Eric Hobsbawm was a historian and a Communist. The first pursuit brought him great success. The second didn’t end as well.
.”) Once the Nazis came to power, he moved to Britain. After receiving his undergraduate and graduate degrees from Cambridge and securing a teaching position at Birkbeck College, he came to lead a charmed life in London, where he attended parties hosted by the theatre critic Kenneth Tynan that featured A. J. Ayer, Robin Blackburn, and Liza Minnelli.
” claims, “while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.” Throughout his life, Marx struggled mightily to ward off that vision. Hobsbawm did, too.,” the first of Hobsbawm’s four volumes of modern history, opens with the French Revolution and Britain’s industrial revolution, two explosions of the late eighteenth century that spurred “the greatest transformation in human history” since antiquity.
This was the contest that Hobsbawm used to frame the arc of history. The dual revolution was the starting gun that sent two marathoners on their race. The first ran under the flag of the market, following laws as if they were blind forces of nature; the second ran under the flag of politics, making laws through reason and speech. At stake was not who would make it to the finish line first but who would remain standing when the race was done.
The working class, Hobsbawm wrote, was born with everything going against it. After the revolutions of 1848 failed, the leaders of the new proletarian movements were in jail, exiled, or forgotten—sometimes, Hobsbawm notes, “all three.” Writing about social revolutions in the decades after 1848 “is rather like writing about snakes in Britain: they exist, but not as a very significant part of the fauna.
That insight afforded Hobsbawm astonishing historical vision, as when he observed, in passing, how the political tempos of the non-industrial world, which were conditioned by the famine or feast of the harvest cycle, were accelerated in the industrial world by the boom and bust of the business cycle.
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