Historian Eric Hobsbawm Was a “Communist Polymath”

Emile Chabal

When I started working on Hobsbawm in late 2012, I was a freshly minted postdoc. I’d spent the previous five years working on contemporary French history and politics, so it was perhaps inevitable that French concepts like the “intellectual” and the Sartrean idea of [in English, “commitment”] loomed so large in my mind.engagement

You are right though: postwar British Marxism has a very different flavor from its French (or continental) counterpart. It was less abstract, less ideological, and less overtly philosophical. What is interesting about Hobsbawm is that he straddled the British and continental European intellectual traditions much more than his other British Marxist contemporaries.

As a student in the late 1930s, he was profoundly shaped by the peculiar environment of Cambridge, but he also saw himself as an integral part of a global communist movement with its base in Paris. After World War II, when he wanted to make his name as a historian, he continued to move between Britain and continental Europe in an effort to find useful interlocutors and mentors.

As I learned more about Hobsbawm’s incessant back-and-forth between the UK and Europe, I was grateful for having been a scholar of France in my younger days; it gave me a unique perspective on his intellectual formation and identity. And it also helped me bridge the often rather sterile divide between the intellectual histories of radical politics in the English-speaking world and continental Europe.

Emile Chabal

I think it’s important to emphasize that Hobsbawm was not a Central European émigré or refugee. He followed a similar trajectory (in his case, from Vienna to Berlin to London in the mid-1930s), and he certainly felt that London in 1933 was desperately boring compared to Berlin. But he was a British national and a native English speaker. When he arrived in London, he had, on paper, come “home,” even if he had never lived in the UK. He was therefore an outsider, not a foreigner.

It would be more accurate, then, to see the young Hobsbawm engaged in a very rapid process of acculturation and assimilation after his arrival in London — and, since he was only a teenager, he discovered that the school system was a very good way of becoming British. Inevitably, this meant that some of his most obviously British qualities — his intellectual agility, his commitment to concision, his facility with self-deprecating rhetoric and debate — were forged during his final years of high school in London and as a student at Cambridge. These intellectual traits were easily recognizable for the rest of his life.

In other ways, however, he was not very British at all. It is noteworthy, for instance, how little class discomfort he appears to have felt. Most British left-wing intellectuals of his generation — whether communist or not — were resentful, if not angry, about the straitjacket of the British class system, but Hobsbawm’s class coordinates lay elsewhere, in the bourgeois universe of Central Europe. Crucially, he missed the vital period between late childhood and early teenage years when the British class system is most aggressively inculcated through schooling and wider society.

By the time he arrived, he could simply transcend class prejudices by being extremely good at school (and, later, at university). This made him remarkably tolerant of manifestations of class prejudice in Britain’s higher educational system. If he disliked High Table at Cambridge, it was because he found the people boring, not because it was an expression of class inequality!

Emile Chabal

Following on from the previous question, one could argue that Hobsbawm’s commitment to communism was another decidedly un-British character trait of his. Rather than adopt a pragmatic position toward the future of the Left by moving away from the Communist Party after 1956, he maintained his attachment to a political idea, which is exactly the kind of “dogmatism” that many in Britain saw (and still see) as a pathology of continental European politics. Hence, I think, why many of his interviews in the 1990s — including the famous one with Ignatieff — were so awkward. He and Ignatieff were talking past each other: Hobsbawm was trying to explain his deep commitment to an ideal, a future utopia, something that transcended him, whereas Ignatieff was insisting he make a moralistic judgment.

It’s interesting to reflect on how Hobsbawm’s communism might have affected the reception of his work and his mass-market success. I don’t actually believe that his communism is the reason for his relative neglect in the Marxist “canon.” I think this has much more to do with the fact that he always presented himself as a “historian,” not as a “theorist.” In the book, I try to make the case that Hobsbawm was quite a serious thinker and that he had a strong theoretical grounding, but some might disagree with me, simply because he worked so hard to downplay his theoretical credentials.

What is unquestionably true is that he was a mass-market publishing sensation, and this may well have had to do with his communism. Paradoxically, though, it’s probably not because people saw his writings as dogmatically communist — a novice reader of might not even realize he was a Marxist! — but because his communist framing of history provided a powerful basis for his work. Many people have been attracted to Hobsbawm’s writings because they feel as if history is in motion in his texts; this derives, in large part, from his underlying philosophy of history.Age of Extremes

Emile Chabal

Yes, I am proud of these chapters in the book! In both my exploration of him as a cultural critic and in the section devoted to his travels, I wanted to widen the frame of intellectual history to take in different kinds of writing. It was particularly important to me to show that Hobsbawm was as much a journalist as he was an academic — and that the two identities were mutually reinforcing.

Given that he was a lifelong academic and very clearly a professional historian, it might seem odd to put his journalistic and scholarly writings on the same level, but all you have to do is look at his bibliography: he published hundreds and hundreds of journalistic op-eds, essays, and reviews. They were a huge part of his published corpus. In the pages of the , , or the , you can see him commenting on current affairs and working out new ideas (about the role of culture in society, for example). I expect it was the on the complete Eric Hobsbawm in 2019–2020 that really brought home to me the importance of these supposedly ephemeral writings.New StatesmanRinascitaTimes Literary Supplementwork I didonline bibliography

Emile Chabal

I always wanted the book to be global so that it would reflect the global character of its subject. But, as Hobsbawm himself knew very well, one’s global ambitions are limited by the hard cash that is available. And so it was for me: it was only when I was awarded a major fellowship grant in 2017 that I was able to undertake interviews in India, Brazil, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Mexico, the United States, France, Germany, and the UK.

These were primarily with Hobsbawm’s friends, students, colleagues, and those influenced by him, and they were tremendously useful to me as I was trying to frame Hobsbawm’s life within a global context. But they also did something more: they helped me understand how Hobsbawm approached foreign countries. He and I did similar things. We both arrived in a new city with an address book and sought out interesting people with whom to talk. In this way, the time I spent interviewing members of the twenty-first-century left intelligentsia gave me a unique insight into how Hobsbawm did more or less the same thing half a century before.

Emile Chabal

There’s no question that being on the Left — whatever we take that to mean — involves accepting and rationalizing defeat. Enzo Traverso has very eloquently about the “left-wing melancholia” that has been part of the story of the Left since the defeat of the Paris Commune in 1871. Hobsbawm embodied this tradition: he understood the history of the Left to be one of adversity. This is part of the reason why he did not take the myriad “failures” of the Left during his lifetime — from the [Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics] of 1939 through to the crushing defeats meted out to the British Labour Party in the 1980s — as a sign that he should jump ship.written

Having said that, I agree with Traverso when he says that the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was a more fundamental and unsettling kind of defeat than anything that had happened before. You can see this even in Hobsbawm’s private correspondence in the early 1990s, where he was forced to reckon with the total failure of his lifetime of political commitment. And yet he came out fighting: in public, at least, he defended communism, and he refused to recant his beliefs.

I think this sort of steadfast commitment to a political ideal is something that is very difficult to understand for left-wing activists born into the post–Cold War world. They look at Hobsbawm — or Sanders or Corbyn — and see a certainty about the future that they don’t have. Some admire this certainty and want it to be the foundation of a renewed left, but it’s also important to recognize that it was the product of a very particular set of mid-twentieth-century historical circumstances, none of which exist today.

Emile Chabal

Hobsbawm entered the university system as a student at Cambridge in 1936, and he remained in it until the end of his post-retirement visiting professorship at the New School in New York in the mid-1990s. He never took extended sabbaticals beyond the standard allowance, and he continued teaching in some way or another throughout his career. He was as fully institutionalized as was possible within the higher educational structures of the time. The fact that he was able to be productive and successful while depending on his university for financial support and logistical infrastructure should give those of us who are in a similar situation today some reassurance. Hobsbawm too got tired of marking essays, chasing collaborators, and doing university paperwork!

And yet something feels different about the twenty-first century. This could be because universities in Western Europe and North America are now contracting, whereas they were expanding in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s. This could also be because wage deflation has made it increasingly difficult to aspire to a comfortable middle-class life on a university salary.

To me, though, the real difference lies in the dramatically enhanced role of public-sector institutions — like universities — in postwar Europe, a point Hobsbawm himself discussed in the late 1970s in his famous lecture “The Forward March of Labour Halted?” When Hobsbawm first became a professional academic in the late 1940s, universities were small and elite institutions, but their rapid growth made them — especially in Europe — essential components of local and regional economies. Today they are every bit as important as factories were in the early twentieth century, and the closure or bankruptcy of a university risks the same catastrophic effects that many European countries experienced during deindustrialization in the 1970s and ’80s. That is why today’s fight to defend higher education feels existential in a way that it did not for Hobsbawm and his generation.