A few weeks before he passed away, Eric Hobsbawm
and his wife invited Romila Thapar to the historian’s 95th
birthday party in London. John Williams played the guitar. The gathered
companions drank to the great man’s health. He was convivial and had all his
wits about him—as seems evident in the pictures below. A century seemed possible
...
In her obituary below, Romila Thapar recounts what Hobsbawm’s work meant to her, and its intellectual
legacy more broadly.
REMEMBERING ERIC HOBSBAWM
Romila Thapar
Eric Hobsbawm was the kind of historian whose
work, although largely on the last three centuries of European history, was
relevant even to those of us who work on a different space and time. The
process of historical investigation for him was not restricted to a narrow
engagement with a specific subject, but with having to situate it in an
extensive horizon involving many peoples and ideas. This vision and the logical
interconnections that he made were in part due to his unusual intellectual
reach and in part to his creative use of Marxist analyses. These not only gave
him a starting point for asking questions but also allowed him to bring his
formidable intellectual perceptions of the past to bear on his historical
generalisations. Historical writing was for him both an intellectual enterprise
and an extension of understanding the mainsprings of human actions.
As an undergraduate
at the School of Oriental and African Studies in the mid-1950s, I was advised
to attend Eric Hobsbawm’s lectures on Political Theory at Birkbeck College in
the University of London. The first few lectures were on Utopian and Scientific
Socialism. They were stunning in their lucidity and sparked off connections
that made me think beyond the boundaries of a single discipline. I was too
awestruck to start a conversation with him. Gradually this changed when some of
us joined in with students who gathered round him for coffee in the Birkbeck
cafeteria.
I subsequently
discovered among my friends some who had migrated from Vienna in 1939 and knew
him in London. Meeting him through these friends introduced me to another
dimension of my understanding of Europe—the awareness of what had been a
Central European intellectual tradition with Vienna as its hub, and its
closeness to French and German intellectual life, rather than the British
alone. Brought up as I was in an Indian Cantonment culture, I was more familiar
with the British tradition than others among non-Indian cultures. Hobsbawm was quintessentially the
Central European intellectual, which in part explains his expansive
intellectual vision. At he pointed out on a later occasion, British Marxism was
more focused on the social sciences whereas continental Marxism by comparison
gave greater space to questions of culture and philosophy.
Eric had a nomadic
childhood. Born in Alexandria to a British Jewish father and a central European
mother, his schooling took him first to Vienna and then to Berlin and
subsequently to England in the 1930s when it became difficult for Jews to
survive in Germany. In Berlin he recognised the fascism of the Nazis, not just
their anti-Jewish activities but also their negation of the normal freedom of a
citizen. He became a communist, seeing in socialism the only answer to fascism.
This commitment remained with him all his life, even though in later years he
was criticised for not resigning from the Communist Party of Great Britain
(popularly known as the CPGB), when the USSR crushed the uprising in Hungary in
1956.
A scholarship to
Cambridge to study history introduced him to a group of young historians,
enthusiasts in their discovery of Marxism, who were trying to introduce the new
social and economic history to readers more familiar with political and
diplomatic history. They called themselves the British Historians Group to
which the qualifier was added, of the CPGB. The group included Christopher
Hill, Rodney Hilton, George Rude, E.P. Thompson, Raphael Samuel, and some
others. Their analyses of British history turned this history round, as it
were, with analyses of class consciousness, property relations, and prevailing
systems of religious belief and learning. The discipline took a new form.
Hobsbawm was also elected to the more eclectic group, exploring ideas, who
called themselves ‘The Apostles’ and counted as their members, Ludwig
Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, J.M. Keynes, and E.M. Forster. Incidentally,
this was also about the time that another group in Cambridge—Anthony Blunt et al.—were recruited as Soviet spies.
Evidently, the British historians were seen as too independent by the USSR.
The British Historians
Group started publishing the now well-known journal, Past and Present, in 1952. The modernisers of history could use
it to express their views and reach a wider readership, as indeed they did.
It carried a variety of views
emanating from Marxist analyses and related thinking, incorporating the
connection of history to other social sciences. In later years it reflected
other ways of thought that had entered the study of history, not all of which
incidentally had the approval of the founders of the journal. Inevitably there
were controversies, as for example on the question of whether history was to be
largely a narrative of the past, or was to explain the past as well, or on the
changes that post-modernism could introduce into writing history. Hobsbawm’s criticism
of such approaches was that they did not ask questions and provide
explanations, which for him was fundamental to historical research. The journal
hosted debates. They were also keen to bring in comparative history and to
publish articles on non-European subjects. Just when I completed my doctorate, Past and Present published my first
article on Ashoka.
This group of historians, as well as some
others such as Richard Cobb and Keith Thomas, were supportive of our attempts
to introduce social and economic history at our universities, as at Delhi
University, for example. They came to India turn by turn during the late 1960s
and 1970s, to give lectures and hold discussions on changing historical
perspectives. This coincided with the period when Indian history, and
especially pre-modern history, was being slowly liberated from the confines of
Indology into the freedom of a social science.
Over the years since
then, and trying to keep up with some at least of Hobsbawm’s publications, one
has seen him emerge as what many scholars would regard as the pre-eminent
historian of modern Europe. This was no mean achievement for a Marxist
historian, as there were, and still are, enough people who are ready to dismiss
Marxist historians without a serious attempt to understand what they have
written.
It was problematic
for Marxists to be appointed to prestigious academic positions with whiffs of
McCarthyism wafting over from the US with the coming of the Cold War. Hobsbawm
was appointed to Birkbeck College and chose to remain there all his
professional life, not least perhaps because it had became a significant centre
of inter-disciplinary research which was new to the British academic scene.
This included the theories being put forward by Marxist scientists such as J.D.
Bernal, who worked there, and J.B.S. Haldane, L. Hogben, and J. Needham, who
frequently gathered there.
As a modern historian
his major work has been the tetralogy: The
Age of Revolution 1789-1848 (1962),
The Age of Capital 1848-1875 (1975) The
Age of Empire 1875-1914 (1987), which he referred to as the long nineteenth
century, and to which he added a fourth, The
Age of Extremes 1914-1991 (1994), which he described as the short twentieth
century. Acclaimed by historians of modern European history, across a range of
ideological positions, these books have been described as showing an awareness
of the deep structures of society and the nature of historical change. Not that the acclamation overlooked
what some have thought of as political weaknesses, though these were largely
confined to The Age of Extremes.
Events in Asia, for instance, could have been less marginal to this history. It
is repeatedly reiterated that he glossed over the horrors of Stalinism in the
USSR, and that he was somewhat dismissive of China. And yet in his essays of
this period he was extremely critical of Stalinism.
Alongside the
tetralogy, and in other books and essays, his writing was seminal to historical
writing in our times. His initial work had been on the Fabian Society and then
on labour movements, Labour’s Turning
Point (1948). From this he moved to another theme, examining archival and
oral sources relating to peasant protests in England and in some areas of
Sicily and Spain. Two books based
on this, which were widely read in other parts of the world as well, and
especially in Latin America, were Primitive
Rebels (1959), and Bandits (1969). These drew attention to
the generally ignored protests of rural secret societies that tended to be
localised, and sometimes reflected millenarian cultures. Such protests, he
argued, occur in many parts of the world among the poor and especially at times
of emerging capitalism. One could add that they occur with other major
historical changes of earlier periods as well. The concept of social banditry
is now familiar to Indian historians. Folk literature if viewed from this
perspective may result in innovative suggestions, especially during the
twilight of the medieval in the eighteenth century, or even currently where
such movements are taking place in relatively remote areas.
The Invention of Tradition (1982) was a collection of essays by various scholars,
edited by Hobsbawm together with Terence Ranger. Its long introduction argues
that much of tradition, as indeed social identity as well, is invented and
changes through the generations. Contemporary political movements draw on the
myths implicit in these supposedly older
traditions to claim legitimacy which gives them the sanction to direct
the movements. In a sense this also touches on Max Weber’s argument about the
way forms of legitimacy change with the requirements of the time as well as
drawing on a presumed past. Few historians today regard ‘tradition’ as
self-generated, unchanging, and continuous, preferring to explain how and why
it began, who were its authors, and what its purpose. Although this book was
not the only work on the subject it did tend to make the discussion more
focused.
A selection of his
essays, early and late, was put together and published in 1997 as On History. The range is again
extensive, some essays making a deeper impact than others. Nationalism and
history was the subject of Nations and
Nationalism since 1780 (1990), but in the essay his succinct statement is
worth discussion: “history is the raw material for nationalist or ethnic or
fundamentalist ideologies, as poppies are the raw material for heroin
addiction. The past is an essential element, perhaps the essential element, in these ideologies. If there is no suitable
past it can always be invented.”Among the examples he discusses are Mortimer
Wheeler’s book, Five Thousand Years of
Pakistan, where 5000 years are more impressive than 46, and the dispute
over the Babri Masjid. I recall a lecture that he gave at Columbia University
in New York in 2004 where he discussed the Babri Masjid issue with clarity and
precision as a process in creating a myth crucial to a political message at a
particular time. Myth is reinforced by claiming it as social memory, but this
too is constructed—as it need not be what actually happened but what people
think had happened.
Nationalism forces historians to become
political actors, he says. They have to present the counter-arguments for those
wishing to know them, even if such people are few. We in this country have seen
this debate spill over into the controversy over history textbooks, and more
recently over other textbooks. Nationalism can also go towards endorsing
identity culture and become identity nationalism, pertaining to a particular
community. Then the requirement is identity history which can end up in
anachronism, omission, and falsehoods. This can only be countered by a sharp
dichotomy between fact and fiction and the supremacy of evidence, and the
historian’s function as a ‘myth-slayer’. “History is being invented in vast quantities … It’s more important
now to have historians, especially sceptical historians, than ever before.’
In an early essay on
what historians owe to Marx, he considers the changes in historiography a
hundred years after Ranke. Among those underlined by Arnaldo Momigliano, whom
Hobsbawm quotes, were a turn towards social and economic history, social forces
as explanations of change and class consciousness. Hobsbawm argues that this
was the transformation of history into a social science. He comes down heavily
on those who describe historical materialism as economic determinism,
dismissing this view as a form of vulgar Marxism, other elements of which he
lists as mechanical applications of the notions of base and superstructure,
class struggle, and historical inevitability.
Essays of both
historiographical and general interest feature in a more recently published
collection, How to Change the World: Marx
and Marxism 1840-2011 (2011). Included here is his Introduction to an
earlier book, Pre-Capitalist Economic
Formations, which had clarified some of my fog about modes of production.
In discussing epochs of historical development his primary point is that the
modes do not necessarily have to be accepted as they are described at any one
given point in Marx’s work, since Marx and Engels continued to revise and
refine them, as he shows. They were not envisaged as a single ladder which all
societies climb, rung by rung at different speeds, eventually arriving at the
top. The Asiatic Mode he rather dismisses, referring to Karl Wittfogel’s
version and the Chinese Communist Party’s support of it, and mentioning its
inclusion and exclusion in Soviet writing, and refers to the views of E.M.S.
Namboodiripad and D.D. Kosambi in passing. He has more to say on the famous
debates on the transition from feudalism to capitalism in various parts of the
world from Japan to the United States. The theory of historical materialism he
says requires only that there be a succession of modes and not necessarily of a
predetermined order; but of course, whatever the form, it has to be supported
with factual evidence. It is worth recalling that flexibility in envisaging
variant modes has led some Marxists working on pre-modern societies, such as
Emmanuel Terray and Geoffrey de Ste. Croix, to explore early societies in
interesting ways.
Among the more
provocative essays in this collection are those on the influence of Marxism in
Europe from 1880 to 2000. What
interested me most is the one on the era of anti-fascism where he discusses the
impact of intellectuals as migrants, swelling the numbers of the existing Left
and giving another direction to European culture and thought. He also
underlines the rejection by the Left, but rather sotto voce, of socialist realism, despite its acclaim in the USSR,
and the cultivation of jazz despite strong Soviet disapproval. Hobsbawm’s own
interests ran contrary to Soviet definitions of culture. He had a small but
impressive collection of Indian miniature painting (far removed from socialist
realism), which he had picked up in various flea-markets and at affordable
sales in the 1950s. In later years he regretted that he could not afford their
inflated prices, but saw them in exhibitions. His interest in jazz (Dixieland)
began in his student days when it was a novelty in Britain. He was the jazz
critic for the New Statesman writing
under the pseudonym of Francis Newton—taken from the name Frankie Newton who
was the drummer for Billie Holliday, and a Left sympathizer. Jazz for him was
the ‘unanswerable sound’, so he had little use for rock and pop. His book, The Jazz Scene (1959), is among the more
perceptive books on jazz and jazz musicians.
Hobsbawm writes that the context of Marxism
in the late twentieth century was so different from earlier times that its
specific character in the anti-fascist era has to be underlined, particularly
as Marxists since the 1960s have had access to something like ‘a giant
super-market of Marxisms’. There was a need for a fundamental rethinking of
Marxist analysis which became possible only when the increasingly dogmatic
orthodoxy of Marxism in the USSR broke up and the assumed superiority of
political authority over scientific statement was opposed. Small educated
groups began to discuss what they saw as problems. I remember attending the
Dialectics of Liberation Conference in London during a long summer month in
1967 where such groups were addressing each other. The pluralism was palpable.
This he describes as the radical wave in the core capitalist countries, and was
concerned that their efforts would hardly dent capitalism or fascism. Yet the
pluralism to some degree reflected a changed historical context.
And then there were
his memoirs, Interesting Times
(2002). The title he said came from an old Chinese saying, that if you wished
to curse someone you wished them to live in interesting times. The book
captures his trajectory both as a historian and as a Marxist. Extra-curricula
activities (although he would not have seen them as such) were advising Neil
Kinnock of the British Labour Party or Lula da Silva in Brazil, with varying
effect. There were friendships with thoughtful people from many places. Being
invited to their home always held the excitement not just of Marlene’s welcome
but also some surprise as to who might be coming for dinner – it could be
Pierre Bourdieu or it could be Immanuel Wallerstein. He writes of being
distanced from the CPGB and being more attuned to the thinking of the Italian
CP and perhaps therefore of Euro-Communism. He did not hesitate to take
positions where necessary in his historical writing that were contrary to
various CPs, which is in part why his historical writing was of the best.
Staying on in the CPGB, he says, was not an endorsement of Stalinism but a
holding on to the promise of the October Revolution. Perhaps it was a futile
dream. In 2009 he stated that socialism had failed, and now capitalism was
bankrupt, so what comes next?
Ultimately his historical writing has not changed the world, but it has
undoubtedly helped us to understand the world.
THIS OBITUARY WAS FIRST PUBLISHED IN THE EPW OF 17 NOVEMBER 2012.
THE PHOTOGRAPHS ARE REPRODUCED COURTESY ROMILA THAPAR.
Comments