Eric Hobsbawm is dead

He was a Companion of Honour, which is a much greater honour than a mere knighthood – it is in the personal gift of the monarch, and there are only ever 65 of them*. Ks are given out like sweets by comparison, to all sorts of third-rate political hacks, bureaucrats, and vacuous celebrities.

*weirdly, David Attenborough is both a CH and an OM, the other fixed-membership order, which tells you that the queen likes wildlife documentaries, or something.

As another old pinko wrote of himself,

There were few who thought him a starter,
Many who thought themselves smarter.
But he ended PM,
CH and OM,
an Earl and a Knight of the Garter.

A solitary CH seems quite lowly by comparison. Still, not bad for an old Commie.

He was a Companion of Honour, which often seems to be the way in which those who decline other honours are nevertheless honoured;

Don’t think so; most of the CHs are fairly heavily loaded already, honours-wise. Knighthoods, peerages, CBEs etc.

In the case of Ferguson the appropriate reaction would be more like I look at his work and I think “Dear God, I’ve been calling myself a historian…” Still, you can’t really expect people to j’en appelle themselves (ref: another old pinko, or two).

Though it’s not what he was best known for, he wrote a very nice little book on jazz early in his career: http://www.amazon.com/The-Jazz-Scene-Eric-Hobsbawm/dp/0679406336

Just noticed that the second paragraph of Hobsbawm’s wikipedia entry claims that he apparently supported the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact, this is linked to a one Oliver Kamm! Who’d a thought it?

supported the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact

I imagine this another way of saying he was a Party member? IIRC, in his autobiography he expresses a good bit of frustration about the policy.

RIP.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Captain-Swing-Prof-Eric-Hobsbawm/dp/1842122355

favorite Hobsbawm book.

I wonder how often 15 happens. Probably quite often: if you ask A to write B’s autobiography, it might well be because A is in the same field as B and knows her – so they’re probably fairly close to each other in age and life expectancy…

Hobsbawm made a rather strange mistake for a Marxist historian in “The Age of Empire”. He contrasts the “modest scale” of atrocities in the premodern era compared with what happened after 1914, and specifically referred to the Congo. (He also mentioned the Amazon, and since there were many fewer Indians to kill there, he’s probably right about that.) I believe he also contrasted the megadeaths of the wars and upheavals in his “short 20th century” (starting in 1914) with what happened in the 19th in “The Age of Extremes”. What about the Chinese civil war, the mass famines under British rule in India and of course the millions dead in the Congo Free State? His comparison of relative atrocity scales only works if you confine yourself to Europe (though the Irish might have something to say about that.)

I believe he also contrasted the megadeaths of the wars and upheavals in his “short 20th century” (starting in 1914) with what happened in the 19th in “The Age of Extremes”. What about the Chinese civil war, the mass famines under British rule in India and of course the millions dead in the Congo Free State?

The Taiping Rebellion was huge, but not as bloody as WW2, as far as anyone can make out. The deaths in the Congo are literally innumerable; we just don’t have the information. What was the population before the Free State was set up? No idea. How many people simply fled elsewhere rather than die? No idea.
The Indian famines are trickier because you face the problem of intent to kill.

Re: Graeber’s Debt

http://www.ditext.com/hobsbawm/9.html

I was also going to post the link to DeLong. I think it’s a useful critique of Hobsbawm, but frustrating at the same time.

@13

But oh no! Hobsbawn thought that the infamous pamphlet had been lost, but devastatingly; Ollie has a copy! Oh, and Hitchens C didn’t like him either. Will his reputation survive a blow delivered by a towering intellectual giant – and Dude Hitchens? History will be the judge.

BTW, I don’t mean to imply that Hobsbawm was trying to make a right wing point, just that he said something false that I’d normally expect from someone whose ideology was the opposite of his. The long 19th century was arguably as bloody per capita as Hobsbawm’s short 20th century or in the same range. But the megadeaths were all outside Europe (with the exception of about 1 million in Ireland).

Here is a link that says the Taiping rebellion cost 30 million lives.

link

Twitter furore has broken out in Ireland, where a Senator tweeted, “Calling yourself a marxist historian is akin to calling yourself a creationist palaeontologist.” The Royal Irish Academy then retweeted it.

Chaos on the (twitter) left ensued.

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Brad DeLong’s Cold Warrior Cosplay!

In further news, Barry Commoner also just died.

http://www.thenation.com/article/170251/remembering-barry-commoner

I read H’s ‘The Age of Revolution’ a very long time ago and ‘The Age of Extremes’ (or most of it) more recently, though still a while back. My recollection, which I wouldn’t want to defend as anything other than a retrospective impression, is that a lot of ‘Age of Extremes’ is not very Marxist. A lot of the judgments and statements are pretty conventional in the sense that they rely on available statistics about economic and social trends. E.g., the chapter on capitalism’s ‘golden age’ is really not very Marxist at all. And it’s worth noting that Stanley Hoffmann, who is most definitely not a Marxist or anything near it, gave ‘The Age of Extremes’ a glowing review in the NYTBkRev (iirc).

I couldn’t bring myself to read beyond the opening paragraph of the DeLong piece — maybe I will try to read it some other time. (DeLong starts by picking on H’s description of the Korean War, which is kind of a minor point in the scheme of the book, which is stronger on broad trends than specific events. Indeed, the early chapter in which H. covers World War I and WW II is probably one of the weakest in the book.)

“Extremes” has some good analysis, but no one could be bothered to catch the author’s silly errors. First A-bomb Aug 10? 60,000 dead at the first day of the Somme? Only 1M battle dead in the world wars, Japan v China, and Korea combined? US troops in action a year and a half in WW1? And that’s not even all the way thru the 1st chapter. Does the UK not have grad assistants?

“Twitter furore has broken out in Ireland, where a Senator tweeted, “Calling yourself a marxist historian is akin to calling yourself a creationist palaeontologist.” .”

FWIW I thınk that ıs to get thıngs precısely the wrong way round. Dobzhansky once wrote a pıece entıtled “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution”. For me you can ditch almost everything ın Marxism ıf you want but what remaıns ıs that classes ‘exist’ ın some form and that they have dıfferent interests whıch (at least occasionally) come ınto conflict. To me nothıng ın history makes any sense unless you accept this ın some shape or form.

Certainly questıons about the current economic policies of the EU and the Government of the UK and (say) Spain Portugal and Greece can’t be understood wıthout thıs insight as the ‘alleged’ ‘ real’ reasons for the policies pursued make absolutely no sense.

The other great insight, not so much of Marx himself but of the Marxist tradition, ıs of the importance of ımperialism ın terms of understanding the modern (and ancient) world. Again I simply can’t get my head round people who try and explain the 19th and 20th centuries wıthout using thıs concept.

@42
The book is based on a course of lectures at the New School, I believe H. says in the preface. He thanks a couple of research assistants. Discussion of casualty figures pp.43-4 seems reasonable and suggests the 1M remark you noticed may be a typo (?).

@46
From the end of the preface/acknowledgments of ‘Age of Extremes’:

My special thanks go to those who have actually helped me to prepare this book. They are, first, my research assistants Joanna Bedford in London and Lisa Grande in New York. I would particularly like to express my debt to the exceptional Ms. Grande…. I have already indicated my debt to the students of the New School [in New York], who listened to the lectures in which I tried to formulate my ideas and interpretations.

I have no idea whether these research assistants were grad students. He may not have used any research assistants on his other books, but for this particular one he did.

It’s actually not that common for academic historians to have graduate students helping them with their books.

Indeed. Niall Ferguson’s commandeered them all for his.

“Marc Mulholland calls Hobsbawm the 20th century’s greatest historian.”

The headline is editorial, rather than my own. Hobsbawm was certainly amongst the greatest.

On wars etc, Steven Pinker made an attempt to normalise these for global population at the time. CT posters weren’t terribly sold on his analysis

Yes, I was just thinking that… CT is condemning Pinker for overestimating how nasty the 19th century was, and Hobsbawm for doing the exact opposite!

I was being snarky about the grad assistants of course. H surely tossed off many dates and figures from memory; it says something about his reputation, or perhaps about capitalist publishing, that no one could or cared to correct his errors.

I’d welcome any help you all could provide on the matter of his last name.

“Eric John Hobsbawm was born in 1917 in Alexandria, Egypt, where a confused clerk at the British consulate misspelled the last name of his father, Leopold Percy Hobsbaum…”

The various obituaries and articles seem to agree with what’s in the Wikipedia article; does “Jack of Oz”‘s suspicion have any basis?

Just for the record, the 19th century trilogy is magnificent — near the top of the list of history books I would recommend to anyone — and the Age of Extremes is useful, though weaker for the reasons mentioned by Jonathan. Industry and Empire is also very good. So is the book on Nationalism, which I just happened to read this summer. Unlike Matt upthread, what struck me about that one was the relatively positive & progressive picture it painted of nationalism. The most important point, I thought, was that the concept was originally specifically political — a nation was a people engaged in collective self-government. The idea that a nation necessarily had an ethnic-liguistic or historical unity only came considerably later. In its origins nationalism was just a corollary of popular sovereignty.

One thing that struck me in Marc Mulholland’s generally solid Jacobin piece was this, from the summing-up at the end: “Capitalism, in the long run, he believed, remained unstable.” Doesn’t this soft-peddle it quite a bit, and make it sound like he turned into a Keynesian, which he did not? It seems to me that he continued to think that capitalism was not just unstable, but fundamentally incompatible with human flourishing, if not human survival. But maybe Mulholland or someone else has some evidence that his late criticism of capitalism was limited to its instability?

ajay:
CT is condemning Pinker for overestimating how nasty the 19th century was, and Hobsbawm for doing the exact opposite
Go back and take a look at the comment thread that followed Chris Bertram’s post “Violence is Down, Says Pinker the Thinker.” There was an extended debate about Pinker and also about somewhat similar though not identical analyses, e.g. J.S. Goldstein ‘Winning the War on War’. (I didn’t read Pinker so my participation in that thread was on the decline-of-war argument but not Pinker’s bk.)

Jonathan:
On wars etc, Steven Pinker made an attempt to normalise these for global population at the time
The “etc” is v important, since Pinker’s argument is not limited to war. You can therefore buy a decline-of-war argument w/o necessarily buying Pinker.

Sorry; back to Hobsbawm.

The idea that a nation necessarily had an ethnic-liguistic or historical unity only came considerably later. In its origins nationalism was just a corollary of popular sovereignty. Yes, this was a big part of what I liked about the book. If you contrast it to, say, Rogers Smith’s _Stories of Peoplehood_ you’ll see that the more common view now is that the idea of a nation as an essentially political entity is rejected and it’s argued that it’s essential that the common mass be filled with mythical stories about imagined beginnings, common essences, and the like. The elite, of course, know that such stores are garbage- they don’t have to believe them- but the idea is that this is necessary to keep the masses unified. A deeply undemocratic and pessimistic view, and I thought Hobsbawm did a lot to show what was wrong with it.

“Annoying as our commenters often are, I’m not persuaded that it would less bad to murder them if there were more people around.”

But it would be less bad to be a commenter among thousands than a commenter among tens, if the same number of commenters were to be murdered in each case. I’m surprised that you don’t see that – you seem to be confusing the morality of a murder with its impact.

One of the juiciest ironies of history at the moment, it seems to me, is that Hobsbawm’s ghost is being taken to the woodshed for not renouncing Stalin soon enough, while many of the same people doing the chastising are taking great pains to excuse current U.S. economic and foreign policy as a momentary derangement of right-wing yahoos in the Republican Party, and telling us that things’ll be better bye-and-bye. Even if you add up all the Afghan wedding parties obliterated, Honduran reporters shot down in the streets, anti-suicide nets around the roofs of Foxconn factories, and Spaniards and Greeks digging through garbage cans, capitalism — well late capitalism, anyway — never had a Stalin.

True, but in a very real sense, irrelevant. Under the circumstances, a little more humility might be in order from the Judts, DeLongs and suchlike, not that I expect any, of course. In any event, if a little Marxism leavens the impulse for letter-day capitalist apologists to crow like a bantam rooster on a dunghill over its supposed superiorities, I’d say its historical worth is of at least some consequence.

Don’t forget 5 million Vietnamese and Indian famine.

IMHO, Hobsbawm’s “dance with the one that brung ya” lifelong attachment to Stalinism as a mode of political practice certainly befogged his analyses of the political-economy of his time and significantly hobbled his “Age of Extremes” and other works on the 20th century…

The question about whether Hobsbawm’s Marxism made “The Age of Revolution” and “The Age of Capital” stronger books or weaker books is one that I oscillate on week-by-week if not hour-by-hour…

Re: “I’d been about to read that trilogy based on the glowing praises for it, but you’ve just turned down the glow, big-time.” You certainly should read “The Age of Revolution” and “The Age of Capital”–the structure is slightly warped by the fact that Hobsbawm is looking forward to the Coming of the Basilea with the storming of the Winter Palace on October 25, 1917 (J), but only slightly…

They are great books.

Thanks, 74!

I’m seeing an omission of comparable praise for The Age of Empire … I take it “omissions are not accidents”? (Marianne Moore)

One of EP Thompson’s advantages as a historian is that he did not claim to own an orrery.

“CT is condemning Pinker for overestimating how nasty the 19th century was, and Hobsbawm for doing the exact opposite!”

I condemned Hobsbawm–did the entire blog? Also, what’s your point? Hobsbawm clearly isn’t talking about a factor of two or so as I already said–he writes as though atrocities and wars killing millions were unknown in his long 19th century and he is simply wrong to have implied that, whether or not it is appropriate to bring in per capita death rates (as I did–the Taiping Rebellion looks even more cataclysmic when you consider how many fewer people there were to kill.)

I stayed out of the Pinker discussion, I think. I had mixed intuitions on that, but nothing factual to say. (Which doesn’t always stop me.)

.

ajay CT is condemning Pinker for overestimating how nasty the 19th century was, and Hobsbawm for doing the exact opposite!

Admission to the CT Office of Condemnation (OfCon) is always available. Send a cheque or Paypal donation to my account and you’re in. The annual summer barbecue and Will-You-Condemnathon is one of the highlights of the year.

Its like asking if the Mona Lisa would have been a better piece of art had Da Vinci not used paints.

I guess one difference is that no one’s really concerned whether the Mona Lisa is an accurate representation of its sitter or not.

“The books are historical materialist in that they histories of ideas, and broad social movements, as opposed to Great Men in History.”

I’m not sure if you are but I detect you are trying to play down the importance of historical materialism to Hobsbawm. I think that is a mistake.

Social and political forms are assumed to be determinations of economic forces. Great events in history are treated as contradictions either between these forms and forces or in the forces themselves. Skeptical empirical research is conducted using this framework to produce testable hypothesis. It’s the method of historical materialism as practiced by good Marxist Historians; we can recognize it as ‘an occasionally useful way of going about the business of understanding movements in history’ without thinking the workers revolution is inevitable or that Stalin’s sort of misunderstood.

It may surprise readers of the Guardian to know that Eric Hobsbawm and I were friends.
– Nial Ferguson

The books actually begin with the twin revolutions—the French revolution and the industrial revolution—and this conjunction is pretty central to his conception of the “long 19th century”. (But if you mean that the first chapter is about the industrial revolution, then yes, in that sense the book “begins” with the industrial revolution.)

Anyway, great books all three. Everyone should read them!

Its collapse which was preceded by economic and social stagnation and decline, however, definitely made it a much less attractive model than it had been at its most successful. Even if it had been able to last it is hard to justify the violent repression under Stalin. One would have to be an extreme utilitarian who really did believe that the ends justifies the means and that the pile of broken eggs was morally insignificant compared to the success of the omelet.

Just consider all the ordinary people who consider historical crimes against the natives, or enslaved Africans, as mere footnotes of regret to the essentially good and admirable American project. Success seems to excuse many a megadeath, and there’s nothing so logical as utilitarianism behind it.

Here’s a thing: 25 years ago it would have been a controversial claim to suggest that membership of a Western European Communist Party automatically made one a Stalinist. They were full of folk who rejected the label.

So quite a lot of the rubbishing of Hobsbawm for staying in the CP is really about rejecting his (effectively) left social democratic/Eurocomminist politics as somehow totalitarian when it so clearly wasn’t.

Of course it’s sad. How can you argue with their pain:

“THOUSANDS of inconsolable teenage girls have gathered at the home of deceased historian Eric Hobsbawm.”

http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/celebrity/teen-vigil-at-hobsbawm-house-2012100243294

though the absence of a World War 3 is probably because of nuclear weapons
Since this is a controversial assertion and since there are good arguments to be made that nuclear weapons have played only a secondary role (if that) in preventing WW3, why mention it in a thread that’s basically about something else? I sort of wish ajay had not mentioned Pinker. We’ve been there, done that, enough.

Why is it very sad that he died?
“Very sad” is a conventional, accepted expression of regret at someone’s passing, regardless of age, esp if you hold the person in some regard. He conceivably cd have lived say 5 more yrs. People do live to 100 and more. Kennan lived to be 102, iirc, just to take one recent example.

“I do occasionally talk to people without them paying me $10,000 first.”

@83 & 84
Irrelevant italian grammar nazi (fascist?):
It’s moNNa Lisa, not moNa Lisa.

Monna Lisa -> Lady Lisa (in renaissance Italian)

Mona Lisa -> Pussy Lisa (in venetian dialect).

I realize that in english the painting is usually known as “mona” Lisa (see english wikipedia), but the correct spelling has 2 Ns (see italian wikipedia, http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gioconda).

92

I do not think there are a lot of American intellectuals and academic historians justifying the treatment of the indigenous population or slavery anymore. In contrast in Russia people like Aleksandr Djukov who justifies the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and the Baltic Deportations, and denies the Holodomor are considered mainstream academics and are backed by the Putin government. I don’t think there is anything today regarding the justification of colonial crimes that is comparable to the rehabilitation of Stalin.

J. Otto Pohl: You do realize that the Baltic Countries celebrate the careers of SS members whose crimes are far worse than anything Stalin did. Today Eastern European nationalism begins with the absence of religious minorities, something only possible thanks to Hitler. Hitler isn’t rehabilitated because he doesn’t need to be: the racist nationalism he created is alive and well without him.

The Evans review trips over its own shoelaces on things like this:

“Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, author of the compelling Diary of a Man in Despair, was not “aristocratic” but the son of an innkeeper. ”

Evans is wrong and Wilson is right: as you might expect from his name, Reck-Malleczewen was a Prussian Junker whose father – a former dragoon officer and German Conservative Party politician – owned the Malleczewen estate in what’s now Poland.

How odd – Evans didn’t check his own book before reviewing Wilson’s then…

Son v. grandson is pretty weak tea, Ajay.

Ah, but stormed by whom? No peeking at the last page of the book!

PaulB: you caught this blog in a clear inconsistency, what with its advocacy of vote for Hobsbawm in the US elections.

If one wants to talk about political crimes, I mean real ones as opposed to rıght-wıng point-scoring, then we might want to talk about Hobsbawm’s partial responsibility for New Labour. But I believe his personal influence over the domestic policies of Joseph Stalin was somewhat limited.

Son v. grandson is pretty weak tea, Ajay.

You’d make a fantastic editor, Anderson.

Watson Ladd:

The Latvian and Estonian Legions were mainly combat units and were cleared of any war crimes by both the US and UK before the Nuremburg Trials. Now there were Latvian police units involved in the Holocaust, but they were separate from the Latvian Legion under the Waffen SS. Like all countries occupied by the Germans local collaboration was important, but I fail to see how Latvia or Estonia is any worse than the Netherlands, Belgium, or France in this regard. To say that Latvians and Estonians defending their homelands against Soviet colonialism, however, was far worse than anything Stalin did is just ludicrous. First the Baltic states were not independent and responsibility for atrocities by the occupation authorities ultimately rested with the Nazis. Second the number of collaborators in actual atrocities were a small minority of the population, much, much smaller than the hundreds of thousands of Baltic men, women, and children deported to Siberia starting on 14 June 1941, before the Holocaust started. Just how did these children deported eight days before the Nazi attack on the USSR responsible for the Holocaust? Finally, Stalin murdered almost more people in 1932-1933 alone in the Holodomor than lived total in all three Baltic countries during WWII. Some five to seven million people deliberately starved to death. In 1937-38 he oversaw the shooting of more people than died in all three Baltic States of all causes during WWII. In less than a year and a half his regime shot over 680,000 unarmed civilians for political reasons. Nothing on that scale happened in the Baltic States under the Germans. The total number of Holocaust deaths in the Baltic three countries was only about a third of Stalin’s victims during the 17 months from July 1937 to November 1938. Even if we only take the number of people shot by Stalin during the national operations in 1937-1938, that is largely those people targeted for being racially German, Polish, Latvian, Estonian, Finnish, or Greek the number is roughly equal to the total number of Jews to die during WWII in all three Baltic States, about 250,000 people. So I fail to see how any Latvian or Estonian not to mention Lithuanian, a country that had no local SS units, is “far worse” than Stalin. But, then again I am not a Marxist so I don’t think that all Latvian and Estonian children should be deported to Siberia to die because some adults later picked up German arms to fight against Stalin.

J Otto Pohl: If economic mismanagement is equivalent to deliberate mass murder, then just about every leader in Africa deserves death. There are huge differences between Stalin’s (unjustified, but do I really have to say that) reign of terror, and Hitler’s wholesale plan for the extermination of everyone between the Oder and the Volga. In particular, if you have my family heritage, you don’t really have a choice in the matter.

Ultimately Stalin represented the flip side of Hitler: the failure of the worker’s movement. But if Stalin was self-liquidation, preserving the possibility of a worker’s movement, Hitler was nothing less then the regressive possibility of the moment made flesh.

As for the question about the Baltics, who is served by your whitewashing? Let me just point out that within days of the invasion, Jews were being killed, with no orders from the invaders. This does not happen in a vacuum. Today’s Baltic nationalism is Holocaust approval.

“The beginning is not the end. The workers’ movements of the last quarter of the 20th century, deflected though they were, were also a foretaste of what we should expect from the larger than ever, more universal than ever working class which enters the new millennium. The most literate, the most cultured, the most homogenous exploited class the world has ever known faces a period every bit as dangerous as Hobsbawm suggests. Where he is wrong in his forecasts is where he is wrong in his history. He does not see that the dynamics of the system itself will force workers to struggle, and that when they struggle they will have the potential to adopt the new world view necessary to lead humanity as whole away from barbarism and towards socialism. Whether this potential is realised cannot be foretold in advance. That depends upon the degree to which the minority of workers and intellectuals who are already won to the new world view are successful in agitating, organising and educating their fellows.”

http://www.marxists.org/archive/harman/1999/xx/20thcentury.htm

Maybe it’s too late to revive this thread, but regarding the shortcomings of Age of Extremes, I think there is more to it than lack of historical distance. It is not just a problem of historians: has there been an in-depth Marxist analysis of the USSR? Most of what I’ve encountered is either Stalin-ruined-it (the Distinctly Ungreat Man Model of History), or the Bolsheviks didn’t understand Marx correctly, which has two basic problems. One is that if things like actual democratic worker control were so central to Marxism, why did brilliant Marxists, like, well, Hobspawn find it expendable for most of the 20th century. More fundamentally, though, if the Soviet Union went the way it did because of how its leadership interpreted Marx, then ideas, not material forces, are in the historical drivers’ seat. Fine with me, but not with Marx.

Was it that the USSR was state capitalism? Some thought so all along, but most Marxists did not. In any case, why did it so develop? What class interests did the Bolsheviks represent? Why was it ultimately a (state) capitalist interest? If the Soviet Union was state capitalism, why did it not behave like other forms of capitalism by maximizing the exploitation of labor (if one buys the whole Marxist shebang, then the CP elite, like every other historical elite, was appropriating surplus value from labor. Fine. But they could have done so much more than they did. Why didn’t they? Because they were good Marxists at heart? Ideas in the drivers’ seat again. Flipping Hegel right back on his head. And why did state capitalism not progress to state socialism as Engels thought it would?

Where is the Marxist analysis of Marxism, as applied?

Apparently A.N. Wilson overlooked this in ‘The Age of Extremes’, p.380:

Stalin…was an autocrat of exceptional, some might say unique, ferocity, ruthlessness and lack of scruple. Few men have manipulated terror on a more universal scale.