Eric Hobsbawm obituary

Eric Hobsbawm obituary

Historian in the Marxist tradition with a global reach

Martin Kettle and Dorothy Wedderburn

The Guardian, Monday 1 October 2012

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/oct/01/eric-hobsbawm

Had Eric Hobsbawm died 25 years ago, the obituaries would have described him as Britain's most
distinguished Marxist historian and would have left it more or less there. Yet by the time of his death at the
age of 95, he had achieved a unique position in the country's intellectual life. In his later years 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.
unlike some others, Hobsbawm achieved this wider recognition without in any major way revolting against
either Marxism or Marx. In his 94th year he published How to Change the World, a vigorous defence of Marx's continuing relevance in the aftermath of the banking  collapse of 2008-10. What is more, he achieved his culminating reputation at a time when the socialist ideas and projects that animated so much of his writing for well over half a century were in historic disarray, and worse - as he himself was always unflinchingly aware.

In a profession notorious for microscopic
preoccupations, few historians have ever commanded such
a wide field in such detail or with such authority. To
the last, Hobsbawm considered himself to be essentially
a 19th-century historian, but his sense of that and
other centuries was both unprecedentedly broad and
unusually cosmopolitan.







The sheer scope of his interest in the past, and his



exceptional command of what he knew, continued to



humble many, most of all in the four-volume Age of...



series, in which he distilled the history of the



capitalist world from 1789 to 1991. "Hobsbawm's



capacity to store and retrieve detail has now reached a



scale normally approached only by large archives with



big staffs," wrote Neal Ascherson. Both in his



knowledge of historic detail and in his extraordinary



powers of synthesis, so well displayed in that



four-volume project, he was unrivalled.







Hobsbawm was born in Alexandria, a good place for a



historian of empire, in 1917, a good year for a



communist. He was second-generation British, the



grandson of a Polish Jew and cabinet-maker who came to



London in the 1870s. Eight children, who included



Leopold, Eric's father, were born in England and all



took British citizenship at birth (Hobsbawm's Uncle



Harry in due course became the first Labour mayor of



Paddington).







But Eric was British of no ordinary background. Another



uncle, Sidney, went to Egypt before the first world war



and found a job there in a shipping office for Leopold.



There, in 1914, Leopold Hobsbawm met Nelly Gruen, a



young Viennese from a middle-class family who had been



given a trip to Egypt as a prize for completing her



school studies. The two got engaged, but the first



world war broke out and they were separated. The couple



eventually married in Switzerland in 1916, returning to



Egypt for the birth of Eric, their first child.







"Every historian has his or her lifetime, a private



perch from which to survey the world," he said in his



1993 Creighton lecture, one of several occasions in his



later years when he attempted to relate his own



lifetime to his own writing. "My own perch is



constructed, among other materials, of a childhood in



the Vienna of the 1920s, the years of Hitler's rise in



Berlin, which determined my politics and my interest in



history, and the England, and especially the Cambridge,



of the 1930s, which confirmed both."







In 1919, the young family settled in Vienna, where Eric



went to elementary school, a period he later recalled



in a 1995 television documentary which featured



pictures of a recognisably skinny young Viennese



Hobsbawm in shorts and knee socks. Politics made their



impact around this time. Eric's first political memory



was in Vienna in 1927, when workers burned down the



Palace of Justice. The first political conversation



that he could recall took place in an Alpine sanatorium



in these years, too. Two motherly Jewish women were



discussing Leon Trotsky. "Say what you like," said one



to the other, "but he's a Jewish boy called Bronstein."







In 1929 his father died suddenly of a heart attack. Two



years later his mother died of TB. Eric was 14, and his



Uncle Sidney took charge once more, taking Eric and his



sister Nancy to live in Berlin. As a teenager in Weimar



Republic Berlin, Eric inescapably became politicised.



He read Marx for the first time, and became a



communist.







He could always remember the day in January 1933 when,



emerging from the Halensee S-Bahn station on his way



home from his school, the celebrated Prinz Heinrich



Gymnasium, he saw a newspaper headline announcing



Hitler's election as chancellor. Around this time he



joined the Socialist Schoolboys, which he described as



"de facto part of the communist movement" and sold its



publication, Schulkampf (School Struggle). He kept the



organisation's duplicator under his bed and, if his



later facility for writing was any guide, probably



wrote most of the articles too. The family remained in



Berlin until 1933, when Sidney Hobsbawm was posted by



his employers to England.







The gangly teenage boy who settled with his sister in



Edgware in 1934 described himself later as "completely



continental and German speaking". School, though, was



"not a problem" because the English education system



was "way behind" the German. A cousin in Balham



introduced him to jazz for the first time - the



"unanswerable sound", he called it. The moment of



conversion, he wrote some 60 years later, was when he



first heard the Duke Ellington band "at its most



imperial". He spent a period in the 1950s as jazz



critic of the New Statesman, and published a Penguin



Special, The Jazz Scene, on the subject in 1959 under



the pen-name Francis Newton (many years later it was



reissued with Hobsbawm identified as the author).







Learning to speak English properly, Eric became a pupil



at Marylebone grammar school and in 1936 he won a



scholarship to King's College, Cambridge. It was at



this time that a saying became common among his



Cambridge communist friends: "Is there anything that



Hobsbawm doesn't know?" He became a member of the



legendary Cambridge Apostles. "All of us thought that



the crisis of the 1930s was the final crisis of



capitalism," he wrote 40 years later. But, he added,



"it was not."







When the second world war broke out, Hobsbawm



volunteered, as many communists did, for intelligence



work. But his politics, which were never a secret, led



to rejection. Instead he became an improbable sapper in



560 Field Company, which he later described as "a very



working-class unit trying to build some patently



inadequate defences against invasion on the coasts of



East Anglia". This, too, was a formative experience for



the often aloof young intellectual prodigy. "There was



something sublime about them and about Britain at that



time," he wrote. "That wartime experience converted me



to the British working class. They were not very



clever, except for the Scots and Welsh, but they were



very, very good people."







Hobsbawm married his first wife, Muriel Seaman, in



1943. After the war, returning to Cambridge, he made



another choice, abandoning a planned doctorate on north



African agrarian reform in favour of research on the



Fabians. It was a move that opened the door to both a



lifetime of study of the 19th century and an equally



long-lasting preoccupation with the problems of the



left. In 1947 he got his first tenured job, as a



history lecturer at Birkbeck College, London, where he



was to remain for much of his teaching life.







With the onset of the cold war, a very British academic



McCarthyism meant that the Cambridge lectureship which



Hobsbawm always coveted never materialised. He shuttled



between Cambridge and London, one of the principal



organisers and driving forces of the Communist Party



Historians Group, a glittering radical academy which



brought together some of the most prominent historians



of the postwar era. Its members also included



Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton, AL Morton, EP



Thompson, John Saville and, later, Raphael Samuel.



Whatever else it achieved, the CP Historians Group,



about which Hobsbawm wrote an authoritative essay in



1978, certainly provided a nucleus for many of his



first steps as a major historical writer.







Hobsbawm's first book, Labour's Turning Point (1948),



an edited collection of documents from the Fabian era,



belongs firmly to this CP-dominated era, as does his



engagement in the once celebrated "standard of living"



debate about the economic consequences of the early



industrial revolution, in which he and RM Hartwell



traded arguments in successive numbers of the Economic



History Review. The foundation of the Past and Present



journal - now the most lasting, if fully independent,



legacy of the Historians Group - also belongs to this



period.







Hobsbawm was never to leave the Communist party and



always thought of himself as part of an international



communist movement. For many, this remained the



insuperable obstacle to an embrace of his writing. Yet



he always remained very much a licensed free-thinker



within the party's ranks. Over Hungary in 1956, an



event which split the CP and drove many intellectuals



out of the party, he was a voice of protest who



nevertheless remained.







Yet, as with his contemporary, Christopher Hill, who



left the CP at this time, the political trauma of 1956



and the start of a lastingly happy second marriage



combined in some way to trigger a sustained and



fruitful period of historical writing that was to



establish fame and reputation. In 1959 he published his



first major work, Primitive Rebels, a strikingly



original account, particularly for those times, of



southern European rural secret societies and



millenarian cultures (he was still writing about the



subject as recently as 2011). He returned to these



themes again a decade later in Captain Swing, a



detailed study of rural protest in early 19th-century



England co-authored with George Rude, and Bandits, a



more wide-ranging attempt at synthesis. These works are



reminders that Hobsbawm was both a bridge between



European and British historiography and a forerunner of



the notable rise of the study of social history in



post-1968 Britain.







By this time, though, Hobsbawm had already published



the first of the works on which both his popular and



academic reputations still rest. A collection of some



of his most important essays, Labouring Men, appeared



in 1964 (a second collection, Worlds of Labour, was to



follow 20 years later). But it was Industry and Empire



(1968), a compelling summation of much of his work on



Britain and the industrial revolution, that achieved



the highest esteem. It has rarely been out of print.







Even more influential in the long term was the Age of...



series, which he began in 1962 with The Age of



Revolution: 1789-1848. This was followed in 1975 by The



Age of Capital: 1848-1875 and in 1987 by The Age of



Empire: 1875-1914. A fourth volume, The Age of



Extremes: 1914-91, more quirky and speculative but in



some respects the most remarkable and admirable of all,



extended the sequence in 1994.







The four volumes embodied all of Hobsbawm's best



qualities - the sweep combined with the telling



anecdote and statistical grasp, the attention to the



nuance and significance of events and words, and above



all, perhaps, the unrivalled powers of synthesis



(nowhere better displayed than in a classic summary of



mid-19th century capitalism on the very first page of



the second volume). The books were not conceived as a



tetralogy, but as they appeared, they acquired



individual and cumulative classic status. They were an



example, Hobsbawm wrote, of "what the French call



'haute vulgarisation'" (he did not mean this



self-deprecatingly), and they became, in the words of



one reviewer, "part of the mental furniture of educated



Englishmen".







Hobsbawm's first marriage had collapsed in 1951. During



the 1950s, he had another relationship which resulted



in the birth of his first son, Joss Bennathan, but the



boy's mother did not want to marry. In 1962 he married



again, this time to Marlene Schwarz, of Austrian



descent. They moved to Hampstead and bought a small



second home in Wales. They had two children, Andrew and



Julia.







In the 1970s, Hobsbawm's widening fame as a historian



was accompanied by a growing reputation as a writer



about his own times. Though he had a historian's



respect for the Communist party's centralist



discipline, his intellectual eminence gave him an



independence that won the respect of communism's



toughest critics, such as Isaiah Berlin. It also



ensured him the considerable accolade that not one of



his books was ever published in the Soviet Union. Thus



armed and protected, he ranged fearlessly across the



condition of the left, mostly in the pages of the CP's



monthly, Marxism Today, the increasingly heterodox



publication of which he became the house deity.







His conversations with the Italian communist - and now



state president - Giorgio Napolitano date from these



years, and were published as The Italian Road to



Socialism. But his most influential political work



centred on his increasing certainty that the European



labour movement had ceased to be capable of bearing the



transformational role assigned to it by earlier



Marxists. These uncompromisingly revisionist articles



were collected under the general heading The Forward



March of Labour Halted.







By 1983, when Neil Kinnock became the leader of the



Labour party at the depth of its electoral fortunes,



Hobsbawm's influence had begun to extend far beyond the



CP and deep into Labour itself. Kinnock publicly



acknowledged his debt to Hobsbawm and allowed himself



to be interviewed by the man he described as as "my



favourite Marxist". Though he strongly disapproved of



much of what later took shape as "New Labour", which he



saw, among other things, as historically cowardly, he



was without question the single most influential



intellectual forerunner of Labour's increasingly



iconoclastic 1990s revisionism.







His status was underlined in 1998, when Tony Blair made



him a Companion of Honour, a few months after Hobsbawm



celebrated his 80th birthday. In its citation, Downing



Street said Hobsbawm continued to publish works that



"address problems in history and politics that have



re-emerged to disturb the complacency of Europe".







In his later years, Hobsbawm enjoyed widespread



reputation and respect. His 80th and 90th birthday



celebrations were attended by a Who's Who of leftwing



and liberal intellectual Britain. Throughout the late



years, he continued to publish volumes of essays,



including On History (1997) and Uncommon People (1998),



works in which Dizzy Gillespie and Salvatore Giuliano



sat naturally side by side in the index as testimony to



the range of Hobsbawm's abiding curiosity. A highly



successful autobiography, Interesting Times, followed



in 2002, and Globalisation, Democracy and Terrorism in



2007.







More famous in his extreme old age than probably at any



other period of his life, he broadcast regularly,



lectured widely and was a regular performer at the Hay



literary festival, of which he became president at the



age of 93, following the death of Lord Bingham of



Cornhill. A fall in late 2010 severely reduced his



mobility, but his intellect and willpower remained



unvanquished, as did his social and cultural life,



thanks to Marlene's efforts, love - and cooking.

That his writings continued to command such audiences at a time when his politics were in some ways so
eclipsed was the kind of disjunction which exasperated



rightwingers, but it was a paradox on which the subtle judgment of this least complacent of intellects feasted. In his later years, he liked to quote EM Forster that he was "always standing at a slight angle to the universe". Whether the remark says more about

Hobsbawm or about the universe was something that he enjoyed disputing, confident in the knowledge that it was in some senses a lesson for them both.

He is survived by Marlene and his three children, seven grandchildren and one great-grandchild. Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm, historian, born 9 June 1917; died 1 October 2012

* Dorothy Wedderburn died on 20 September 2012
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