Eric
Hobsbawn, the son of a Jewish tradesman,
was born in Alexandria, Egypt, on 9th June,
1917. After the First World War ended his parents
moved to Austria. By the time he was thirteen,
both his parents had died. He went to live with his aunt in Berlin.
When
Adolf Hitler gained power in 1933, what
was left of Hobsbawn's family moved to London.
He studied history at King's College,
Cambridge, and while a student joined
the Communist Party. He also edited the
student weekly, Granta.
On
the outbreak of the Second World War Hobsbawn
joined the British
Army.
Despite speaking German, French, Spanish and Italian fluently he was
turned down for intelligence work. He served with the Royal Engineers
and later with the Educational Corps.
After
the war Hobsbawn returned to Cambridge University
where he completed a PhD on the Fabian Society.
In 1947 he became a lecturer at Birkbeck College.
After
the war Hobsbawn joined E.
P. Thompson,
Christopher
Hill,
Rodney Hilton, Raphael
Samuel, George Rudé, John Saville,
Dorothy Thompson, Edmund Dell, Victor Kiernan and Maurice Dobb in
forming the Communist Party Historians' Group. In 1947 Hill published
Lenin and the Russian Revolution.
Two years later Hill and Edmund Dell published the path-breaking collection
of documents on the English
Civil War,
The Good Old Cause (1949).
In
1952 members of the Communist Party Historians' Group founded the
journal, Past and Present. Over
the next few years the journal pioneered the study of working-class
history.
Hobsbawn's
first book, Primitive Rebels,
was published in 1959. This was followed by The
Age of Revolution (1962), Labouring
Men (1964), Industry and Empire
(1968), Bandits (1969). In 1969
Hobsbawn co-wrote Captain Swing
with George Rudé.
Hobsbawn,
unlike most of his friends, remained a member of the Communist
Party. However, he did protest against the Soviet invasion of
Hungary
in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. In
1970 he became professor of history at Birkbeck College, a post he
held for twelve years.
Other
books by Hobsbawn include Revolutionaries
(1973), The Age of Capital (1975),
History of Marxism (1978), Workers
(1984), The Age of Empire (1987),
Nations and Nationalism
(1990), The Age of Extremes (1994),
On History (1997), Uncommon
People (1998), The New Century
(1999) and Interesting Times (2002).
(1)
Eric Hobsbawn, Industry and Empire (1968)
The Industrial Revolution marks the most fundamental transformation
of human life in the history of the world recorded in written documents.
For a brief period it coincided with the history of a single country,
Great Britain. An entire world economy was thus built on, or rather
around, Britain, and this country therefore temporarily rose to a
position of global influence and power unparalleled by any state of
its relative size before or since, and unlikely to be paralleled by
any state in the foreseeable future. There was a moment in the world's
history when Britain can be described, if we are not too pedantic,
as its only workshop, its only massive importer and exporter, its
only carrier, its only imperialist, almost its only foreign investor;
and for that reason its only naval power and the only one which had
a genuine world policy. Much of this monopoly was simply due to the
loneliness of the pioneer, monarch of all he surveys because of the
absence of any other surveyors. When other countries industrialized,
it ended automatically, though the apparatus of world economic transfers
constructed by, and in terms of, Britain remained indispensable to
the rest of the world for a while longer. Nevertheless, for most of
the world the 'British' era of industrialization was merely a phase
- the initial, or an early phase of contemporary history. For Britain
it was obviously much more than this. We have been profoundly marked
by the experience of our economic and
social pioneering and remain marked by it to this day.
(2)
Eric Hobsbawn, interviewed in 2002.
In Germany there wasn't any alternative left. Liberalism was
failing. If I'd been German and not a Jew, I could see I might have
become a Nazi, a German nationalist. I could see how they'd become
passionate about saving the nation. It was a time when you didn't
believe there was a future unless the world was fundamentally transformed.
(3)
Eric Hobsbawn was interviewed by Tristram Hunt in The
Observer in September, 2002.
Tristram Hunt: Martin Amis's new book, Koba The Dread,
has impugned the British Left - and you personally - for not condemning
Stalin's atrocities. In your autobiography you vividly bring out the
mindset of a believing Communist in the 1940s and 1950s: the party
discipline and a reluctance 'to believe the few who told us what they
knew' of Soviet Russia. Yet you also bring out the historical context
for joining the Communist Party - the battle against fascism on the
streets of 1930s Berlin and a strong sense of the idealism of the
October Revolution. There also remains the broader historical context
that the Soviet Union remained a viable economic and political model
to many in the West right up to the 1970s. Do you think this historical
context seems absent in the current debate about 'Communist guilt'?
Eric Hobsbawn: I must leave
the discussion of Amis's views on Stalin to others. I wasn't a Stalinist.
I criticised Stalin and I cannot conceive how what I've written can
be regarded as a defence of Stalin. But as someone who was a loyal
Party member for two decades before 1956 and therefore silent about
a number of things about which it's reasonable not to be silent -
things I knew or suspected in the USSR - I don't want to be critical
of a book which brings out some of the horrors of Stalin. It isn't
an original or important book. It brings nothing that we haven't known
except perhaps about his personal relations with his father. But I
don't want to say anything that might suggest to people that I'm in
some ways trying to defend the record of something which is indefensible.
Tristram
Hunt: Amis has criticised
those on the Left who deny any moral equivalence between Nazism and
Communism because the latter committed atrocities in the cause of
a higher social ideal as opposed to racial genocide. The majority
of deaths in the Soviet Union came not from political or racial persecution
but famine caused by economic policies. As you have written of Stalin:
'His terrifying career makes no sense except as a stubborn, unbroken
pursuit of that utopian aim of a communist society.' I want to tease
out this issue of idealism. You stayed in the party after 1956 partly
because of solidarity to the fallen and partly because of a belief
in a societal ideal. Are you still drawn to an Enlightenment ideal
of societal perfectibility or have you come to accept the limits of
the human condition - what your friend Isaiah Berlin called, 'the
crooked timber of humanity'?
Eric Hobsbawn: Why I stayed
in the Communist Party is not a political question about communism,
it's a one-off biographical question. It wasn't out of idealisation
of the October Revolution. I'm not an idealiser. One should not delude
oneself about the people or things one cares most about in one's life.
Communism is one of these things and I've done my best not to delude
myself about it even though I was loyal to it and to its memory. The
phenomenon of communism and the passion it aroused is specific to
the twentieth century. It was a combination of the great hopes which
were brought with progress and the belief in human improvement during
the nineteenth century along with the discovery that the bourgeois
society in which we live (however great and successful) did not work
and at certain stages looked as though it was on the verge of collapse.
And it did collapse and generated awful nightmares.
Tristram
Hunt: What struck
me in your autobiography was that despite your lifelong Communist
Party membership, you were deeply hostile to Militant Tendency attempts
to take over the Labour Party during the 1980s. Indeed, to the fury
of your comrades you became a committed supporter of Neil Kinnock's
modernisation of the party - describing the 1992 general election
night as the 'saddest and most desperate in my political experience'.
Yet you have spoken out against Tony Blair, branding him 'Thatcher
in trousers'. Surely New Labour was the inevitable conclusion of Kinnock's
modernisation process?
Eric Hobsbawn: Most communists
and indeed most socialists disagreed at the time (1980s) with the
few of us who said it's absolutely no use, the Labour Party has got
to go in a different direction. On the other hand, what we thought
of was a reformed Labour Party not a simple rejection of everything
that Labour had stood for. Obviously, any Labour Government, however
watered down, is better than the right-wing alternative as the USA
demonstrates. But I'm not absolutely certain that Labour Prime Ministers
who glory in trying to be warlords - subordinate warlords particularly
- are a thing that I can stick and it certainly sticks in my gullet.
(4)
Maya Jaggi interviewed Eric Hobsbawn in the The
Guardian in September, 2002.
"I've never tried to diminish the appalling things that
happened in Russia, though the sheer extent of the massacres we didn't
realise," says Hobsbawn. "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."
He says of Stalin's Russia:
"These sacrifices were excessive; this should not have happened.
In retrospect the project was doomed to failure, though it took a
long time to realise this." Yet he appears to argue that some
goals are worth any sacrifice. "I lived through the first world
war, when 10 million-to 20 million people were killed. At the time,
the British, French and Germans believed it was necessary. We disagree.
In the second world war, 50 million died. Was the sacrifice worthwhile?
I frankly cannot face the idea that it was not. I can't say it would
have been better if the world was run by Adolph Hitler."
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