ERIC J HOBSBAWM (1917-2012)
The Brilliance Brilliance and Dogmatism of Hobsbawm Ramachandra Guha
Eric Hobsbawm was a pioneer in introducing new methods and perspectives in the historian’s historian’s craft craf t and breaking the bounds of the discipline. His intellectual contributions to our understanding of the world, even in contexts far removed from what he studied and wrote about, are exceptional. However, his academic brilliance was scarred by his h is unquestioning unquestioning loyalty to the Communist Party of Great Britain, which made him compromise academically when writing on the history history of of the 20th century. Yet, despite this flaw, his intellectual achievements are staggering.
A
rthur Koestler once remarked that he would gladly exchange a 100 readers today for 10 readers in 10 years time, and for one reader i n a 100 years time. Most serious writers would endorse this th is sentiment. Newspaper columnists and writers of pulp fiction write for the moment, but literary novelists and scholars seek to write for posterity, or at least for the next generation. But while the hope (or conceit) is ubiquitous, few novelists successful in their own day are read 20 years hence, and even fewer scholars. Who now reads Talcott Parsons, once (in the 1950s and 1960s) the most prominent sociologist in America and the world? And who now remembers Mikhail Sholokhov, the most famous socialist novelist of his time, a winner of the Nobel Prize in literature? Koestler’s aphorism comes to mind when conside considering ring the career of of his fellow fellow European Jew, fellow British citizen, and fellow polyglot Eric Hobsbawm. Hobs bawm. Hobsbawm, who died in the first week of October, lived a long and very productive life. Born in Alexandria in 1917, he studied at King’s College, Cambridge, served in the second world war, and after that conflict had ended, joined the faculty of Birkbeck College in London. For the next 60 years he was a stalwart of British intellectual life, while also profoundly influencing scholars and scholarship across the world.
Varied Intellectua l Production
This is an expanded version of an essay published in Prospect in Prospect,, October 2003. Ramachandra Guha (
[email protected] (
[email protected])) is sociologist and historian based in Bangalore.
The books by Hobsbawm best known to the general genera l (or non-academic) non-academic) reading public were Age of Extremes Ext remes and Interesting Times. The first book is a history of what he called the “short “short twentieth century” – from the onset of the first world war in 1914 1914 to the final collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The second book covered the same period, but in more personal terms, with wars and states and technological innovations viewed from the vantage point, and individual experience, of a boy growing up in Vienna and Berlin before settling down in England, from where, as an established and ever more influential academic, he travelled across Europe and North America and occasionally to other continents too. The majestic 19th century trilogy and the two, very differently cast, 20th century histories are abundantly available in book stores. Yet the works by Hobsbawm that had the most enduring intellectual impact, and are most admired by scholars, live on now only in libraries. These are his studies of the struggles of workers, craftsmen and peasants in early industrial Europe – books Primitive ive Rebel Rebelss (1959), Labouri Labouring ng such as Primit Men (1964), Captain Swing (1969 – written Bandits (1973). with with George George Rudé) Rudé) and Bandits These books demonstrated demonstrated that Marxists too could write with real flair and feeling, sensitively probing the emotions, ambitions, failings and hopes of ordinary indi vidual vidualss seeking seeking to challeng challengee structur structures es of power and authority. In these books Hobsbawm helped invent what is calle called d “hist “history ory from from below below”. ”. To To be sure, the invention was not his alone – his fellow British Marxists George Rudé and E P Thompson could claim an equal share of credit. Rudé had come to the subject even before Hobsbawm (through his studies of the crowd in the French Revolution), while while Thompso Thompson n (the autho authorr of The Making of the English Working Class and Whigs and Hunters, among other works) was a finer stylist, bringing a passion and grace to his prose that was in part (but only in part) due to the fact that English was his first (and more or less his only) language.
Hobsbawm’s works fell broadly into three categories. The books most widely w idely prescribed in college courses were his broad-brush histories of the 19th century: The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital and The Age of Empire. These were macro histories, covering a wide Pioneer, A Vanguard Vanguard Too spatial scale, written within a classically A Pioneer, Marxist framework, strong on econom- In 1980, as a beginning beginni ng graduate student, ics and technology with some (if not I was directed by my thesis supervisor to
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that had just appeared in the journal Past and Present. This was a response to a previous essay in the same journal, by Lawrence Stone, that celebrated the “return of narrative” to historical writing, this, in Stone’s view, a welcome departure from the arid, analytical, social-scientific and (not least) Marxisant trends that had previously dominated the discipline. Hobsbawm saw Stone’s triumphalism as misplaced; to be sure, historians needed to write well, but they had also to analyse and synthesise, to explain events and processes in terms of what they meant to human values and institutions. As a sociologist try ing to w rite history, I was encouraged, and inspired, by Hobsbawm having so successfully transgressed disciplinary boundaries, working from the other side of the divide. And since my own research was on peasant protest, I read works like Primitive Rebels and Captain Swing with more than ordinary attention. Meanwhile, there had emerged a vibrant Indian tradition of social history, embodied in Subaltern Studies, whose first volume was published in 1982, with Ranajit Guha’s Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgenc y in Colonial India appearing a year later. In Elementar y Aspect s, Ranajit Guha took issue with Hobsbawm’s Leninist vanguardism. The author of Primitive Rebels had said of the peasants, artisans, and workers he was writing about that these were “pre-political people [who] have not yet found, or only begun to find, a specific language in which to express their aspirations about the world”. Likewise, the introduction to Captain Swing described the agricultural workers’ uprising of 1830 as “improvised, archaic, [and] spontaneous”, whose “great tragedy was that it never succeeded in linking up with the rebellion of mine, mill and city”. Ranajit Guha saw this approach as condescending: invoking Gramsci, he noted that there was no room for pure spontaneity in history. Acts dismissed by modern, universityeducated scholars as “pre-political” in fact contained an immanent critique of the political and economic orders they were aimed at. Rather than judge these
political preferences, the historian should use his sources to reconstruct the rebel’s worldview and sympathetically assess it on its own terms.
Cross-Disciplinary Influence The critique was not unmerited; even so, it can be argued that without Hobsbawm’s (and Rudé’s) books there would have been no Subaltern Studies at all. Those white British males showed the way, pioneering research into non-traditional sources and drawing on disciplines other than history in understanding the social conflicts and social movements of the past. Hobsbawm himself had a dazzlingly wide range of interests. T he Preface to the first edition of Primitive Rebels observes that the author’s curiosity in this (thus far neglected) subject had been sparked by an Italian historian. The book grew out of lectures given at Manchester University at the invitation of the great anthropologist Max Gluckman, an exile from his native South Africa. Hobsbawm wrote that he “was fortunate enough on that occasion to be able to discuss the subject with him [Gluckman] and with a group of anthropologists, historians, economists and political scientist s”. The intellectual debts signalled, the Preface to Primitive Rebels went on to say that a subject such as this cannot be studied from documents alone. Some personal contact, however slight, with the people and even the places about which the historian writes, is essential if he is to understand problems which are exceed ingly remote from the normal li fe of the British university teacher.
Hobsbawm thanked, among others, the mayor and deputy mayor of a town in Sicily, a cobbler, a peasant, a veterinary surgeon and an organiser of women, whom he had spoken with while writing Primitive Rebels. Then he added: None of them are responsible for the v iews expressed in this book, and it is perhaps comforting that some of them will not care one way or another, because they will never read it.
In his willingness to learn from other scholarly disciplines, his ability to use sources in several languages, his reallife contacts with the kinds of people he was writing about – in all these respects Eric Hobsbawm was exceptional. I never
company throughout my working life. His books, written about other continents and other centuries, provided stimulating and provocative points of departure for my own researches into the history of 20th century India. I suspect my experience is representative – other Indian and African and Latin American historians who never saw the man in the flesh likewise read his work very closely indeed. Growing up, intellectually speaking, in the 1980s, I read E P Thompson with as much attention (and marginally greater admiration) than I did Eric Hobsbawm. History, as much as historians, will remember them together as unquestionably the greatest British practitioners of a scholarly craft that no other nation (not even France) has treated with such respect and even deference. From Gibbon and Macaulay through Trevelyan and A J P Taylor on to Niall Ferguson and Simon Schama, historians have been public figures in Britain. In the 19th and 20th centuries, they often outsold popular novelists while being quoted respectfully in Parliament and being granted peerages and Masterships of Oxbridge Colleges. In the 21st century, they have done all this, and anchored television series and (thus?) had their personal lives discussed in the tabloid press too. There were, and are, British historians who were, and are, more famous and powerful within Britain than Eric Hobsbawm and E P Thompson. But in global terms their influence massively outranks that of their predecessors, peers or successors. This may be because they knew that history was both a social science and a branch of literature. Hobsbawm talked a great deal to (and learnt much from) economists and political scientists. Thompson had productive friendships with anthropologists, sociologists, and literary scholars. As a consequence, their histories were rigorously researched, brimming with primary materials gathered in the archives, but also analytically robust, reaching be yond the how and when to the why and to what purpose. Hobsbawm and Thompson were also internationalists. A European by birth, Hobsbawm had travelled extensively in
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for many years in India, while his Ameri- Union. In his book Ages of Extremes, can mother grew up in the Middle East. written immediately after the fall of the Later, his involvement with the peace Berlin Wall, Hobsbawm is curiously demovement brought him in close touch fensive and apologetic about the side – with other parts of Europe. In either case, his side – that lost the cold war. Writing personal biography reinforced a capacious of inter-war Soviet economic policy, of intellectual vision, producing histories the forced seizures of land, the industrithat were more analytically broad-minded alisation from above, the suppression of than was (and often still is) the norm. creativity and innovation, not least the millions of deaths through persecution The Costs of Dogmatism and starvation, he explains these away In a pure, technical sense, Hobsbawm on the grounds that there was no other may have been the more skilled historian. option for a “backward and primitive He knew more languages, and he had a country, isolated from foreign help”. He surer grasp of technology and economics. goes on to claim that But Thompson was the more evocative the transformation of a largely illiterate country into the modern USSR was, by any writer, and, in political (and dare I say standards, a towering achievement. And for moral) terms, the more courageous man. millions f rom the villages whom, even in the When the Soviets invaded Hungary in harshest times, Soviet development meant 1956, Thompson left the Communist Party, the opening of new horizons, the escape but Hobsbawm stayed, a loyal party from darkness and ignorance to the city, light and progress, not to mention personal man till the end. advancement and careers, the case for the The costs of this political obstinacy new society was entirely convincing. were not insubstantial. His orthodox Marxism did not allow him to engage If the case was indeed so convincing, with exciting intellectual trends such as why was it not tested ever in a free a nd environmental history. When, in the late fair election? Hobsbawm’s analysis also 1980s, Past and Present began publish- glosses over the millions of ordinary ing essays on the history of forests and Russians who perished in camps darker wildlife, he grumbled to a mutual friend, and more brutal than any run by the the Catalan polymath Joan Martinez Tsar. The persecution of writers and sci Alier, that the radicalism of a journal he entists is ignored. Altogether, this analyhad helped found was being diverted sis of Soviet history rests on a crude and diluted by mere fashion. (At that utilitarian calculus, with the historian time, orthodox Marxists were prone to playing the part of a political partisan. see environmentalism as a bourgeois de- As a lifelong member of the Communist viation from the class struggle.) Party of Great Britain, Hobsbawm de A more substantial cost of this dog- fends the mother of all communist parmatism was manifest in his own later ties by arguing that it could not make its writings. Here, he never squarely omelette of steel mills, collective farms, confronted the violence and brutalities etc, without breaking eggs. of Soviet and Chinese communism. His The foreign policy of the Soviet Union books on the 20th century skate over is likewise interpreted in the Age of Exthe Nazi-Soviet Pact and the horrors of tremes in partisan terms. When speaking collectivisation while providing the of the invasions of Hungary, Czechoslovareader with the pathetic consolation kia and Afghanistan, Hobsbawm suggests that, in any case, fascism was worse (a) that these were inevitable in the condithan communism. tions of the cold war, (b) that the regimes Hobsbawm’s friends, in appreciations imposed by the Soviets were somewhat printed the day after he died, boasted representative of the popular will. On that his own works were never pub- the other hand, the anti-communist lished in the Soviet Union. This seems to campaigns of the US are said to have be a rather weak defence. The question, been marked by “barbarity ”, while states surely, is not what the Soviets thought of threatened by them (such as Vietnam) him, but what he thought of the policies are characterised as “embattled”; both
softer, more apologetic, terms when discussing the expansionism and recourse to aggression of his own side. In the early 1930s, after the onset of the Great Depression and the rise of Hitler, many intellectuals saw the Soviet Union as the last, best hope of mankind. By the end of that decade, however, evidence of the famines and the purges was beginning to accumulate. The more sensitive and far-sighted writers now realised that the road to the promised Socialist Utopia was littered with corpses. Others refused to abandon their hopes, not least because of the imperialist tendencies of the capitalist countries. When the Soviets played a leading role in the defeat of the Nazis these fellow travellers were confirmed in their beliefs. Then came 1956 – a year which witnessed both the invasion of Hungary and the revelations of the crimes of Stalin in the 20th Congress of the CPSU.
Vitiated Scholarship It is hard to understand, or to make excuses for, gifted intellectuals living outside the Soviet Union, who yet chose to remain loyal to the Soviet regime after 1956. In Hobsbawm’s case, this loyalty seriously vitiated his later historical scholarship. When he wrote about the 19th century his ideological affiliations did not matter, but the closer he came to his own time his interpretations were distorted by his membership of the Communist Party of Great Britain, itself a dependent satellite of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. One must not, of course, be too harsh and judgmental about the political choices and preferences of other scholars. In t he case of Hobsbawm, however, we do have a basis for comparison. Historians such as E P Thompson and Ranajit Guha, likewise attracted in their youth by the romance and promise of communism, left the communist party in 1956. They were (morally and intellectually) liberated as a result. The week Hobsbawm died, I was in London, where I was struck by the striking variations in the notices in the British press. The left-wing press stressed the scholarship while glossing over the poli-
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reverse. The fact is that Eric Hobsbawm was both a very great historian and a political dogmatist. His intellectual achievements were staggering. His books on the
19th century, and his precocious studies of popular protest, shall continue to be read, and reread, in countries far dista nt from his own. But his later works
illustrate that still valid and still widely dishonoured dictum of George Orwell: No writer must be a loyal member of a political party.
