"Downhill All the Way"

The above is the title of an essay by Tony Judt, reviewing The Age of Extremes: A History of the World 1914-1991 by the Marxist historican Eric Hobsbawm. It appears in the posthumously published volume When the Facts Change: Essays 1995-2010. I picked up the volume at my local library, because it contains an essay that I had earlier come across in The New York Review of Books on the connection between modernity and the growth of railroads.

Ling Jian, Communist Sisters: Tears of Idealism

Even back in my undergraduate days, in the 1960s, Hobsbawm's writings figured on the edges of my consciousness, but, not being a history major, I never read him. Increasingly over the years I have become aware of his committed communism, and, as a committed conservative, this aspect of his writings made it unlikely that I would ever read him. The following, from the obituary in The Guardian on his death in 1912, speaks to my negative reaction:

"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."

It can also be imagined that I would not have much sympathy for a scholar who wrote, in his 94th year, How to Change the World, what The Guardian called "a vigorous defence of Marx's continuing relevance in the aftermath of the banking collapse of 2008-2010." I have very little tolerance for people who believe they know how to change the world.

Okay. Not that I am unfamiliar with Marxist thought, and in fact it has been a great influence on my own ideas, especially the role that capitalism and the ensuing prosperity have played in creating Liberalism. (More to that topic at another time.) I learned a lot from Judt's essay, especially about left-wing intellectuals.

Judt begins by placing Hobsbawm as a scholar who had a great effect on a generation of historians from about 1959 to 1975, especially for his works on what might now be called social history, especially "a world of rural protest in Europe and overseas," as in his 1959 book Primitive Rebels. His writings unearthed an earlier tradition of British radical historiography and drew attention to labor and to workers and artisans. What Judt terms Hobsbawm's "most enduring imprint on our historical consciousness" are three volumes on the "long 19th century," beginning with The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848 (1962), followed by The Age of Capital, 1848-1875 (1975) and The Age of Empire, 1875-1914 (1987). Judt's essay, a review of the fourth volume in this series, made me think I should take a look at the second volume in particular.

Although Judt is an admirer of Hobsbawm for his erudition and breadth of "vision," what interests me about the review is his critique of Hobsbawm's shortcomings (which, although Judt doesn't say so, is really a critique of Marxist shortcomings). In a sense, Hobsbawm's allegiance to communism always remained that of the enthusiast for a vision that he embraced in his youth. Thus, the Spanish civil war, which united so many intellectuals in the anti-Fascist cause, remained for Hobsbawm "the only political cause which, even in retrospect, appears as pure and appealing as it did in 1936." The same can be said for many of my generation who came of age in 1968 and for whom the experience still represents something holy. This is a self-centered view of history and explains why so many of them, now receiving Social Security and benefiting from their IRAs, refuse to indict the anti-liberal attitudes of contemporary college students. In a similar way, Hobsbawm failed to indict Stalin's use of the Spanish conflict to "settle local and international scores under the guise of supporting an anti-Fascist war."

Beers sold in a Spanish supermarket

Judt also makes a fascinating observation, namely, that Hobsbawm, in this new book, fails to consider that Lenin's revolution was "above all the first and greatest of the 'third world' coups d'etat that he describes so well elsewhere, in which revolutionary modernizers capture the capital city and forcibly seize power in an archaic society." I guess that this explains why so many third world nations after World War II fit so easily in the Soviet camp. In a similar way, according to Judt, Hobsbawm misses the extent to which Hitler effected "a major European revolution," transforming Central and Eastern Europe in a way that prepared the way for the "Socialist" regimes of the postwar years, which built on what Hitler had brought about, "notably the destruction of the intelligentsia and urban middle class of the region, first through the murder of the Jews and then as a result of the postwar expulsion of Germans from the liberated Slav lands." Because Hobsbawm wishes to downplay any revolutionary tendencies in Fascism, he does not recognize the irony that Hitler paved the way for Stalin. This, to Judt, seems "a consequence of continuing to see the world the way it seemed at the time, when both ideologically and militarily Fascism and Communism were in total conflict, and Stalin represented the 'left wing' of the victorious forces of the Enlightenment."

I go on too long today, but I will have more to say on this subject, as it concerns my own interpretation of the current intellectual climate, a climate entrenched in the vision of Hobsbawm.

Picture credits: Christies; Affaritalini; Karen Salmonsohn