I was saddened to hear of the death of Eric Hobsbawm, one of the great generalist Marxist historians writing in the English language of my lifetime.
I met Hobsbawm on a number of occasions when he came to Rutgers University in the 1970s and 1980s, the first time with his friends and fellow Marxist historians Edward and Dorothy Thompson; the second , at the end of the 1980s when he gave some lectures under odd circumstances once more at Rutgers.
First, Eric Hobsbawm the man. He was a little persnickety, something of a putdown artist when I first met him in the 1970s. I was taken aback when said that he had heard about my dissertation, hadn’t read it and probably wouldn’t read it. I thought that he some kind of British aristocrat British aristocrat, maybe even like some careerist leftists at the timethat I called “Gucci Marxists” but I was very wrong. I hadn’t read his work, which was not about U.S. history, but I began to read it.
The next time I saw him was a decade later at Rutgers, where he had come as a distinguished lecturer. Felix Browder, the academic Vice President and the son of Earl Browder, had signed off on the lecture, which was held in a very noisy area attached to a dormitory, with people going in and out, banging doors, etc. I was mortified, told him that he shouldn’t stand for such conditions, but Eric kept his cool—I now knew a great deal about his work now saw him as a stiff upper lip Englishman in the best sense.
Although he was a longtime member of the Communist Party of Great Britain(now the Communist Party of Britain) which he joined in 1936, Hobsbawm did not suffer the fate of U.S. Communist historians like Phil Foner and Herb Aptheker , not to mention many other scholars associated with the CPUSA, firing, blacklisting, becoming in the language of George Orwell an “unpersons.” He kept his position and like Foner, Aptheker and others, continued to write and edit major general works for the people. Although he left the Communist Party of Britain a very long time ago, it was not with the “God that failed” recriminations that “ex-Communists” like Howard Fast had to go through in the U.S. to be “rehabilitated.” It is said that he even was something of an unofficial advisor to the left Labor leader Neil Kinnock(who led the party in the late Thatcher years).
, Finally, Niall Ferguson, a leading historian of the contemporary Anglo-American Right who is the exact opposite of everything that Eric Hobsbawm was— hip defender of imperialism, former Thatcherite, transplanted Harvard University which his political friends routinely bait as a haven for radicalism and liberalism , advisor to McCain in 2008, -- writer for Newsweek, Time, opponent of the Obama administration and supporter of Mitt Romney today, actually wrote that Eric Hobsbawn’s four volume general world history was “the best starting point for anyone I know to begin studying modern history.”
The Eric Hobsbawm I remember would have smiled at that and suggested that Ferguson take his own advice.
Eric Hobsbawm loved Jazz , which the great CPUSA critic Sidney Finkelstein long ago rightly called “a peoples music,” and wrote about it under the name of Frankie Newton(Billie Holliday’s Communist trumpeter) for the left British publication The New Statesmen.
He wrote as prolifically as Foner or Aptheker and continued to do so for the rest of his life as they did.
For what might be called the academic establishment(work that graduate students are supposed to remember of examinations) his best known works were probably Primitive Rebels(1959) and with George Rude, Captain Swing I have long used two of the general histories that Ferguson alluded to , The Age of Empire (1875-1914 and The Age of Extremes1914-1991, in courses that I teach in the history of Socialism and Communism. Although with the first two volumes in the series, The Age of Revolution,(17 and The Age of Capital(1848-1875) they are more than an introduction to modern history. They provide a framework for understanding history.
Eric Hobsbawm was involved in many battles within the Communist Party of Great Britain over the decades and as a scholar and an activist took positions that I and many of our readers would both agree and disagree. He died at the age ninety five, still active, still reading and still writing, fighting his last battle against leukemia. To the end, from my readings he was both his own man and a man of the left. He lives in through his work and through all who knew him.