Eric the Red - The New York Times
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Eric the Red - The New York Times
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August 24, 2003
Eric the Red
By Christopher Hitchens
INTERESTING TIMES A Twentieth-Century Life. By Eric Hobsbawm. Illustrated. 448 pp. New York: Pantheon Books. $30. In March 1950 there was a public debate in New York City, moderated by the eminent radical sociologist C. Wright Mills. The motion before the meeting was: Is Russia a socialist community? Proposing for the ayes was Earl Browder, a loyal Stalinist who had nonetheless been removed by Moscow (for some minor deviations) from the leadership of the American Communist Party. Opposing him was the mercurial genius Max Shachtman, later to become a salient cold warrior but then the leader of the Trotskyist (or Trotskyish) Workers Party. Reaching his peroration against Browder, Shachtman recited the names of the European Communist leaders who, for their own minor deviations, had been liquidated by Stalin. Turning to his antagonist, he pointed and said: ''There, but for an accident of geography, stands a corpse!'' Eyewitnesses still relish the way in which Browder turned abruptly pallid and shrunken. Eric Hobsbawm has been a believing Communist and a skeptical Euro-Communist and is now a faintly curmudgeonly post-Communist, and there are many ways in which, accidents of geography to one side, he could have been a corpse. Born in 1917 into a diaspora Jewish family in Alexandria, Egypt, he spent his early-orphaned boyhood in central Europe, in the years between the implosion of Austria-Hungary and the collapse of the Weimar Republic. This time and place were unpropitious enough on their own: had Hobsbawm not moved to England after the Nazis came to power in 1933, he might have become a statistic. He went on to survive the blitz in London and Liverpool and, by a stroke of chance, to miss the dispatch to Singapore of the British unit he had joined. At least a third of those men did not survive Japanese captivity, and it's difficult to imagine Hobsbawm himself being one of the lucky ones. For the most active part of his life as an intellectual and a historian, Hobsbawm identified
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/24/books/eric-the-red.html?pagewanted=print[11/13/2013 5:37:18 AM]
Eric the Red - The New York Times
himself with the Soviet Union, which came into being in the same year he did. The failure and disgrace of this system are beyond argument today, and he doesn't any longer try to argue for it. In ''Interesting Times,'' he explains his allegiance in a pragmatic-loyalist manner, to the effect that many people were saved by Communism from becoming corpses, and that one was obliged to choose a side. This is utilitarianism, not Marxism, and he seems to recognize the fact by being appropriately laconic about it. It seemed to make sense at the time; he lost the historical wager and so did the party; history, he says, does not cry over spilled milk. Willing as I was to be repelled by such reasoning (blood is not to be rated like milk, after all), I found that I was instead rather impressed by its minimalism. If you wanted to teach a bright young student how Communism actually felt to an intelligent believer, you would have to put this book -- despite its rather stale title -on the reading list. To have marched in the last legal Communist demonstration in Berlin in 1933 may have been an experience as delicious as protracted sexual intercourse (Hobsbawm's metaphor, not mine), but the experience of defending the indefensible and -- more insulting -- of being asked to believe the unbelievable was far less delightful and, equally to the point, very much more protracted. Again, Hobsbawm's vices mutate into his virtues (and vice, as it were, versa). He is determined to show that he was not a dupe, but went into it all with eyes open, while he is no less concerned to argue that he did not want to become one of those ''God That Failed'' ex-Communists. Is this idealism or cynicism? He was one of a group of solid and brilliant English Marxist historians, including Christopher Hill and Edward Thompson and John Saville, none of whom could stomach the Communist Party after 1956. Yet he soldiered on as a member until the end of the Soviet Union itself, while admitting that he hardly ever visited the place and that when he did, he didn't much care for it. Now he tells us that he suffers nostalgia for what he never much liked. I think he has nostalgia all right. He mourns the lost Britain of trams and bicycles and hiking and cheap lodging and labor solidarity, and he misses the intellectual companionship of a Europe, part Parisian and part Mitteleuropa, where names like Henri Lefebvre and Ernst Fischer really meant something. He also possesses a strong feeling for the Italy that took Antonio Gramsci seriously and, in his absorbing passages on his long stays in the United States, says that he felt most at home in the 1950's of jazz and the Village and counterMcCarthyite bohemia. (Under the nom de plume of Francis Newton he was for many years a jazz critic of some aplomb.) I would say that by 1968 Hobsbawm had become a fairly distinguished political and cultural conservative. He already knew that the Soviet Union was going nowhere but down, and in Latin America, where Communist revolution was still thinkable, he regarded the idea as neither possible nor desirable. (Who else, in a personal memoir, would throw away an anecdote about interpreting for Che Guevara at a conference in Havana, commenting dryly that the glamorous hero of the insurgents ''said nothing of interest''?) Avoiding all postmodernist fads and hewing to a line of detachment and objectivity, of the sort that Marxists once had the nerve to call ''scientific,'' he continued to produce admirable works on labor history, slightly promiscuous studies (in view of his disdain for Guevara) of the social role of bandits and gangsters, and highly evolved attempts to
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/24/books/eric-the-red.html?pagewanted=print[11/13/2013 5:37:18 AM]
Eric the Red - The New York Times
capture the essence of the epochal. If we now periodize our historical understanding by reference to decades or even centuries rather than reigns, then we are partly using his method. And if, when considering modern nationalism and the nation-state, we refer knowingly to ''invented traditions,'' we are borrowing something of his cosmopolitan ease; while a popular neologism such as ''globalization'' would seem like a no-brainer to someone like Hobsbawm, who had been studying empire and the Industrial Revolution since the 20th century was in short pants. Thus there is less paradox than first appears in the willingness of such a civilized man to align himself with such a barbaric and philistine politics. He did it, he tells us in effect, because the Communist International supplied the elements of family and fatherland that were unavailable to a deracinated Jewish orphan intellectual. In other words, he did it because of his displaced yearning for family values, religion and patriotism: the Tory virtues. In a memoir that is often very reticent (a whole bad marriage goes by in a blink) he reveals perhaps more than he intends when he tells us, ''I confess that the moment when I recognized that I could envisage a real relationship with someone who was not a potential recruit to the party was the moment I recognized that I was no longer a Communist in the full sense of my youth.'' A great deal is compressed into that wry, arid sentence. Since Hobsbawm was at Cambridge University for much of his earlier academic career, he feels obliged to give some account of his membership in the Apostles and of the relationship, if any, between this open conspiracy and the more occult world of the Cambridge spies. He doesn't increase much the sum of our knowledge of this overtrodden field, though he does note, with a glacial matter-of-factness, that if invited to work for Stalin's secret police he would have obeyed the call without hesitation. The most absorbing chapter of the book discusses not past battles but contemporary ones. In 1978, in the journal Marxism Today (a monthly, now defunct, linked to the British Communist Party), Hobsbawm wrote an essay pointing out that labor militancy was either (a) a thing of the past or (b) a sectional and essentially apolitical phenomenon. This was timed with extraordinary, if accidental, deftness. For many people on the existing left, it raised the curtain, not only on the decline of British Labor but also -- and then much less thinkable - on the corollary ascendancy of Margaret Thatcher. Hobsbawm, in a whole chapter on this episode, makes it clear that he understood and even welcomed the logic of what he had said: the left had to be defeated, and its illusions dispelled, if progress was to resume. After a long and arduous shakeout, this has culminated in the near obliteration of the Tory Party and the rise to power of Tony Blair, at once the most radical and the most conservative of politicians. Very many of Blair's tough young acolytes received their political baptism in what I try to call the Marxist Right, the doctrines of which might be termed Hobsbawmian. Thus a long life devoted to the idea that history was inexorable has, as its summary achievement, the grand recognition that irony outlasts the dialectic. Photo: Eric Hobsbawm in Rome, 1958, speaking at a conference on the Italian Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci. (Photo from ''Interesting Times'')
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August 24, 2003
Eric the Red
By Christopher Hitchens
INTERESTING TIMES A Twentieth-Century Life. By Eric Hobsbawm. Illustrated. 448 pp. New York: Pantheon Books. $30. In March 1950 there was a public debate in New York City, moderated by the eminent radical sociologist C. Wright Mills. The motion before the meeting was: Is Russia a socialist community? Proposing for the ayes was Earl Browder, a loyal Stalinist who had nonetheless been removed by Moscow (for some minor deviations) from the leadership of the American Communist Party. Opposing him was the mercurial genius Max Shachtman, later to become a salient cold warrior but then the leader of the Trotskyist (or Trotskyish) Workers Party. Reaching his peroration against Browder, Shachtman recited the names of the European Communist leaders who, for their own minor deviations, had been liquidated by Stalin. Turning to his antagonist, he pointed and said: ''There, but for an accident of geography, stands a corpse!'' Eyewitnesses still relish the way in which Browder turned abruptly pallid and shrunken. Eric Hobsbawm has been a believing Communist and a skeptical Euro-Communist and is now a faintly curmudgeonly post-Communist, and there are many ways in which, accidents of geography to one side, he could have been a corpse. Born in 1917 into a diaspora Jewish family in Alexandria, Egypt, he spent his early-orphaned boyhood in central Europe, in the years between the implosion of Austria-Hungary and the collapse of the Weimar Republic. This time and place were unpropitious enough on their own: had Hobsbawm not moved to England after the Nazis came to power in 1933, he might have become a statistic. He went on to survive the blitz in London and Liverpool and, by a stroke of chance, to miss the dispatch to Singapore of the British unit he had joined. At least a third of those men did not survive Japanese captivity, and it's difficult to imagine Hobsbawm himself being one of the lucky ones. For the most active part of his life as an intellectual and a historian, Hobsbawm identified
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/24/books/eric-the-red.html?pagewanted=print[11/13/2013 5:37:18 AM]
Eric the Red - The New York Times
himself with the Soviet Union, which came into being in the same year he did. The failure and disgrace of this system are beyond argument today, and he doesn't any longer try to argue for it. In ''Interesting Times,'' he explains his allegiance in a pragmatic-loyalist manner, to the effect that many people were saved by Communism from becoming corpses, and that one was obliged to choose a side. This is utilitarianism, not Marxism, and he seems to recognize the fact by being appropriately laconic about it. It seemed to make sense at the time; he lost the historical wager and so did the party; history, he says, does not cry over spilled milk. Willing as I was to be repelled by such reasoning (blood is not to be rated like milk, after all), I found that I was instead rather impressed by its minimalism. If you wanted to teach a bright young student how Communism actually felt to an intelligent believer, you would have to put this book -- despite its rather stale title -on the reading list. To have marched in the last legal Communist demonstration in Berlin in 1933 may have been an experience as delicious as protracted sexual intercourse (Hobsbawm's metaphor, not mine), but the experience of defending the indefensible and -- more insulting -- of being asked to believe the unbelievable was far less delightful and, equally to the point, very much more protracted. Again, Hobsbawm's vices mutate into his virtues (and vice, as it were, versa). He is determined to show that he was not a dupe, but went into it all with eyes open, while he is no less concerned to argue that he did not want to become one of those ''God That Failed'' ex-Communists. Is this idealism or cynicism? He was one of a group of solid and brilliant English Marxist historians, including Christopher Hill and Edward Thompson and John Saville, none of whom could stomach the Communist Party after 1956. Yet he soldiered on as a member until the end of the Soviet Union itself, while admitting that he hardly ever visited the place and that when he did, he didn't much care for it. Now he tells us that he suffers nostalgia for what he never much liked. I think he has nostalgia all right. He mourns the lost Britain of trams and bicycles and hiking and cheap lodging and labor solidarity, and he misses the intellectual companionship of a Europe, part Parisian and part Mitteleuropa, where names like Henri Lefebvre and Ernst Fischer really meant something. He also possesses a strong feeling for the Italy that took Antonio Gramsci seriously and, in his absorbing passages on his long stays in the United States, says that he felt most at home in the 1950's of jazz and the Village and counterMcCarthyite bohemia. (Under the nom de plume of Francis Newton he was for many years a jazz critic of some aplomb.) I would say that by 1968 Hobsbawm had become a fairly distinguished political and cultural conservative. He already knew that the Soviet Union was going nowhere but down, and in Latin America, where Communist revolution was still thinkable, he regarded the idea as neither possible nor desirable. (Who else, in a personal memoir, would throw away an anecdote about interpreting for Che Guevara at a conference in Havana, commenting dryly that the glamorous hero of the insurgents ''said nothing of interest''?) Avoiding all postmodernist fads and hewing to a line of detachment and objectivity, of the sort that Marxists once had the nerve to call ''scientific,'' he continued to produce admirable works on labor history, slightly promiscuous studies (in view of his disdain for Guevara) of the social role of bandits and gangsters, and highly evolved attempts to
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/24/books/eric-the-red.html?pagewanted=print[11/13/2013 5:37:18 AM]
Eric the Red - The New York Times
capture the essence of the epochal. If we now periodize our historical understanding by reference to decades or even centuries rather than reigns, then we are partly using his method. And if, when considering modern nationalism and the nation-state, we refer knowingly to ''invented traditions,'' we are borrowing something of his cosmopolitan ease; while a popular neologism such as ''globalization'' would seem like a no-brainer to someone like Hobsbawm, who had been studying empire and the Industrial Revolution since the 20th century was in short pants. Thus there is less paradox than first appears in the willingness of such a civilized man to align himself with such a barbaric and philistine politics. He did it, he tells us in effect, because the Communist International supplied the elements of family and fatherland that were unavailable to a deracinated Jewish orphan intellectual. In other words, he did it because of his displaced yearning for family values, religion and patriotism: the Tory virtues. In a memoir that is often very reticent (a whole bad marriage goes by in a blink) he reveals perhaps more than he intends when he tells us, ''I confess that the moment when I recognized that I could envisage a real relationship with someone who was not a potential recruit to the party was the moment I recognized that I was no longer a Communist in the full sense of my youth.'' A great deal is compressed into that wry, arid sentence. Since Hobsbawm was at Cambridge University for much of his earlier academic career, he feels obliged to give some account of his membership in the Apostles and of the relationship, if any, between this open conspiracy and the more occult world of the Cambridge spies. He doesn't increase much the sum of our knowledge of this overtrodden field, though he does note, with a glacial matter-of-factness, that if invited to work for Stalin's secret police he would have obeyed the call without hesitation. The most absorbing chapter of the book discusses not past battles but contemporary ones. In 1978, in the journal Marxism Today (a monthly, now defunct, linked to the British Communist Party), Hobsbawm wrote an essay pointing out that labor militancy was either (a) a thing of the past or (b) a sectional and essentially apolitical phenomenon. This was timed with extraordinary, if accidental, deftness. For many people on the existing left, it raised the curtain, not only on the decline of British Labor but also -- and then much less thinkable - on the corollary ascendancy of Margaret Thatcher. Hobsbawm, in a whole chapter on this episode, makes it clear that he understood and even welcomed the logic of what he had said: the left had to be defeated, and its illusions dispelled, if progress was to resume. After a long and arduous shakeout, this has culminated in the near obliteration of the Tory Party and the rise to power of Tony Blair, at once the most radical and the most conservative of politicians. Very many of Blair's tough young acolytes received their political baptism in what I try to call the Marxist Right, the doctrines of which might be termed Hobsbawmian. Thus a long life devoted to the idea that history was inexorable has, as its summary achievement, the grand recognition that irony outlasts the dialectic. Photo: Eric Hobsbawm in Rome, 1958, speaking at a conference on the Italian Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci. (Photo from ''Interesting Times'')
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