Eric Hobsbawm, The last intelligent Marxist

The Economist

His boyhood enthusiasm for the countryside, especially for its birds, never left him. His heart soared at the sight of a red kite or a hen harrier. He mourned how rarely he heard the song of the yellowhammer, “a-little-bit-of-bread-and-no-cheese”, on his hikes through the hills of mid-Wales to which he had retreated, close to the River Wye.

Eric Hobsbawm was a rare bird himself: “the last living Communist”, as he was teased at his 90th birthday party, and one of the last committed Marxist historians. He had become a Communist at secondary school in Berlin in 1932, and joined the party when he went up to his beloved King’s, Cambridge in 1936, because politics was his passion and it was either Hitler or the other side. But he remained for 50 years until Communism foundered, collapsing “so completely”, he wrote, “that it must now be obvious that failure was built into this enterprise from the start.” Why, then, had he stayed? Because he was of the generation that believed the October Revolution of 1917 was the great hope of the world; and he could not bear to betray either the revolution itself, or those who had fought for it.

There were testing moments, for sure. In 1956, after Soviet tanks crushed the Hungarian uprising and Khrushchev exposed the crimes of the Soviet past, Mr Hobsbawm’s embrace of Stalinism was revealed for the folly it was. Most of his intellectual friends left the party. He stayed, gradually regretting that he had remained an apologist for “Uncle Joe” for so long. But just as he kept his kneejerk political obsessions—supporting, for example, any team that played football against a country, like Croatia, that had a fascist fellow-travelling past—so he remembered the Soviet Union, horrors and all, with an indulgence he could not feel for China.

Alongside his Communism, he insisted on remaining a Marxist historian. Again, he was asked why. It put him in a ghetto, when he had rather cleverly—with his blue eyes, fair hair and English father—got through a childhood in interwar Vienna as der Engländer, rather than being labelled as the Jew he also was. That Marxist tag threatened to tarnish his reputation, when his lucid and scholarly books on what he called the long 19th century, from 1789 to 1914 (“The Age of Revolution”, “The Age of Capital”, “The Age of Empire”), on nationalism and on labour movements deserved, and won, an audience well beyond leftist circles and academe.

Defiant, Mr Hobsbawm championed Marx to the last. For his intellectual force; for his grasp of the world as a whole, at once political, economic, scientific and philosophical; and not least for his conviction, as relevant in 2008 as in 1848, that the capitalist system, with its yawning inequalities and naked greed, would inevitably—irresistibly—necessarily—be destroyed by its own internal tensions, and would be superseded by something better.  More >>