Keith Thomas ON HISTORY by Eric Hobsbawm (Abacus)
Eric Hobsbawm turned 80 last year. He is probably the best-known living British historian, certainly the one whose work has been translated into the most languages. He brings to his historical writing some outstanding gifts: a probing intelligence, exceptional analytic power, great linguistic facility and an extremely wide range of knowledge.
Born in Alexandria, brought up in Vienna and Berlin, and educated at Cambridge in the late 1930s, he is a cosmopolitan of broad culture and, that relatively unusual thing among British historians, an intellectual.
Thus equipped, Hobsbawm has illuminated an astonishing range of topics and themes. He is not a delver in the archives, and his books are feats of synthesis and analysis, rather than works of primary research. But he has a rare capacity to devise or disseminate new concepts which leave an enduring mark: “social banditry”, for example, or “the invention of tradition”. Professional historians admire him for his magisterial essays on labour history and for his penetrating studies of social and political topics: Primitive Rebels, Bandits, Revolutionaries, and Nations and Nationalism.
But he is perhaps most widely known for his four volumes on the history of European capitalism from the late 18th to the 20th century: The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital, The Age of Empire and Age of Extremes. Every page of this absorbing series reveals its author to be himself a supreme exemplar of that bourgeois culture which he so memorably dissects.
All his books are written with laconic elegance, in a cool, ironic, dispassionate tone. They are broad in their comparative perspective and incisively argued. In an age of narrow specialists, Hobsbawm remains the supreme generalist.
There are those who regret his relentless concentration on large impersonal forces and his somewhat schematic view of the past. But for sheer intelligence, he has no superior in the historical profession: no great praise perhaps, for, as he remarks in one of his essays, history has not, over the past century or two, been a discipline which has required great intellectual powers.
His latest collection, now out in accessible paperback, is a mixture of reprinted pieces and previously unpublished addresses. There are three main themes: the use and abuse of history; modern trends in historical writing; and the author’s views on what history ought to be about.
The Hobsbawm who emerges from these essays is above all a man of the Enlightenment, a believer in the capacity of human reason and a searcher for the laws of social evolution which will help us to understand and ameliorate the condition of mankind. He has no sympathy with post-modernist attempts to obliterate the distinction between fact and fiction. He accepts that a totally “objective” view of the past is unobtainable, for every historian sees it from a distinctive perspective. But facts cannot be invented and statements about history must rest on verifiable evidence.
Unfortunately, most history has been written for ideological purposes: to buttress the authority of rulers or to provide a convenient myth for nationalism and other social movements. As Ernest Renan said, “Getting history wrong is an essential factor in the formation of a nation. The historian’s duty is to deconstruct these myths by stripping aside the fabrications and anachronisms; and it is in the modern university that such a critical history can be most easily practised.”
These are unexceptionable propositions, of a kind which a more conservative historian like the late Sir Geoffrey Elton would have warmly endorsed. What distinguishes Hobsbawm from most of his contemporaries is his apparently continuing belief that the best guide to history remains the materialism of Karl Marx.
For Hobsbawm, the attraction of Marxism is that it provides a model of long-term historical transformations and a convincing answer to what he calls “the central question of how things fit together”. It also sets limits to the scope of human action. Hobsbawm in no way rules out human culture, individuality and purposive behaviour. But with Marx he is adamant that the prevailing mode of production constricts human possibilities.
The collapse of the Soviet Union is often said to have discredited the Marxist interpretation of history. This is unfair, for the Soviet catastrophe was largely irrelevant to a theory which, for all its defects, has proved an important stimulus to historical thought. What the events of 1989-91 did discredit was Soviet communism.
Hobsbawm’s works were never regarded as orthodox enough to be translated into Russian during the Soviet period. But he admits to having devoted most of his life to a “cause which has plainly failed: the communism initiated by the October Revolution”; and his sympathy for the Soviet experiment, despite its horrors, remains unconcealed. In one of his essays he vigorously defends partisanship as an incentive to historical understanding; and in a passage of remarkable magnanimity, he expresses the hope that the experience of defeat will make him a better historian.
Sceptics who think of Eric Hobsbawm as a brilliant man regrettably trapped in a Marxist time-warp should read this absorbing collection of essays. They will be amazed by its freshness. The book is of great interest for the light it throws on one of the most powerful minds of our time. It should be read by anyone who cares how history should be written and why it matters.