by Pepe Escobar (cross-posted with the Asia Times by special agreement with the author)
We all lose by not having Eric Hobsbawm absorb the geopolitical dementia of the early 21st century to later refine it in sharp, crisp historical analysis.
A new, exhaustive biography, ‘Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History,’ by his former student and Regius Professor of History Emeritus at Cambridge, Richard Evans – out now in the UK and in the US in April – allows us to evaluate the extent of our loss.
It all starts with – what else – an undying love of good books: “In the end, one doesn’t just read them, one lives with them. That’s civilization.” That’s so apt coming from someone who in 1940, during the war, read “100 pages of Stendhal on the back of a lorry – a gesture of civilization.”
At the time “the English boy” born in Alexandria in June 1917, a Gemini, was not even contemplating the idea of becoming a professional historian. He’d rather write “proletarian literature.” During a stressful – historical – juncture when Hitler announced he expected to take up residence in London within a fortnight, Eric was already determined that “I want to write so that everyone recognizes the houses and streets, smells the flowers, feels the passions.” In the end, he somehow achieved his dream – to be a historian.
Readers in five continents know that Eric always defined himself as a Marxist. It says a lot about British intelligence that MI5 spent a lot of time and energy tracking Eric while totally bypassing the “Cambridge Five” who were merrily passing secrets to the USSR – Blunt, Burgess, Cairncross, MacLean and Philby – all of them, unlike Eric, Brit establishment to the core.
The book details delightful personal vignettes, such as: Eric in Paris in the early 1950s, “observing the passing scene from the approved cafes such as the Flore or the Rhumerie” and mingling with, among others, Lucien Goldmann, Roland Barthes and Edgar Morin, the great Henri Cartier-Bresson, going to jazz clubs, and interacting with intellectuals who were either unorthodox Marxists or drifting away from Marxism for good. He got to know Jean-Paul Sartre quite well – sharing the odd mutton curry at La Coupole.
At the time both the French and the British Communist Party were hardcore Stalinist, totally unlike Eric. No wonder the party in Paris never invited him to any meetings. Eric was a consummate political pragmatist. He may have been a communist, of course, but never sectarian. His loyalty, above all, was to the broad cause of socialism. As Evans stresses, “he believed consistently in the unity of the Left, not in any kind of Marxist sectarianism.”
All that jazz
The official ‘Made in the USSR’ party line on jazz was extremely negative during the Stalinist era. Then, rehabilitation ensued. By 1962 jazz was all the rage, for instance, in Czechoslovakia. That’s when jazz – and especially the blues – started to be sold across the “real socialism” sphere as the music of the oppressed black working class in capitalist America.
Enter Eric as jazz critic of the New Statesman, under the pseudonym Francis Newton. At the time, late 1950s to early 1960s, journalism was despised by British academia. Swinging from jazz clubs and concerts to the quasi-mythical hipster hangout, the Downbeat Club in Old Compton Street in Soho, Eric pulled it off as a cultural reporter instead of music critic. Many in academia were oblivious to his alter ego.
Eric’s jazz criticism is fascinating in itself. He was attracted by the cerebral classicism of the Modern Jazz Quartet rejecting “the old, full-blooded, spontaneous jazz … because it reminds them of oppression, illiteracy, of Negroes clowning to wheedle crumbs from the whites.”
He didn’t get Miles Davis – “surprisingly narrow technical and emotional range” – or Thelonius Monk – “neither the technical mastery nor the staying power” of Duke Ellington. On the other hand, he found Ornette Coleman “unforgettable.” He would always display a positively gloomy vision of mass-produced pop. Eric was a marvelous interviewee. I wish I could have asked him back in the 1980s what he thought of David Bowie.
Evans does full justice to the importance of the “Age” trilogy.
‘The Age of Revolution’, following European history from 1789 to 1848, made a splash with its formidable thesis tracing the simultaneous impact of the “dual revolution,” the French political and ideological and the British industrial; essentially, the foundation of the modern world.
The concept of “dual revolution” would become seminal in every historical writing and teaching of the past half-century. No one before Eric had shown that the Industrial Revolution was due to Britannia ruling the waves, which enabled it to create a virtual monopoly of cotton exports to India and Latin America.
He also definitely showed how the French bourgeoisie, as a ”coherent social group,” drove political change “when the French monarchy, mired in deep financial crisis following the War of Independence in the US, lost the support of the feudal aristocracy.”
By the time ‘The Age of Capital’ was out, in the mid-1970s, Eric had clinched a triple treat; academic recognition, vast commercial success, full respect and recognition by the British establishment.
‘The Age of Empire’, chronicling the “long 19th century” from 1789 to 1914, unveiled a magnificent concept also essential to any future historical scholarship. Arguably the best summary ever of Eric’s prodigious gifts was offered in a review by Perry Anderson: “economy of synthesis; vividness of detail; global scope, yet acute sense of regional difference; polymathic fluency, equally at ease with crops and stock markets, nations and classes, statesmen and peasants, sciences and arts; breadth of sympathies for disparate social agents; power of analytic narrative; and not least a style of remarkable clarity and energy, whose signature is the sudden bolt of metaphoric electricity across the even surface of cool, pungent argument.”
The universalist project
Eric instinctively knew already in 1989 what would happen after the collapse of the USSR. At a conference in Sweden, as recalled by French historian Patrick Fridenson, he prophesized: “With the Soviet Union you have had peace; you are going to have war.”
Later on, in 1990, he would write: “The fall of the Soviet-type system, about which all illusion had long gone, is less significant than the apparent end of the dream of which it was the nightmare version.”
No wonder Eric was a critic of nationalism and identity politics. He always stressed, “the political project of the left is universalist.” Nations were no more than artificial constructs – see, for instance, the British empire arbitrarily demarcating the borders of Afghanistan and Iraq, among others.
‘Age of Extremes’ turned Eric into a global superstar. But there are flaws. Essentially, the point of view is centered on Vienna, Berlin and London. There is no comprehensive analysis of the ascension of the American bourgeoisie, or the turbulence across East Asia. The book actually revolves around the history of the decline of a Western civilization that totally betrayed the 19th-century promise of cultural and material flowering.
At dinner parties, Eric eschewed small talk and behaved as a true political party animal. He wanted to cut to the chase right away. As his editor at Penguin, Stuart Proffitt, recalled: “The quality of his information from around the world, in extreme old age – this must have been when he was 93, 94, something like that – but he knew exactly what was going on all over the world. I mean, he was like a sort of one-man Economist Intelligence Unit. It was really, really extraordinary.”
Eric the Brazilian
Eric may have become widely respected in the US, due to his academic stints, and in India, but in Brazil he became larger-than-life. His books sold almost a million copies. He was essential in shaping the political thinking of two former Presidents, Cardoso and Lula.
In 1975, during the military dictatorship, he was invited to the first major conference featuring leftist intellectuals such as Arno Mayer from Princeton and Juan Linz from Yale. Talking fluently about Brazilian peasant millenarian movements, he had the guts to declare he was a Marxist historian, planting a seed that would engender the end of the military dictatorship in the following decade.
It’s impossible to understand where Eric Hobsbawm was coming from without the essential background provided by Evans. Eric became acquainted with Marxist theory and an ideal of communism in the early 1930s, when the Communist Party seemed to many young people of his generation to embody the only possible hope of defeating Nazism and building a better world.
So this spectacle of a great mass movement sharing common ideals forged in Eric a lifelong, visceral emotional sense of belonging, healing the scars in his shattered family life. Evans sums it all up: “This feeling lasted, buried deep in his soul, for the rest of his life.”
And that’s how we should also understand his passion for jazz – the search for a community that provided some sort of emotional equivalent of a family.
Eric never followed the party line. Only intellectual amoebas could possibly accuse him of being a Stalinist. He did, consciously, remain part of a global network of fellow leftist intellectuals for the rest of his life. In a nutshell, he was a crossover Marxist, an absolutely unique, polyphonic, intellectual mix shaped by myriad influences.
And the greatest thing is that he was, above all, one helluva writer. It was literature that guided him to history. And that’s why, ashes to ashes, his global appeal will remain something for the history books.
i have never read any of his works, and am totally unfamiliar with him, but music is in fact the spirit of revolution, inspired by God, in my belief by the opressed. Jazz, Blues, Regae, Rock and Roll, Punk, and calypso were all voices of revolution. Calypso music was the only trusted source of news, since plantation slaves communicated through Calypso, since most other forms of communication were outlawed.
Jazz was prohibited by the Nazis for being impure and embraced by Jews, as was the art of Chagall.
Many may disput punk being music of the opressed, but I disagree. It is the voice of the white youth being opressed and manipulated into compliance by the neo-liberals and neo-conservatives like Mary Whitehouse, also named in Pigs on Animals by Pink Floyd, Hey you Whitehouse, hah ha charade you are.
We can only end with Bye Bye Miss American Pie, by McClean, the day the music dies, is the day that America is officially dead.
Its been said that rock and roll has mostly died, replaced by rap music, and I can not disagree.
@punk ‘the voice of the white youth being opressed and manipulated’
Like ‘The Prodigy’? Keith Flint who ends up in suicide, like a score of other ‘idols’ of the ‘white youth’?
Never expected to find such an acute and glowing tribute to Eric Hobsbawm on your website by such a appreciative polemicist as Pepe Escobar. Thank you so much for this reminder of a man whose courage and intellect would act like a beacon in this wasteland of cultural and political ignominy that currently defines the UK. I felt singulary compelled to re-read Age of Extremes 12 months ago as a portent of the times ahead of us.
And now we exist, for the while, in what one observer declared the Age of Consequences. Ecological, economic and geo-political collapse and chaos, all rapidly accelerating and synergistic.
Thank to Pepe, I did not know anything of Eric Hobsbawm, nor even of his exsitence.
Now, as a person from the left since the teens, although not considering myself dogmatical nor being under any party discipline, I felt a sudden interest in reading his works and biography.
Which of his works do you think I should start reading?
My wife recommends The Invention of Tradition and The New Century.
Anon; For a serious Leftist who wants to grasp the totality of modern transformation I suggest you start with “The Age of Revolutions” and work forward from there.
Look, there’s no such thing as a “Stalinist.” It should read a Marxist-Leninist. The Trotskyites and Revisionists are the “Marxist sectarians.” (i.e. pseudo-Marxists, Fabians, and other fantasists)
See for instance: https://sascha313.wordpress.com/2014/11/10/kurt-gossweiler-der-antistalinismus/
They always tell it exactly the other way around (big lies), in order to fool you. Always.
For instance: “Muslims attacked the US and destroyed the World Trade Center.”
On the contrary. The robber barons (mafia/.cult) who run the West demolished the towers (to have a pretext) and attacked the Muslims.
(classic controlled demolition of the outside of the buildings, and the melting and dissolution of esp. the core of the buildings with help of nuclear demolition devices. Both are proven beyond any doubt. The “shock and awe” spectacle of the impacting planes was another diversion)
“They always tell it exactly the other way around (big lies), in order to fool you. Always”
Absolutely correct.
Stuff does not fly sideways and upwards in a fire. Only small nuclear explosions could have done this job. We all know who did it as only one Israeli was killed – in the financial centre of New York. Netanyahu went on Israeli TV to tell his tribe that it was the best thing that ever happened to them.
Please read the moderation policy. Mod
It is amazing how removed. Mod this gentleman – manage to fu** up countries on a massive scale. All the time, purporting to have the interests of the “working class” at heart.
The list of café in Paris above – la Coupole, Café Flore and la Rhumerie – are places that no working-class person can afford to have a coffee in. Let alone a lamb curry.
BTW, Stalin was not exactly ant-Semitic as many of these “intellectuals” claim. he had Jewish wives and mistresses.
I am working class and once I had a coffee in Café De Flore…The price was not superior than even at any kiosk in a public park in Paris, and the teapot I was served gave for two cups of very good coffee, not to mention that in exchange you can enjoy the warm ambiance in the harshest of the winter ( when I was there…) and the absolute courtesy and profesionalism of the waiters, even when you walk in, as I was alone and dressed in proletarian fatigues for traveling, in fact, I got to notice that the waiter was very pleased to serve me, eventhough there was no croissant to take with the coffee…
I went to the bathroom in the second floor, and just discovered a far more sophisticated clientele, reunited in great round tables, well dressed but in a very sober style…I guessed it was there where the famous literary talks were taking place…Anyway, I could see that nobody got impressed by my presence….
It is not that the price would have kept the working class out of those Cafes frequented by the bourgeois leftoid ‘intellectuals’ and bohemian artists of the 20-60s.
There was simply not much working class around Montparnasse (taken over by the Americans after WW1) and Saint-Germain-des-Pres. The jazz clubs clustered around the same areas, Saint-Germain-des-Pres and Cartier Latin. Anyhow, today’s Montparnasse is no more what it was in its days of glory.
Here is the current menu:
https://cafedeflore.fr/menu/?lang=en
An espresso coffee is 4.90€ ($5.60)
A club sandwich is 22.00€ ($24.90)
The current SMIC (minimum wage) in France is 10,03€ per hour. Two hours of work for one measly sandwich that is half the size of its American or Australian equivalent.
for almost thirty years they tried to kill Stalin, the Judeo-Bolsheviks. they considered,rightly, the Revolution to be theirs. finally they succeeded poisoning the only obstacle that kept them from swallowing up the whole soviet construct. when the russian patriots of the time, inside the Party, were distancing themselves from the thesis of their “clique” they asked the “right to emigrate”: either my way or the highway.
One would not expect the acknowledgement of the fact that Eric Hobsbawm was actually the son of Leopold Percy Hobsbaum (né Obstbaum), a merchant from the East End of London who was of Polish Jewish descent, and Nelly Hobsbaum (née Grün), who was from a middle-class Austrian Jewish family background and a member of the ‘Cambridge Apostles’, the hub of Soviet espionage in Britain, and that despite the constant surveillance by the MI5 he never suffered any repercussions and did impede neither a brilliant academic career (hailed as “one of the great British historians of his age”) nor ‘vast commercial success’ and ‘full respect and recognition by the British establishment’.
He was not shy to declare (in an interview with Michael Ignatieff on BBC) that the deaths of millions of Soviet citizens under Stalin would have been worth it if a genuine Communist society had been the result, arguing that, “In a period in which, as you might imagine, mass murder and mass suffering are absolutely universal, the chance of a new world being born in great suffering would still have been worth backing” but, unfortunately, “the Soviet Union was not the beginning of the World Revolution”. The following year, when asked the same question on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, if “the sacrifice of millions of lives” would have been worth the future communist society, he replied: “That’s what we felt when we fought the Second World War”. He repeated what he had already said to Michael Ignatieff, when he asked the rhetorical question, “Do people now say we shouldn’t have had World War II, because more people died in World War II than died in Stalin’s terror?”.
The death-toll of Stalin’s ‘Terror’ has been grossly overstated for propaganda purposes. As with Mao’s ‘crimes’ also increased by at least one order of magnitude, and a deliberate intention added, for psychopathological projection purposes. Similarly we hear of the Khmer Rouge atrocities, certainly wicked, but NEVER of the same number, more or less, murdered by the secret, illegal, and pitiless US bombing campaign, that, in fact, radicalised the Khmer Rouge and made them more vengeful. Indeed I well remember the reaction of one Scandinavian UN apparatchik when asked if US crimes were also to be prosecuted along with the Khmer Rouge ones. The icy mask of Nordic calm disappeared in a trice, to be replaced by the outrage of the Western ubermensch at the outrageous audacity of the question.
The greatest mass murderers in history are the English, particularly in India and China, and in various African atrocities, not to forget the poor Irish, with the terror-bombing of Germany during WW2 an inglorious finale’ (one hopes), the USA, with the extermination of the American indigenous, the death-toll of the Atlantic slave trade, 200 years of butchery in Latin America, the subjugation of the Philippines and the sixty million or so killed by US Imperialism since WW2, by direct aggression, bloodthirsty sanctions, promotion of civil war and the economic depredations and social destruction of the neo-liberal capitalist system of neo-colonialism imposed on the poor world. Far behind come the Nazis, the Japanese in China, the Mongols, Timur, various invaders of India, Chinese civil wars and peasant rebellions etc.
The difference is that although Professor Hobsbawm opposed the British establishment, they tolerated and even admired him, whereas in China he would simply have been organ harvested.
My dear Hajduk, your Falun Gong lies are contemptible.
‘Mind is bound by labelling’ (Buddha)
As for China, since you mentioned it, torturing and organ harvesting 60000 yoga practitioners…it’s not exactly utopian is it?…(although apparently it did solve China’s transplant shortage for a couple of years).
I often wonder about the pathopsychology of those who peddle such lurid, hate-crazed, lies. I’ve long suspected that there is a good deal of pathopsychological projection involved, and anticipated wish fulfillment, and I rather think that you are a very extreme example of the type.
This site is to discuss the ideas and events of the day … this tit-for-tat is ended … mod
‘It is not the faults of others, but one’s own faults, arising like reflections in the surface of a mirror’ (Buddha)
Mod: I disagree with your implementation of website policy in this case. The original inflammatory remarks should be pulled not simply the (understandable, and actually very mild response). To be frank, I also think your put down was a bit petty. Anyway, I’m too busy for this kind of nonsense. Best wishes to you. H.
Only the British ‘establishment would have appointed him Professor between 1970 and 1982 and an Emeritus Professor of History in 1982, Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, from 1949 to 1955, to the Order of the Companions of Honour, President of Birkbeck, University of London from 2002 until his death, confer the Balzan Prize for European History since 1900 “for his brilliant analysis of the troubled history of 20th century Europe and for his ability to combine in-depth historical research with great literary talent.”
Birds of a feather flock together.
The idea that Eric Hobsbawn was a member of the British establishment is just silly. The professorships were actually his job, unless you are saying that all senior academics are establishment figures? The only exception is the Companion of Honour which simply means that you had an illustrious career and the Queen enjoys your company.
You are right – there’s no proof anywhere that “millions” were killed by Stalin. This was invented after WWII to discredit Stalin and USSR, who were the clear winners in WWII – plus USSR did not go through a great depression – and after the war had a lot of respect, authority, moral credibility, and admiration around the world. All that had to be destroyed because western capitalists saw USSR as an existential threat.
I know, it is hard to believe today, because we’ve had almost 75yrs of non-stop brainwashing about S. and USSR, but it is a much more accurate picture than the one we’re getting from MSM (and again, I speak as someone who had family members taken away – but the context is much more complex, and the numbers have been highly inflated).
I do know that it was established some time ago that over 90% of those sent to the Gulag survived and finished their sentences, but such a fact (still bad enough)is the sort that the Western fakestream media presstitutes ‘disappear’ immediately, if they value their jobs and future employment prospects as lying propaganda droogs. The lies re. China are more ludicrous, with figures like 100 million bandied about, because there the element of race hatred and raw terror at China’s rise is so very marked.
And that Mulga reminds me of Michael Hastings and his murder after he threatened the security of the work General David Petraeus was doing.
Thanks for that observation, Andrew. My paranoia just notched up a further degree, but my insignificance gives me some reassurance.
The real brainwashing is the denial of the Bolshies crimes, well documented, thank you.
Anon, of course the Bolsheviks committed crimes. What political or religious organised movement, particularly one attacked by savage, vicious and genocidal enemies, has not? I only find the exaggerated, mendacious and hypocritical inflation of these crimes, and the invention of others, repellent.
Who where the savage, vicious and genocidal enemies who attacked the Bolsheviks? Ah, yes, the Russian ‘Whites’, the Russian popes, the Russian pogromists, the Russian kulaks.
And, Anonymouse, the Western forces who intervened in the Russian Civil War, the Polish fascist regimes who attacked the Soviet Union, the Western supported Nazis who attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, the fascist Ukrainians who attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, and thereafter up to today, and the Western fascists, led by the USA, who have attacked the Soviet, then Russia, ever since 1917, right up to the moment. You mustn’t forget them. Japan had a go, too, but Zhukov kicked their backsides, so they concentrated on their genocide in China, instead.
@The Polish fascist ‘regimes’.
Pilsudski was a socialist, at one time President of The Polish Socialist Party. In 1904 he organized the Combat Organization of the Polish Socialist Party (Polish: Organizacja Bojowa Polskiej Partii Socjalistycznej, abbreviated OBPPS) to fight against Russia, that he loathed like all the good Socialists (spiced with Polish messianism). He constantly ploted against Russia and created with Austrian help the nucleus of a future Polish Army to fight in the coming war against Russia. During WW1, allied himself with the Central Powers, his units being the first to cross in Russia even before the declaration of war. He served in the Regency Kingdom of Poland, created by the Central Powers, and acted as minister of war in the newly formed Polish Regency government; as such, he was responsible for the Polnische Wehrmacht [Royal Polish Army contemptuously nicknamed die Polnische Wehrmacht by Imperial Germany (Polish: Polska Siła Zbrojna]. Actually, he proved himself ‘prescient’ (in other words initiated in the plans of the Big Players) declaring that in the impending war, for Poland to regain independence (and its former glory), Russia must be beaten by the Central Powers and the latter powers must in their turn be beaten by France, Britain and the United States). His attack on Russia in 1919 was the continuation of this policy and not an attack against ‘Bolshevism’. He considered the Bolsheviks less dangerous for Poland than the ‘Whites’. He thought that Poland would be better off with the Bolsheviks, alienated from the Western powers, than with a restored Russian Empire. His aim was the restoration of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in alliance with an ‘independent’ Ukraine. By ignoring the strong pressures from the Entente Cordiale to join the attack on Lenin’s struggling Bolshevik government, Piłsudski actually saved it in the summer and the fall of 1919.
But in fact, there were the Bolsheviks who attacked, following the indications of Trotsky that “the revolution should be “brought on the bayonets” (of the Red Army), as “through Kiev leads the straight route for uniting with the Austro-Hungarian revolution, just as through Pskov and Vilnius goes the way for uniting with the German revolution. Offensive on all fronts! Offensive on the west front, offensive on the south front, offensive on the all revolutionary fronts!”. The concept was developed in 1918 but officially published under that name first in 1920 (Wojennaja Mysl i Riewolucija, 3/1920, Mikhail Tukhachevsky).
The repression of the ‘enemies of the People’ (an open ended category) started immediately after the October coup. Cheka was founded on the 20th of December 1917, as the ‘armed arm of the dictatorship of the proletariat’, with at its helm the ‘solid proletarian jacobin’, Felix Dzerzhinsky, hailed by Lenin as ‘our Fouquier-Tinville, who would put down the counter-revolutionary scum’. Dzerzhinsky explained that “The Red Terror [involves] the terrorization, arrests and extermination of enemies of the revolution on the basis of their class affiliation or of their pre-revolutionary roles.” Very little to do with external “savage, vicious and genocidal enemies”, but with the internal ones. The main ‘counter-revolutionary scum’ were the ones credited as the carriers of the ‘social revolution’ brewing for centuries, the Russian peasants, the ‘half-savages’ whose ‘animal individualism’ should be ‘subjected to the organised reason of the town’ (as Maxim Gorki put it).
Dear me, Anonymoose, your little dire-tribe doesn’t make all the foreign interventions in post-revolutionary Russia disappear from history, does it? That the Bolsheviks faced vicious class enemies, as has every revolution in history, does not mean that they should have sat back and waited for your White amigos to re-group and slaughter them. I dare say that you’re a supporter of the Right terror in Guatemala, El Salvador, Chile, Brazil, Honduras, Argentina, Greece, Spain, South Korea and South Vietnam – I could go on ALL day- too.
The British are indeed the *true* Evil Empire given that the massive crimes against humanity that they have committed in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, or the entire Western hemisphere are not even perceived as crimes by many people. In fact, this today applies to the Anglo Americans in general, who are the civilizational spawn of this English Evil Empire.
Worse still, the Anglo Americans instinctively smear and blood-libel their opponents (like Russia, China, Iran) by psychologically projecting their own crimes onto these “enemy” nations.
This is the warped character of these Anglo Americans, who possess a fanatical belief in their own moral righteousness as the self-appointed judge, jury, and executioner of Democracy, Freedom, Human Rights for the entire world–not matter how many crimes they themselves commit.
In this sense, the Zionists are merely one deranged subgroup of the Anglos and West in general.
All the denizens of the West are truly sick, as they delude themselves that they are God’s Chosen People.
Thanks very much for printing this.
What a nice surprise to wake up to and read with my morning coffee.
Pepe is the renaissance guy with his wide range of interests and ability to write about them and pique others’ interest.
I make a point of reading all of Richard Evan’s pieces in the London Review of Books. He is always interesting. I didn’t realize that he was a student of Hobsbawm’s.
Of course I have heard of Eric Hobsbawm, but now I shall read him.
Starting with The Age of Revolution.
I have read Paul Johnson’s The Birth of the Modern, which deals with 1815–1830.
Also a very good read, highly recommended. REads practically like a novel.
(BTW, Johnson has also written a very readable History of the Jews.)
But I expect that Hobsbawm is the horse’s mouth on this age.
It seems a shame for this thread on a story about a magnificent historian should become a locus of the same old same old fisticuffs about a few words used in the review. But there it is! If your only tool is an ax, that ax will be ground at every opportunity, it seems.
Katherine
I
@Katherine. “The Invention Of The Jewish People” by Shlomo Sand, Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Tel Aviv, 360 pages
uses modern archeological discoveries, ancient records and correspondences to disprove the myths of the Jewish people. Of course Jewish critics call him a “self hating” Jew. Of course, we Americans have our own accepted, false, and cherished myths about ourselves. I found Prof. Sand’s book well documented and fascinating. You might too. Peace!
And Sand makes clear that everything he has written about the multifarious origins of ‘the Jews’ has been known to academia for a very long time indeed.
I think the former statement is more true than the latter:
“… he prophesized: “With the Soviet Union you have had peace; you are going to have war.” Later on, in 1990, he would write: “The fall of the Soviet-type system, about which all illusion had long gone, is less significant than the apparent end of the dream of which it was the nightmare version.”
If EH talks about a nightmare, than he clearly did not understand the USSR. What the country achieved, in spite of the horrors imposed on it by the west, is short of miraculous. I wonder how many nations would have been able to withstand the abuse USSR had to endure, starting with 1917 (but really, even before, incl. the useless Crimean war in 1853 and Napoleon in 1812). We’ll never know how the USSR would have developed had it not been undermined by the west every step of the way. We do know that socialism there could hardly achieve its full potential, as the country lived under a constant threat from the west. (Some of my family were kulaks, chased off their land, but I still try to be objective and look at the big picture.)
And, Gora, don’t forget the achievements of the USSR in culture, particularly music and the cinema. And, as Paul Robeson observed, and was poisoned and subjected to mind-destroying ECT for saying so, the USSR was the place where, for the first time in his life, he felt like a full human being.
The USSR has been villainised continually by the nightmarish capitalist-imperialist west because of its unrivalled superiority. In Latin America, people used to refer to the USSR as the overture of the new socio-economic system, where the well-being of the people would be the priority, not the profit of the few… The dismantling of the USSR was a tragedy for the whole world…
A glowing tribute to one of history’s greats. A great many things would remain in the dark if not for Hobsbawm. Interesting, his jazz preferences. Hopefully the bio will rekindle interest in his works such that the young will learn what too many elders have forgotten.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PEd7nTROwo
The last five minutes are the most interesting. I have a nightmare about the proletarian washerwoman in 1984, who cheerfully sings manufactured folk songs as she hangs out her washing, because it is not impossible. We can indeed become oblivious and acclimatised to an objectively intolerable state of affairs through what Professor Hobsbawm describes as a ‘slow motion catastrophe’.