NMML

OCCASIONAL PAPER
HISTORY AND SOCIETY
New Series
16

The Interesting Ideas of Eric Hobsbawm

Madhavan K. Palat

Nehru Memorial Museum and Library

2013

NMML Occasional Paper

© Madhavan K. Palat, 2013
All rights reserved. No portion of the contents may be reproduced in any
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 The Interesting Ideas of Eric Hobsbawm1
Madhavan K. Palat*

Hobsbawm’s modern world originated in the big bang of the

eighteenth century, and it was extinguished in an implosion almost
exactly two centuries later. To him these two hundred years were
defined by the project of the Enlightenment which imagined a
world that was equally good for all of humanity and not for just
some part of it. More than revolution, the Enlightenment drove
this world onward until it seems to have exhausted itself by the
end of the twentieth century: the Marxist Hobsbawm is inspired
more by the Enlightenment than by one of its consequences, the
millenarian dream of revolution. Deriving from the
Enlightenment, the conjoined industrial and French revolutions,
known as the dual revolution in his work, generated all subsequent
events. The industrial revolution assumed both capitalist and
socialist forms, and the political revolution inaugurated by the
French species spawned a series of bourgeois and socialist
revolutions, attempts at revolution of both types, and revolutions
against revolution, or counter-revolutions. They permeated not
only the politics and the economy of the continent, but as much
its social and cultural processes and the sciences and the arts.
His magnificent oeuvre celebrates this universe bounded by the
two revolutionary waves of the late eighteenth and the late
twentieth centuries; but it is a celebration that broods on its dark
side as much as on its stupendous achievements. His grand theme
is the hope held out by the Enlightenment, the revolutions that
1
Revised version of Public Lecture delivered at the Nehru Memorial Museum
and Library, New Delhi, 22 November 2012 in memory of Eric Hobsbawm
who died on 1 October 2012. I am most grateful to Mehrdad Samadzadeh of
Toronto University for his considerable help with sources.
* Madhavan K. Palat is Editor of Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru and
formerly Professor of Russian and European History, JNU, and Senior Fellow,
Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi

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2 Madhavan K. Palat

sustained it, and the counter-revolutions that negated it. As this

modern world drew to its close in the 1990s, a gloomy uncertainty
hangs over the world, and his musings on the post-Cold War world
reflect this unease.

Origins

Hobsbawm is obviously not the first to have noted that a new

world seemed to have sprung into existence from the late
eighteenth century. The revolutions of the late eighteenth century
have induced the greatest transformations in human history since
what has been called the neolithic or agricultural revolutions so
many millennia ago, and we are still living those changes. Along
with so many others, he appraised the significance of that half
century as the profoundest since “the remote times when men
invented agriculture and metallurgy, writing, the city and the
state.”2 The organizing principle of the first three volumes of the
Age series is the dual revolution of the English Industrial and the
French political revolutions; and it has been widely acclaimed
for capturing the dynamic of Europe’s revolutionary turbulence
and creativity during the nineteenth century at least, if not beyond.

But it is not clear from his work why these changes should
have occurred or why the human species should have altered the
course of its career so dramatically. He has devoted himself over
six decades at least to the history of the modern world from the
end of the eighteenth century to the end of the twentieth. He has
spaciously argued that the history of humanity from the paleolithic
to the nuclear age is the province of the historian. He has
frequently returned to the theme of the twelve millennia of human
history and of the drama of modernity, but he has not chosen to
explain the birth of the modern. 3 He has been accused of

2
E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution. Europe 1789-1848 (London: Sphere
Books, Cardinal edn 1973; original edn London: Weidenfield and Nicolson,
1962), p. 13. Hereafter, references to Hobsbawm’s works will omit his name
after the first reference.
3
See his collection of essays on history, Eric Hobsbawm, On History (London:
Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1997), ch. 3, p. 20.

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 The Interesting Ideas of Eric Hobsbawm 3

presenting that combination of events as an irruption without

antecedents: “The Industrial Revolution and the French
Revolution dominate the drama of these fifty-nine years, but they
appear blind, intrusive, unmotivated forces rather than logical
historical movements.”4

However, like so many of his generation, and especially

Marxists, Hobsbawm had hoped to explain these events as
“logical historical movements” in the transition from feudalism
to capitalism. 5 He claimed that the “general crisis” of the
seventeenth century eliminated the obstacles to capitalist
development; henceforth there was no question of reversion to
dispersed peasant production as had happened after the crisis of
the fourteenth century. The removal of these obstacles, it appears,
was the necessary condition. The sufficient condition was the
revolutionizing of social structures and the creation of new
production systems (the factory system), both of which occurred
in Britain in the course of the eighteenth century and culminated
in the industrial revolution. This reads like a statement of a
general law with causes and effects; and despite the real erudition
and stimulating insights, too many phenomena are said to have
been necessary for something to occur and then they are
discovered to have indeed occurred. Again, perhaps like a
Marxist, but not necessarily so, he has sought a crisis to explain
change, and certainly revolution. The French Revolution may
certainly be traced to an immediate crisis, as also perhaps to a
longer term one; but it is not so obvious in the case of the
industrial revolution in England except in the banal form that

4
Geoffrey Bruun, Review of The Age of Revolution, in Political Science
Quarterly, vol. 79, no. 3 (Sep., 1964), pp. 446-447, here p. 447.
5
E. J. Hobsbawm, “The General Crisis of the European Economy in the 17th
Century,” Past and Present, no. 5, May 1954, pp. 33-53; idem., “The Crisis of
the 17th Century,”Past and Present, no. 6, November 1954, pp. 44-65; idem.,
Comment in “Discussion of H. R. Trevor-Roper: ‘The General Crisis of the
17th Century’,” Past and Present, no. 18, Nov. 1960, pp. 12-14 and the full
discussion by several authors, pp. 8-42.

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4 Madhavan K. Palat

change of any kind must imply a crisis. Hence a crisis in the

middle of the seventeenth century to account for a revolution at
the end of the eighteenth. A historical law, a crisis, and a
revolution; a neat Marxist model, perhaps too neat for comfort.

He seemed to have felt the discomfort, for he did not return

to the subject after the initial debate in the fifties. He claimed
that a revolution as extraordinary as the dual one may be
explained only by reaching far back in time, beyond the crises of
the ancien régimes, the American Revolution, the English
Revolution, the Reformation, the European expansion, and even
earlier. He posed the explanatory choice as one between
everything and nothing, and wisely opted for the latter. His
contribution to that famous Marxist debate on the transition from
feudalism to capitalism passed through the trapdoor so effectively
that few of his reviewers bothered to link his account of the dual
revolution to it.6 He contented himself with the assertion that all
the elements for the great transformation must have been in place;
and these were the world market, entrepreneurship, the English
state committed to maximization of private profit, the revolutions
in science and technology, individuation, and the ideology of
rational progress, conventional listing if there is one. By the 1780s
these foundations had been laid firmly enough to permit
humanity’s great leap forward.7

Hobsbawm set himself the task, not of discovering the origins

of the modern world, but of uncovering the process of its self-
creation. The modern world is revolutionary, and Revolution is
its own explanation. Modernity was and is compelling; the entire

6
Save in Eugene D. Genovese, “The Politics of Class Struggle in the History
of Society: An Appraisal of the Work of Eric Hobsbawm,” in Pat Thane,
Geoffrey Crossick, and Roderick Floud, eds, The Power of the Past. Essays
for Eric Hobsbawm (London: Cambridge University Press; Paris: Editions de
la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1984), pp. 13-36, here pp. 22-23; James,
Cronin, “Creating a Marxist Historiography: The Contribution of Hobsbawm,”
Radical History Review, 19, Winter 1978-1979, pp. 87-109, here pp. 88, 103.
7
The Age of Revolution, p. 14.

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 The Interesting Ideas of Eric Hobsbawm 5

world either flung itself into it or was sucked into it; and its
revolutionary career is far from coming to an end, even in the
postmodern world. The process is too profound and its range too
universal for explanations in terms of national or even European
histories. In this respect he was adhering to the self-understanding
of the French Revolution of itself, and, in the abstract, of
revolutionaries of themselves. In the purity of their pursuit of a
new world uncontaminated by the old, they refused to derive their
action from antecedents or to legitimize it from such sources.
Their Revolution was its own justification and end. However this
reasoning may apply to Robespierre, it did not to the English
political agitators and innovators of the turn of the century to
whom the transformations in their own country were legitimized
as the restoration of well-established liberties. Nor did it apply
to the American colonies where Jefferson defended himself
against the charge of plagiarizing Locke in his Declaration of
Independence by pointing to it as the commonsense of his time
rather than a revolutionary act in itself.8 While Hobsbawm has
not treated of the American Revolution, he has in effect endowed
the Industrial Revolution with the attributes of the French
Revolution, and fused them into a single series of volcanic
eruptions that reorganized the world thereafter. A world was
brought into being, the modern world, in the manner that God
created the universe, an act for which nobody seeks out a cause.

It is not obvious even now why this portentous series of events

had to occur in this northwestern corner of the European
continent, except, as Hobsbawm pointed out, that all the necessary
elements must have been in place. Foucault was puzzled. He
suggested there is no explanation for what he termed the modern
episteme having erupted in Europe at the end of the eighteenth
century; this happened with Kant more than anybody else, and it
was in faraway Königsberg in the eastern outpost of Europe rather
than in its northwestern one. The modern episteme was not

8
Jürgen Habermas, Theory and Practice, translated from the German by John
Viertel from the original edition of 1971 (Oxford: Blackwell and Polity Press,
1988), pp. 87-88.

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fabricated in order to solve any urgent problem that the Classical

episteme could not sort out; it was not the result of the
accumulation of previous knowledge or attainments; it did not
necessarily answer to the imperious dictates of capitalism or of
Reason. Human beings make their own history, and they
periodically remake it, without any apparent compulsion. They
may be constrained, as the Marxian dictum has it, but not in any
determinate fashion; they may shape their future, secure in the
knowledge that their ancestors had done likewise, that the present
may or may not have been the chosen future of a past generation.9

World History

The focus is European, but its ambition is planetary. This is

conceivable only with the modern period of human history when
the fate of all of humanity was integrated through the multiple
processes that go by the parochial or partial names and concepts
of industrialization, revolution, modernization, colonial conquest,
and imperialism. The first book of the Age series is ostensibly
limited to Europe and contains Europe in the subtitle; the rest
have dispensed with that limitation altogether. Yet America is
missing throughout, in all four volumes, and necessarily so in all
his other histories. At best America is in the wings, always an
extra, never the major player, even in the twentieth century. This
is strange, even for the eighteenth century, when the American
Revolution was as consequential as those occurring in Europe.
American, French, British, and sundry European histories
intermingled in Robert Palmer’s and Jacques Godechot’s 1950s
atlanticist thesis of the Age of Democratic Revolutions, in which
many historians have included many lesser known ones from the

9
“And it took a fundamental event—certainly one of the most radical that ever
occurred in Western culture—to bring about the dissolution of the positivity
of Classical knowledge, and to constitute another positivity from which, even
now, we have doubtless not entirely emerged.
This event, probably because we are still caught inside it, is largely beyond
our comprehension.” Michel Foucault, The Order of Things. Archaeology of
the Human Sciences, (New York: Vintage Books, 1973, Translation of the
French Les Mots et les Choses, Editions Gallimard, 1966), pp. 220-221.

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 The Interesting Ideas of Eric Hobsbawm 7

Low Countries, Switzerland, Poland, Haiti, and Latin America.

The common sources and reciprocal influences have been worked
and re-worked many times, but purely national or just European
histories have long been seen as limiting and limited, even when
Hobsbawm composed his first volume. Perhaps he felt it belonged
too obviously to the Cold War that the democratic allies of the
Second World War should be celebrated in this fashion;10 if so,
the remedy would not be to bring together Britain and France,
the European allies in that war. He has claimed that the American
revolution was neither a social nor an ecumenical one like the
French, for it did not transform class structures nor did it exert
much influence outside. But these objections miss the point of
the argument of the Age of Democratic Revolutions somewhat.
His exclusion of America seems parochially European.

Yet, he was far from dismissing the American Revolution. As

early as 1959 he bestowed upon it the following accolade, seeing
in it the beginning of all good things:

“The American and French Revolutions of the 18th

century are probably the first mass political movements
in the history of the world which expressed their
ideology and aspirations in terms of secular rationalism
and not of traditional religion. The fact marks a
revolution in the life and thought of the common people
so profound that its nature is difficult even to appreciate
for those of us who have grown up in an epoch when
politics is agnostic, whatever the private beliefs of
politicians and voters. The modern labour movement
is the product of this epoch in two distinct ways. First,
because its leading ideology, Socialism (or Communism
or Anarchism, which belong to the same family), is the
last and most extreme descendant of 18th-century
10
Allan Potofsky, “The One and the Many: The Two Revolutions Question
and the ‘Consumer-Commercial’ Atlantic, 1789 to the Present”, in Manuela
Albertone and Antonino De Francesco, eds, Rethinking the Atlantic World.
Europe and America in the Age of Democratic Revolutions (Houndmills,
Basingstoke: Palgrave, Macmillan, 2009), pp. 17-45, here p. 32.

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illuminism and rationalism; and second, because the

working classes themselves, its supporters, the children
of an unprecedented era, were probably as a class less
affected by traditional religions than any other social
group of men, except for certain limited strata or élite
groups such as middle-class intellectuals.”11

In 1961 he noted that Tom Paine’s revolutionary career was due

to his fortuitous expedition to America in 1776 with a
recommendation from Benjamin Franklin.12 Even in The Age of
Revolution, where he made the strongest case against the
American revolution, he did admit its importance indirectly thus:
“Victory over England was gained at the cost of financial
bankruptcy, and thus the American Revolution can claim to be
the direct cause of the French.” 13 This was not to admit the
potency of the American Revolution so much as to notice the
foolishness of the French state for overreaching itself through a
transatlantic war. But he could go further in the same volume by
asserting: “Proletarian consciousness was powerfully combined
with, and reinforced by, what may best be called Jacobin
consciousness, methods and moral attitudes with which the French
(and also before it the American) Revolution had imbued the
thinking and confident poor.” 14 This seemed to suggest the
ecumenical force of the American Revolution. In 1980 he
identified the beginnings of the militancy of such an unlikely
species as European shoemakers from roughly the period of the
American Revolution, “that the century beginning with the
American revolution was the golden age of shoemaker
radicalism.”15 By 1982 he was prepared to concede that “… the

11
E. J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels. Studies in Archaic Forms of Social
Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1959), p. 126.
12
E. J. Hobsbawm, Labouring Men. Studies in the History of Labour (London:
Weidenfield and Nicholson, 1964), p. 3.
13
The Age of Revolution. p. 78.
14
The Age of Revolution. pp. 255-256.
15
E. J. Hobsbawm, Worlds of Labour. Further Studies in the History of Labour
(London: Weidenfield and Nicholson, 1984), pp. 126, and 129.

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 The Interesting Ideas of Eric Hobsbawm 9

ideology of the Enlightenment was one which had a strong appeal

to working-class activists and militants from the American
Revolution onwards.” 16 The age of “civility” began with the
American Revolution and ended with the First World War.17 As
his work progressed he acknowledged America ever more. In The
Age of Empire, he defined the dual revolution as composed of
the British Industrial Revolution and the “Franco-American
political revolution.”18 He went a step further to accept that during
the centenary of the French Revolution “the educated citizens of
the western world became conscious of the fact that this world,
born between the Declaration of Independence, the construction
of the world’s first iron bridge and the storming of the Bastille,
was now a century old.” 19 He was even prepared to pay the
American the compliment of possibly embodying a social
revolutionary tradition: “a left-wing tradition that reached back
beyond Marx and Bakunin to 1789 and even 1776, revolutions
hoped to achieve fundamental social change by means of sudden,
violent, insurrectionary transfers of power.”20 As he discussed the
sources of non-proletarian support for socialist parties, he
admitted the common radical inspiration of the American and
French revolutions: “As the parties of the least privileged, it was
natural that they should now be seen as standard-bearers of that
fight against inequality and ‘privilege’ which had been central
to political radicalism since the American and French
revolutions…” 21 After American hegemony had been firmly
established in the post-Cold War world, he allowed himself to
say, not only that America was a “revolutionary” power like
France and Russia, but also that the Left is bonded by traditions

16
Worlds of Labour, p. 71.
17
“But we can say that one of the main forces which helped civility to progress
in the century and a half between the American Revolution and World War I
when it clearly did, was that which found its organized expression in the labour
and socialist movements of the western world.” Worlds of Labour, p. 316.
18
E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire 1875-1914 (New York: Random House,
Vintage Books edn, 1989), p. 9.
19
The Age of Empire, p. 13.
20
The Age of Empire, p. 133.
21
The Age of Empire, p. 138.

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deriving from the English, American, French, and Russian

revolutions, and even that “communism was part of that tradition
of modern civilization that goes back to the Enlightenment, to
the American and French revolutions.”22 What he may have tried
to deny in the heady sixties, he admitted ever so reluctantly in
the eighties, as the crisis of Soviet socialism became evident and
thereafter when the triumph of America was final. But these were
asides in the course of scattered essays and of three large volumes
of what he imagined as world history; essentially America was
ignored in the making of the modern bourgeois world, a strategy
that has been shown to be inadequate even in the case of the
colonies or semi-colonies and surely must be when it involves
so dynamic a centre of capitalism in the nineteenth century and
the leading one of the twentieth.23

In his history of the twentieth century, Age of Extremes,

America is again the missing presence.24 Three chapters have been
devoted to the Soviet Union, namely, the Revolution, the mature
Soviet Union, and the collapse, but not one to America. We are
taken through the wars, the Depression, the Cold War from the
beginning to the end, but without America. In the nineteenth
century, the history seemed to have been primarily European, and
on that basis, it purported to be a world history also. That could
not hold in the twentieth when the Soviet Union and America took
the lead after 1945 and decolonization shifted the balance further.
Even within Europe, the imbalance is stark. National Socialism
surely merited somewhat greater attention than an epigraph by
Ian Kershaw at the head of chapter 4, revealingly titled “The Fall
of Liberalism.” If a pattern is clear it is that what Hobsbawm does
not like he prefers not to write about; given his erudition and

22
Eric Hobsbawm, The New Century. In Conversation with Antonio Polito.
Translated from the Italian by Allan Cameron (London: Abacus, 2003, original
edn 2000), pp. 44-55, 96, 162.
23
See for example C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914.
Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).
24
Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes. The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991
(London: Little Brown and Co., Abacus edn, 1995; first edn London: Michael
Joseph, 1994)

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brilliance, his readers indulge his prejudices, gladly accompany

him through the century, and tell the world what a masterpiece
he has gifted them. He disdains America seemingly because he
is European and a Marxist; he despises National Socialism
because he is a communist and democrat; and he has composed
a highly acclaimed history of the twentieth century with both of
them hovering in the shadows.

Yet he has been congratulated for not being parochially

European and ranging as far as Egypt, India, China, and Latin
America. It is doubtful whether his comments in such short
compass on these parts of the world are illuminating, and such a
reception perhaps tells us more about European and American
anxieties about being considered parochial in the postcolonial
world.25 Certainly, his chapters on the rest of the world are the
weakest in his Age series,26 especially the one that might have
been closest to his heart, the gathering of the revolutionary storm
clouds outside Europe before 1914, in China, India, Iran, the
Ottoman Empire, Mexico and, above all, Russia. Astonishingly,
not even Russia seems to have attracted more attention than say
India or China. His observations on Russia before the Revolution
of 1917 read like a layman’s general knowledge about Russia,
namely the classics of literature and heroic tales about the Russian
revolutionary movement before its Marxist phase. That it was a
European great power since the early eighteenth century, a
colonial empire from the nineteenth, a state undertaking its own
major capitalist reforms during the century, seems to have escaped
notice. All these accounts of the world outside Europe read
painfully like rapid summaries based on a quick reading of some
limited literature. It is perhaps better to be Eurocentric and useful
rather than global and inadequate.

25
See reviews by Theodore S. Hamerow in American Historical Review, vol.
68, no. 4, July 1963, pp. 1018-1019; by A. Goodwin in The English Historical
Review, vol. 79, no. 312, July 1964, pp. 616-617.
26
E. J. Hobsbawm,The Age of Capital, 1848-175 (London: Little Brown and
Co., Abacus edn, 1977), ch. 9 and The Age of Empire ch. 12.

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Class

The major works are constructed around the three defining

attributes of European civilization of the nineteenth century and
the first half of the twentieth. These are class, nation, and empire.
He has set them in that hierarchy of significance without saying
so and without explaining why it should be so. The three together
do define European identity substantially, but not wholly, since
Christianity has not been included and he is little interested in
that subject. To set them in a hierarchy may at best reflect the
author’s idiosyncrasy; but it derives more likely from his Marxist
and socialist commitment in which class, the class struggle, and
the class revolution provided the myth of action. The nation was
secondary and an impediment, overpowering reality that it was;
and empire was a putrefying excrescence, if also a regrettable
reality. Class was far more congenial, for the emancipatory
promise of the Left emerged from that relation; nation occluded
it and empire corrupted.

His modern society of the nineteenth century was a class

society, structured by the polar opposition of the bourgeoisie and
proletariat, with the aristocracy, peasantry, and lower middle class
as doomed encrustations on these poles.27 The sustained combat
between the bourgeoisie and proletariat created the Europe we
know today, of civil liberties, democracy, and welfare. 28
Astonishingly, for one reputed to be a Marxist, his focus of
attention is the bourgeoisie, not the proletariat. It could of course
be said in extenuation that he has a distinguished forbear in Karl
Marx.

It would perhaps not be an exaggeration or unfair to the

historian to say that the three volumes of the Age series are a
celebration of the conquering bourgeois. This is not to disparage
it is a justification of capitalism or of bourgeois values, or as
ignoring the near fatal contradictions under which this dynamism

27
He set it out explicitly once, in Labouring Men, pp. 22-23.
28
The New Century, pp. 98-100.

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laboured, the miseries it inflicted both within Europe and

worldwide, or the corrosive uncertainties that plagued the
bourgeois in their moment of triumph. But there was an
asymmetry in the class relation of bourgeoisie to proletariat: the
bourgeoisie held the whip hand and it was infinitely more wide-
ranging in its creativity and its destruction than the proletariat
could hope to be or aspired to be. Both nation and empire were
obsessively bourgeois preoccupations, limitedly proletarian, and
marginally socialist. But within the nation, the bourgeoisie and
the proletariat, acting in tandem in their class opposition,
produced the civilization of Europe with its civil liberties,
democracy, and welfare. Even within this triad, the bourgeoisie
played so dynamic and expansive a role, far greater than that of
the proletariat, since they preceded the working class and
dominated the world of politics, entrepreneurship, innovation, art,
music, literature, and science. Without diluting either his socialist
commitments or his loyalty to the working class, especially of
Britain, Hobsbawm must, as a good historian, record the stellar
achievements of the bourgeoisie even as he critically appraises
them. He set out to capture both the class relation and the
asymmetry within it, in the manner that the Communist Manifesto
registered both the revolutionary function of the bourgeoisie and
its engendering of its proletarian gravedigger.

This paradoxical preference for the bourgeoisie could perhaps

be explained in part by the fact that he had after all assembled
two hefty volumes of assorted articles on the proletariat
exclusively. But the Age series was not meant to be read as a
complement to the two volumes on labour; it was to stand on its
own as comprehensive, and in his view, balanced accounts of
Europe and the world during the nineteenth century, with a fourth
volume on the twentieth; also, his two volumes on labour deal
almost exclusively with the British working class, not the
European. The particular balance of the Age series appears
deliberate and independent of other work.

The chapters on politics and society are dominated by the

bourgeoisie with the working class enlarging their role as the

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century progresses, especially in the third volume, The Age of

Empire. But the sections on the economy and on the arts are
exclusively on the bourgeoisie; and if the working class has a
walk on part in the accounts of mass entertainment culture, they
must share a very crowded stage with bourgeois entrepreneurs,
artists, actors, advertisers, salesmen, and impresarios, and only
as audiences do they appear to play the leading role. Perhaps he
was aware that his political and ideological commitments and his
public image did not square with such loving attention to the
bourgeoisie. He has opened his second volume with a profession
of virtue thus: “The author of this book cannot conceal a certain
distaste, perhaps a certain contempt, for the age with which it
deals, though one mitigated by admiration for its titanic material
achievements and by the effort to understand even what he does
not like.”29 But his distaste for the bourgeoisie or for the epoch
is not as obvious as he might want us to believe. When he reached
the third volume, there was no ambiguity: “Essentially the central
axis round which I have tried to organize the history of the century
is the triumph and transformation of capitalism in the historically
specific forms of bourgeois society in its liberal version.”30 Now
he applied it to the whole century, not to just this one volume.

If the overwhelming presence of the bourgeoisie is as

expected, what is not so expected is Hobsbawm’s infinitely
greater sensitivity to the experience of being bourgeois, to the
interiority of the bourgeois, from his (and occasionally her)
sexuality, family life, fantasies, and leisure, to his gargantuan
appetite for life outside the family. The high points of
Hobsbawm’s vast oeuvre are always the chapters on bourgeois
culture, art, science, philosophies, ideologies, and the professions.
In The Age of Revolution, the chapters on the French Revolution
that outlined the structures of bourgeois or modern politics and
accounted for the career of a Napoleon and the one on the career
open to talent are scintillating exercises in historical synthesis.
In The Age of Capital and The Age of Empire, the chapters on

29
The Age of Capital, p. 17.
30
The Age of Empire, pp. 8-9.

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 The Interesting Ideas of Eric Hobsbawm 15

the bourgeois world followed by the one on the arts mark similar
peaks of achievement. Here we may enter the private world of
the bourgeois, men and women, from their bedrooms to their
dining rooms and parlours, to their holidays by the sea or in alpine
snows, to their new found obsession with sport, each game of
which was standardized with rules, teams, and competitions,
culminating in the founding of the Olympic Games, their
cultivation of art and the art market to such an extent that artists
could now live as bourgeois individuals rather than as
entertainers, and much else that we take for granted as belonging
to modern culture. The discussions of the various arts and the
academic disciplines are detailed and masterful.

The bourgeois was remaking the world in his image. The

aristocracy was reinventing itself with Churchills and Curzons
marrying American heiresses to keep themselves afloat even as
the bourgeois shamelessly aped the aristocracy by pursuing titles
and country homes. Even that oxymoron, the bourgeois monarchy,
made sense with the image of Victoria, Albert and their numerous
brood as a respectable middle class family after the primitive
aristocratic conduct of her uncles. At the other end of the class
hierarchy, so much of the working class was becoming
“respectable” or bourgeois; and nothing terrified the lower middle
class more than the prospect of not being recognized as bourgeois.
The possible exception to this was the formation of a distinct
proletarian culture that drew the line between itself and the
bourgeois world despite the growth of respectability. But so
deeply intertwined and interdependent were these two worlds that
the distinction could be overdrawn. Only the peasantry lived in
a different universe; but they had disappeared in much of Western
Europe, or more precisely, from Hobsbawm’s radar.

He devoted two large volumes of essays to the working class

specifically, indeed of Britain alone.31 Despite their size, they do
not compare with his adventurous explorations of the lives of the
bourgeois. His proletariat lived a life marked by the slum, mass

31
Labouring Men; Worlds of Labour.

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housing, and factory, from mid-century taking a day trip to a

resort, and eventually in the twentieth squeezing in a foreign
vacation, but apparently inhabiting a universe that is pitifully
circumscribed. But Hobsbawm’s account of proletarian life
acquires a sparkle of its own when workers enter the political
domain, through unions, politics, and ideology, especially
Methodism or socialism. In a sense this is no longer the history
of the working class or of the experience of being a worker and
rather more a political history with a focus on the left of the
political spectrum. On these subjects Hobsbawm is illuminating
and authoritative in his usual sweeping fashion, on the nature of
unionism until the 1840s, the growth from the 1850s, the new
unionism from 1889 until 1914 when general unions to unite all
the working class was seriously attempted, its socialist origin and
its rightward turn by the War, the apogee of working class and
socialist influence in the late forties, and the shifts thereafter.
Similarly, his many discussions of the labour aristocracy and the
nature of internal stratification within the working class point to
the politics of a peculiar form of unionism within the British
working class in which the labour aristocracy first secured the
benefits of scarcity for themselves, and later, as mass
proletarianization occurred toward the end of the century, they
turned to the radical option of general unions and leading them.

His important analysis of the nature of reformism in the

Labour Party reformulated the theses of class collaboration. He
traced it to the extraordinary prosperity of Britain as both the
pioneer industrial nation and as the centre of the largest colonial
empire, to the labour movement and unionization having preceded
the coming of socialism, to governments, even the Conservative,
accepting unionism and conciliation from the 1860s, to the union
bureaucracy becoming enmeshed in the State from as early as the
1890s, to the absence of the split between social democratic and
communist wings of the movement unlike the rest of Europe after
1917, and finally and most importantly, to the sheer longevity of
capitalism in which even the most militant worker and unionist
was obliged to engage in a species of reformism to be relevant
to the class. The leadership of the Labour Party may shift

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rightward, but militants sustained their pressure without a formal

schism for the formation of a communist party. Nothing however
could change the reality of having to negotiate everyday on the
premise that capitalism was permanent.

“But inevitably, even the most revolutionary must fight

the battles for improvement and reform according to
the nature of the terrain, which is that of ‘realistic’
calculation in a capitalist economy and a capitalist state.
That is to say they must compromise, make allies, and
in general act as reformists. If he is to be effective in
a stable capitalist economy, even the communist union
leader must do this, whatever his private reservations
and calculations. A communist municipality in a non-
communist state must for most of the time behave
very much like any other left-wing municipality. It is
thus only natural that for many ‘spontaneous’ labour
militants the alternative to mindless militancy is for
practical purposes an efficient reformism within a
capitalist environment which is regarded as de facto
permanent; or which is regarded, at best, as subject only
to gradual and piecemeal change.”32

This could be read as his apology to Lenin for Britain not

having done better, while rebelliously reminding Lenin that
Russia was blessed or cursed with the feeblest capitalist economy,
the absence of political democracy, virulent hostility to unions
by both the government and employers, and with the socialist
movements having preceded unionization. In sum, Russia was
backward, hence the Revolution; he uses the same thesis in Age
of Extremes and elsewhere to explain the failure of the Soviet
experiment. These numerous important examinations however
deal with the politics and stratification of the working class and
less with how workers shaped themselves.

32
Labouring Men. p. 339.

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The contrast with Edward Thompson’s capacity to penetrate

to the interior of the workers is evident: Hobsbawm does that only
with the bourgeoisie. But Hobsbawm becomes Thompsonian in
his infrequent investigations of the pre-capitalist worker,
especially his fine accounts of machine breakers and “tramping,”
and (jointly with Joan Scott) of political shoemakers. His
specialized studies of the gas workers and the dockworkers go
over the same ground but are somewhat less from within that
world. He rises to supreme heights in his elegiac article of 1979
on working class culture.33 It was a culture that was formed in
the 1880s with the “lay religion” of football and league matches;
the peaked cap, holidays in resorts like Blackpool, and the fish
and chip shop invented in 1865; the pub, the cinema, the palais
de danse, jazz, and the radio; pay day on Friday and leisure on
Saturday; the woman solitary at home, a shapeless bag by the
age of thirty, but the pillar and moral force of the family; all this
and much else which disappeared one by one from the fifties. It
was a class that was united, conscious of itself, and opposed to
the bourgeoisie; it was marked by ancient traditions of solidarity
and mutualism which peaked during the general strike of 1926
when they came out, not to overthrow the state or capitalism, but
in support of miners who deserved a living wage. His evocation
of this world is a wistful and eloquent obituary of that class.

His independent volumes on the working class focused on the

class itself, but only on the British working class; the Age series
pays scant attention to the proletariat, but its bourgeoisie is
European, not merely British. His first volume, The Age of
Revolution, is only marginally about workers since there were so
few of them in any case and the single chapter on the subject is
reserved for the labouring poor, of whom workers were a part.
Workers may have been few in number, but their significance in
this period is registered by Edward Thompson’s masterpiece, The
Making of the English Working Class. In The Age of Capital a
small section on workers appears in chapter 6, a full chapter 12,

33
“The Formation of British Working Class Culture (1979)”, in Worlds of
Labour, ch. 10, pp. 176-193.

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and no more. There is necessarily a chapter on the revolution of

1848 and scattered analyses of socialism in different countries.
But the book has been overwhelmed by the subject he professes
to dislike. The economy is devoted to the bourgeoisie through
two substantial chapters; politics is wholly bourgeois politics, and
there are four chapters at least on the subject; one exquisite
chapter is on bourgeois life itself; and another two outstanding
ones are given to the sciences and the arts, again exclusively
bourgeois culture. The proletariat secures essentially one chapter
out of seventeen in a volume on the period that saw Marx’s
most famous works, the Communist Manifesto, the Eighteenth
Brumaire, the first volume of Capital, and the Civil Wars in
France. The Poverty of Philosophy and the Russian translation
of Capital, the first into any language, should also be included.
In the subsequent volume, The Age of Empire, this pattern is
repeated, and the bourgeoisie is described (chapter 7) with the
warmth, affection, and intimacy of knowledge and feeling that is
usually reserved for personal friends and families or schools and
regiments. But the proletariat suffers its usual fate. It gets one
chapter to itself out of fourteen, with scattered references in the
politics chapters, although this was the half century when the
proletariat appeared in its most visible and potent form, mass
socialist parties determined much of the politics of Europe, and
the political influence of Marx began to be registered. The
German Social Democratic Party expected to come to power by
election, general strikes had been attempted in different parts of
Europe, Sorel theorized the myth of the general strike, and Russia
went through a major revolution in 1905 with the workers in the
lead. Eugene Genovese, his admiring Marxist colleague, admitted
to that “paradox in his big books on industrial capitalist society.
For there is much less in them than some might demand about
working-class culture and related matters.” But he excused it on
the ground that the tetralogy and his labour history volumes taken
together “comes as close to providing that ‘history of society’ as
anything available.”34

34
Genovese, “The Politics of Class Struggle,” p. 19.

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Not quite. His detailed examination of the proletariat in any

sense consists only of assembled essays which do not add up to
a systematic history. In any case they are confined to the British
species; the proletariat of his historical exercises does not belong
to general history. Perhaps the genuine proletariat occupies a
terrain that is as dreary as his factory, assembly line, and working
class housing, and it offers little to absorb the bourgeois (or
probably even the proletarian) historian despite the importance
of the class for extended periods of time. The worker, before he
became a proletarian, was altogether more colourful, creative, and
eccentric; he could be the village philosopher, often itinerant, and
ready to share his thoughts with his community, wherever it was;
in sum, he was an individual. These qualities draw the bourgeois
historian to his mental and psychological universe. But that is
not surprising, for these are bourgeois attributes in a non-
bourgeois world.

We are not permitted to forget the class relation, but even so

with a twist. Hobsbawm would not be Marxist if he did not see
life shot through with polarities. But these are not necessarily of
class as much as we might expect them to be. This polarity is the
centrepeice of his tetralogy for the nineteenth century, or so we
are told, and indeed, as already noted, the focal points of class
structure are the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. However, the
crucial relation between the two classes, the hinge on which it
all turns, is submerged somewhere. There is little about the
relation of employer to worker, of the techniques of management,
how employers and managers addressed their workers or vice
versa, company welfare and philanthropy, the test of power
through strikes and lockouts, and other aspects of their
interactions. There is much about revolution, but not about class
conflict: and it is worth remembering that not only is class conflict
swallowed up in revolutionary movements, but that the chief
medium of the class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the
proletariat was everything short of revolution.

If there is not as much about class struggle as we might expect,

there is an enormous amount on conflicts and stratification within
the working class, the strains between militants and leaderships

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 The Interesting Ideas of Eric Hobsbawm 21

in unions, differences among unions, and reformism in the Labour

Party. He composed a number of important articles on the thesis
of the aristocracy of labour in Britain which revealed virtual class
division within the working class itself; but it was motivated,
paradoxically it might seem, by the compulsion to explain why
the politics of Britain were not polarized to the point of
revolution.35 But then, that was a famous Leninist thesis. Within
the labour movement and especially the Labour Party, he
discerned the extremes between a highly militant rank and file,
shop stewards, and others, against a reformist leadership. This
would have pleased a Subaltern historian of the late twentieth
century.

His focus of attention and interest is polarity of any kind, not

merely of class. He plunged into the controversy over whether
the standard of living of the masses had improved or deteriorated
in the course of the industrial revolution in Britain from the late
eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth. Expectedly,
he denied that it was improving although he was cautious as to
how far the charge of deterioration could be sustained. 36 In
Europe, the nation challenged the multinational empire, in the
world, the colony the metropolis, the advanced the backward, and
so on until it culminates in the horrors of the twentieth century,
of the most extreme ideological contestation, total wars, and the
end of modernity. In every area of inquiry, he sought out the polar
oppositions that generated the crises, structured them, and
transformed them. The process was dialectical, as he said of the
British labour movement: “But if the socialist consciousness of
the British working class is potential rather than real; if indeed

35
“The Labour Aristocracy in Nineteenth-century Britain (1954)”, “Trends in
the British Labour Movement since 1850 (1949/1963)”, in Labouring Men,
ch. 15, pp. 272-315, ch. 16, pp. 316-342, respectively; “Debating the Labour
Aristocracy” (1979), “Labour Aristocracy Reconsidered”, “Artisans and Labour
Aristocrats” in Worlds of Labour, ch. 12, pp. 214-226, ch. 13, pp. 227-251, ch.
14, pp. 252-272, respectively.
36
“The British Standard of Living 1790-1850”, “History and the Dark Satanic
Mills” (1958), “The Standard of Living Debate: a Postscript”, in Labouring
Men, ch. 5, pp. 64-104, ch. 6, pp. 105-119, ch. 7, pp. 120-125, respectively

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it is at every moment transformed into its opposite in the context

of a reformist movement and imperialist institutions, we should
nevertheless be wrong to underrate the bitter process of political
education which has taught it utterly to reject capitalism, even
though it may not quite know what such a rejection implies.”37

The last volume, Age of Extremes, is not even built around

class, which seems to have become irrelevant in spite of the
Russian Revolution, the triumph of Labour in Britain after World
War II, and communist regimes in so many parts of the world.
Both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat seem to have dug their
respective graves after the First World War. This volume offers
only states, parties, and ideologies in mortal combat, besides art,
culture, and related subjects. The bourgeoisie, which he so
celebrated in the nineteenth century, has disappeared as an
autonomous agent. Perhaps the species does not look like a
bourgeoisie any longer, they appear to be just monsters. His fellow
Marxist, Perry Anderson, was dismayed. “Never since the Gilded
Age have financial buccaneers and industrial magnates stalked
the earth with such giant strides, trampling over labour and
swaggering through culture, from the heights of wealth and power
Gould and Morgan could scarcely have imagined. A glance at
press or television is reminder enough of the ubiquity of this tribe.
Omitting it, Age of Extremes offers a decapitated portrait of
contemporary society.”38 But none shed a tear for the working
class, and Hobsbawm had already dried his eyes by the late 1950s
and composed a sublime epitaph in 1979.39 The proletariat almost
vanishes in this volume, and by the end of it, it has vanished into
history. In February 1992 he managed to deliver an entire lecture
on the crisis of ideologies without once using the word “worker.”40

37
In Labouring Men, ch. 16, “Trends in the British Labour Movement since
1850” (1949/1963), pp. 316-342, here p. 330.
38
Perry Anderson, “Confronting Defeat,” in London Review of Books, vol. 24,
no. 20, 17 October 2002, pp. 10-17.
39
“The Formation of British Working Class Culture,” (1979), in Worlds of
Labour, ch. 10, pp. 176-193.
40
Eric Hobsbawm, “The Crisis of Today’s Ideologies,” New Left Review, I/
192, 1992, pp. 55-64.

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Non-Class

The class relation of the bourgeoisie to the proletariat

dominates the story, even if in lop-sided fashion; but the other
classes have been dismissed not a little curtly. This is intriguing,
for other classes did exist, and even Marxists have admitted to
the fact. These are the aristocracy, the peasantry, and the lower
middle class or petite bourgeoisie, and each played major roles
in the history of these two centuries, although theory did not
provide for them. However, Hobsbawm has devoted loving
attention to the marginal species of bandits for which there exists
almost no theory other than what Bakunin had offered; and he
had little positive to say about Bakunin.

The aristocracy as a class has not been accorded the role that
most other histories do. He has assimilated the aristocracy to the
bourgeoisie since they derived their means of existence in much
the same fashion, from capital and the state in various forms.
Hence, the only distinguishing feature of the aristocracy was its
lineage and flummery culminating in the monarchy. Further, the
aristocracy increasingly consisted of ennobled bourgeois also, and
Britain was as usual the leading practitioner of this form of
diluting and neutralizing a possible source of opposition to
modernization. However, from 1789 until at least 1918 across
Europe they did play a decisive role constitutionally, politically,
socially, and in certain professions like the military and
diplomacy. In theory they did not belong to the bourgeois world
and their historical function along with monarchies had been
exhausted. But they did exist, all too visibly, and surely it must
be explained why the “conquering bourgeois” was so addicted to
aristocracy and monarchy even as these dinosaurs underwent their
own process of embourgeoisement. Joseph Schumpeter, in an
influential thesis, has argued the bourgeoisie’s need for non-
bourgeois sources of support, and explained the imperialism and
“objectless” warfare of that epoch by the atavism of aristocracy;41
41
Joseph Schumpeter, Imperialism. Social Classes. Two Essays, translated by
Heinz Norden (New York: Meridian Books, 1955; original German edn 1919,
1929), pp. 64-98.

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and Arno Mayer has provided it substantial empirical support.42

But Hobsbawm’s histories have noticed them virtually only in
the context of the aristocratizing bourgeois, not as a distinct caste
that left their imprint on the Europe of these two centuries.

Similarly his indifference to the peasantry as a class is

intriguing. Not only was it a major presence in France, Spain and
Italy, to all of which he devotes much attention, but it was a major
political actor in its own right in Russia. The peasantry was
indispensable to the Bolshevik Revolution; and, after a brief
decade of dreams realized, it was liquidated by the Stalinist
revolution of the 1930s. The Soviet Union, whose demise he
regretted so deeply at the end of his last volume, was the product
of this destruction, and the event was one of the great dramas of
the twentieth century along with the Holocaust. Again, the
intermediate classes, lumped together as the lower middle class,
provided mass support to the various fascist movements which
the working class did not. No theory proclaimed a future for these
categories caught in the interstices of the great classes of
bourgeois society, but they were collectively large and distinct,
and their anxieties were well exploited by the fascists. Perhaps
it is churlish to keep asking for so much from a historian who
has given us so much; it is a tribute to his achievement that we
always ask for more.

He may have ignored many classes that deserve better, but

how do we account for his unexpected attention to bandits of all
species? In two volumes he has considered the phenomena of
social banditry, mafia, millenarianism, and city mobs, all of them
in many ways interrelated or comparable.43 They drew upon an
extensive repertoire from pre-modern times but they acquired a
peculiar salience during those vital transitional decades when
capitalism, liberalism, and electoral politics penetrated the
country and city streets and before industry, bureaucracy, and
42
Arno Mayer, The Perisistence of the Old Regime. Europe to the Great War
(London: Verso, 1981)
43
Primitive Rebels; E. J. Hobsbawm, Bandits, rev. edn (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1981, 1st edn 1969).

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socialist and other politics absorbed these forms of action into

modern social and political movements and transformed them out
of recognition. Their high moments lasted until somewhere
between the 1860s and 1880s. Before they were absorbed into
crime and modern politics, they fought, each in its own way, for
justice, the norms of tradition, and the law of custom, as well
understood by their respective communities.

Of these, the rural bandit is of special interest in that

Hobsbawm is so passionately engaged with him. The bandit was
a member of his rural community, sharing their ideas and
worldview and without framing an independent one of his own.
He is not ideologically primed differently from the rest of the
village, but he is distinguished by personal character, or more
accurately, charisma. He refuses to submit to lord and state, to
bend his back as was the wont of the peasantry, to be passive in
the face of injustice when it occurred. He abstracts himself from
his community, breaks out of its immobility, forms a band of not
more than about thirty outlaws, and harries his oppressors until
he is killed, bought off, or justice is done. He never attacks the
peasants themselves. He is usually a freebooter, an ex-soldier, a
young man, or part of the rural surplus labour in times of crisis.
But the sociological category is of lesser significance than his
psychological attributes. He is essentially one of those “men who
are unwilling to accept the meek and passive social role of the
subject peasant; the stiffnecked and recalcitrant, the individual
rebels. They are, in the classic familiar peasant phrase, the ‘men
who make themselves respected.’” 44 His exploits make him a
heroic symbol to his community, he could spearhead a movement
of resistance, and most of all, his action could merge with a larger
revolutionary movement. Ultimately, “Banditry is freedom.” 45
Hobsbawm has made numerous qualifications and distinctions,
but this is a sort of eternal species until the coming of capitalism:
“Social banditry of this kind is one of the most universal social

44
Bandits, p. 35.
45
Bandits, p. 30.

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phenomena known to history, and one of the most amazingly

uniform.”46 Such sweeping statements violate the trade union rules
of the historical profession; in spite of that he does provide the
historical context to such occurrences.

Most unusually, he has described the phenomenon and sung

its glories as Bakunin himself did. Bakunin idealized the brigand
of Cossack legend, the Stenka Razins and the Emelian Pugachevs,
who could shake the peasantry out of their immobility and
passivity and lead them in insurrections that brought the
Muscovite state to its knees. 47 He looked forward to a new
revolutionary leadership that embodied these qualities to appear
among the people once again. Hobsbawm did not expect any such
to emerge from among these bandits; but he did suggest how those
energies could be and were absorbed by revolutionary
movements, and he has provided innumerable examples from
Andalusia and Italy, the Balkans and Hungary, deep into the
fabled steppe and forest lands of Ukraine and Russia. This is
unusual for a Marxist, and Hobsbawm has been suitably
disparaging about Bakunin elsewhere. “Bakunin added little to
Proudhon as a thinker, except an unquenchable passion for actual
revolution,—‘the passion for destruction’, he said, ‘is at the same
time a creative passion’—an ill-advised enthusiasm for the
revolutionary potential of criminals and the socially marginal, a
real sense of the peasantry and some powerful intuitions.” 48
Hobsbawm had taken elaborate care to distinguish the bandit from
the criminal and to suggest how this socially marginal type could
contribute to revolution; Bakunin was less circumspect, indeed
he was careless to the point of irresponsibility, in his use of words,
but he was fully alert to the distinctions that Hobsbawm made.
Yet Hobsbawm did not allow Bakunin the same insights, and if

46
Bandits, p. 18.
47
Michel Bakounine, [Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin,], Archives Bakounine.
Bakunin Archiv, Arthur Lehning ed., vol. 3, Gosudarstvennost’ i Anarkhiia,
Vvedenie, chast’ 1, 1873, (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1967), pp. 1-200, of which the
Pribavlenie A, pp. 164-179, especially pp. 170-178.
48
The Age of Capital, p. 193.

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Bakunin contributed in any way to his understanding of the

phenomenon, he did not acknowledge it.49

But the bandit story does not end there. Astonishingly, he has
driven the English farm labourer’s rebellion of 1830, the Swing
riots, into virtually the same fold as the banditry of southern and
eastern Europe.50 The English farm labourers were not peasants,
a species that had disappeared from England by the middle of
the eighteenth century, if not earlier. They were wage labour on
farms worked by tenant farmers of the great landowners. But until
the late eighteenth century they lived in a world of custom marked
by patronage, obligation, mutualism, parish relief, and notions
of fair wages and fair prices: they had not yet been overtaken by
an absolute market logic that determined employment, wages, and
prices, and deleted mutualism. This began to happen from the
1790s, was contained during the war years, and flared up
thereafter. As agricultural labour was inexorably proletarianized,
it rebelled. One wave of crisis occurred in 1816, the next in 1830,
the subject of this work. It took the form of issuing threatening
letters from one “Captain Swing”, attacking parsons and lower
officialdom, arson of property, and most of all, destruction of
threshing machines which had cut into employment.

Hereafter it merges with the story of the bandit. The rebels

had little relation to the politics of the time, to Radicalism or the
revolutionary wind carried across the Channel after the July
Revolution; but they knew whom they hated and despised and
what they wanted in concrete terms. Their targets were the
machines that deprived them of work; parsons, justices of the
peace, and overseers; and the property of the farmers. They were
“pre-political” and were innocent of an independent ideology.

49
Of his reviewers, only E. H. Carr seems to have related this work to Bakunin,
perhaps owing to his specialized interest in Russia, although Bakunin himself
was pan-European in his political action. See E. H. Carr’s review of Primitive
Rebels, in The British Journal of Sociology, vol. 11, no. 1, March 1960, pp.
92-93.
50
E. J. Hobsbawm and George Rudé, Captain Swing (London: Lawrence and
Wishart, 1969).

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They did not expect to overthrow the social order; and they even
imagined that King and Parliament could be with them. After
transportation to Australia, they settled down to new lives,
indistinguishable from free settlers, leaving no legacy of Captain
Swing and rebellion in the colony.51 Their type consisted of the
young, unmarried, and pauperized, isolated like shepherds,
generally independent, least amenable to discipline, often
poachers and smugglers, ready for violence, and naturally
rebellious.52 They were not organized for a concerted movement,
and their leaders were seldom chosen by election or formal
procedure. The leader emerged out of the mass for his charisma,
by a “natural process of selection, based on his personal initiative
or his standing in the community”.53 Hobsbawm has not said it
in so many words, but this was the English bandit, and the book
was published in the same year as the one on banditry. It is not
surprising that he finds the bandit a universal pre-modern type.
Prevalent even in industrializing England, it was erased with
the final triumph of the market, democracy, and bureaucracy
in the 1830s.

Nation and Empire

Nation and empire distinguish Europe as much as class, and

to the historian they might have seemed entitled to equal weight.
But clearly not to Hobsbawm. Nation is distinctly secondary, and
empire tertiary. He has consigned nationalism to an independent
but rich volume without allowing it to interrupt the study of the
conquering bourgeois in the three volumes of the Age series save
through the obligatory chapter, as indeed for the working class.
But its trajectory and fate runs parallel to class: it was created in
the age of revolution, its attained its calamitous apogee in the
twentieth century, and it exhausted itself by the end of it.

His arguments are not new but they are presented with

51
Captain Swing, pp. 65, 63, 18, 279.
52
Captain Swing, pp. 62-63.
53
Captain Swing, p. 207.

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characteristic verve and vivid illustration.54 With greater historical

density, they are an amalgam of the work of Ernest Gellner,
Benedict Anderson, Miroslav Hroch, Anthony D. Smith and
others.55 They claim that nationalism is the ideology that asserts
the congruence of a single contiguous territory and a single
culture; that nationalism created the nation with the assistance
of the state; that the nation did not create nationalism, instead it
was the other way about; that it is a very modern artefact, the
product of these processes, and dating from the eighteenth century
as usual; that it did not and could not have existed for the centuries
and millennia that every nationalist everywhere claims for his or
her particular nationality; and that each nationalism and nation
has erased innumerable potential nations and nationalisms.

The single culture itself has been variously defined by

theorists, but broadly it consists of a common territory, history,
economy, language, and culture once again, sometimes called
psychology. Different theorists use variable combinations of these
criteria; but when all else fails, language is used as a proxy. In
case of multiple languages, a single territory with what can pass
for a single history is deployed, as in the case of Spain, Italy,
Yugoslavia and the Russian Empire and Soviet Union. India, as
we know only too well, belongs to the latter category. Sometimes
religion stands in for culture, as it has for Zionism and Israel.
Every nationalism has to get its history wrong, and Hobsbawm,
like every critical historian of nationalism, must cite Ernest
Renan’s aphorism of 1882 to that effect. Extravagant histories
are written, which more often read like mythological tracts, of
origins lost in the mists of time, of heroic periods of overcoming
obstacles, of golden ages, of decline through moral turpitude,
treachery, and alien corruption, of resurrection in modern times,
and of a glorious destiny in the years to come.
54
E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780. Programme, Myth,
Reality, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992; 1st edn 1990)
55
Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986);
Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983); Benedict
Anderson, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism, revised edn (London: Verso, 1991).

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The question that is close to his heart was the difficult relation
between nationalism and socialism, especially in 1914. Socialism
was famously hostile to nationalism on the ground that
nationalism strove to unite classes instead of dividing the
exploiter from the exploited, and that it divided the working class
into national fragments instead of uniting them worldwide as
socialists hoped to do. In Rosa Luxemburg’s extreme vision,
nationalism would dissolve with capitalism in a universal socialist
world; many, but not all, nationalisms repaid the compliment by
dismissing socialism as dangerously divisive of community and
nation through their vaunted internationalism. Historians have
overwhelmingly endorsed the thesis that socialist internationalism
failed utterly when the choice for war had to be made in 1914.
Socialists and workers voted for their respective nations over their
class and movement and enthusiastically rushed into the
holocaust.

But Hobsbawm has pointed to the complexities of this

situation. Like so many other Marxists, he recognized that the
national states were the real organizing bases of power, and
workers and socialists had to work with them and conquer them
before heading out to the promised universalism. Given the
uneven development of capitalism, socialists had to function
within those compact territories first. It allowed for the
compatibility and co-existence of national and class identities.
Workers and others faced multiple ideological pulls, nationalist,
socialist, and confessional; and many found it possible to combine
the three rather than look upon them as mutually exclusive as
ideologues and historians have argued subsequently.
Democratization before 1914 had been driven powerfully by
workers and socialists; and the masses looked upon the state as
theirs also rather than of the bourgeoisie alone. Such a state
merited defence against alien assault, and governments were
astonished by the patriotic frenzy of 1914. But these masses also
did not expect their programmes of social reform to be abandoned
because of the war, and workers were ready enough to go on strike
during the war. National and social objectives seemed entirely

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compatible to them.56 In the polyglot empires and states of Central

and Eastern Europe, so many socialist movements were the
carriers of nationalist movements, as among the Finns, Poles,
Georgians, Armenians, and Jews, both Bundist and Zionist. After
the war, nationalism was written into so many socialist
programmes, not only into Wilson’s. Not merely was Pilsudski
of Poland socialist, but Lenin absorbed the energies of national
conflicts into his socialist revolution and eventually the Bolshevik
state. During the Second World War, nationalism and socialism
were locked in tight embrace in France, Yugoslavia and much of
occupied Europe. Social and radical movements pursued their
objectives both within the wars and outside of them, and they
imparted a socially radical momentum to both the wars. Hence
1914 was not a socialist failure to the extent that it has been
assumed.

This was an explanation for the nationalist passions of workers

in 1914, for socialist participation in the War, and of the alliance
between nationalists and communists in the thirties and forties
against the common fascist foe. It expressed Hobsbawm’s dream
of a Popular Front that united the people in common struggles
against greater evils like counter-revolution; and it blocked the
Right’s drive to convert people’s causes into national causes. But,
as the century wore on, and only socialism seemed to wane while
both capitalism and nationalism retained their vigour, he accepted
the reality of both for the foreseeable future and the need to work
on those foundations against new common threats in the form of
globalization.

This would be possible because nationalism came in varied

forms, and the better part of it could be extracted. This was the
citizen nationalism or universal nationalism bequeathed by the
French and American Revolutions as opposed to the exclusive,
parochial, and ethnic nationalisms that followed soon after.
Citizen nationalism consisted in citizens bonding in the politics
of the sovereign state of a single territory within which a single
56
Nations and Nationalism, pp. 88-89, 123-127, 130.

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political culture was cultivated and which looked forward to a

universal culture of humanity. Nationalism was revolutionary and
ecumenical, and the national territory was merely the stepping-
stone to humanity. It was inclusive, not exclusive; it represented
a common interest against a particular interest like privilege; and
it did not imply ethnicity, religion, or language as it did later.57
To ideologists in mid-century when bourgeois liberalism reigned
supreme, the criterion for nationhood was the capacity to expand
toward the horizon:

“…it was accepted in theory that social evolution

expanded the scale of human social units from family
and tribe to country and canton, from the local to the
regional, the national and eventually the global. Nations
were therefore, as it were, in tune with historical
evolution only insofar as they extended the scale of
human society, other things being equal.”58

This implied movements of national unification into larger

states, be it German or Italian, but also those like Poland,
Czechoslovakia, Rumania, and Yugolsavia, each of them
nationally heterogeneous. Territory, not ethnicity of any kind,
would provide the foundation for such national units, an ideal
retained in Austro-Marxist theories of nationality at the turn of
the century. Any people with any religion or language could live
in a state ruled by another people; and while they might conflict
for a variety of reasons, it would not be because different peoples
could not live under one political authority. Polyglot empires like
the Russian, Habsburg or Ottoman embraced large numbers of
such varied peoples, Jews were emancipated in much of Europe
during the nineteenth century, and the United States offered
citizenship to an immense variety of peoples.

After mid-century another form of nationalism reared its head.

It was exclusive, ethnic in various ways, separatist within an
existing state, xenophobic, and determined to erect permanent
57
Nations and Nationalism, pp. 18-22.
58
Nations and Nationalism, p. 33.

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barriers rather than dismantle them. From about the 1880s the
extremes appeared, of claiming that any group could demand a
state, territory, and nation for itself, that ethnicity and language
could be the sole criteria, and nationalism itself became an
ideology of the right.59 The politics of language appeared in every
part of the world leading to various forms of “purification”,
“simplification”, and standardization, in each case constructing
a new language, not for communication, but for social
engineering.60 Racism, although not the same as such nationalism,
flourished in this milieu.

This is the kind of nationalism that has descended on the world

in late twentieth century. The expansive citizen nationalism has
lost its élan, and “nationalism, however inescapable, is simply
no longer the historical force it was in the era between the French
Revolution and the end of imperialist colonialism after World War
II”,61 but the new ones “seem to be reactions of weakness and
fear, attempts to erect barricades to keep at bay the forces of the
modern world”,62 and akin to various fundamentalisms. It was not
clear in which direction it was heading, but it seemed obvious
that neither form of nationalism would be decisive in the new
world after 1991. The nation had provided the power base from
which to assert rights internationally, especially for labour; and
that was eroding rapidly.63 The only hope, but not a prediction or
even expectation, was the possibly residual function of a citizen
nationalism as a shield from the scorching blast of globalization.64
It was a melancholic conclusion, since citizen nationalism at one
time was revolutionary and ecumenical, not protectionist and
restrictive.

59
Nations and Nationalism, p. 102.
60
Nations and Nationalism, pp. 110-120.
61
Nations and Nationalism, p. 169.
62
Nations and Nationalism, p. 170.
63
E. J. Hobsbawm, “Guessing about Global Change,” International Labor
and Working Class History, vol. 47, Spring 1995, pp. 39-44.
64
Wade Matthews, “Class, Nation, and Capitalist Globalization: Eric
Hobsbawm and the National Questions,” International Review of Social
History, vol. 53, 2008, pp. 63-99, here pp. 94-95.

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He edited what might look like a companion volume to his

work on nationalism, but it had been published in fact seven years
earlier.65 The Invention of Tradition, a slim volume of outstanding
essays, has enjoyed a vogue that is surprising. The contributions
are all enlightening in every way, but the theme is not remotely
novel. Historians have for long been busy uncovering myths of
all kinds, national, local, religious, class, caste, tribal, and much
else. This was the greatest claim of the professional historian and
of what is disparagingly called positivist history from the
eighteenth century. Hobsbawm’s volume exposes yet again
another set of myths and traditions, those generated or fabricated
by nationalism.

Perhaps the explanation for its success lies elsewhere. This

anthology should be set alongside Pierre Nora’s extraordinary
project of seven volumes of dozens of scintillating essays by some
of the most distinguished historians of France.66 It is a study of
how a national memory had been constructed around a number
of sites or themes in the course of the past two centuries, and
how that memory was now eroding. (Hobsbawm however
distanced himself from Nora on the Rankean ground that it was
a flight from “the actual past” and “more or less sophisticated
reductions of history to mere forms of literary composition.”).67
In comparable fashion, the Subaltern Studies group unpacked the
claims of Indian nationalism to hegemony in the history of modern
India and the serial jousts with the British Empire. Nora’s
assemblage is a beautiful requiem to the French nation state;
Hobsbawm’s much smaller effort is an ironic inquiry into the
artificiality of the nation; and Subaltern Studies sharply punctures
what they see as the bloated balloon of Indian nationalism.

65
Eric Hobsbawm, Terence Ranger, eds, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1983).
66
Pierre Nora ed., Les lieux de mémoire, 7 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1984-1992)
67
E. J. Hobsbawm, “A Life in History,” Past and Present, no. 177, 2002, pp.
3-16, here p. 13.

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Each of these arose from the same ground of the hollowing

of the nation, but the spirit was different in each case. They
appeared in the eighties when the nation was losing its lustre.
International organizations cut into national sovereignty in
different ways from the sixties. A swathe of economic activities
were transnationalized from the seventies, that is, they had
no basis in any specific national boundaries, unlike inter-
nationalization, which consisted in national firms expanding their
enterprise beyond their national borders.68 In Europe, the nation
was, or seemed to be, ending its spectacularly successful career
with the halting progress of the European unification. Anti-
colonial nationalisms had run their course, with decolonization
climaxing in the exhilaration of American defeat in Vietnam.
Nationalism in the former colonies now seemed parochial: the
pressure to globalize from the eighties and carried out in the
nineties in so much of the world, heightened the sense of the
inadequacy of what had once been emancipating. The Soviet
Union disintegrated, not on account of nationalism, but owing to
failure in the Cold War. Nationalism was merely the beneficiary,
not the agent, of the Soviet dissolution; and post-Soviet
nationalisms are bereft of the creative energy of both the European
nationalisms of the nineteenth century and of the anti-colonial
ones of the twentieth, their stridency notwithstanding. Thereafter
American hyperpower and globalization have further served to
cool this passion. The great burst of critical studies on nation and
nationalism that appeared from the seventies is a reflection of
the deliquescence of the nation state and of nationalism the world
over.69 The time was ripe for exposure by Hobsbawm, farewell
by Nora, and dismissal by the Subaltern Studies group.

Catastrophe, Ecstasy and Gloom: The Twentieth Century

As he reflected on the Enlightenment project, its triumphs in

the nineteenth century and its disasters in the twentieth,
Hobsbawm chronicled the progress of barbarism throughout the

68
Age of Extremes, p. 277.
69
Nations and Nationalism, pp. 3-4, and ch. 6.

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twentieth century, beginning with 1914 when the lamps went out
over Europe. It is a depressing record with which few could
disagree. Warfare became total as governments felt free to send
millions of their own citizens into holocausts such as at Ypres
and Verdun, as non-combatants became fair game as much as
combatants, as national populations were mobilized behind their
respective governments to demonize their opponents, as war led
to breakdowns of the social and political order on a scale never
known before in history, and eventually as approximately 187
million of the world’s population were slaughtered between 1914
and 1991.

In his analysis of the horrors of the twentieth century, he

isolated fascism for its sinister singularity. The Stalinist phase of
Soviet socialism was not assimilated to barbarism as totalitarian
theory so favoured;70 and the atrocities of colonial regimes were
ignored, whatever their excesses in Africa, in India, and in South
East Asia. Soviet socialism belonged to the tradition of the
Enlightenment, and its genocidal ferocity was condoned on that
ground. By the same logic, imperialist savagery was not worthy
of note as it issued from liberal capitalism, again the self-
conscious heir of the Enlightenment. Fascism on the other hand
deliberately repudiated or claimed to repudiate the Enlightenment.
In sum, the brutalities of communism and liberalism were
deviations from their own norms and could be corrected, those
of fascism were its own norm and had to be fought to extinction.
In the story of the epic struggle between good and evil, the
alliance of liberalism and communism seemed natural, as befitted
the proper legatees of the Enlightenment; and the opponents
appear as “the threat of an entire world built on the deliberate
reversal of civilization.”71 He spoke of fascism as an isolated
phenomenon with little support outside its core areas, and that it
had “dissolved like a clump of earth thrown into a river.”72 He
claimed that fascism “had never been, even in theory, a universal

70
Age of Extremes, pp. 393-394.
71
Age of Extremes, p. 150.
72
Age of Extremes, p. 175.

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programme or political project.”73 Ultimately, fascism was outside

the pale.

But ideological hatred by itself does not make for theoretical

clarity. The twentieth century inspired profound reflections on
the nature of barbarism in the modern world. It has been variously
posited as the antithesis of the Enlightenment, as generated by
it, and as internal to it.74 While Adorno and Horkheimer agonized
over the manner in which it had been spewed out by the
Enlightenment itself 75 and have been followed by Bauman76 in
that respect, they have also suggested that it was internal to it, a
demon to wrestle with perpetually. Hobsbawm has shed so much
light on the darkest century of human history that he could not
indulge any naïve faith in the glories of the textbook version of
the Enlightenment. But he appraised the twentieth century as a
triumph over the barbarism that had negated the Enlightenment.
As evil it had been vanquished; as a cancer it had been rooted
out. But was it an evil or a cancer; was it external or did it grow
out of all that the Enlightenment had bequeathed? In the
exhilaration of the victory of 1945 he seemed to think of it as the
ultimate triumph; but when he described the post Cold War
condition in almost the same terms as the fascist, it seemed more
like a cancer that could periodically recur. As a proper historian,
he recorded that fascism grew on democratic soil. “The major
difference between the fascist and non-fascist Right is that fascism
existed by mobilizing masses from below. It belonged essentially
to the era of democratic and popular politics which traditional
reactionaries deplored and which champions of the ‘organic state’
tried to by-pass. Fascism gloried in the mobilization of masses

73
Age of Extremes, p. 176.
74
Josef Früchtl, Our Enlightened Barbarian Modernity and the Project of a
Critical Theory of Culture (Amsterdam, NLD: Amsterdam University Press,
2008), p. 13.
75
Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment,
translated by John Cumming (London: Verso, 1979; original German edn 1969).
76
Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1991).

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...Fascists were the revolutionaries of counter-revolution...”77 He

fought it as if it were external; but the historian in him was aware
that it was internal to “civilization.” Race could be as universal
to a certain range of the fascist species as class to the communist
or the citizen to the liberal; in each case challenges had to be
extirpated. Each sought perfection through elimination, which was
Bauman’s thesis. We have not seen the end of such cancers, or
perhaps even internal demons, and the post-Cold War world has
already thrown up ample evidence of such possibilities.

A Unifying Vision of Crisis?

Is there is a unifying vision to this enormous corpus? There

need not be, and a person who has lived nearly a century might
have been entitled to change his mind or be inconsistent. A shift
of focus from a youthful, sometimes breezy Marxism and all the
central concerns of Marxists then have been noted, from the
transition debate, the standard of living question, the aristocracy
of labour thesis, and labour history generally, to the fate of the
modern world, including some of the losers like the bandits. But
such a shift of themes of interest need not betoken a change of
method or vision. Insofar as a single vision may be identified, it
is that of crisis, stretching from the general crisis of the
seventeenth century and the crisis of the old type to the repetitive
crises of capitalism down to the post-Cold War years.

Some of these crises are the obvious ones of the economy,

war, and revolution; but even his celebration of the achievements
of the conquering bourgeois are cast in the form of crises. It is
not a history of progress, evolution, problem-solving, and growing
stability. It is never a calm world, not even for five years. At the
end of the three volumes of the Age series, he summed up his
central insight thus: “Their [historians’] central preoccupation,
and the one which runs through the present book, must be to
understand and to show how the era of peace, of confident
bourgeois civilization, growing wealth and western empires

77
The Age of Extremes, p. 117.

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inevitably carried within itself the embryo of the era of war,

revolution and crisis which put an end to it.”78 Not merely Marx
but Hegel also would have been pleased.

The restlessness of the capitalist pulsates through his work.

His history is a record of extraordinary feats of bourgeois
achievement combined with spectacular catastrophes of their own
making. His modern world is in the grip of endemic crisis even
as it notches up progress that would have been almost impossible
to imagine from one generation to the next. Nothing is ever stable
or final, capitalism lurches from crisis to crisis dragging the
socialist world in its wake. There are losers and there are winners,
but his focus is less on their undoubted privations and triumphs
and more on the fact of continual change and crisis and the
dizzying rapidity of it. Until the middle of the twentieth century
these were more likely due to the creativity and contradictions
inherent to capitalism; thereafter it shifts to being the dangers of
unbridled developmentalism; and humanity faces a greater threat
from the latter than from the former.

The story of Victorian prosperity is nothing if not one of

crises, of a system always threatening to go out of control and
nearly doing so in the crash of 1873. The boom of 1850-1857
was followed by a slump in 1857-1858, a revival and another
slump in 1867-1868 culminating in the great crash of 1873. The
boom was good for manufacturers but not for workers whose
wages could not keep up with the inflation. It induced one more
stage in the unification of the world, but divided it yet again into
advanced and backward. The world was united into one market,
but crises became instantly worldwide instead of being confined
regionally and to specific markets. Life became more standardized
across the board in the developed world, but it was polarized into
standardized nationalisms that tore at each other with a bitterness
that could not have been contemplated earlier. The mass hatreds
and competitions generated by nations and nationalism could not
be contained within the liberal bourgeois world created by the

78
The Age of Empire, p. 327.

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dual revolution. Absolutist regimes knew that bourgeoisie and

capitalism brought progress and prosperity; but they tried in vain
to have them without the political consequences. Contemporaries
could not comprehend the paradox of the liberalizing and
modernizing Emperor Alexander II being assassinated by the
beneficiaries of his reforms.

Democracy is the most famous instance of loss of control. It

is celebrated as progress, empowerment, and citizenship; but it
energized the masses who tended not to be democratic, liberal,
socialist or rational. Bourgeoisies and aristocracies could threaten
each other with mass mobilizations and extensions of the
franchise; neither wanted it but both resorted to it to outflank their
opponents; in the event both faced the dreadful prospect from the
eighteen sixties of mass political parties of the proletariat,
peasantry, and lower middle class fired in different ways by
nationalism, class anger, resentment and frustration. Bismarck and
Disraeli were successful performers on the conservative side
displaying the manner in which the masses could be used against
the liberals. Napoleon III, the political fixer to whom an unkind
fate had granted merely the name without its genius, superseded
both conservative and liberal through a plebiscitary dictatorship
that revealed the ominous outlines of mass democracy. The mass
mobilizations of democracy entailed new loyalties; and regimes
desperately galloped ahead of the breaking ice by resorting to
irrationalism, xenophobia, colonial conquests, new traditions like
national anthems, national days, monuments, and vast official
spectacles like coronations, whether in European capitals or even
the colonial one of Delhi in 1911. The coming of progress to
agriculture brought with it ever more dangers. As peasants were
released from slavery, serfdom, and independent household
production, they threatened insurrections that could join with
revolutions, as eventually so many of them did in different parts
of the world.

Did the bourgeois enjoy his or her triumph, unlimited

prosperity, and freedom to be creative. Not quite. They took to
new forms of leisure, be it sport, or trekking in the mountains, or

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trips to seaside resorts and spas. But why did Anglo-Saxon male
urban professionals begin climbing Alpine slopes with such
passion? The answer is vintage Hobsbawm: “perhaps the close
company of tough and handsome native guides had something to
do with it.”79 The repression and hypocrisy of bourgeois sexuality
has been much written about. But to Hobsbawm they seemed more
tormented by their state of liberation than hypocritical about it.
Roman Catholic men could philander freely as long as they
maintained their families properly; but Protestant men sought to
obey the moral law and agonized over their desire to violate it
and their actual violations of it. Sex was concealed, not flaunted,
with liberation; but secondary sexual characteristics were
brandished in the form of luxurious facial hair growth among men
and flouncy dresses that exaggerated the buttocks in women. The
individual male had been liberated through citizenship; but the
family that nurtured him, and to which he retreated from the social
Darwinism of the outside world, was held in thrall. He was a
dictator to his wife, children and servants as much as Krupp was
to his factories and Wagner to his enthralled audiences. A world
of equals had been created, yet hierarchies remained or were
engendered. Why? It was agreed that it was not due to superior
intellect, education, or morality, for that would not account for
the wealth of the plutocrat, the subordination of women, or the
misery of the proletariat. The answer was found in what was to
become the scourge of the twentieth century: genetic selection
and scientific racism. This baleful ideology was conceived in the
womb of bourgeois liberalism to account for inequalities in a
world of equals.

The world of art and literature was more than the unfolding
of creative genius. His The Age of Empire launched into the
subject with crisis, and as always, specifically of the bourgeoisie:
“Perhaps nothing illustrates the identity crisis through which
bourgeois society passed in this period better than the history of
the arts from the 1870s to 1914. It was the era when both the
creative arts and the public for them lost their bearings.” He saw

79
The Age of Capital, p. 243.

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the crux of the problem in the divergence of the modern from the
contemporary. Until about 1900, the modern in art and politics
went hand in hand; thereafter they diverged. Thus the Arts and
Crafts Movement, which found its incarnations across Europe up
to Russia, turned to the pre-modern as a source of inspiration,
but not for the purpose of restoration. Hence William Morris could
be socialist, and art and politics could go together. But anxieties
mounted as the bourgeoisie adopted the movement; at the same
time mass socialism was becoming routine politics; and art and
politics deviated. But the avant-garde, which flourished after
1900, failed to remake the world in its image when revolution
swept the world in the second decade. The most important
movement in the arts since the Renaissance was overtaken by the
mass entertainment industry of high technology, which remade
the world in its own image instead. All that was considered high
art was swept up in the mass culture of mediocre, profit driven,
and deliberately philistine taste. As he noted, the arts were indeed
revolutionized, but not by those who wanted to do so.

Even a subject like trade union history is presented in the

manner of stock market fluctuations. There are “jumps”, jerky
movements upward in membership and activity, and sudden
collapses.80 Compare these with the accounts of trade unions by
Sidney and Beatrice Webb81 or Henry Pelling.82 Their histories
of impeccable scholarship reveal a steady growth with periodic
retreats, expansion into new regions and sectors, attachment to
political ideologies like socialism or political parties like Labour,
but staid and regular withal. They do not impart that sense of crisis
and extremes as Hobsbawm does.

The twentieth century was in the grip of endemic crisis; and

with the modern mutating into the post-modern, he discerned “the
80
“Economic Fluctuations and Some Social Movements since 1800” (1952),
in Labouring Men, ch. 8, pp. 126-157.
81
Sidney and Beatrice Webb, The History of Trade Unionism, 5th edn (London:
Longmans, 1902).
82
Henry Pelling, A History of British Trade Unionism, 2nd edn (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1971).

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general breakdown of civilization as we know it over large parts

of the world in and since the 1980s,”83 just as the fascist poison
of the 1930s had boded “the threat of an entire world built on the
deliberate reversal of civilization.”84 But it seemed to be worse
than the horrors of all that preceded it, for the world seemed to
have become rudderless, without direction, with decision-makers
not knowing what to do with a world that has escaped their
control. The atrocities perpetrated between 1914 and 1991 could
be ascribed to decisions by a Hitler, a Stalin, a Mao, or their
equivalents, but that somehow did not seem appropriate after
1991. The world seemed plunged into Hobbesian anarchy and
Durkheimian anomie; for “we no longer know what ‘the done
thing’ is, there is only ‘one’s own thing’.” 85 It pessimistically
mimicked Fukuyama’s optimism, for capitalism was now bereft
of an internal contradiction that could either contain its excesses
or ensure its dissolution.86

The end was heralded in so many different ways from the

eighties. Working class consciousness seemed to have been
extinguished although the working class and the social democratic
parties of Western Europe continued to flourish into the eighties
at least. The great social revolutions of our times are no longer
linked to socialist ideals but of the kind that the Iranian revolution
represented.87 The big city was no longer the arena of proletarian
and socialist mass politics but of a ghettoized form of protest
action, of violence reminiscent of the early nineteenth century
but without the structure that sustained those forms of
radicalism. 88 A new form of identity politics seemed to have
replaced the socialist politics of emancipation which spoke for
83
Eric Hobsbawm, “Barbarism: A User’s Guide,” New Left Review, I/206,
1994, pp. 44-54, here p. 47.
84
Age of Extremes, p. 150.
85
“Barbarism: A User’s Guide,” p. 54.
86
Gregory Elliott, Ends in Sight. Marx / Fukuyama / Hobsbawm / Anderson
(London: Pluto Press, 2008), p. 85.
87
Eric Hobsbawm, “Farewell to the Classic Labour Movement? New Left
Review, I/173, January-February 1989, pp. 69-74.
88
Eric Hobsbawm, “Labour in the Great City,” New Left Review, I/166, Nov.-
Dec. 1987, pp. 39-51.

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everyone rather than a group or groups,89 and this includes the

new nationalisms as of Scotland or Wales.

He sounded more like an aristocrat surveying the debris of

the French Revolution and the coming of modernity when norms
were self-legislated, not given by tradition; he could equally have
been a grand bourgeois appalled at the socialist revolution of
1917 and the end of order and property, and of civilization as he
knew it until then. Hobsbawm had lived the modern world of the
two centuries since 1789 that he has analysed so eloquently; he
now sensed that world was dissolving into a postmodern one
which he could not comprehend and therefore could not discern
any comprehension among those who led or theorized that
transformation. It is an ironic comment on the fate of one who
had lived on the radical edge of modernity for nearly a century.
He himself had expertly described the revolutionary logic of
continual change and radicalization as it began with the French
Revolution, with the world which had been superseded in 1991
and its aftermath. The outline of the future was not clear and
postmodernists did not seem to make any sense. In this lay the
barbarism of our times. To him it was the end of the modern world
of which he was such an accomplished historian, just as so many
others were enthusiastically welcoming it as the renewal of all
that the Enlightenment had once seemed to promise.90

Marxism

In what sense was Hobsbawm a Marxist as a historian?

He was a Marxist, a communist, and a member of the Communist
Party of Great Britain which died before he did; and Marx
accompanies him on all his expeditions like “a shadow or faithful

89
Eric Hobsbawm, “Identity Politics and the Left,” New Left Review, I/217,
May-Jun. 1996, pp. 38-47.
90
Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York:
The Free Press, Macmillan, 1992), ch. 4, especially p. 42; Robert Kagan, The
Return of History and the End of Dreams (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008),
pp. 5-9.

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wife”, as Pushkin might say.91 But he has told us little about the
method to his Marxist history. Marxist admirers have complained
that in spite of several well-received books and a high profile as
a Marxist historian, he had been incorrigibly reticent on his
method and theory.92 He has occasionally enlightened us, but
regrettably, these theoretical exercises do not compare with his
histories for depth, clarity, or sophistication. He has preferred the
passing comment to the extended treatise. In effect, his empirical
work of so many books is his theoretical statement on what is
Marxist history. Nobody could have asked for a more exhaustive
account, but it is not rendered in the form of a series of theoretical
propositions, and still less of capsules to be effortlessly swallowed
or of aphorisms for instant quotation. His method must be
extracted from this enormous corpus, and it would reveal
inconsistencies, contradictions, shifts of positions, and most of
all, convergence between Marxists and non-Marxists, all which
makes it impossible to identify a single Marxist method. It should
also come as no surprise if at least some of his theoretical
pronouncements seem to be at variance with his historical
exposition.

His works have been described as Marxist and reviewers have

generously distributed backhanded compliments with the odd
disparagement. Commenting on Primitive Rebels, Karl Helleiner
observed that in spite of being a “scholar of left-wing leanings”,
Hobsbawm had given these archaic social movements “a much
more sympathetic hearing” than the “Fathers of Communism” had
cared to do, 93 while Fritz Redlich approved of the work but
warned readers “it is clear that this book is written from the

91
“Kak ten’ il’ vernaia zhena”, in Aleksandr’ Pushkin, Evgenii Onegin, ch. 1,
stanza 54.
92
James, Cronin, “Creating a Marxist Historiography: The Contribution of
Hobsbawm,” Radical History Review, 19, Winter 1978-1979, pp. 87-109, here
pp. 94-96.
93
Karl F. Helleiner, in The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political
Science / Revue canadienne d’Economique et de Science Politique, vol. 26,
no. 4, Nov. 1960, p. 660.

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standpoint of socialists.” 94 Julian Pitt-Rivers accused him of

evolutionary Marxism, 95 while François Billacois warmly
welcomed Bandits but mentioned only in passing that Hobsbawm
was a Marxist without suggesting any influence on his method.96
Govinda Pillai, as a communist writing in a communist party
journal, was enthusiastic about this contribution to Marxist
history; but unusually, he congratulated Hobsbawm “that in spite
of the ideological conviction of the author, he does not attempt
to fit in facts to preconceived theories.” 97 David Epstein was
exceptional in complimenting him on his Bandits attesting to the
“renewed vitality of Marxism”, on his being “a committed
Marxist, yet alive to the subtlety and vitality of people who live
in an archaic world”, and especially of possessing the magic of
the bandit!98 Mark Solomon likewise claimed that Hobsbawm’s
Primitive Rebels “advanced a creative Marxist framework for
reinterpreting (or interpreting) Robin Hood-style banditry, peasant
revolutionary groups, ‘primitive’ social agitation, pre-industrial
urban mobs and early secret labor movements.”99 Jackie Assayag
identified Hobsbawm’s distinction between the pre-political
bandit and the political revolutionary that followed as an instance
of Marxist, indeed Leninist, teleology of stages, 100 which is
perhaps Pitt-Rivers’s meaning of evolutionary Marxism. None of
them, save Assayag, explained what was Marxist about them,

94
Fritz Redlich, in Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte,
Bd 47, H. 3, Sept. 1960, p. 416.
95
Julian Pitt-Rivers, in American Anthropologist, New Series, vol. 63, no. 4,
Aug. 1961, pp. 855-856.
96
François Billacois in Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 28e année, no. 5,
Sept.-Oct. 1973, pp. 1160-1162.
97
P. Govinda Pillai, “The World of Social Bandits,” Social Scientist, vol. 2,
no. 11, June 1974, pp. 71-75.
98
David G. Epstein in American Anthropologist, vol. 73, no. 4, Aug. 1971, pp.
958-960;
99
Mark Solomon, “An Engagement of Head and Heart: Eric Hobsbawm’s 20th
Century, Science & Society vol. 71, no. 3, July 2007, pp. 356-360.
100
Jackie Assayag, “ ‘Sur les échasses du temps’. Histoire et anthropologie
chez Eric J. Hobsbawm,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, t. 53e,
no. 4 bis, 2006, pp. 100-113, here pp. 106, 110.

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presumably because social history and these subjects of inquiry

are assumed to make them Marxist.

Ashworth warns us that with The Age of Capital “Hobsbawm

is to the Marxist interpretation of history [what] Macaulay is to
the Whig. His book should be read for new insights and constant
stimulus. But, no more than Macaulay’s, should his version be
swallowed whole.”101 John F. C. Harrison reassures us that he was
Marxist in the tradition of Marx himself rather than of Marxists,
and that he had worn his Marxism “very lightly indeed,”102 while
Max Fletcher informs us that this outstanding work exhibits the
analytical quality of Das Kapital rather than the propagandistic
froth of the Communist Manifesto.103 Lawrence Murray concluded
a positive assessment with appropriate condescension: “…those
who have disdained Marxist history as narrowly ‘economically
determinist’ will be acquainted with the wider possibilities of an
unorthodox approach.” 104 Stephen Salsbury complained that
“Hobsbawm is a confirmed Marxist and this strongly colours his
book. While many of his most significant judgements remain free
of Marxist bias, the author spends a disproportionate amount of
time discussing Marx’s view on each particular historical event
or trend…Despite this bias, the professional historian will enjoy
reading Hobsbawm’s work and it will serve as an excellent
introduction for the literate reader who knows little or nothing
about mid-century world history.”105 Edward Shorter also found
the book “so intellectually appealing” in spite of being a “standard
Marxist analysis.” 106 Karl de Schweinitz has discharged the

101
W. Ashworth, Review of The Age of Capital,in The Economic History Review,
New Series, vol. 29, no. 3, Aug., 1976, pp. 528-529.
102
John F. C. Harrison, Review of The Age of Capital,inVictorian Studies, vol.
20, no. 4, Summer, 1977, pp. 423-425
103
Max E. Fletcher, Review of The Age of Capital,in The Journal of Economic
History, vol. 37, no. 2, Jun., 1977, pp. 524-526.
104
Lawrence L. Murray, Review of The Age of Capital, in The Business History
Review, vol. 51, no. 1, Spring 1977, pp. 103-104.
105
Stephen Salsbury, Review of The Age of Capital, in Technology and Culture,
vol. 18, no. 2, Apr. 1977, pp. 256-257.
106
Edward Shorter, Review of The Age of Capital, in Journal of
Interdisciplinary History, vol. 8, no. 1, Summer 1977, pp. 155-157.

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unusual function of defending Marx from Hobsbawm’s charge

that he had welcomed the colonial conquest of India; but besides
endorsing the work of this “distinguished Marxist historian”, he
had nothing to say on method.107 Alford applauded his immense
erudition while dismissing his Marxism as “loose” and “old-
fashioned.”108 Alain Silvera declared, “Although at no point does
he ever spell out the theoretical assumptions of his interpretation,
the whole architecture of his edifice is firmly rooted in classical
Marxism handled with grace and elegance and with a lively
attention to the curious but telling detail.”109 William Langer paid
him the supreme compliment of comparing him to Jacob
Burckhardt, but went on to note that “Hobsbawm is a confirmed
Marxist, so it is easy for him to elaborate on economic
developments and their consequences. I hasten to add, however,
that he is not painfully Marxist.”110 Some were merely perverse:
“It is not difficult to see why the attempt to make sense of history
on this scale appears to be less difficult for Professor Hobsbawm
than many other historians, for the strong hypothesis of Marxist
orthodoxy that sustains his exposition throughout, while Marx
himself emerges as the solitary hero in an unheroic era.” He
concluded that this was an example of “how not to write
history.” 111 Hobsbawm has had to suffer the embarrassing
compliment of having his The Age of Capital greeted as a
handbook for social and political activism rather than one of
scholarship: “For workers, teachers, students, union organizers,
female liberationists, and youth group militants, Hobsbawm’s
book under review, coinciding as it does with an admirable new
translation of ‘Capital’, is an event to be celebrated.” Perhaps

107
Karl de Schweinitz, Review of The Age of Capital, in Journal of Economic
Issues, vol. 10, no. 4, Dec. 1976, pp. 967-970.
108
B. W. E. Alford, Review of The Age of Empire, inThe Economic History
Review, New Series, vol. 42, no. 2, May, 1989, pp. 302-303.
109
Alain Silvera, Review of The Age of Empire, in Victorian Studies, vol. 32,
no. 3, Spring, 1989, pp. 460-461.
110
William L. Langer, Review of The Age of Capital, in The American Historical
Review, vol. 81, no. 4, Oct., 1976, p. 817.
111
Roy A. Church, Review of The Age of Capital, in Journal of Economic
Literature, vol. 15, no. 4, Dec., 1977, pp. 1347-1348.

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predictably, it was from the Economic and Political Weekly.112 In

short, he may have been a Marxist, but he knew how to read and
write. But nobody has quite explained in what sense his historical
work may be considered Marxist.

On the other hand, a significant number of important

reviewers have ignored his Marxism altogether. Many of the
readers of his two books on primitive rebels 113 and social
banditry 114 don’t seem to have noticed it. Pat O’Malley is an
avowed Marxist, a sociologist and legal theorist, but he discussed
Hobsbawm’s account of social banditry in considerable detail
several times without touching upon the question of his Marxism
or its supposed method.115 Nor did Anton Blok, who likewise

112
Anon, “Creation of World Capitalist Economy”, Economic and Political
Weekly, vol. 12, no. 22, May 28, 1977, pp. 875-877, here p. 875.
113
See reviews by Raymond Carr in Economic History Review, New Series,
vol. 12, no. 2, 1959, pp. 348-350; Raglan in Man, vol. 49, Aug. 1959, pp. 144-
145; Lewis A. Coser in American Sociological Review, vol. 25, no. 6, Dec.
1960, pp. 988-989; E. H. Carr in The British Journal of Sociology, vol. 11, no.
1, Mar. 1969, pp. 92-93; Rita James in American Journal of Sociology, vol.
66, no. 1, Jul. 1960, pp. 97-98; Peter Worsley, “The Revolt of the Inarticulate,”
Past and Present, no. 17, Apr. 1960, pp. 87-93; H. Hearder in The English
Historical Review, vol. 76, no. 298, Jan. 1961, p. 167; César Graña, in American
Sociological Review, vol. 29, no. 5, Oct. 1964, pp. 761-762; Peter N. Stearns
in The Journal of Modern History, vol. 36, no. 1, Mar. 1961, pp. 82-83;
and John C. Cowley in Science and Society, vol. 31, no. 3, Summer 1967,
pp. 365-367.
114
See reviews by Mary McIntosh in The British Journal of Sociology, vol. 21,
no. 3, Sept. 1970, p. 355; James W. Hurst in Science and Society, vol. 35, no.
3, Fall 1971, pp. 360-362.
115
Pat O’Malley, “Social Bandits, Modern Capitalism and the Traditional
Peasantry. A Critique of Hobsbawm,” The Journal of Peasant Studies, vol. 6,
no. 4, 1979, pp. 489-501; idem, “Class Conflict, Land and Social Banditry:
Bushranging in Nineteenth Century Australia,” Social Problems, vol. 26, no.
3, Feb. 1979, pp. 271-283; idem,“The Suppression of Social Banditry; Train
Robbers in the US Border States and Bush Rangers in Australia, 1865-1905,
Crime and Social Justice, no. 16, Winter 1981, pp. 32-39. See also Hobsbawm’s
response to O’Malley’s critique, reflecting on the extent to which banditry
could persist in capitalist and post-traditional peasant societies, in Bandits,
pp. 150-164.

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devoted considerable attention to Hobsbawm’s social banditry.116

The Marxist Genovese, in a substantial appraisal of Hobsbawm’s
Marxist method, was not able to identify anything more than
sympathy for bandits: “Hobsbawm’s judicious treatment of the
strength and weakness of the people with whose struggles for
justice he passionately identifies appears in especially moving
form in his studies of social bandits.”117 Henri Dubief commended
Hobsbawm for taking care “not to revive defunct freudo-marxist
interpretations,”118 while others have referred to them only en
passant or not at all when fruitfully employing his insights.119

Of the Age series, Geoffrey Bruun found his The Age of

Revolution lacked “a comprehensive unity and integration”; and
if he thought the Marxism distorting, he did not mention it at all.120
Theodore Hamerow again found it uneven and brilliant, while
John F. C. Harrison was just as enthusiastic, even if he regretted
the short shrift given to religion; but neither mentioned Marx.121
A. Goodwin seems to have been disoriented by the fact that one
who professed to be a Marxist could compose a work of such
exceptional quality. “Dr. E. J. Hobsbawm has made this selective
thesis [that of the dual revolution] his own and has exploited it
with astonishing virtuosity. The work is challenging, learned,
brilliant in its analytical power, wide-ranging in its exposition of

116
Anton Blok, “The Peasant and the Brigand: Social Banditry Reconsidered,”
Comparative Studies in Society and History, 14, 1972, pp. 494-503. Hobsbawm
replied to Blok’s critical comments, in Bandits, pp. 139-143.
117
Genovese, “The Politics of Class Struggle,” p. 19.
118
Henri Dubief in Revue Historique, t. 225, fasc. 2, 1961, pp. 483-487, here
p. 487.
119
See Casey R. Schmitt, “The Barefoot Bandit, Outlaw Legend, and Modern
American Folk Heroism,” Folklore, 123, Apr. 2012, pp. 74-83.
120
Geoffrey Bruun, Review of The Age of Revolution, in Political Science
Quarterly, vol. 79, no. 3 (Sept., 1964), pp. 446-447.
121
Theodore S. Hamerow, Review of The Age of Revolution, in American
Historical Review, vol. 68, no. 4, July 1963, pp. 1018-1019; John F. C. Harrison,
“Recent Writing on the History of Victorian England”, Victorian Studies, vol.
8, no. 3, Mar., 1965, pp. 263-270, here 265.

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literary, aesthetic and scientific achievements and packed with

novel insight.”122 Perhaps Hobsbawm was not being so selective
after all. S. D. Berkowitz hailed his social history in The Age of
Capital but regretted his inadequate handling of the economic
history. “It lacks a coherent and detailed theoretical framework
for the changes it describes, but it makes up for this in its scope
and depth of presentation of the consequences of the extension
and consolidation of modern industrial capitalism.”123 J. P. T. Bury
enjoyed the immense erudition and readability of the work, but
complained, without comment on method, that the largest number
of index references was to Marx.124 This might have been the
proper occasion to comment on Marxism, but it did not appear
on the radar. Eugen Weber warmly welcomed his The Age of
Empire without once referring to Marx or Marxism,125 while John
Saville did not merely bypass Marxism altogether but threw in
Nietzsche for good measure: “For those who work their way
attentively through this newest volume, one result might be a
reaching out for some of the works of Nietzsche as part of a more
general recognition of the role and place of the artistic imagination
in the delineation of social and political change.” 126 Others
mention his Marxism cursorily or not at all.127

If Hobsbawm has not told us what is Marxist history, he

has told us what is it not but passes for it, and this is known as
vulgar Marxism.

122
A. Goodwin, Review of The Age of Revolution, in The English Historical
Review, vol. 79, no. 312, July 1964, pp. 616-617.
123
S. D. Berkowitz, Review of The Age of Capital, in Contemporary Sociology,
vol. 6, no. 4, July, 1977, pp. 428-430, here p. 430.
124
J. P. T. Bury, Review of The Age of Capital in The English Historical Review,
vol. 92, no. 363, Apr. 1977, p. 458.
125
Eugen Weber, in The American Historical Review, vol. 74, no. 2, Apr. 1989,
p. 432.
126
John Saville, Review of The Age of Empirein International Labor and
Working-Class History, no. 36 (Fall, 1989), pp. 134-137, here p. 137.
127
A. L. Morton, Review of The Age of Capital in Science and Society, vol. 42,
no. 1, Spring 1978, pp. 94-97.

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“the Marxist influence among historians has been

identified with a few relatively simple, if powerful,
ideas, which have, in one way or another, been
associated with Marx and the movements inspired by
his thought, but which are not necessarily Marxist at
all, or which, in the form that has been most influential,
has not necessarily been representative of the mature
thought of Marx. We shall call this type of influence
‘vulgar-Marxist’, and the major problem of analysis is
to separate the vulgar-Marxist from the Marxist
component in historical analysis.”128

This is what most people distinguish as Marxist history, and

he listed its vulgarities: 1) the economic interpretation of history,
2) base and superstructure, 2) class struggle and class interest,
4) historical laws and inevitability, 5) specific subjects, like
capitalist development, 6) specific areas of interest to Marxists,
like the study of the oppressed, 7) observations about historians
who claim to be searching for the truth. But it might be worth
our while first to distinguish questions of method from those of
interpretation, to the extent that they may be separated at all.

To begin with, Hobsbawm has disdained slogans, formulae,

clichés, and sundry forms of signalling for others to recognize
members of the tribe. However, until the early sixties, when
perhaps he still retained some of the heady enthusiasm of his
youth, he did permit himself the occasional war cry. In 1952, in
his account of Methodism and its supposed dampening effect on
working class radicalism, he employed a purely Leninist slogan
and referred to the man himself. It defined a revolutionary crisis
as consisting of the ruling groups incapable of acting and the
subalterns refusing to endure privation any longer. 129 This
aphorism was beloved of Soviet historians, or rather was imposed

128
“What Do Historians Owe to Karl Marx?” (1968-1969), On History, p.
145.
129
Labouring Men, p. 24.

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on them,130 but what Lenin said any political strategist might have
also said. It is not specifically Leninist, or for that matter Marxist
in any sense, Lenin’s implacable declarations to the contrary
notwithstanding. In his essay on the labour aristocracy, he
identified a period of history, from the 1890s to 1914, as
imperialist. This did not denote the conquest of colonial empire;
it was what had become Marxist usage for a phase of high
concentration of capital, of cartelization, of banks gaining control
of industries and creating thereby “finance capital”, all these in
addition to of course imperialist rivalries. With Marxists, he
repeatedly identified it as an era of “monopoly capitalism.” He
even spoke of the “industrial reserve army of unemployed and
underemployed.”131 In one essay alone he spoke as if he were
addressing the faithful at a Party school, about the mode of
production, how the potential for one exists in another, how they
tend to be mixed; and he raised such non-questions as to whether
forces of production had outgrown relations of production in
Europe alone, and whether something in the superstructure
blocked such trends in other non-European worlds. However, he
generally steered clear of such theological disputation, and
nothing that he wrote as history reflects these arid propositions.132
None of his accounts seek to lead us directly or surreptitiously
to the final crisis of capitalism; none of them seek to expose the
sinister manipulation of the bourgeoisie to deflect history from
its appointed course toward the millennium; and he does not find
scapegoats for the failures of the numerous revolutions that he
has analysed.

130
This has been condensed into a pithy saying: “verkhi ne mogli, nizy ne
khoteli.” Lenin used it several times, one instance being: “For a revolution to
take place, it is usually insufficient for ‘the lower classes not to want’ to live in
the old way; it is also necessary that ‘the upper classes should be unable’ to
live in the old way;” See V. I. Lenin, “Krakh II Internatsionala,” Polnoe
Sobranie Sochinenii, 5th edn (Moskva: Institut Marksizma-Leninizma pri TsK
KPSS: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1969), vol. 26, pp. 218-219;
translation from V. I. Lenin, “The Collapse of the Second International,”
Collected Works, translated from the 4th edn of V. I., Lenin, Polnoe Sobranie
Sochinenii, (London: Lawrence & Wishart, n.d.) vol. 21, pp. 213-214.
131
Labouring Men, pp. 272, 290, 297, 300.
132
“Marx and History (1984),” On History, pp. 157-170.

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Did he engage in the vulgar Marxism that he himself

denounced? The core of it consists of the two first features that
he has listed, economic determinism and the question of base and
superstructure, which are interrelated. The first claims that the
events and even actions in history are determined by an economic,
or material, interest; and the second that the “base” or the manner
in which human beings create the material conditions of their
existence must determine all else which may not be material,
namely, the “superstructure” of politics and culture in their widest
meanings.

Economic determinism, the economic foundations to life, and

materialism, are interrelated concepts with varying stress on the
“economic factor” in explanation. Hobsbawm has asserted that
the “materialist approach to history” is the best, and he has handed
out the formula “It is not consciousness that determines life, but
life that determines consciousness”,133 which would have made
Plekhanov ecstatic.

But he was ambivalent about materialism as the monopoly of

the Marxists. He has gone out of his way to point out that the
materialist contribution came from many sources, the Marxist
being a relatively late stimulus. The historical discipline began
modernizing from the 1890s when narrative and a narrowly
political history of individual events was overtaken by one that
sought regularities, made larger generalizations, freely borrowed
from other disciplines, and related the events of history to the
different phenomena of society. This was marked by the
convergence between history and the social sciences, when history
came to be regarded as a possible social science, which allowed
it to discern both uniqueness and general patterns in human action.
The convergence “included followers of both Marx and Comte
as well as people like Lamprecht, who were politically and
ideologically far from rebellion. It included the followers of Max
Weber and Durkheim.”134 This was a revolt against “orthodoxy”

133
“Marx and History” (1984), On History, p. 160.
134
“Has History Made Progress” (1979), On History, ch. 5, here p. 61.

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which, he has asserted, “wasn’t ideological” even when it was

directed against a “ ‘materialist conception of history’.” He felt
that Marx’s analytical rigour yielded predictive force; he then
graciously admitted Alexis de Tocqueville and Jacob Burckhardt
also into the company of the elect.135 He defended himself against
a possible charge of undermining Marxism:

“If I say that this tendency, which has continued to

progress, was general, it is not because I wish to
minimize the specific influence of Marx and Marxism
on it and in it. I am the last person who would want to
do so, and in any case even at the end of the nineteenth
century few serious observers would have wished to do
so. What I am trying to do is to show that historiography
has been moving in one particular direction over a
period of several generations, irrespective of the
ideology of its practitioners, and – what is more
significant – against the enormously powerful and
institutionally entrenched resistance of the historical
profession.”136

History seems to have been carried on an irresistible surge of

progress, “irrespective of the ideology of its practitioners.” He
seems to be suggesting, without using the word, that a non-
ideological professionalism carried all before it. He summarily
included Marxists among so many others as the “Braudelian –
Marxist – Weberian modernizers.” 137 He then catalogued the
sundry pressures that made it so “materialist”: it began with the
economists and sociologists, followed by the geographers in
France, and even lawyers. The stirring question of the relation
of religion to capitalism was broached, after Marx himself, by
Max Weber, whom Hobsbawm called a sociologist although he
represented all disciplines within himself, and by Ernst Troeltsch,
the theologian. Later, the French Annales historians drove the

135
“Looking Forward: History and the Future,” (1981) On History, p. 39
136
“Has History Made Progress” (1979), On History, ch. 5, here p. 62.
137
“A Life in History,” p. 13.

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process forward with messianic enthusiasm, and only from the

1950s did the Marxists begin to play a noticeable role. However
much materialism was significant to Marxist history, he took some
trouble to point out that Marxists and non-Marxists drew on
common sources of inspiration, and that Marxists were laggards
in the writing of history.

As for the related question of base and superstructure, fellow

Marxists have accused him of ambivalence: what other British
Marxists emphatically repudiated, Hobsbawm seems to have
perversely adhered to. This charge arises chiefly from his
theoretical discussion on the “hierarchy of social phenomena”,
implying thereby the base and superstructure, and with it, the
problem of determining which of the levels determine the other
levels.138 It would be possible to detect this tendency in some of
his early work. In his study of the labour aristocracy he has at
points claimed a direct correlation between the politics of the
labour aristocracy and their economic condition.139 Early in The
Age of Revolution he explained the French Revolution with a
straightforward and favourite Marxist formula of the productive
forces outgrowing the relations of production: “the conflict
between the official framework and the vested interests of the
old régime and the rising new social forces was more acute in
France than elsewhere.”140 Beyond an occasional excess of this
kind, it would not be possible to identify a base and superstructure
in Hobsbawm’s works. In his accounts of the birth, career,
catastrophe, and recovery of the bourgeois universe, all the
“levels” function simultaneously and in relation to each other,
such that primacy may not be accorded to any one of them, be it
the economic “base” or the cultural “superstructure.” This cannot
be discerned even in the sequence of chapters. For example, in
The Age of Revolution, the chapter, “The Career Open to Talent”,
precedes the one on “The Labouring Poor”; between the two
138
“What Do Historians Owe to Karl Marx? (1968-1969),” On History, pp.
148-149; Kaye, The British Marxist Historians, pp. 132, 154.
139
“The Labour Aristocracy in Nineteenth-century Britain” (1954), in Labouring
Men, pp. 272-315, here pp. 287-288.
140
The Age of Revolution, pp. 75-76.

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chapters on ideology, that on “Religion” is placed before the one

on the “Secular”; and even “Science” follows “The Arts.” But
some may be reassured to find that in The Age of Capital
“Science” takes precedence over “Religion” and “The Arts”,
although disconcertingly, “City, Industry, the Working Class”
comes a poor third after “The Land” and “Men Moving.” Other
works offer little with which to distinguish a base from a
superstructure. As for the claim that he pursues a “bottom up”
approach because he studies the bottom of the social pyramid,
this is egregious.141 Yet so fine a historian as Michelle Perrot could
accuse him of being Marxist (and it is an accusation) for granting
priority to social and economic history;142 this could be doubly
repudiated, first since social and economic history does not
identify the Marxist, and second since Hobsbawm’s Age series
cannot be so described.

But it seems necessary to rescue Hobsbawm from his Marxist

followers. One of them, James Cronin, has himself quoted
Hobsbawm on the futility of the base-superstructure obsession.143
Cronin then attempted to protect his flank by approvingly citing
Leszek Kolakowski, that speaking of the “relative autonomy” of
levels “deprives Marxism of its specificity, and makes historical
materialism a banal commonplace.” 144 Both the Marxist
Hobsbawm and the astringent critic of Marxism, Kolakowski,
seem to be in agreement on the matter of base and superstructure
according to Hobsbawm’s admiring Marxist commentator, Cronin.
Having completed the scholarly ritual of citing both sides to an

141
Kaye, The British Marxist Historians, p. 148.
142
Michelle Perrot, Review of Franc-tireur. Autobiographie, in Le Mouvement
social, no. 201/220, Culture et Politique, avril-sept. 2007, pp. 209-213, here
p. 209. Edward Said also charged Hobsbawm with believing “that economics
and politics are determining factors for literature, painting and music: certainly
he has no truck with the idea (which I myself believe in) that the aesthetic is
relatively autonomous, that it is not a superstructural phenomenon.” See Edward
Said, “Contra Mundum,” London Review of Books, vol. 17, no. 5, 9 Mar. 1995,
pp. 22-23.
143
Cronin, “Marxist Historiography,” p. 97.
144
Cronin, “Marxist Historiography,” p. 97.

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argument, he presented Hobsbawm’s resort to this discredited

model, discounted by Hobsbawm himself: “Indeed, the structure
and argument of The Age of Capital itself embodies an essential
element of Hobsbawm’s historical problematic: to delineate
precisely the mode of interaction between economics on the one
hand, and politics, culture and sensibility on the other, between
base and superstructure.” 145 He has then pointed out how
Hobsbawm set out to “solve the problem”146 by detailed empirical
accounts of the shifting relation between different “levels” of
existence, like the economic, political, cultural and so on. But it
is not clear what problem Hobsbawm has solved since he had
not started out with one. Marxists (not Hobsbawm) first tied
themselves in knots through a reductionist base-superstructure
model, and then claimed that Hobsbawm expertly dealt with it
by sophisticated empirical research free of reductionism.

In like fashion, Genovese has patted him on the back for not
confining himself to working class history, for not reducing the
state “to a mere vehicle of class repression”, for hesitating “to
call the bourgeoisie a ‘ruling class’ ” in The Age of Capital, for
not setting much store by the withering away of the state, and
most gratuitously, for objectivity that is not neo-Kantian:
“Ironically, Hobsbawm’s work, which rejects Max Weber’s neo-
Kantian ‘ethical neutrality in the social sciences’ and all such
attempts to achieve an impossible objectivity, ends by advancing
as close as humanly possible to that qualified objectivity without
which the writing of history must turn into ideological
swindling.”147 He is assumed to be a good Marxist because he is
not a bad one. But the one does not follow from the other; it may
also imply that he is not Marxist after all, especially when these
claims about objectivity are set alongside Hobsbawm’s own view
about non-ideological professionalism in method.

Next, Hobsbawm has been repeatedly complimented for

composing total histories; and Marxists have claimed that this is
145
Cronin, “Marxist Historiography,” p. 90.
146
Cronin, “Marxist Historiography,” p. 100.
147
Genovese, “The Politics of Class Struggle”, pp. 25-33.

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an example of Marxist method.148 His Age series are indeed fine

examples of total history, of everything from the agricultural and
industrial “base” to the cultural “superstructure” of the arts and
sciences. As total histories, they seek to relate any one sphere or
“level” of society to every other, so that nothing is considered in
isolation, everything is interrelated, like life itself. However its
relation to Marxism specifically is not clear.

Marxists are by no means the first, or for that matter the last,
or even the principal exponents of such comprehensive histories
of mankind. Modern historical writing from its inception in the
middle of the eighteenth century had established that aspiration;
and it was regularly attempted throughout the nineteenth
century.149 Guizot called such a totality “civilization”,150 which
was to be distinguished from the events of history.151 It was a
globalism that de Tocqueville eagerly imbibed: “The history of
civilization…wants and should want to embrace everything at the
same time. Man must be examined in all aspects of his social
existence.” 152 Michelet was unequivocal about his totalizing
ambition, 153 and Macaulay opened his History with the

148
Cronin, “Marxist Historiography,” pp. 96-102, 104; Herbert Kisch and John
P. Henderson, “Hobsbawm and ‘The Age of Capital’”, Journal of Economic
Issues, vol. 16, no. 1 (Mar., 1982), pp. 107-130, here p. 111; Justin Rosenberg,
“Hobsbawm’s Century,” Monthly Review, vol. 47, no. 3, July 1995, pp. 139-
148.
149
Christian Delacroix, François Dosse, Patrick Garcia, Les courants historiques
en France, deuxième edition revue et augmentée (Paris: Armand Colin, 2005),
pp. 28-29.
150
M. [François] Guizot, General History of Civilization in Europe from the
Fall of the Roman Empire to the French Revolution, 3rd American edn (New
York: Appleton, 1846), vol. 1, lecture 1.
151
Ceri Crossley, French Historians and Romanticism. Thierry, Guizot, the
Saint-Simonians, Quinet, Michelet (London and New York: Routledge, 1993),
p. 82.
152
George Armstrong Kelly, The Humane Comedy: Constant, Tocqueville and
French Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 33,
citing from de Tocqueville’s correspondence of 1850.
153
Jules Michelet, Histoire de France. Choix de textes présentés par Paule
Petitier (Flammarion, 2008), pp. 11-14

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programme “to relate the history of the people as well as the

history of the government”,154 although he did not succeed in
doing so. This was carried to great heights in the twentieth by
especially the French historians Lucien Febvre, Marc Bloch, and
most of all Fernand Braudel and their followers. In the post-World
War II years, “theoretically driven history of whole societies
changing over time” was the product of the confluence of British
Marxists, the French Annales group, and sociologists like Charles
Tilly. 155 Within British history, and without the elaborate
grandstanding of the French historians, Hobsbawm’s
contemporary, Asa Briggs, for one, engaged in just such history
that presented the lived experience as reasonably as was
practicable and avoided the disciplinary compartment.156

This is not a Marxist method; at best some Marxists, indeed

remarkably few, have attempted it. What is loosely called Marxist
history in this British context is social history, or the history of
entire societies from high politics to daily life; its most productive
years were after the War and until the 1970s; and the Marxists
were the most creative in this genre, the counterpart of the non-
Marxist Annales historians in France. But it seems to be called
Marxist in Britain, not merely because the chief practitioners were
communists, but because Marxism seems to have been the route
of escape into totality from the disciplinary segregation of
university departments.

Hobsbawm has claimed, and Marxists have asserted, that the

Marxist method understands history as a history of change.157 This
embraces a number of claims, none of them specifically Marxist,
but believed to be so or claimed to be so by Marxists. These are

154
Thomas Babington Macaulay, The Works of Lord Macaulay, vol. 1 (London:
Longmans, Green, 1906), p. 3
155
See Geoff Eley, A Crooked Line. From Cultural History to the History of
Society (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), ch. 2, the quotation,
p. 47.
156
Specifically mentioned as the non-Marxist among those who wrote such
social histories, see Eley, A Crooked Line, p. 27.
157
Cronin, “Creating a Marxist Historiography,” pp. 96, 102.

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at least the following: 1) change is continuous in history, and all

structures must change into something else; 2) by that logic, the
present is not final, and must itself be superseded; 3) any structure
contains within itself tendencies which work toward its stability
as much as its disruption; and, apparently the most difficult to
ingest, 4) that we do not know in which direction the change is
taking us, although we know how it has happened in history. In
his final years he defined it as follows: “Above all, a Marxist
interpretation suggests that, in having understood that a particular
historical stage is not permanent, human society is a successful
structure because it is capable of change, and thus the present is
not its point of arrival.”158

These seem to be banal given the two centuries of dizzying

changes, which all recognize to have been the greatest the human
species has known since agriculture ten millennia ago. However,
there are a number of targets to this polemic. The first is the desire
for stability after the disorientation induced by the perpetual
change of modernity, an experience that is already two centuries
old. This was a conservative dream in the nineteenth century, and
both liberals and conservatives believed in it or looked to it during
mid-Victorian prosperity. It infected the Western world during the
extraordinary boom and prosperity in the post war years until
1973, which Hobsbawm himself has celebrated as “The Golden
Age” and “The Golden Years” in his Age of Extremes; and change
has been sufficiently disturbing for even Hobsbawm to deplore
it in almost conservative fashion after the end of the Cold War.
It penetrated even the Soviet Union during those years of post-
War reconstruction and revival when Khrushchev made bold to
prophesy a date for the dawn of Communism. And in the post
Cold War years, a flurry of writing has looked forward to the “end
of history”, free of ideological contestation. But these are
ideologies for the modern and postmodern world to coerce them
into stability; they did and do affect historical accounts; but they
are not historical interpretations which cannot but demonstrate

158
The New Century, p. 6; “What Do Historians Owe to Karl Marx?” (1968-
1969), pp. 148-153.

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change. If nothing else, such histories must explain their ideal

present through changes in the past.

The second, and by far the most significant target, is

nationalist historiography. In every country, or rather nation, it
posits an unchanging essence which endures all the travails of
history to blossom into the final flower of the nation. Nationalist
histories have been by far the most influential of historical writing
over the two centuries, and they have not lost their hold on either
the lay or the academic public, not the least since states
ceaselessly demand them in order to mobilize, manipulate, and
direct the mind of the citizen.

The third is immensely influential currents in historiography,

best represented by the Annales, which suggests stable structures
of the longue durée, so stable that Braudel has invoked the
metaphor of the prison to imagine them.159 These do not deny
change, but they are recorded as those violent convulsions, or
the conjunctures, taking place within the tight coils of the long
term structures. But such histories have been limited to the
European Middle Ages, and they do recognize the uncontrollable
nature of the transformations since then, which is why the pre-
modern ones are imagined as so stable. They set off the pre-
modern type of change from the modern one, and the pre-modern
crisis from the modern crisis. Despite the limits within which the
Annales have functioned, they have been targeted, obliquely by
Cronin and directly by Genovese,160 although not by Hobsbawm
himself, whose admiration for them is unreserved, and who sees
their work as the counterpart of his own.

Hobsbawm could be accused of the error of essentialism in

one respect. He has discerned the primitive rebel and the bandit
159
Fernand Braudel, “History and the Social Sciences.The Longue Durée”
(1969), in Fernand Braudel, On History, translated by Sarah Matthews
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 25-54, here pp. 30-31;
Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen a l’époque de
Philippe II, 4me edn, tome 2 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1979), p. 519.
160
Genovese, “The Politics of Class Struggle”, pp. 16-17.

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as an eternal pre-modern type that vanishes with modern politics

and administration. Unlike the nationalist story it does not cross
the great divide of modernity; but unlike the longue durée, it does
not posit a stable total structure of society. But since only one
type in such pre-modern society remains unchanging, it could
imply that all of society was in some sense unchanging, since a
structure must change if one element changes. If the Marxist is
the historian of change, Hobsbawm has been found wanting in
this one respect at least; but since he investigates the bandit
ensnared in the transition to modern politics, he has escaped
without censure.

But the Marxist is not the only historian of change. Hobsbawm

(and his followers) could have pointed out that this was the
proudest claim of what has come to be disparaged as historicism,
or the method of the German school of history, that the truth of
social phenomena lies in their ceaselessly changing history, not
in any permanent laws. 161 Their polemical target was the
Enlightenment rationalism of the eighteenth century and neo-
Kantianism thereafter, which have been accused of proposing
eternal values; the Marxists focused on the social conservatism
of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and their yearning for
stability. The concerns of the historicists run parallel with those
of the Marxists, but they were on opposite sides of the barricades.
If Hobsbawm was pursuing an idea of revolution, Meinecke
imagined, at least in 1936, that historicism was “one of the
greatest intellectual revolutions that has ever taken place in

161
There are many discussions of this subject; authoritative ones would be
Friedrich Meinecke, Historism. The Rise of a New Historical Outlook,
translated from the German by J. E. Andersen (London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1972; original German edn 1959); George Iggers, The German
Conception of History. The National Tradition of Historical Thought from
Herder to the Present (Middleton, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press,
1968), pp. 3-4; Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past. On the Semantics of
Historical Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004, translated from
the German and with an introduction by Keith Tribe; original German edn
1979), ch. 2.

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Western thought.” 162 But Hobsbawm has repeatedly drawn

attention to the convergence of different ideologies and methods
in the professionalization of historical writing since the late
nineteenth century; and he has cited Ernst Troeltsch, the
theologian and a leading historicist scholar, as one of the most
significant contributors to that process. Hobsbawm may be hinting
at this aspect of convergence.

However Hobsbawm is preoccupied with much more than the

banality of recording change: he is concerned with change through
the dialectic as the singularly creative Marxist method.163 This
looks upon any system as carrying within itself the seeds of its
disruption, hence whatever is stable must also be unstable. This
is an argument against conservative sociologies, especially
structural-functionalism so much in vogue in his day, and all the
celebratory histories, once again of the nationalist and historicist
variety, that recounted the entire past as the preparation for the
ideal present. This is perhaps not so Marxist as Hegelian; and it
demands the identification and succession of “ages” or “epochs”,
which in Marxist terms become “modes of production.” It seems
to become Marxist when stated in specific or formulaic terms.
Thus Christianity maturing in the womb of the Roman Empire,
the Counter-Reformation giving way to the Enlightenment, or the
rationality of the Enlightenment to the Romanticism of the early
nineteenth century, may not seem very Marxist, whereas the
transition from feudalism to capitalism does. It is also worth
noting that most Marxists have resorted to both the dialectical
contradiction of the type that Hobsbawm has upheld, and the
stability that he has deplored. Soviet Marxists are the prime
exemplars. They have represented the Russian Revolution as the
product of the contradictions of capitalism in Russia and the
Soviet system as the permanent resolution of those contradictions,

162
Meinecke, Historism, p. liv; Thomas Albert Howard, Religion and the Rise
of Historicism. W. M. L. De Wette, Jacob Burckhardt, and the Theological
Origins of Nineteenth-Century Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000), p. 2.
163
“What Do Historians Owe to Karl Marx?,” On History, pp. 153-154.

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hence of an eternal stability that Hobsbawm deprecated. But

Soviet Marxists have been discarded as vulgar Marxists by almost
universal agreement, and certainly by Hobsbawm himself.

Hobsbawm has made another important methodological claim

for Marxism. It is that the past cannot be studied in its own terms
since it is only from the present that the past appears as the past.
As he put it

“[…] in his mature works Marx deliberately studied

history in reverse order, taking developed capitalism
as his starting point. ‘Man’ was the clue to the anatomy
of the ‘ape’. This is not, of course, an anti-historical
procedure. It implies that the past cannot be understood
exclusively or primarily in its own terms: not only
because it is part of a historical process, but also
because that historical process alone has enabled us to
analyse and understand things about that process and
the past.”164

This was a polemic against historicism, which warned against

anachronism, demanded that the past be studied exclusively in
its own terms, that the only reality is historical, and that the
present is mere abstraction.165 But historicism has always faced
the charge, not merely from Marxists, that there is danger of
antiquarianism in a rigid application of this procedure.166 Further,
independent of the ideological and methodological concerns of
the historicists, many historians have had recourse to what is
known, ironically enough, as the “regressive” or even the
“retrogressive” method. It consisted in the technique of starting
from the present or what is better known and working backward
to times that are less well-known but which may be better
164
“Marx and History”, On History, pp. 158-159.
165
Frank Ankersmit, “The Necessity of Historicism,” Journal of the History of
Philosophy, vol. 4, 2010, pp. 226-240, here p. 229.
166
Mark Bevir, “Contextualism: From Modernist Method to Post-Analytic
Historicism,” Journal of the Philosophy of History, 3, 2009, pp. 211-224, here
p. 222.

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understood in this manner. It was employed most fruitfully in

many works of classic importance.167

The next on the list of methodological claims to Marxism is

the theory of combined and uneven development, and Rosenberg
has credited Hobsbawm with having applied it creatively to his
history.168 It contains two propositions on the global spread of
capitalism, first, that it was uneven, and second, that in one region
it combined different processes which had been separate in
another region. It was uneven in the sense that a capitalist form
must first evolve in a non- or pre-capitalist one, typically, a
factory in a village or in a town with craft workshops around it.
This does not require Marxist insights to be self-evident, for all
industrialization, or for that matter any innovation of any kind,
cannot but proceed in this fashion. All development, by its nature,
must be uneven. The second proposition, on combined
development, is weightier. This rests on the insight that the wheel
need not be reinvented each time, that an innovator would borrow
outright a successful model from any part of the world, hence
that the latecomer would telescope processes which had been
distinct in an earlier phase. Within the Marxist tradition, Trotsky
is the principal theorist of this process, which appeared to him to
unlock the secrets of the Russian Revolution.169

However, Trotsky himself was drawing upon a commonplace

of Russian theoretical debate on the “advantage of backwardness.”
This thesis noted that later developers merged processes which
had been separate for earlier ones, hence the latecomers enjoyed
the advantage of a delayed start by not having to go undergo the
experiences of pioneers. Petr Chaadaev, traditionalist and
conservative, noticed this possibility in 1837 when he pointed

167
Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution. The Annales School,1929-
89 (London: Polity Press, 1990), pp. 23-24.
168
Justin Rosenberg, “Hobsbawm’s Century,” Monthly Review, vol. 47, no. 3,
July 1995, pp. 139-148.
169
Leon Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, 3 vols, translated
from the Russian by Max Eastman (London: Sphere Books, 1967), vol. 1,
pp. 22-23.

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out that Russia was akin to a blank sheet, bereft of history: she
could both avoid the mistakes of her predecessors and escape the
incubus of history by carrying out radical changes through an act
of pure will. 170 Alexander Herzen, liberal and aristocratic,
suggested that the peasant commune had preserved the people
from “Mongol barbarism and civilizing Tsarism, from the
landlords with a veneer of Europe and from German
bureaucracy”, preparing them for socialism. 171 Nikolai
Chernyshevskii, the proto-Narodnik, elaborated the insight by
pointing to the “acceleration” (uskorenie) of historical processes,
which dispenses with the routine of replication; 172 and the
Narodniks relayed the idea further with V. P. Vorontsov arguing
that latecomers could collapse stages of development instead of
having to repeat them.173 Trotsky resumed this train of thought
as “combined development.” It fertilized his idea of a “permanent
revolution”, that is, the distinct stages of revolution in Europe
would be fused into an uninterrupted or “permanent” process in
Russia; and it resurfaced through Lenin’s notion of the “weakest
link” in the chain of imperialism. Both of them privileged
the backwardness of Russia in the making of revolution.
These insights into combined development reappeared in
an entirely non-Marxist context after World War II in Alexander
Gerschenkron’s theory of late industrializers effecting

170
P. Ia. Chaadaev, “Apologie d’un fou,” (1837), in P. Ia. Chaadaev, Polnoe
sobranie sochinenii i izbrannye pis’ma, tom 1 (Moskva: Nauka, 1991),
pp. 289-304; Andrzej Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy. History of a
Conservative Utopia in Nineteenth-Century Russian Thought, translated from
the Polish by Hilda Andrews-Rusiecka (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975),
pp. 105-117.
171
Alexander Herzen, “The Russian People and Socialism,” (1851), My Past
and Thoughts, translated by Constance Garnett, revised by Humphrey Higgins
(London: Chatto & Windus, 1968), vol. 4, pp. 1647-1679, here p. 1663.
172
N. G. Chernyshevskii, “Kritika filosofskikh predubezhdenii protiv
obshchinnogo vladeniia,” in Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevskii, Sochineniia
v dvukh tomakh, tom 1 (Moskva: Mysl’, 1986), pp. 603-645.
173
V. P. Vorontsov, Sud’by kapitalizma v Rossii (S.-Peterburg: Stasiulevich,
1882), pp. 13-14.

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“substitutions” of processes that had occurred earlier elsewhere.174

Thus Marxists and non-Marxists have drawn on a common stock
of ideas of pre-Marxist provenance; 175 but, like the class
interpretation of the French Revolution, Marxists have imagined
these ideas as uniquely their own.

Hobsbawm himself has not claimed all this for Marxism, even
if others have done so; and he was both well aware of
Gerschenkron’s theory and attracted to it:

“There is an elegant historical model, according to

which the more backward an economy and the later it
started upon industrialisation, the greater its reliance
on the new large-scale methods of mobilizing and
directing savings. In the developed western countries
private resources and the capital market were quite
adequate. In central Europe the banks and similar
institutions had to act much more systematically as
‘developers’ of history. Further east, south and overseas,
governments had to step in themselves, generally with
the aid of foreign investment either to secure capital at
all or, more likely, to see that investors were guaranteed
– or at least thought they were guaranteed – the
dividends that would alone mobilize their money, or
alternatively to undertake economic activities
themselves. Whatever the validity of this theory, there
is no doubt that in our period the banks (and similar
institutions) played a much greater role as developers
and directors of industry in Germany, the great
industrial newcomer, than in the west.”176
174
For a full sequence of these ideas, see Manfred Hildermeier, “Das Privileg
der Rückständigkeit. Anmerkungen zum Wandel einer Interpretationsfigur der
neueren Russischen Geschichte,” Historische Zeitschrift, vol. 244, 1987, pp.
557-603.
175
On the Marxist tradition, with mention of some of the non-Marxist sources,
see Marcel van der Linden, “The Law of Combined Development: Some
Underdeveloped Thoughts,” Historical Materialism, vol. 15, 2007, pp. 145-
165.
176
The Age of Capital, p. 253.

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Unfortunately, he has not acknowledged Gerschenkron!177 He

need not have been so squeamish, for it appears that Gerschenkron
was after all a fallen Marxist from the inter-war years.178

How Marxist are his interpretations of modern history? Again,

the results are not as expected, for there is a distinct shift of gear
from the late fifties. He began with labour history driven by the
Marxist problematic of the working class as the source of
emancipation in industrial society. With this inspiration he
composed his articles on British unionism, working class culture,
the burning issue of consciousness and spontaneity, the internal
stratification of the working class or the labour aristocracy thesis,
and perhaps most of all, the question of the standard of living
during the industrial revolution. He capped these with that other
magnificent obsession of Marxists of the epoch, the transition
from feudalism to capitalism. The proletariat seems to have
induced ennui: he then went slumming in the pre-modern world
of bandits before conquering the peaks of the grand bourgeois
from where he surveyed the universe of modernity. Workers
remained a residual if productive area of concern. He did not
compose a major book on them, whereas he devoted three full
books to bandits (including the English species) and five major
ones (including the one on nationalism) to the modern world. He
clearly did not expect much more from workers after their
absorption into consumer culture by the fifties.179

The thesis of the dual revolution, or of the industrial and

French revolutions being combined as a single capitalist
revolution, has been accorded the distinction of being Marxist.180

177
Noticed by Karl de Schweinitz in his review, in Journal of Economic Issues,
vol. 10, no. 4, Dec. 1976, pp. 967-970. Our page references differ owing to
different editions used.
178
Marcel van der Linden, “Gerschenkron’s Secret: A Research Note,” Critique:
Journal of Socialist Theory, vol. 40, no. 4, pp. 553-562.
179
“The Formation of British Working Class Culture,” (1979), in Worlds of
Labour, ch. 10, 176-193, here p. 192.
180
Rosenberg, “Hobsbawm’s Century.”

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However, Hobsbawm has made no such claim and his own

account of the historiography of the French Revolution confutes
this thesis. Hobsbawm refuted two claims on the French
Revolution made by the revisionists from the 1950s. The first was
by Alfred Cobban, that the Revolution was not bourgeois since
the bourgeoisie neither made the Revolution not benefited from
it, and that the Revolution hindered rather than stimulated the
industrial development of France.181 The second was by François
Furet, that the Revolution registered continuity rather than a
decisive break with the past of French history. Hobsbawm has
gone to some lengths to show how the class and revolutionary
interpretation of the French Revolution was not a specifically
Marxist thesis although it had come to be identified as such in
the course of the twentieth century.

The class interpretation, that of a bourgeoisie overthrowing

an aristocracy, was elaborated by the Restoration Liberals,
especially by François Guizot, Augustin Thierry, Victor Cousin,
and F. A. Mignet, later by the Republicans, and then appropriated
by the Left as their own.182 Guizot was acutely aware of “the
struggle of classes; a struggle which constitutes the very fact of
modern history, and of which it is full. Modern Europe, indeed,
is born of this struggle between the different classes of society.”183
Not surprisingly, Marx was his most celebrated adept. Hobsbawm
endorses the findings of modern research, that the bourgeoisie
did not make the Revolution and that it was of doubtful benefit
to them directly; but the idea of a bourgeois revolution was liberal,
not Marxist. Even François Furet the revisionist has pointed out
the Jacobin origins of the concept of the bourgeois revolution.

181
First in 1955, but fully set out in Alfred Cobban, The Social Interpretation
of the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964).
182
E. J. Hobsbawm, Echoes of the Marseillaise. Two Centuries Look Back
on the French Revolution (London: Verso, 1990), ch. 1; see also review by
David. P. Jordan in American Historical Review, vol. 97, no. 1, Feb. 1992,
pp. 215-216;
183
Guizot, General History of Civilization, vol. 1, lecture 7, here p. 164;
Crossley, French Historians and Romanticism, p. 86.

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Similarly, Hobsbawm traced the second aspect of the

interpretation, of the Revolution as rupture rather than as
continuity, to these same Restoration Liberals: they both recorded
and endorsed the fact of the rupture and of its permanence,
deplore the violence and democratic excesses of the Revolution
as they may. Alexis de Tocqueville, the aristocratic liberal, had
argued in 1856 that revolutionary continuity lay in the
centralization of the state from the ancien régime into the
nineteenth century, but that revolutionary discontinuity consisted
in the destruction of “everything in the old order that stemmed
from aristocratic and feudal institutions.”184 Hobsbawm enjoyed
pointing out that de Tocqueville, always presented as the
fountainhead of the continuity thesis, was unequivocal about the
finality of the break with the past socially.

As for the Revolution and industrialization, it is an oft-cited

paradox that France lagged behind in industrialization despite her
Revolution, and that Britain, Germany, and the United States
streamed ahead without such dramatic propulsion. However, these
same liberal scholars yearned for industrialization, admired
England as the model, and regarded France, Holland, and Britain
as having carried out the political, social, and economic
transformations that go by the general expression bourgeois
revolution. Historians may rightly note the modest results of the
French Revolution for the economic development of France, but
these Restoration Liberals saw a dual revolution taking place in
their lifetimes in that western corner of Europe and spoke
glowingly of the future that it portended.

Hobsbawm has recorded how Marx admitted to having derived

so much of his understanding of class relations and class struggle
from these liberals; but nobody for that reason could accuse the
very bourgeois Guizot of being Marxist in anticipation of Marx.185

184
Alexis de Tocqueville, The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution,
translated from the French by Stuart Gilbert (UK: Collins, The Fontana Library,
1966) chapter 5, here pp. 50-51.
185
Echoes of the Marseillaise, ch. 1; and the same arguments repeated in E.
J. Hobsbawm, “The Making of a ‘Bourgeois Revolution’,” Social Research,
vol. 71, no. 3, Fall 2004, pp. 455-480.

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Hobsbawm has adhered to what has come to be understood as

the Marxist interpretation while accepting the results of empirical
investigations; but he has shown how the Liberals had propounded
this interpretation before Marx himself seized upon it. With
polemical delight and academic exasperation, Hobsbawm was
reminding the revisionist liberals of the latter half of the twentieth
century that they were repudiating their forbears of the first half
of the nineteenth century.

It could of course be said that Hobsbawm was being self-

consciously Marxist by endorsing an interpretation that is today
considered Marxist against revisionists anxious to knock it down,
even if this Marxist account owes its origins to a liberal
historiography of the first half of the nineteenth century. But there
could be two objections to this claim. The first is that this is less
Marxist scholarship and historiography and more the taking of a
factional position within French academic politics and the
historical profession, and waving the flag for communists in
general. The second, and academically more consequential, is that
his argument suggests the convergence of ideological positions,
of what is loosely called Marxist and non-Marxist history, which
has been a major theme in Hobsbawm’s reflections on the
development of historical research since the late nineteenth
century.

Hobsbawm’s interpretation of the twentieth century however

has made him suspect in the eyes of many Marxists. They have
frowned on his cavalier treatment of the sacred subjects of the
Russian Revolution and the Soviet experience.186 Kevin Murphy,
speaking as a Marxist historian of Russia to the few of the
community that remain, has upbraided Hobsbawm for 1)
endorsing the “continuity thesis”, that the Revolution, the Civil
War, the New Economic Policy, and the Five Year Plans,
collectivization, and purges could be analysed as a single bloc of
events, hence that Stalin was anticipated by Lenin, or even in

186
Age of Extremes, ch. 2, pp. 54-75, ch. 13; Eric Hobsbawm, “Can We Write
the History of the Russian Revolution?” (1996), in On History, pp. 241-252.

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What is to be Done?; 2) engaging in counterfactuals like what

would have happened had the revolutions of 1917 and all that
followed not occurred; 3) asserting that the Bolsheviks seized
power with an unrealistic programme of socialist revolution; 4)
refusing to realize or remaining unaware that the civil war was
so extreme because of the American, British, and French roles in
it; 5) explaining Stalinism by socialism in one country rather the
devastation of the civil war. In short, Hobsbawm’s account was
impoverished, rigid ideology substituting for researched history,
dismissing socialism in Russia as doomed for its isolation in a
backward country.187

Kevin Murphy’s critique is persuasive, for Hobsbawm was

far too summary. He did not grapple with the nature of popular
support that the Bolsheviks enjoyed, and he collapsed too many
distinctions, being perhaps a trifle lukewarm over the important
one between the twenties and the thirties in the Soviet Union.
Worst of all, he traced the Stalinist dictatorship to Leninist party
organization. Murphy did not say so, but Hobsbawm raised these
counterfactuals only with respect to the Russian Revolution and
not to the dual revolution of the eighteenth century: he was happy
to consider a world without the Russian Revolution but not one
without its French precursor. He deplored the futility of such
counterfactual speculation with respect to the French Revolution
and went to great lengths to demonstrate that the liberals of the
post-revolutionary generation, from Guizot to de Tocqueville, had
considered it so decisive a break with the past that they did not
have any wish to turn the clock back. 188 In an astonishingly
primitive and painfully cliché-ridden series of speculations and
counterfactuals, he likened the Russian Revolution to natural
phenomena like earthquakes or floods, and recommended that
“We must stop thinking of the Russian Revolution in terms of
the Bolsheviks’ or anyone else’s aims and intentions, their long-

187
Kevin J. Murphy, “Can We Write the History of the Russian Revolution? A
Belated Response to Eric Hobsbawm,” Historical Materialism, vol. 15, 2007,
pp. 3-19.
188
Echoes of the Marseillaise, ch. 1; “The Making of a ‘Bourgeois Revolution’.”

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term strategy, and other Marxists’ critiques of their practice.”189

It was something he would not impute even to the First World
War or the Holocaust. Hitler embodied pure ideology, 190 the
Russian Revolution mere instinct, surely a bewildering appraisal
from a Marxist. As a European socialist, even if communist,
Hobsbawm ultimately joined with Kautsky in shutting off Lenin
and Soviet socialism from Europe, despise Kautsky as he may.
Perhaps he wished it had never happened, for then the European
Left would have been free of this Slavic albatross. That might
also explain why his reading on Russia seems so limited.

His further discussion of the Soviet epoch and of post-War

Europe has been quite as distressing to Marxists. He opened his
Age of Extremes with a disorienting leitmotif: “It is one of the
ironies of this strange century that the most lasting results of the
October revolution, whose object was the global overthrow of
capitalism, was to save its antagonist, both in war and in peace
– that is to say, by providing it with the incentive, fear, to reform
itself after the Second World War, and, by establishing the
popularity of economic planning, furnishing it with some of the
procedures for its reform.”191 The Soviet Union first defeated the
fascist threat and rescued Western liberalism from that dystopia.
The Soviet challenge then impelled Western governments toward
welfare, full employment, and the golden age of prosperity
between 1945 and 1973. The Left finally realized its principal
objectives. The UN Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 owes
so much to the labour movements.192 During those palmy days,
the civil rights of the French revolutionary programme were
consolidated, democracy was extended to the entire adult
population, and welfare reached everybody. 193 In his final
judgement communism saved capitalism instead of mankind, and

189
Murphy, “Can We Write the History of the Russian Revolution?” p. 249.
190
Age of Extremes, p. 154.
191
Age of Extremes, pp. 7-8.
192
Worlds of Labour, p. 312.
193
The New Century, p. 100; Age of Extremes, pp. 272-273, 284.

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it consumed itself in the course of that redemptive mission.194 This

then is the tragedy of the Soviet collapse: the external compulsion
on capitalism to reform itself had been dissolved, the internal or
the socialisms of labour movements seemed to count for little,
and the loss of the dream of the alternative to capitalism no longer
matters. Hobsbawm’s despair is matched by Rosenberg’s counter-
despair: “It is almost as if Hobsbawm had forgotten that the real
ground of socialist politics never was the existence of the Soviet
Union but rather the existence of capitalism.”195

Russians may feel rueful. In various versions of nationalist

Russian history, Russia saved, protected, or rescued Europe from
the Mongols in the thirteenth century, from Napoleon in the
nineteenth century, and from Hitler in the twentieth. They must
now learn from a distinguished Western historian, celebrated by
liberals and Marxists alike, that liberal capitalism survived thanks
to Russians trudging in their millions into the gulag. Hobsbawm
does not seem to rejoice at the possible liberation of Russians
from their communist incarceration; he merely records their
emerging from the nether world to be driven into the
postcommunist blizzard; but he regrets that Western capitalism
may once again descend into chaos without the counterbalancing
power of even a senescent gulag.

But a final Marxist vision and method may be considered, the

obvious and most powerful one of the crisis-ridden condition of
humanity and certainly of the modern world which engenders its
own gravediggers. It has already been suggested that this might
have been his central vision. But was the centrality of crisis in
his accounts the product of a Marxist orientation? Not necessarily.
It was the stock-in-trade of the Annales historians who were not
Marxists but who were much admired by Hobsbawm. They
engaged primarily in the history of the Middle Ages, not of

194
See Elliott, Ends in Sight, ch. 3, here p. 79.
195
Rosenberg, “Hobsbawm’s Century,” pp. 139-148; pinpointed, but without
the despair, in Elliott, Ends in Sight, p. 81.

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industrial capitalism; they delineated the structures and described

the crises which occurred within them with almost law-like
regularity. They owed much to the work of Wilhelm Abel, who
viewed history through the prism of crisis after the experience
of the Great Depression from 1929.196 These were Hobsbawm’s
formative years also, the years of slump, unemployment,
revolution and counter-revolution, Marxism, Fascism, the Popular
Front, and the Spanish Civil War, before World War II engulfed
all else. Marxist theory was merely one of the sources for
regarding history as driven by crisis.

Unlike the Manifesto, he did not express any belief in a

coming proletarian revolution: in this respect he remained firmly
social democratic and left liberal. As he admitted early in the
twenty-first century,

“With hindsight, one might say that socialism was

either a utopian dream or little more than an agitational
slogan, for until the Russian Revolution not even the
Socialist Left had really thought about what to do in
the event of victory. There was not even a serious
debate on how an economy should be socialized. It was
generally accepted that it could be managed by the state
on the model provided by capitalism of the time, in
which the larger businesses were already in the hands
of public organizations. Socialist theory was a critique
of capitalist reality rather than a real project for the
construction of a different society. And make no
mistake about it, this also applied to Marxists.”197

In his highly polemical dismissal of the Fabians, he has

entertained us with biting irony thus:
196
Wilhelm Abel, Agrarkrisen und Agrarkonjunktur. Eine Geschichte der Land-
und Ernährungswirtschaft Mitteleuropas seit dem hohen Mittelalter, 3rd revised
and enlarged edn, (Hamburg: Verlag Paul Parey, 1978; orig. edn 1935); Eric
Hobsbawm, “Interview. World Distempers,” New Left Review, 61, Jan-Feb
2010, pp. 133-150, here p. 148.
197
The New Century, p. 100.

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“The failure of the Fabians in the big things is to some

extent mitigated by their indefatigable activity, their gift
as drafters of pamphlets and administrative projects,
their wide circle of political acquaintances, and above
all, by the self-abnegation with which they were
prepared to help any and every person or group which
they believed capable of advancing their cause.”198

He has done something more. He excoriated the Fabians,

Bernard Shaw and Sidney and Beatrice Webb, for ending “their
careers as enthusiastic supporters of Soviet Communism.” But
their cardinal sin consisted in something more: “They had always
believed in a thoroughgoing reconstruction of society. They had
never been committed to the British political apparatus of their
youth.”199 In his final years he hinted that the Russian Revolution
fractured the unity of the left and the liberals which had together
fought for the civil liberties, democracy, and welfare. 200 His
ultimate faith remained the optimistic philosophies of the rational
Enlightenment, which gave him hope even when the socialist
states had failed in such squalid fashion. Speaking of the nature
of political commitment, he reflected:

“Is it directed toward the great causes of the

Enlightenment: reason, progress, and the betterment of
the conditions of all human beings? Or toward other
causes that can be just as strong emotionally, such as
nationalism or racism? They are not the same thing.
And I think that communism was part of that tradition
of modern civilization that goes back to the
Enlightenment, to the American and French revolutions.
I cannot regret it.”201

198
Labouring Men, p. 252.
199
Labouring Men, p. 254.
200
The New Century, p. 99.
201
The New Century, p. 162.

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In a world gripped by never-ending crises, who was the

gravedigger? It was supposedly the proletariat in Hobsbawm’s
tetralogy of class polarities; but a closer examination suggests
that even this did not hold. The crises of capitalism were those
induced by capitalist excess, the cyclical crises from the short
seasonal one to the long Kondratieff. The other crises were of
counter-revolution culminating in the horror and supposed
extirpation of fascism and all that this implied. In his final volume
on the twentieth century, it had ceased to be a class or even class;
it had become unabated developmentalism 202 followed by the
uncertainty and “barbarism” of postmodernism. The proletarian
gravedigger of the Communist Manifesto seems to have risen but
once, in 1917, and the result, according to Hobsbawm, was to
inject concrete into the sinking foundations of capitalism, not to
drain them. The spectre that had been haunting Europe since 1848
was transmogrified into a stern conscience keeper to capitalism.
Capitalism’s gravediggers were capitalist, be it predatory
speculator or genocidal fascist: when the hour of reckoning
seemed to approach, it reached out to the totalitarian incarnation
of its ascribed proletarian gravedigger. Capitalism was ultimately
merely two-faced, both creative and destructive in itself, in every
fibre of its being.

Destructive possibilities flourished in many forms. Capitalism

harboured internal contradiction, the inspiration that Marx
furnished to the generations down to the 1960s. Hobsbawm’s
tetralogy on the nineteenth century and the first half of the Age
of Extremes relied on this Marxian insight. On the other hand,
the success of capitalism could lead to the destruction of the
institutions that sustained it, as Schumpeter noted; 203 and
unregulated markets, like a forest fire, could consume all in its
path, as Karl Polanyi warned. 204 They silently informed his
reflections on the end of the twentieth century when Marx seemed
202
Age of Extremes, pp. 568-570.
203
Schumpeter, Imperialism. Social Classes, Prologue to Part II, pp. 61-62,
and ch. 12, p. 139.
204
Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation. The Political and Economic Origins
of Our Time (Boston, Mass: Beacon Press, 1957, first edn 1944).

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less and less of a guide to the condition of capitalism.205 Finally,

modernity could induce catastrophe in the biosphere, 206 the
culmination of the insights of conservatives and romantics of
every colour who deplored modernity’s tendency to ruin the work
of God, of Nature, of Tradition, of all that has been given to us,
and to destroy in general. The socialist option was foreclosed;
capitalism had learnt to cope with contradiction but was spinning
out of control; and another, greater menace loomed. The
approaching “general crisis” was not specific to either liberal or
socialist ideology.207

This survey suggests that the professional reception of his

work and his public image as a Marxist diverge significantly. His
professional colleagues assessed his work for its contributions
to scholarship and our understanding of historical processes
whether or not he was a Marxist. The wider public, to judge from
his obituaries as also from press comments during his lifetime,
saw him as a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain,
and were obsessed with the political positions he took, especially
on questions like Stalinism and the record of the Soviet Union.
He was politically active and projected himself publicly as a
Marxist and Communist; but in his academic work he was
rigorous, engaged with all of scholarship, not just that which
professed to be Marxist, and collaborated extremely fruitfully
with those who were remote from Marxism. Thus, the outstanding
contribution to his compilation, Invention of Tradition, came from
Hugh Trevor-Roper,208 who had placed himself as far to the right
of the ideological spectrum as Hobsbawm had to the left of it.
And he was at pains to explain that what has been seen as a litmus
test of Marxist commitment, the class and revolutionary
interpretation of the French Revolution, was in fact a thoroughly
bourgeois and liberal account from the first half of the nineteenth
century from which Marx drew his inspiration and insights. He
205
Elliott, Ends in Sight, p. 83.
206
Age of Extremes, pp. 568-570.
207
“The Crisis of Today’s Ideologies,” p. 58.
208
Hugh Trevor-Roper, “The Invention of Tradition: The Highland Tradition
of Scotland,” in The Invention of Tradition, pp. 15-41.

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was devoted to both rigorous scholarship and to Marxism without

admitting of any contradiction between the two, not allowing for
shortcuts on the ground of ideological virtue, and accepting that
the world outside of Marxism contained incomparable riches, to
which his collaboration with Trevor-Roper is eloquent testimony.

Marxists (and non-Marxists) may be discomfited by his

evenhanded reassurance to both sides that “Marxism has so
transformed the mainstream of history that it is today often
impossible to tell whether a particular work has been written by
a Marxist or a non-Marxist, unless the author advertises his or
her ideological position.This is not a cause for regret.”209 Clearly,
he placed himself in the mainstream, at least by 1984 when this
was published. Hobsbawm was not isolated in feeling the warmth
of convergence. Victor Kiernan, another distinguished Marxist
historian of that generation, confessed that “Marxism may have
grown more reasonable, but less readily recognizable,” and that
it may be difficult to say who is not a Marxist, “so widely has
the influence of Marx’s more general ideas spread.” 210 Perry
Anderson expressed the same insight in negative fashion as he
observed in 1976 that Marxist history, though considerable, had
not contributed significantly to Marxist theory.211 In effect, there
is no Marxist history, only individuals, among them historians,
who may be Marxist; but if people wanted to classify him a

209
“Marx and History” (1984), On History, p. 170.
210
V. G. Kiernan, “History” (1983), in V. G. Kiernan, History, Classes and
Nation-States. Selected Writings of V. G. Kiernan, edited and introduced by
Harvey J. Kaye (Oxford: Polity Press, Basil Blackwell, 1988), pp. 29-65, here
pp. 58-59.
211
His words were: “Yet, despite the formation of major schools of Marxist
historiography in nearly all the advanced capitalist countries, it cannot be said
that historical materialism as a theoretical system has benefited
commensurately. There has been comparatively little integration of Marxist
history into Marxist politics or economics, to date. This anomaly appears all
the greater when it is recollected that no professional historiography of this
type existed in the epoch of classical Marxism; while its advent in a later
epoch has had no noticeable effects within post-classical Marxism.” See Perry
Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (London: Verso, 1979; 1st edn
1976), pp. 111-112.

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Marxist historian, Hobsbawm would not reject the label, 212

perhaps pour encourager les autres.

He remained committed to the strategy of the Popular Front

of the thirties, of workers uniting with non-workers and
communists with social democrats and even conservatives, all
together against fascism. George Orwell was appalled at the sight
of communists and duchesses marching in step to the beat of Rule
Britannia,213 but communists were able to attract a wider range
of popular emotion than they have ever done before or since. He
applauded rather than deplored the fact that communists had
fought in the Spanish Civil War for democracy rather than
revolution, that they had given up insurrection for a more
gradualist politics, and even for parliamentarism.214 In the 1980s,
he provided substantial intellectual respectability to New Labour
to overcome the diehards of the communist and Labour parties
to forge unity with other classes and reformers, by advocating
“realism.”215 In the last resort, his Marxism was an aid to the
critique of reality to improve the present, not an instrument of
creating an alternative society. But, as a critique, he pursued the
insights imbibed from the Manifesto.

Conclusion

The contribution that Hobsbawm and his Marxist colleagues

made to invigorate historical research has been justly celebrated;
but he (and they) could flourish and be imagined only in an
ideologically plural environment. Marxism never did have a ghost

212
His words were: “Second, about the Marxist approach to history with which
I am associated. Though it is imprecise, I do not disclaim the label.” See
“Preface” (1997), On History, p. viii.
213
David Renton, “Studying their Own Nation Without Insularity? The British
Marxist Historians Reconsidered,” Science & Society, vol. 69, no. 4, Oct. 2005,
pp. 559-579, here p. 566.
214
Age of Extremes, pp. 162-163.
215
Herbert Pimlott, “From ‘Old Left’ to ‘New Labour’? Eric Hobsbawm and
the Rhetoric of Realistic Marxism,” Labour / Le Travail, vol. 56, Fall 2005,
pp. 175-197.

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of a chance of gaining political power in Britain, and the

communist party has always been a marginal curiosity to British
politics. But Marxist intellectuals, and especially historians
among them, have been of the mainstream, not of the margin.
They have been immensely influential in British culture, however
impotent in British politics. With variations, this applies to the
advanced capitalist countries of Europe, especially Germany,
Italy, or France. He claimed that the strength of Marxism lay in
its capacity for critique; if so, the more advanced and entrenched
capitalism in Europe, the more fertile the field of academic
Marxist action. After all, Marx had subtitled his masterwork A
Critique of Political Economy. Once again, he owes (and so do
we owe) a high debt of gratitude to capitalism and bourgeois
society for having spawned gravediggers like himself. It was
Britain that had offered Marx and Engels that opportunity, and
this, as the English would love to say, is but one of the
peculiarities of the English. 216 But as Marxism invested the
citadels of political power in Russia and East Europe, it became
sterile and marginal to the cultural and academic life of the Soviet
Union and its dependencies. It was the antithesis of the British
and western world. Marxism could prosper only as critique.217 An
enthroned Marxism was a contradiction of terms like the
bourgeois monarchy; yet both bloomed at opposite ends of the
European continent, each a presumed caricature of the authentic
species, but each surviving as such long enough to represent
authenticity. The Soviet Union bestowed on Hobsbawm the
ultimate honour of never having his works translated, although,
as he pointed out, he was a member of the Communist Party of
Great Britain and an editor of the English edition of the Collected
Works of Marx and Engels.218 But, as Russians would love to
quote Fedor Tiutchev:

Who would grasp Russia with the mind?

For her no yardstick was created:
216
E. P. Thompson, “The Peculiarities of the English,” The Socialist Register,
1965, pp. 311-362.
217
Implied in Kiernan, “History”, p. 58.
218
“Preface” (1997), On History, p. ix.

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Her soul is of a special kind,

By faith alone appreciated.

However, Hobsbawm unerringly placed his finger on the

button: “Much of my life, probably most of my conscious life,
was devoted to a hope which has been plainly disappointed, and
to a cause which has plainly failed: communism initiated by the
October Revolution. But there is nothing which can sharpen the
historian’s mind like defeat.”219 Dr Samuel Johnson would have
concurred as he murmured at a public execution, “Hanging
wonderfully concentrates the mind.”220

But Hobsbawm would have rebounded, and for him as for

Scarlet O’Hara there was always a tomorrow. He was above all
a free spirit like his bandits and he celebrated freedom and
creativity. The rationality of the Enlightenment seemed to him to
provide the space for it, the only space that humanity has so far
been able to create, collectively and institutionally, for the
exercise of such freedom. Marx appeared to have understood its
contours and its possibilities best, but Marxists and communists
did not always do so. His heart beat in unison with the utopianism
of revolutionaries and their movements, not with parties,
organizations and their odious bureaucracies, even if they called
themselves revolutionaries. Only of revolutionaries could he have
said this:

“Without wishing to make it appear more sensible and

less extraordinary than it often is, it is advisable for
the historian to appreciate the logic, and even the
realism—if the word can be used in this context—
which moves them, for revolutionary movements are
difficult to understand otherwise. It is their peculiarity
that those who cannot see what all the bother is about
are disabled from saying anything of great value about
219
“The Present as History,” (1993), in On History, p. 239.
220
Cited in Greg Dening, Mr Bligh’s Bad Language. Passion, Power and
Theatre on the Bounty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Canto edn
1994), p. 40.

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84 Madhavan K. Palat

them, whereas those who do (especially when among

primitive social movements) cannot often speak in terms
intelligible to the rest. It is especially difficult, but
necessary, to understand that utopianism, or
‘impossibilism’ which the most primitive revolutionaries
share with all but the most sophisticated, and which makes
even very modern ones feel a sense of almost physical
pain at the realization that the coming of Socialism will
not eliminate all grief and sadness, unhappy love-affairs
or mourning, and will not solve or make soluble all
problems; a feeling reflected in the ample literature of
revolutionary disillusionment.”221

All his histories evoked that freedom and creativity at their

most inspiring. This is what brings the conquering bourgeois of
high finance, industrial entrepreneurship, and technological
innovation on to the same page as the visionary artist, musician,
and novelist, the inquisitive scientist and academic, the utopian
revolutionary and the social bandit, the political shoemaker,
tramping artisan, and the metropolitan mob before bureaucratic
rationality flattened it. These are the people that crowd his
histories like characters in an epic Russian novel, not the
politicians, soldiers, and bureaucrats, be it of state or trade union,
unless like a Napoleon or Bismarck they display the creative spark
and daring imagination of the artist and scientist. These are not
the histories of so much else that the bourgeois made, the great
institutions of state, parliaments and bureaucracies, judiciaries and
armed forces, academic centres and trade unions. These are stories
of how each of them, individuals and institutions, drove
themselves to extremes, to the limits, and over the edge. Creativity
threatens to consume itself, as Marx warned of the uncontrollably
creative capitalism, and the history of the modern world furnishes
more than enough evidence of it in Hobsbawm’s pages.

221
Primitive Rebels, p. 60.

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 The Interesting Ideas of Eric Hobsbawm 85

Works Cited

By Hobsbawm (in chronological order)

“The General Crisis of the European Economy in the 17th Century,”
Past and Present, no. 5, May 1954, pp. 33-53
“The Crisis of the 17th Century,” Past and Present, no. 6, November
1954, pp. 44-65
Comment in “Discussion of H. R. Trevor-Roper: ‘The General Crisis
of the 17th Century’,” Past and Present, no. 18, Nov. 1960, pp. 12-
14; the full discussion by several authors, pp. 8-42
Primitive Rebels. Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the
19th and 20th Centuries (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1959)
The Age of Revolution. Europe 1789-1848 (London: Sphere Books,
Cardinal edn, 1973; original edn London: Weidenfield and
Nicolson, 1962)
Labouring Men. Studies in the History of Labour (London: Weidenfield
and Nicholson, 1964)
Bandits, rev. edn (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981, 1st edn 1969)
Hobsbawm, E. J.; Rudé, George, Captain Swing (London: Lawrence
and Wishart, 1969)
The Age of Capital, 1848-175 (London: Little Brown and Co., Abacus
edn, 1977)
Hobsbawm, Eric; Ranger, Terence, eds, The Invention of Tradition
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983)
Worlds of Labour. Further Studies in the History of Labour (London:
Weidenfield and Nicholson, 1984)
The Age of Empire 1875-1914 (New York: Random House, Vintage
Books edn, 1989)
“Farewell to the Classic Labour Movement? New Left Review, I/173,
January-February 1989, pp. 69-74
Nations and Nationalism since 1780. Programme, Myth, Reality, 2nd
edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992; 1st edn 1990)

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86 Madhavan K. Palat

Echoes of the Marseillaise. Two Centuries Look Back on the French

Revolution (London: Verso, 1990)
“The Crisis of Today’s Ideologies,” New Left Review, I/192, 1992,
pp. 55-64
“Barbarism: A User ’s Guide,” New Left Review, I/206, 1994,
pp. 44-54
“Identity Politics and the Left,” New Left Review, I/217, May-June
1996, pp. 38-47
On History (London: Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1997)
The New Century. In Conversation with Antonio Polito. Translated from
the Italian by Allan Cameron (London: Abacus, 2003, original edn
2000)
“The Making of a ‘Bourgeois Revolution’,” Social Research, vol. 71,
no. 3, Fall 2004, pp. 455-480
“Guessing about Global Change,” International Labor and Working
Class History, vol. 47, Spring 1995, pp. 39-44
“A Life in History,” Past and Present, no. 177, 2002, pp. 3-16
Interesting Times. A Twentieth-Century Life (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
Abacus edn, 2002) [not cited]
“Portrait de l’historien en franc-tireur,” Revue d’histoire moderne et
contemporaine, t. 53e, no. 4 bis, 2006, pp. 72-76
“Interview. World Distempers,” New Left Review, 61, Jan-Feb 2010,
pp. 133-150

On Hobsbawm – General
Anderson, Perry, “Confronting Defeat,” London Review of Books, vol.
24, no. 20, 17 October 2002, pp. 10-17
Blok, Anton, “The Peasant and the Brigand: Social Banditry
Reconsidered,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 14,
1972, pp. 494-503
Cronin, James, “Creating a Marxist Historiography: The Contribution
of Hobsbawm,” Radical History Review, 19, Winter 1978-1979, pp.
87-109

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 The Interesting Ideas of Eric Hobsbawm 87

Elliott, Gregory, Ends in Sight. Marx / Fukuyama / Hobsbawm /

Anderson (London: Pluto Press, 2008)
Genovese, Eugene D., “The Politics of Class Struggle in the History
of Society: An Appraisal of the Work of Eric Hobsbawm,” in Pat
Thane, Geoffrey Crossick, and Roderick Floud, eds, The Power of
the Past. Essays for Eric Hobsbawm (London: Cambridge
University Press; Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de
l’Homme, 1984), pp. 13-36
Kaye, Harvey J., The British Marxist Historians (London: Polity
Press, 1984)
Murphy, Kevin J., “Can We Write the History of the Russian
Revolution? A Belated Response to Eric Hobsbawm,” Historical
Materialism, vol. 15, 2007, pp. 3-19
O’Malley, Pat, “Class Conflict, Land and Social Banditry: Bushranging
in Nineteenth Century Australia,” Social Problems, vol. 26, no. 3,
Feb. 1979, pp. 271-283
O’Malley, Pat, “Social Bandits, Modern Capitalism and the Traditional
Peasantry. A Critique of Hobsbawm,” The Journal of Peasant
Studies, vol. 6, no. 4, 1979, pp. 489-501
O’Malley,Pat, “The Suppression of Social Banditry; Train Robbers in
the US Border States and Bush Rangers in Australia, 1865-1905,
Crime and Social Justice, no. 16, Winter 1981, pp. 32-39
Renton, David, “Studying their Own Nation Without Insularity? The
British Marxist Historians Reconsidered,” Science & Society, vol.
69, no. 4, Oct. 2005, pp. 559-579
Schmitt, Casey R. “The Barefoot Bandit, Outlaw Legend, and Modern
American Folk Heroism,” Folklore, 123, Apr. 2012, pp. 74-83
Reviews of Primitive Rebels and Bandits
Billacois, François, Review of Bandits, in Annales. Histoire, Sciences
Sociales, 28e année, no. 5, Sept.-Oct. 1973, pp. 1160-1162
Carr, E. H., Review of Primitive Rebels, in The British Journal of
Sociology, vol. 11, no. 1, Mar. 1969, pp. 92-93
Carr, Raymond, Review of Primitive Rebels, in Economic History
Review, New Series, vol. 12, no. 2, 1959, pp. 348-350

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88 Madhavan K. Palat

Coser, Lewis A., Review of Primitive Rebels, in American Sociological

Review, vol. 25, no. 6, Dec. 1960, pp. 988-989
Cowley, John C., Review of Primitive Rebels, in Science & Society,
vol. 31, no. 3, Summer 1967, pp. 365-367
Dubief, Henri, Review of Primitive Rebels, in Revue Historique, t. 225,
fasc. 2, 1961, pp. 483-487
Epstein, David G., Review of Bandits, in American Anthropologist, vol.
73, no. 4, Aug. 1971, pp. 958-960
Graña, César, Review of Primitive Rebels, in American Sociological
Review, vol. 29, no. 5, Oct. 1964, pp. 761-762
Hearder, H., Review of Primitive Rebels, in The English Historical
Review, vol. 76, no. 298, Jan. 1961, p. 167
Helleiner, Karl F., Review of Primitive Rebels, in The Canadian Journal
of Economics and Political Science / Revue canadienne
d’Economique et de Science Politique, vol. 26, no. 4, Nov. 1960,
p. 660
Hurst, James W., Review of Bandits, in Science & Society, vol. 35, no.
3, Fall 1971, pp. 360-362
James, Rita, Review of Primitive Rebels, in American Journal of
Sociology, vol. 66, no. 1, July 1960, pp. 97-98
McIntosh, Mary, Review of Bandits, in The British Journal of
Sociology, vol. 21, no. 3, Sept. 1970, p. 355
Pillai, P. Govinda, “The World of Social Bandits,” Social Scientist, vol.
2, no. 11, June 1974, pp. 71-75
Pitt-Rivers, Julian, Review of Primitive Rebels, in American
Anthropologist, New Series, vol. 63, no. 4, Aug. 1961, pp.
855-856
Raglan, Review of Primitive Rebels, in Man, vol. 49, Aug. 1959,
pp. 144-145
Redlich, Fritz, Review of Primitive Rebels, in Vierteljahrschrift für
Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, Bd 47, H. 3, Sept. 1960, p. 416
Stearns, Peter N., Review of Primitive Rebels, in The Journal of Modern
History, vol. 36, no. 1, Mar. 1961, pp. 82-83

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 The Interesting Ideas of Eric Hobsbawm 89

Worsley, Peter, “The Revolt of the Inarticulate,” Past and Present, no.
17, Apr. 1960, pp. 87-93
Reviews of the Age Series
Alford, B. W. E., Review of The Age of Empire, in The Economic
History Review, New Series, vol. 42, no. 2, May, 1989, pp. 302-
303
Anon, “Creation of World Capitalist Economy”, Economic and Political
Weekly, vol. 12, no. 22, May 28, 1977, pp. 875-877
Ashworth, W., Review of The Age of Capital, in The Economic History
Review, New Series, vol. 29, no. 3, Aug., 1976, pp. 528-529
Berkowitz, S. D., Review of The Age of Capital, in Contemporary
Sociology, vol. 6, no. 4 July, 1977, pp. 428-430
Bruun, Geoffrey, Review of The Age of Revolution, in Political Science
Quarterly, vol. 79, no. 3, Sept., 1964, pp. 446-447
Bury, J. P. T., Review of The Age of Capital in The English Historical
Review, vol. 92, no. 363, Apr. 1977, p. 458
Church, Roy A., Review of The Age of Capital, in Journal of Economic
Literature, vol. 15, no. 4, Dec., 1977, pp. 1347-1348
de Schweinitz, Karl, Review of The Age of Capital, in Journal of
Economic Issues, vol. 10, no. 4, Dec. 1976, pp. 967-970
Fletcher, Max E., Review of The Age of Capital, 1848-1875, in The
Journal of Economic History, vol. 37, no. 2, June, 1977, pp. 524-
526
Goodwin,A., Review of The Age of Revolution, The English Historical
Review vol. 79, no. 312, July 1964, pp. 616-617
Hamerow, Theodore S., Review of The Age of Revolution, in American
Historical Review, vol. 68, no. 4, July 1963, pp. 1018-1019
Harrison, John F. C., “Recent Writing on the History of Victorian
England”, Victorian Studies, vol. 8, no. 3, Mar., 1965, pp. 263-270,
here 265
Harrison, John F. C.,Review of The Age of Capital, inVictorian Studies,
vol. 20, no. 4, Summer 1977, pp. 423-425
Jordan, David. P., in American Historical Review, vol. 97, no. 1, Feb.
1992, pp. 215-216

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90 Madhavan K. Palat

Kisch, Herbert, and Henderson, John P., “Hobsbawm and ‘The Age of
Capital’”, Journal of Economic Issues, vol. 16, no. 1, Mar., 1982,
pp. 107-130
Langer, William L., Review of The Age of Capital, in The American
Historical Review, vol. 81, no. 4, Oct., 1976, p. 817
Morton, A. L., Review of The Age of Capital in Science & Society,
vol. 42, no. 1, Spring 1978, pp. 94-97
Murray, Lawrence L., Review of The Age of Capital, in The Business
History Review, vol. 51, no. 1, Spring 1977, pp. 103-104
Rosenberg, Justin, “Hobsbawm’s Century,” Monthly Review, vol. 47,
no. 3, July 1995, pp. 139-148
Said, Edward, “Contra Mundum,” London Review of Books, vol. 17,
no. 5, 9 Mar. 1995, pp. 22-23 [Review of Age of Extremes]
Salsbury, Stephen, Review of The Age of Capital, in Technology and
Culture, vol. 18, no. 2, April 1977, pp. 256-257
Saville, John, Review of The Age of Empirein International Labor and
Working-Class History, no. 36, Fall 1989, pp. 134-137
Shorter, Edward, Review of The Age of Capital, in Journal of
Interdisciplinary History, vol. 8, no. 1, Summer 1977, pp. 155-157
Silvera, Alain, Review of The Age of Empire, in Victorian Studies, vol.
32, no. 3, Spring 1989, pp. 460-461
Weber, Eugen, Review of The Age of Empire in The American
Historical Review, vol. 74, no. 2, April 1989
Reviews of Interesting Times
Assayag, Jackie, “ ‘Sur les échasses du temps’. Histoire et
anthropologie chez Eric J. Hobsbawm,” Revue d’histoire moderne
et contemporaine, t. 53e, no. 4 bis, 2006, pp. 100-113
Perrot, Michelle, Review of Franc-tireur. Autobiographie, in Le
Mouvement social, no. 201/220, Culture et Politique, avril-sept.
2007, pp. 209-213.
Solomon, Mark, “An Engagement of Head and Heart: Eric Hobsbawm’s
20th Century,” Science & Society vol. 71, no. 3, July 2007, pp.
356-360

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 The Interesting Ideas of Eric Hobsbawm 91

Other
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Parey, 1978)
Adorno, Theodor W.; Horkheimer, Max, Dialectic of Enlightenment,
translated by John Cumming (London: Verso, 1979; original
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Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin
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Anderson, Perry, Considerations on Western Marxism (London: Verso,
1979; 1st edn 1976)
Ankersmit, Frank, “The Necessity of Historicism,” Journal of the
History of Philosophy, vol. 4, 2010, pp. 226-240
Bakunin: Michel Bakounine, [Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin,],
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Gosudarstvennost’ i Anarkhiia, Vvedenie, chast’ 1, 1873, (Leiden:
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Bambach, Charles R., Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of Historicism
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Bauman, Zygmunt, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca: Cornell
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Bayly, C. A., The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914. Global
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