The Centenary of the Birth of a Great Historian

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

 

This year being the centenary of his birth, many articles are appearing about one of the 20^th century’s most eminent historians, Eric Hobsbawm.

The accolades are coming particularly from the left, as Hobsbawm was a lifelong member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and chair of its Historians’ Group.

Unlike many of his intellectual colleagues and comrades, including Christopher Hill, John Saville, and E.P. Thompson, Hobsbawm did not quit the party even after the crimes committed in the name of Communism by Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union were exposed in 1956.

The Historians’ Group also vociferously protested against Moscow's suppression of the Hungarian revolt that year, but Hobsbawm remained a member of the party, to the puzzlement of many of his British friends.

Perhaps his life history provides an answer. First and foremost was the fact that he was a Jew who came of age in the 1930s, when fascism and Nazism were spreading across Europe, spewing vitriolic racial anti-Semitism in their wake.

In his autobiography, Interesting Times: A Twentieth Century Life, published in 2002, Hobsbawm attributed much of his intellectual development to his unusual life. 

He was born in 1917, to Jewish parents -- a father from the East End of London, and an Austrian mother. After the First World War ended, they settled in Vienna. Before coming to England, Hobsbawm lived briefly in Berlin, appalled by the rise of Adolf Hitler.

He took part in the last legal demonstration of the Communist Party of Germany, days before Hitler became chancellor.

It seemed to him that the Communists were the only ones willing to stop the Nazis. He later explained that he had become a Communist not as a Briton, but as a central European fighting fascism.

“I didn’t want to break with the tradition that was my life,” he remarked in an interview that appeared in the New York Times on Aug. 23, 2003. “I still think it was a great cause, the emancipation of humanity.”

Hobsbawm left behind a prodigious body of work, but is probably best remembered for his three-volume history of what he called the “long nineteenth century”: The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848; The Age of Capital, 1848–1875; and The Age of Empire, 1875–1914. 

He later added to his original trilogy The Age of Extremes, 1914–1991, on the “short” twentieth century. They remain among the standard historical works for the period.

A year before his death Hobsbawm published How to Change the World: Tales of Marx and Marxism, a defence of Karl Marx’s continuing relevance in the aftermath of the 2008 recession. 

I met Hobsbawm in 1994, at a conference on the history of British Communism, held at the University of Manchester. My paper, “Sidestepping the Contradictions: The Communist Party, Jewish Communists and Zionism 1935-48,” was on the same panel as one of his.

In the book of the conference proceedings published later that year by Pluto Press, Hobsbawm wrote that my paper, demonstrating the “disproportionately great” role of Communism among British Jews, “can throw light on the history of the lesser components of the multi-ethnic nation-state of Great Britain.” I must say that I was flattered.

When Hobsbawm died in 2012, at the age of 95, an appreciation of his life appeared in the Oct. 1 edition of the Guardian, the left-liberal London newspaper.

“In his later years,” observed columnist Martin Kettle and University of London sociologist Dorothy Wedderburn, “he became arguably Britain's most respected historian of any kind, recognised if not endorsed on the right as well as the left, and one of a tiny handful of historians of any era to enjoy genuine national and world renown.”

Are the ideals he espoused dead? Not according to Joseph Fronczak, a Princeton University historian, in an on-line June 9 article published in the Jacobin, the left-wing quarterly published in New York. 

“Hobsbawm’s vision of humanity-encompassing Enlightenment ideals expressed politically in the form of socialism, seemingly dead at his short century’s end in 1991, now in 2017 suddenly appears once more in surprisingly sturdy shape,” he asserts, “fortified for what looks to be another long century.”