Thinking Historically: The Legacy of Eric Hobsbawm
At Eric Hobsbawm’s passing, we must pause and reflect on his legacy as perhaps one of the most widely read and admired Marxist historians in the world, writes Janaki Nair
Janaki Nair 6th Oct 2012
British historian Eric Hobsbawm, who passed away this week.
ust last week, while completing some lectures focused on the British Marxist Historians for a course on Historical Method, I reminded my students that E.J. Hobsbawm was among the pioneers who was still alive. Hobsbawm, perhaps, but the work of British Marxist Historians? Hobsbawm's name brought a flicker of recognition and appreciation to some faces, but by and large, I sensed that my passionate conviction about their importance was tolerated, but not quite understood, and even less, considered relevant. I felt like an intellectual Rip Van Winkle, taking the British Marxists out for an airing, or worse, providing them artificial resuscitation in a vastly altered milieu when they were unequal to the pressures and demands of contemporary India. But are they so irrelevant?
"From disaster, springs opportunity": nothing illustrates this somewhat hackneyed phrase as well as the rise and rise of British Marxist historiography following the ruined hopes of World War I and the rise of Fascism. In reach and influence, worldwide, the intellectuals of both the Red Science movement at Cambridge and the British Marxist Historians' Group (BMHG), of which Dona Torr (sadly, forgotten, both by name and contribution) and Eric Hobsbawm were equal founding members, was out of all proportion to the numbers of people involved. Further, if the Cold War crippled the Red Science movement, following the expose of Lysenkoism, it acted as a spur to historical writing, beginning with the work of Maurice Dobb, continuing in the work of Rodney Hilton, and coming to flower fully in the prodigious output of Christopher Hill, E.P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm.
Closely linked to the CPGB, until 1956 for most, and even after for Hobsbawm (leading him to be seen as something of a Stalinist), the British Marxists were distinctly uncomfortable with the idea of treating Marx's own thoughts on history as something to be applied rather than tested. Indeed, it is a measure of the discomfort caused to ruling classes worldwide, including in the Soviet Union, that Hobsbawm's works were not translated into Russian until after 1989. As he moved away from defiantly dull British economic history to a more culturalist understanding of, generally, class, rebellion, failed rebellions, traditions, revolutions and industrial capitalism, even nationalism, Hobsbawm defined, with others, a new firmament of "history from below". Now, neither "history from below" nor "social history" were pioneered by the BMHG, but it certainly gave these perspectives far greater visibility and influence than ever before.
Hobsbawm was of course the most sternly economistic of them all, though he surprised and delighted his readers with his ability to use the most mundane and trivial data to yield great insight. A late 19th century increase in golf courses as a sign of the emerging "labour aristocrat" and his bourgeois tastes; the anti intellectual effect of the British public school's emphasis on sport and on 'steeling' the masculine; the radio transforming above all the life of the working class woman. This and many more such archival nuances made reading his work a rich and rewarding journey.
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It is a measure of the discomfort caused to ruling classes worldwide, including in the Soviet Union, that Hobsbawm’s works were not translated into Russian until after 1989.
master at synthesizing large bodies of secondary works, Hobsbawm brought entire eras between the covers of his books, making him a popular and widely read historian. But it is really perhaps the works less known to the wider reading public that are like small polished gems, shedding their lustre on little known questions of history. While sharing the moral charge of E.P. Thompson and Christopher Hill, Hobsbawm, in comparison, wrote with less panache, and yet was careful and persuasive, open and willing to revise his cherished beliefs, when necessary. He speculated on why shoemakers were among those who espoused political radicalism in a wide variety of 19th century settings: in what reads like a whodunit, he takes us through a series of questions relating to the shoemakers' physical location, their bodily weaknesses, their relatively higher engagements with the life of the mind, to come to grips with this unlikely radicalism. Among the most surprisingly influential of his books was an edited volume, The Invention of Tradition. No stone was left unturned in his quest for answers to events that might, or should have been: why did the class antagonism of the early 19th century in Britain give way to the class collaboration of the late 19th century?
Michel Foucault once remarked that Marxism "exists in nineteenth century thought like a fish in water: that is, it is unable to breathe anywhere else". Hobsbawm too was most at home in the 19th century, though his forays into the 18th and the 20th centuries were equally serious. It was that century that held the most promise, the most potential for change, and all the excitement for the historian tracking a new mode of production in the making, the era of capital's first appearance on an English stage, which generated a wide range of protests, revolts and rebellions. He pursued questions that arose from his sheer dismay that all this political, intellectual and religious, ferment and turbulence yielded little more than a Labour Party, the Bank holidays, and a piano in the labour aristocrat's parlour.
If Hobsbawm was steadfastly Marxist, it was because he "believed Marxism to be much the best approach to history because it is more clearly aware than other approaches of what human beings can do as the subjects and makers of history, as well as what, as objects of history they can't." Marxism alone, he believed, allowed historians to understand that their own ideas were likely to be affected by their own social being. No wonder he remembered, though with some despair, the moment when women's history came of age in the late 1960s, at the meetings of the History Workshop, that heady moment of sleeping bags, improvised crèches, and tousled hair, all of which merely added up, alas, to "collective self discovery". It was in a small, beleaguered voice that Hobsbawm asserted the urgency of professionals defending history against the onslaught from within and without, to conclude that "We are needed".
At Eric Hobsbawm's passing, we may stop to reflect on this collective legacy, as historians, as intellectuals who despair about our "global economic warming", and as reading publics. We could, following Marx, "think historically", for we must continually remind ourselves that capitalism has failed a majority of people in the world. Or else we might simply say, as Hobsbawm himself did, that we read/write history because we can think of nothing more enjoyable to do.
The author is a professor of History at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.