The History of Eric Hobsbawm

When he died in 2012 at the age of ninety-five, Eric Hobsbawm was probably the most famous historian in the world, as well known in Brazil and Japan as in London. He was also among the most highly regarded, despite (or perhaps because of) his long-term commitment to Marxism. It may seem remarkable that a biography of an academic historian, who held no public offices, as well-written as it is gripping, can be sustained for 785 pages, but this is the achievement of Sir Richard Evans in this monumental biography, one of the best I have ever read about anyone.

Evans is probably best known for his three-volume history of Nazi Germany, and for the evidence he gave in 2000 at the famous lawsuit brought by David Irving against Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt about the veracity of the Holocaust. Evans is not a Marxist and, although he knew Hobsbawm, was not close to him. To sustain such a massive biography, Evans has had full access to Hobsbawm’s voluminous diaries, letters, financial records and intelligence files compiled by MI5 through bugging the British Communist Party’s headquarters. He records in full Hobsbawm’s private life, his unfortunate early marriage and his affairs, leaving little to the imagination.

There are many myths about Eric Hobsbawm, the most common being that he was a refugee from the Nazis. In fact, his father was born in London and worked in Alexandria, Egypt, where, implausibly, Eric was born; he was a British subject at birth, entitled to live in Britain whenever he chose to. His parents died young, and Hobsbawm was brought up by relatives in Austria and Germany. He spoke English in the home, and was known as “the English boy” at school. A non-observant Jew, he witnessed the rise of Nazism at first hand; as a teenager, he became a fully committed communist, adopting a viewpoint to which he held firm for many decades. Hobsbawm went to England, along with relatives, soon after Hitler came to power in 1933.

His amazing intelligence and extraordinary memory were evident early. By the time he was seventeen, Hobsbawm may well have been, quite literally, the best read and most erudite teenager in the world. In February 1935, according to his diary, he read plays by seventeen different writers from Aeschylus to O’Neill; in March and April, he read six Shakespeare plays and works by Coleridge, Chaucer, Fielding, Petronius, Proust, Thomas Mann, Milton, Boswell, Wilfred Owen, Donne, Lessing, Housman, Dryden, David Hume, John Dos Passos, Pope, “and others”, as Evans puts it.  In January of that year he had bought Volume One of Das Kapital, which he absorbed and used “as a textbook”, but also, as a work to consult “when I don’t want to take the trouble to think … I look up the place in Marx and I have a complete and brilliant analysis.” He was apparently also impressed by Stalin, giving a copy of the dictator’s History of the Communist Party as a gift to his cousin.

In England, Hobsbawm’s brilliance strongly impressed the teachers at his school, St Marylebone Grammar School, and he gained admission and a substantial scholarship to King’s College, Cambridge, best known for the number of Etonians who went there. At Cambridge, he gained a starred double first (the highest possible degree) in history and, rather incongruously, became a member of the Apostles, the famous secret society known for its geniuses, communists and homosexuals, Hobsbawm checking two of those three boxes.

After war service (as a sergeant), and despite his already well-known Communist Party membership (he joined it as an undergraduate at Cambridge), in 1947 Hobsbawm was appointed to a lectureship at Birkbeck College, London University’s institution for mature students, where he remained for the rest of his working career. This was a rather incongruous post for an increasingly eminent historian, but its venue in central London and the fact that its classes were only held in the evening, giving ample time for research, suited him well. But academic promotion was blocked for many years by several factors. The first, of course, was his membership in the Communist Party. It should be said that he was at Cambridge some years after the members of the notorious “Cambridge spy ring” (Burgess, Maclean, Philby et al), and had no connection with it. Unlike them, he had no government secrets to impart to the Kremlin, and was never asked to, according to the extensive secret bugging of the Party’s headquarters by MI5. But, during the Cold War, any senior promotion of a known communist raised legitimate fears that he would indoctrinate his students, as well as bring enormous hostile publicity to that university. In addition, his department heads, probably with a strong element of jealousy, simply failed to appreciate Hobsbawm’s great gifts. For years, his promotion at Birkbeck was blocked by his department head, a little-known medievalist who appeared to be the embodiment of Conan Doyle’s dictum that talent instantly recognises genius, but mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself. Similarly, Hobsbawm applied for the Chair of Economic History at Cambridge, but the post went to (in Evans’s words) “an obscure figure who had written on South American banks”.

From the 1950s on, however, Hobsbawm produced a stream of the books for which he became internationally known—Primitive Rebels, Captain Swing (with George Rudé), The Invention of Tradition (as an editor), Industry and Empire and, above all, his four-volume history of the world since the French Revolution, published between 1962 and 1994, The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital, The Age of Empire and The Age of Extremes, in addition to lesser works and countless essays and newspaper articles. Throughout, his incredible erudition was both evident and striking, a factor which impressed everyone who knew him.

I knew Hobsbawm rather well, over many years, and like others, was astonished by his learning and memory. I once became impressed by a book published in 1916 by Josiah Stamp, British Incomes and Property, an outstanding analysis of Britain’s very complex income tax system, and mentioned this work to several senior historians in London, none of whom had ever heard of it. In contrast, when I mentioned it to Hobsbawm, the story was different: without pausing, he fully agreed with me about its superlative merits, on which he enlarged for ten minutes or so, although he almost certainly had not opened the book in twenty years.

Hobsbawm remained a Marxist for nearly all the rest of his life, although he almost certainly altered his outlook substantially in old age. He remained a paid-up member of the British Communist Party until it dissolved itself in 1991, remaining faithful to it even as very many intellectuals left it after the Hungarian uprising in 1956. Around 1968, at a dinner party, Michael Strait, an American, “made some bitter comments about the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia”. Hobsbawm replied that “there are more political prisoners in the United States today than there are in Czechoslovakia”, a statement, if accurately reported, Orwellian in its mendacity. At the time of the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary, he found fault with some aspects of the intervention, but concluded: “If we had been in the position of the Soviet government, we should have intervened.” Many similar statements, echoing the Party line, are given in Evans’s book.

There are many mysteries about Eric Hobsbawm’s life and beliefs, but the most obvious one is: how on earth a man of his commanding intellect, consistent originality and international perspective could, decade after decade, sublimate these qualities to slavish support for Joseph Stalin, a crude mass-murdering dictator, to his even more mediocre successors, and to the even dimmer leadership of the British Communist Party. Broadly, of course, this was because Hobsbawm came of age in the 1930s, the “devil’s decade” of fascism and mass unemployment. But so did many others, most of whom later repented of their folly.

At the heart of Hobsbawm’s belief system, in my opinion, was his relationship with his Jewish background—or rather, the black hole which defined this relationship. He was in Berlin in 1933 on the day Hitler came to power; several members of his family perished in the Holocaust. Hobsbawm later admitted that he was intellectually unable to confront the Holocaust. When the American historian Arno Mayer sent him the typescript of a book on the exterminations, Hobsbawm wrote back: “Since the first material on the camps came out in the early fifties or late forties, I have kept away from it … I have found it too difficult to face emotionally.” A French publisher who is Jewish declined to publish a translation of The Age of Extremes because it barely mentioned the Holocaust, discussing it in perhaps eight or ten lines, much less than the space that Hobsbawm gave to the Dadaist movement in modern art; Auschwitz was not mentioned at all.

Although he may well have softened at the end, Hobsbawm was of course an atheist with no religious connections to Judaism. So far as I am aware, he said nothing whatever about Soviet anti-Semitism. He apparently never visited Israel, and in 2005 signed a left-wing petition condemning Israeli policy on the West Bank. The Jew he mentioned most often in his vast output was Karl Marx. As George Canning put it in another context long ago, Hobsbawm was “a friend to every country but his own”.

Of course, when he was writing about Korea or Mexico, this gaping void was irrelevant, but in my view was symptomatic of a void extending far beyond the Jews. Hobsbawm was an unremitting universalist, hating all nationalisms and national identities, and perhaps not understanding them. He was a Marxist, who believed that class and dialectical materialism determined history. But Jews are arguably the ultimate particularistic people, whose religious claim is that they were “chosen”, and who have been persecuted and massacred on religious and then “racial” grounds, not because of economic class. Hobsbawm’s oeuvre may be seen as an attempt to negate and evade this reality, an attitude which permeates his work. (It is also somewhat similar to the attitude of E.P. Thompson towards Methodism in The Making of the English Working Class. Thompson was the son of Methodist missionaries in India; his condemnation of the baneful effects of Methodism during the British industrial revolution is one of the most striking sections of his book.)

Perhaps, too, Hobsbawm’s attitude extended to his treatment of America, which may be seen as a kind of Jewry Writ Large, a “chosen people” in “God’s own country”. Hobsbawm never understood America and, like many European intellectuals, detested its unbounded capitalism, lack of a European welfare state, gun violence and lowlife popular culture. Rather unexpectedly, he was also a noted jazz critic, writing many columns under the pseudonym “Francis Newton”. His writings on jazz strike me as somewhat jejune, showing a dislike for virtually any jazz produced after its “authentic” phase from about 1915 to 1935. These points seem to me to be arguably central in understanding Hobsbawm’s viewpoint.

A matter of importance about which more needed to be said concerns Hobsbawm’s attitude towards E.P. Thompson (1924–93), the Anglo-Marxist historian who was, it might be argued, Hobsbawm’s great rival. Seven years younger than Hobsbawm, Thompson was educated at Oxford and was also, like Hobsbawm, a member of the Communist Historians’ Group; the two knew each other over many years. In 1963 Thompson published The Making of the English Working Class, his 800-page magnum opus, which has been described as “incontestably the most important work of history of the post-war period”. Famously “seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ handloom weaver” and others from “the enormous condescension of history”, in contrast to Hobsbawm’s internationalism it was exclusively British in perspective. It appeared fortuitously at the start of the period of student unrest, and became the favoured historical work of thousands of radical students and also of many lay radicals who were deeply interested in the exploitation of their working-class ancestors in Yorkshire or Wales, but had no real concern about poverty in Ecuador or Silesia. Had Thompson gone on from The Making of the English Working Class to produce, as everyone expected, further volumes on British factory capitalism, industrial cities, trade unions and the Labour Party, he, rather than Hobsbawm, would certainly have been regarded as the king (or, perhaps, first party secretary) of Anglo-Marxist historians. But in 1971 he unexpectedly quit academic life to become a full-time activist for nuclear disarmament, writing little or nothing on history, and producing no successor to The Making of the English Working Class. For eight or ten years after its publication, however, Thompson had completely upstaged Hobsbawm as the guru historian of the far Left, as well as other prominent Anglo-Marxist historians like Christopher Hill and John Saville. In Hobsbawm’s autobiography Interesting Times and elsewhere, one can discern an element of resentment towards the younger man. One would like to have this more thoroughly discussed.

Did Hobsbawm moderate his views as he aged? There is a good deal of evidence for such an interpretation. There is, for instance, the economic success he increasingly enjoyed as a world-famous writer. By 1989-90 (Evans supplies the data from Hobsbawm’s financial records), entirely in addition to his salary as a professor, Hobsbawm earned £91,557, serious money at the time, from royalties, lecture fees and “renting out property”. He had a Swiss bank account, and (like many others) employed a tax accountant to find every last deduction, especially for his numerous overseas trips. He received advances of £90,000 each for The Age of Extremes and Interesting Times. He was elected a member of the prestigious Athenaeum Club on Pall Mall and had a country house in Wales. When asked how he squared this with his Marxist beliefs, Hobsbawm replied, “If you are on a ship that’s going down, you might as well travel first class.”

It was widely noted by reviewers that The Age of Extremes no longer used social class or class conflict as its framework. Remarkably, it seems that during the last part of his life Hobsbawm voted for the Liberal Democrats, not for a left-wing party. He also began to receive sharp criticism from left-wing sources as well as from conservatives, in particular from feminists, who noted the absence of women and women’s issues from his books, and, as well, for his alleged ignoring of blacks and of African history.

It seems that he even made peace with his Jewish background. At his funeral service, at his request a rabbi recited Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead. In Evans’s book there is a photograph of Hobsbawm’s grave, at Highgate Cemetery, near the tomb of Karl Marx. It is very plain, stating only his name and dates and the word Historian. The photograph shows the gravestone covered with many pebbles, traditionally placed by mourners on Jewish graves. One god failed; another older one perhaps took its place. Could Hobsbawm have gone the whole hog, and become a Tory? Stranger things have happened.

We may never see his like again, a matter for regret and sadness. But we are unlikely ever to see again the historical conditions which were responsible for his viewpoint, for which there should be rejoicing.

Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History
by Richard J. Evans
Little, Brown, 2019, 785 pages, £35

William D. Rubinstein held chairs of history at Deakin University and the University of Wales, and is currently an adjunct professor at Monash University. He wrote on Israel’s growing influence on Western conservatism in the April issue.