Why Hobsbawm?

Enemy of the (Capitalist) State?

Not the least of the many contradictions informing the academic career of Hobsbawm was the contrast between his self-perception as victim on account of his political views, and his steady institutional advance, in terms of employment, promotion, travel and publication. This journey coincided with his ascent to the ranks of the British Establishment, a process marked by recognition and honours. In what is at first sight an anomaly, he was lionized and feted by Establishment academics – among them Noel Annan and Isaiah Berlin (pp. 121, 254, 397, 447–449, 454–455, 480) – not noted for showing a sympathetic political attitude towards Marxism and socialists. ⁴ Significantly, perhaps, it was a journey marked by the fact that, increasingly, his most damning political criticisms tended more often than not to be directed at those belonging to the far left (Tony Benn, the Labour politician, and Arthur Scargill, leader of the 1984–1985 miners’ strike).

Claims made by Hobsbawm to victimhood (p. 302) notwithstanding, time after time attempts to block his advance came to naught. ⁵ Thus the security services were unable to prevent him from broadcasting on the BBC (pp. 262, 407), from travelling abroad (pp. 237, 384–385, 387, 445–446, 447–448) or from obtaining travel grants (pp. 404–405). Unlike Paul Robeson, whose passport was confiscated by the US authorities, Hobsbawm travelled extensively from the 1950s onwards, without encountering obstacles, either financial or political. Despite the occasional setback, his institutional progress in terms of academic posts and promotions followed a conventional trajectory, to the extent of being able eventually to turn down offers of senior appointments. Nor did negative appraisals of manuscripts he submitted prevent their eventual publication (p. 381); indeed, Hobsbawm appears to have had a privileged input to the world of publishing, exercising a lot of influence at Weidenfeld and Nicolson (p. 467), from whom he received substantial book advances and for whom he recruited other authors. ⁶

From the 1980s onwards, Establishment honours and/or recognition multiplied apace (p. 479 ff.): Hobsbawm was elected to membership of the Athenaeum Club, and to Fellowships at King’s College, Cambridge and the British Academy (FBA). Significantly, he himself accepted this as ‘natural’, admitting that ‘the Establishment is increasingly clasping me to its international bosom – and frankly, I am vain enough to like this kind of initial-collecting [FBA, CH] … there are considerable compensations’ (p. 482). Unsurprisingly, the culmination of his ascent into the ranks of the British Establishment was the offer of a knighthood and then a Companion of Honour (CH, an Establishment bauble) from Tony Blair for ‘laying the intellectual foundations for New Labour’ (pp. 560–561). At first glance, the receipt by a Marxist historian of such recognition and appreciation from capitalist institutions seems to be an anomaly.

There can be no doubt as to the influential role exercised by Hobsbawm during the 1960s and 1970s in what is described (pp. 444–445) as ‘a revolution in British historiography … the coming of social history’. Evidence suggests, however, that this had little or nothing to do with Marxism. This, perhaps, helps explain both the acceptability of his views to academics hostile to socialist theory, and the ease with which he was absorbed into the ranks of the establishment. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that increasingly his publications (Hobsbawm, 1987, 1989, 2000) elicited criticisms along the lines of ‘there was nothing particularly Marxist about them’, ‘the absence of any viable Marxist analysis’, ‘an elegy for mid-Victorian, middle-class liberalism’ and ‘he does not use the category “class” in his depiction of the twentieth century’. Neither is it a surprise that the sorts of political mobilization and agency promoted by Hobsbawm were tactical alliances and electoral pacts between workers and the middle classes (pp. 510–511, 516 ff., 578), an approach described by Evans (p. 254) as ‘his trademark note of paradoxical compromise’.

Hence the kind of theory and politics advocated by Hobsbawm possessed only a tenuous connection to Marxism. When asked to define the latter, he replied that ‘it suggests that … human society is capable of change’, a definition which, as Evans (p. 610) records, was derided as either meaningless or tautological. In keeping with this, Hobsbawm also maintained that ‘[c]ommunism first and foremost represents a demand for human rights’, a view that is quite simply wrong. ⁷ What Marxist theory upholds is not human rights, a very general and non-class-specific political objective that can be invoked and realized by all class elements defensively within capitalism, but rather control of the State in order to establish socialism. Neither does it advocate an equally unspecific notion of ‘change’ – a term used thus is one associated with Whig history and not Marxism – but rather formation of and struggle by opposing classes, a process which generates systemic transformation.

This uncertainty as to what Marxists believe and advocate in turn raises two other questions: might not the rewards/honours received by Hobsbawm have been, after all, just for his being a pathbreaking historian; and if not Marxism, then with what sort of theoretical approach was his social history consistent?

History, Methods, Politics

These problems with theory stem in part from methodological causes: often, therefore, Hobsbawm simply took at face value accounts he heard, either from fellow academics or from peasants met briefly in the course of his travels (p. 380). Evans (p. 318) notes in passing how, after attending meetings of the Communist Party Historians’ Group in the early 1950s, Hobsbawm used to gather up ideas that had been discussed in note form and then write them as articles. This suggests that at least some of the arguments contained in his publications during that decade were those put forward by other attendees, and therefore did not originate with him. Similarly, the arguments informing Primitive Rebels – described by Evans (p. 383) as having ‘introduced novel concepts into the historiographical debate’ – emerged mainly from conversations with others at that conjuncture (p. 379); much the same is true of his knowledge about rural Latin America (Bethell, 2016: 19). When in the following decade Hobsbawm agreed to collaborate with George Rudé on Captain Swing, he gave as a reason that his understanding of the issues came from having supervised a doctorate on the subject (pp. 438–439): in this instance, too, neither the idea nor the research appears to have been that of Hobsbawm himself. ⁸

In keeping with this pattern, E. P. Thompson hinted that Hobsbawm was somewhat cavalier with regard to his influences, being reluctant to credit others who made the same case and/or used the same sources (pp. 336–337). Notwithstanding claims about the originality of his approach to historiography – made not just by Hobsbawm himself but also by his biographer and others on his behalf (pp. 335–336, 532–533) – there are grounds for questioning such assessments. Hence the argument that he ‘pioneered an entirely new approach to British labour history’ (p. 432) is not correct. ⁹ There is a long – very long – lineage where this kind of analysis is concerned, extending from Government Commissions and Reports, via accounts by, among others, William Cobbett, William Howitt, Richard Heath and William Dodd in the 19th century, to similar approaches in monographs written by W. Hasbach, F. E. Green, Wal Hannington, Reg Groves and Page Arnot in the early 20th century. In fact, labour, its international context, characteristics and political direction/organization was central to most political economy discussion (Cobden, Bagehot, Sidgwick, Kay-Shuttleworth, Fawcett) throughout the Victorian era, thereby anticipating Hobsbawm by at least a century. ¹⁰

Methodological issues such as these notwithstanding, diaries and letters reveal that Hobsbawm had a high opinion of his own abilities, a perception reinforced and shared by many of those he encountered, inside and outside academia: the biography (pp. 46, 51, 80, 91, 116, 123, 171, 319) records numerous examples of fulsome praise – ‘academic brilliance’, ‘exceptionally brilliant’, ‘I am intelligent, very intelligent … I already see myself at Oxford’, ‘the most brilliant historian of our generation at Cambridge’, ‘precociously brilliant’, ‘very brilliant’ and so on and so forth. Such encomia sit awkwardly with the reality of his intellectual practice, however, involving as it did serious political misjudgements and historiographical misinterpretations leading to or necessitating subsequent changes of mind.

Not only did Hobsbawm accept what was claimed to be the case against the accused at the Moscow trials, therefore, and thought the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact would prevent war (pp. 148–149, 174–175), but he also dismissed the likelihood of a military coup in Chile just before its occurrence and was similarly overoptimistic about the impact of Gorbachev on the Soviet Union (pp. 408, 545–546). ¹¹ Equally misplaced was his view that Yugoslavia would not fragment along national/ethnic lines. ¹² As problematic was underestimating the impact of nationalism in 19th century European revolutions (p. 402), and idealizing rural banditry as a way of redistributing wealth away from the rich towards the poor. Also missed was the fact that Peasant Leagues in Brazil were organized by the Communist Party (p. 405), and that unfree production relations on latifundia in Peru were not obstacles to economic growth and would therefore not vanish once landlords were expropriated. ¹³

Given its centrality to his reputation as a leading historian, perhaps the main error Hobsbawm made concerned the labour aristocracy in 19th century Britain (p. 249). Initially – at the start of the 1950s - he subscribed to the view that British workers were less revolutionarily inclined than their European counterparts as a result of benefitting from imperialism, and consequently having been bought off by capitalism. In versions of this same argument published later, Hobsbawm conceded that in the British context it was incorrect to say that unskilled workers were more revolutionary than their more skilled equivalents. Nevertheless, his stance on this debate is defended by Evans, who contends that Hobsbawm sparked a fruitful historical controversy, a hallmark of his career to come. About this misinterpretation and its justification, a number of observations are in order.

To begin with, it was not until the 1980s that Hobsbawm recognized his error (pp. 696–697 n. 35) where misinterpretation of the labour aristocracy thesis is concerned. By then, it was all too clear that capitalism was changing for the worse, as the neoliberal project took hold in metropolitan contexts – once again, rather late in the day for someone to have to rectify a mistake. More generally, and including also all his other misinterpretations, there is an issue here that the biography does not address. Put bluntly, how can being incorrect, repeatedly so, be taken as a sign of intellectual and/or academic distinction, and in what way is Hobsbawm’s case different in this regard from all the other historians and social scientists who over the years have similarly advanced views that turn out to be wrong? As such, it highlights the contradiction between on the one hand the inexorable paeans to the analyses undertaken and/or positions held by Hobsbawm, and on the other a consistent pattern of being wrong-footed in many of his political and historiographical judgments. In short, the question posed once again is: why Hobsbawm?

Social History and/as the ‘Cultural Turn’

Accordingly, it is necessary both to agree and yet to disagree with Evans (p. 35) when he observes that for Hobsbawm ‘[b]ecoming a Communist meant embracing poverty as a positive virtue … This was surely a key psychological impulse behind his growing self-identification as a Communist’. Whilst it is true that this was probably a motivating factor where Hobsbawm was concerned, turning poverty into a virtue in this manner is not really a Marxist view, more of religious one (= ‘Blessed are the poor’). Much rather socialists regard poverty as a blight to be eradicated, a disempowering systemic effect of capitalism. This distinction is important, since Hobsbawm’s perception of poverty as empowering helps explain his understanding of social history and the ‘cultural turn’, each of which also claim to endorse ‘those below’ simply because they are ‘below’ and an ‘unheard voice’.

Epistemological clues to this difficulty, and his resulting take on social history, lie in his espousal of a non-Marxist form of pro-rural/anti-urban Romanticism: as set out in the biography (pp. 37, 61, 62), he was ‘more [of] a Romantic rebel’ who ‘developed a strong love of the English countryside … Nature was important to Eric [who experienced] an almost ecstatic feeling of communing with nature’. This can be linked in turn to the way Hobsbawm approached many of the issues he investigated, not least his idealization of bandits as the epitome of peasant activism, an authentic voice from below (pp. 382–383, 405–406). As he himself observed, ‘I have the bad habit of always sympathizing with the weaker side’ (p. 193), and indeed it could be argued that his negative interpretation regarding the social impact of the industrial revolution (pp. 335–336) may have led in turn to a positive view of pre-industrial rural society in Europe and Latin America, an idealization that is the hallmark not of Marxism but of agrarian populism. ¹⁴

The search by Hobsbawm for ‘authenticity’ and ‘otherness’ in the domain of popular culture – a quest informing his love of Jazz (p. 367 ff.) – opens up a space not just for the celebration of pristine culture as an unheard voice from below, a position that was to generate advocacy of the ‘cultural turn’ and – where rural society was concerned – the ‘new’ populist postmodernism, but also rural agency as a form of reasserting such traditional cultural ‘otherness’. ¹⁵ It is true that eventually Hobsbawm became a critic of postmodern theory (pp. 529–530, 550 ff., 595), but this was only after those who remained Marxists had done so earlier. Rather late in the day, he finally recognized the tainted impact of the ‘cultural turn’ on the study of politics and history, ironically after he himself had spent many years contributing to its epistemological foundations.

Hence the errors he made about Latin American feudalism stem largely from such misinterpretation: that peasant activism was rooted in the ideology of the Middle Ages, and the belief by Hobsbawm that the model to analyse this was the subaltern of Gramsci (pp. 380, 498). That an essentialist view of the peasantry (= undifferentiated, subsistence-oriented) underwrote his intellectual approach to rural contexts, both in Europe and the Third World, is clear from his observation (p. 166) that ‘the destruction or at least the weakening of the self-sufficiency of the peasants [pointed to similarities] between European history and that of backward colonial countries’. Unsurprisingly, Hobsbawm endorsed a pre-modern ‘way forward’ (p. 382), whereby peasant agency = Middle Ages discourse = grassroots ‘authenticity’. Not only is this inconsistent with Marxist theory, but it is also precisely what ‘new’ populist postmodernists argue. ¹⁶ In other words, this is the trajectory away from a socialist transition that Hobsbawm followed.

This is clear from his claim (p. 302) that during:

the periods in which intellectuals have attached themselves to the people, they have performed their finest tasks. In the periods in which the intellectuals have retreated into their ‘ivory tower’ they have produced nothing of value due to their disassociation from the people.

Such a view could in part explain his initial uncritical espousal of the ‘new’ populist postmodern approach to the agrarian sector of Third World nations. Hence the seeming realization of this very link between intellectuals and ‘the people’ (not the class) in the form of first uncovering and then championing what was presented as an homogeneous category of rural ‘others’ (= the ‘unheard voice’ of those below), suppressed by imperialism and colonialism. In the light of this it comes as no surprise that Hobsbawm reacted with enthusiasm for the kind of social history reflected in the ‘cultural turn’. It was deemed progressive in political terms, by him and others, on the grounds that grassroots reassertion of traditional culture was simply an expression of ‘from below’ opposition to colonialism.

Because Hobsbawm omitted to ask about the extent to which peasants were differentiated along class lines, and what kind of smallholders were involved in grassroots rural agency, therefore, he failed to spot the effectiveness of traditional/‘authentic’ ideology in the pursuit of capitalist economic and political objectives. This shortcoming – not differentiating rural producers, their activism and objectives – led in turn to a tendency on his part to over-optimism when evaluating the ‘potential for a genuine social revolution’. Overlooked by him, consequently, was that in Peru and India it was usually the better-off peasants who mobilized, not just against the landlord class but also (and later) against sub-tenants and agricultural workers. More often than not, peasants generally are to be found in the ranks of the counter-revolution, activism that has nothing to do with a socialist transition, to which property-owning smallholders are frequently opposed.

Conclusion

Any answer to the question asked here – why Hobsbawm, or what was it about him that merits the attention his analyses or views have attracted – has to start with an unavoidable contradiction. Hobsbawm regarded himself, and was regarded by others, as victimized for his leftist political views, a commitment that affected his academic employment prospects and publishing output. Yet in terms of posts held, promotions conferred, conferences attended and books/articles published, his academic career does not seem to have been unduly affected in negative terms, nor did he suffer hugely simply on account of his leftist politics, much rather the opposite. Early opposition to his views came not so much from agents of the State as from fellow historians, and concerned not his politics so much as his competence. Consequently, it is possible to tell a different story about Hobsbawm’s political difference.

Not only was he never arrested and imprisoned for his political views – unlike many socialists whose opinions are considered ‘dangerous’ in countries where they live or which they visit – but the security services proved singularly ineffective in blocking his institutional advance, publications, broadcasting or travel. Much rather, Hobsbawm was friends with and cherished by members of the British Establishment not known for their sympathetic attitude towards holders of socialist views. After reading the biography, therefore, the impression that remains is one of an unresolved contradiction: between on the one hand Hobsbawm’s own self-image of victimhood on account of his politics, and on the other the seemingly limitless recognition and honours accorded him by Establishment institutions and persons, plus the relative ease of his access to publishing outlets and the extensive nature of his publication record. When added to the fact of his mistaken historical and political judgments, the element of contradiction looms yet larger, and requires explanation.

The argument of those regarded as most critical of Hobsbawm is that he gradually moved rightwards politically as he grew older, making his peace with capitalism as a system in his later years. Advanced here is a somewhat different contention: it is that he was never that radical politically, and further that this was evident from the very first. It was precisely because of this that the British Establishment grasped him to its bosom, and he was able to do all the things – travel, publish, broadcast, ascend the academic hierarchy – that those on the left usually find difficult to do because of institutional and other obstacles placed in their path. This acceptability to the powers that be can also be linked to the fact that Hobsbawm was a precursor of the ‘cultural turn’; all the views he formulated or expressed with regard to social history and rural society in the Third World subsequently emerged in the form of the ‘new’ populist postmodernism which not only became academically fashionable but opposed and undermined Marxist theory from the 1980s onwards.

Historically, the ruling class everywhere has always endeavoured to pursue a well-tried tactic: pick out the least threatening and dangerous individual from amongst its political opponents and lionize him/her. The object is to depict as politically harmful those views which in reality pose the least risk, thereby defusing/displacing ideological hostility to its own political survival, a particularly effective manoeuvre where intellectuals are concerned.

Not the least important roles discharged by academics who have a privileged access to public platforms are three in particular. First, to question continuously the possibility/desirability/feasibility of revolutionary socialism. Second, to endorse, seemingly from a leftist position, an ‘alternative’ politics that does not threaten the power/wealth of those who own/control the means of production/distribution/exchange. And third, to convey or reinforce the image of a benign capitalism that does not suppress criticism from its political opponents. All these roles, it could be argued, were ones that Hobsbawm fulfilled to perfection.