolution” was driven, Hobsbawm argued, by modernity’s “dual revolutions,” a French political revolution and a British industrial revolution. Hobsbawm traced their ramifications up to the failed revolutions of 1848. This was followed by the “age of capital,” a global counterrevolutionary reconstruction of political economy based on bourgeois arrogance and recklessness. After the ages of revolution and capital, Hobsbawm’s long nineteenth century then culminated with the “age of empire,” the contradictions of which brought a long century’s worth of immense social transformation and economic expansion to its inevitable collapse point: World War I. Reminiscent of Karl Polanyi’s iconoclastic classic of historical political economy, The Great Transformation, Hobsbawm’s trilogy was a textured, sweeping, and sophisticated explanation of how in the nineteenth century liberalism triumphed over its many reactionary and radical adversaries, from monarchism to Jacobinism. Hobsbawm’s Strange Century If his nineteenth century was long, its bourgeois liberal triumph was short. And the twentieth-century consequences of nineteenth-century hubris were grave. In the book he added to his original trilogy, The Age of Extremes, 1914–1991, Hobsbawm depicted the twentieth century as a tempest of revolution, total war, genocide, political illusion, economic exploitation, imperial hubris, and technological terror. Above all else, his interpretation of the “age of extremes” https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/06/eric-hobsbawm-historian-marxism-communist-party-third-reich-stalingrad 2/8 8/20/2018 Hobsbawm’s Long Century emphasized the twentieth century as the battlefield of a great contest among modern ideologies fighting for world supremacy amid the ruins of liberalism once it collapsed in the global catastrophe of the Great Depression. Published in 1994, the book accomplished the unusual feat of making the immediate past feel strange and unfamiliar. In Hobsbawm’s hands, the twentieth century centered on the world-historic role of communism, but it was not the world- historic role communism had chosen for itself. “It is one of the ironies of this strange century,” Hobsbawm concluded, “that the most lasting result of the October revolution, whose object was the global overthrow of capitalism, was to save its antagonist, both in war and in peace.” As for the wartime rescue, that can be explained in two words: Red Army. (Or if you prefer one word: Stalingrad.) As for the peacetime rescue, that counter-intuitive insight required someone with Hobsbawm’s dialectical creativity to see: twentieth-century communism saved liberal capitalism, he explained, “by providing it with the incentive, fear, to reform itself after the Second World War, and, by establishing the popularity of economic planning, furnishing it with some of the procedures for its reform.” The human emancipatory project of communism failed, yes, but twentieth-century communism (inadvertently) succeeded in saving capitalism from itself. The impact of The Age of Extremes upon its publication was immense. Translated widely and published in countries around the world, it became enough of a global phenomenon that at least one observer felt that Hobsbawm had become “undoubtedly today the historian most read in the world.” At the age of seventy-seven, Hobsbawm became more famous than ever, but it was not that the old man was fêted. Rather, he was puzzled over. Liberal intellectuals wondered how someone who knows so much could have failed to understand the one thing that mattered about the twentieth century. This puzzlement made the elderly, bespectacled, hearing-aided British scholar in comfortable shoes (though never, not once in his life, blue jeans) an unlikely rebel figure of some notoriety. Even after the Cold War was over — indeed, paradoxically, more than ever — he was “Eric the Red.” He was so perplexing because, in contrast to Hobsbawm’s panoramic historical vision, when these liberal intellectuals looked back at Hobsbawm’s short twentieth century, they had a narrow view of it. They saw only a moral test in which anticommunism, in the guise of anti-totalitarianism, dictated the answer to the only question on the test. Hobsbawm had failed. The World as It Is That is how most essays on Hobsbawm end. They end with his significance glazed in that post–Cold War moment of neoliberal triumphalism, Hobsbawm reduced to a tragic figure unfortunate enough to outlive his times and hear History’s harsh judgment. Liberal capitalism, the very subject of his great tetralogy, now stood astride the globe, triumphant and unchallenged as never before, its champions easily confident that there was no alternative: the future was to repeat the nineteenth century. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/06/eric-hobsbawm-historian-marxism-communist-party-third-reich-stalingrad 3/8 8/20/2018 Hobsbawm’s Long Century Much like the bourgeois industrial revolution that defined Hobsbawm’s long nineteenth century, the twenty-first century, it was understood, would be driven by globalized capital and the liberal norms established by the nineteenth- century bourgeoisie: the age of extremes had given way to a new age of liberal capitalism — the age of neoliberalism. There was at least a whi of end-of-history assumptions at work behind the post–Cold War liberal commentary. Furet, who had left the party after 1956, was less exuberant than many, but he nonetheless portrayed the consensus view when he concluded, “Here we are, condemned to live in the world as it is.” He wrote this in a book on twentieth-century communism’s demise, dramatically titled The Passing of an Illusion, that appeared the year after The Age of Extremes and came to serve as its intellectual counter.
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