Eric Hobsbawm

• 1. Introduction

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  Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm was born on the 9th of June 1917 in Alexandria, Egypt, and he died on the 1st of October 2012 in London, just shy of his 96th birthday. In 2002, a right-leaning magazine called The Spectator described him as "arguably our greatest living historian, not only Britain's, but the world's". That verdict came despite the fact that Hobsbawm had been a card-carrying member of the Communist Party for most of his adult life. It is a tension that sits at the very heart of his story. How does a man whose politics were shaped by the hope of a Soviet dawn go on to write what one historian called the best starting point for anyone who wishes to study modern history? How does a scholar shaped by Marx produce work praised by critics across the political spectrum? And what happens when one of the great analytical minds of the 20th century refuses to fully condemn the system he had spent a lifetime believing in? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. A Displaced Childhood

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  A clerical error at birth set the tone for Eric Hobsbawm's unusual life. The registrar wrote Hobsbawm instead of Hobsbaum, and the name stuck. His father, Leopold Percy Hobsbaum, was a Jewish merchant from London's East End, of Polish Jewish descent. His mother, Nelly, came from a middle-class Austrian Jewish family. Neither parent was religiously observant. The family settled in German-speaking cities, first Vienna and then Berlin, yet Hobsbawm grew up speaking English as his first language. His father died in 1929, when Eric was 12. The boy began working as an au pair and English tutor to help support the household. His mother died two years later, in 1931, and he and his sister Nancy were taken in by their maternal aunt, Gretl, and their paternal uncle, Sidney, who had married and had a son named Peter. Hobsbawm was a student at the Prinz Heinrich-Gymnasium Berlin, today known as the Friedrich-List-School, when the Nazi Party came to power in 1933. That same year the family relocated to London, where he enrolled in St Marylebone Grammar School. He did not consider himself a refugee. His father's British nationality made him British by birth. The grief and dislocation of those years, the orphanhood, the flight from fascism, would leave a permanent mark on how he read the politics of the 20th century.

• 3. Cambridge and Conviction

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  King's College, Cambridge, admitted Hobsbawm in 1936, and he arrived already committed. He joined the Communist Party of Great Britain through the university's Socialist Club. He took a double-starred first in history, the highest result Cambridge awards, and was elected to the Cambridge Apostles, the university's storied secret society. His doctoral dissertation focused on the Fabian Society. During the Second World War he served in the Royal Engineers and the Army Educational Corps. His communist sympathies cost him an overseas posting. He had used a wall newspaper he edited during army training to argue for the opening of a Second Front, which was at that moment a formal demand of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and the security services took notice. MI5 opened a personal file on him in 1942. He was released from the military in 1946 and applied to return to Cambridge as a research student. The combination of a first-rate mind and a party card would define the rest of his career.

• 4. Career Under Surveillance

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  MI5's file on Hobsbawm shaped his professional life for years. In 1945, he applied to the BBC for a full-time post making educational broadcasts for servicemen returning to civilian life. Officials considered him "a most suitable candidate". MI5 vetoed the appointment. The agency believed he was unlikely "to lose any opportunity he may get to disseminate propaganda and obtain recruits for the Communist party". In 1947 he became a lecturer at Birkbeck College, University of London, which he later recalled with relief as a place unusually free of anti-communist bias among staff and students. He spoke of his good fortune at having secured that post in 1948, before the Cold War hardened into institutional policy. He described a British variant of McCarthyism in which Marxist academics faced blocked promotions rather than dismissal: "you didn't get promotion for 10 years, but nobody threw you out". He became reader at Birkbeck in 1959, then professor between 1970 and 1982, and emeritus professor in 1982. He was a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, from 1949 to 1955. He helped found the academic journal Past and Present in 1952, a publication that became one of the most influential history journals in the English-speaking world. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1976, a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1971, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2006. In 2003 he received the Balzan Prize for European History since 1900, awarded for "his brilliant analysis of the troubled history of 20th century Europe and for his ability to combine in-depth historical research with great literary talent".

• 5. The Long Nineteenth Century

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  Hobsbawm coined the phrase "long nineteenth century" to describe the period running from the French Revolution of 1789 to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. He argued that two revolutions drove this era: the political upheaval of France and the economic transformation of Britain's Industrial Revolution. He called this pairing the "dual revolution" and saw it as the engine behind the rise of liberal capitalism. His tetralogy on this period opened with The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789-1848, published in 1962, and continued through The Age of Capital: 1848-1875 and The Age of Empire: 1875-1914. Niall Ferguson wrote that the quartet constitutes "the best starting point I know for anyone who wishes to begin studying modern history". The historian Mark Mazower described the achievement of these books as telling large-scale history "in a way that is as compelling as a detective story". James Joll, writing in The New York Review of Books, called the nineteenth-century trilogy "one of the great achievements of historical writing in recent decades". A recurring theme across the tetralogy was social banditry. Hobsbawm placed figures like the rural outlaw inside a social and historical frame, countering the older view of such violence as spontaneous and unpredictable. The fourth volume, The Age of Extremes, covered the "short 20th century" from 1914 to 1991. Ian Kershaw described it as "masterly analysis". A 2011 poll by History Today magazine named Hobsbawm the third most important historian of the previous 60 years.

• 6. Politics, Loyalty, and Dissent

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  Hobsbawm joined the Sozialistischer Schulerbund, an offshoot of the Young Communist League of Germany, in Berlin in 1931, aged 14. His membership of the Communist Party of Great Britain lasted, with one significant qualification, until near the party's dissolution in 1991. He signed a historians' letter protesting the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, a moment when thousands of British communists resigned from the party. Hobsbawm stayed. He was, by his own account, mistrusted by the party leadership afterward and had ceased active political work by the end of the 1950s. He maintained ties to former colleagues such as E. P. Thompson and John Saville, who left and became leading figures in the British New Left, while also providing intelligence reports on those dissidents to CPGB headquarters. He later dismissed the New Left as "a half-remembered footnote". After 1968, he became a leading figure in the Eurocommunist faction within the CPGB. In a lecture delivered to fellow Marxists in March 1978, later published in Marxism Today, he argued that the working class was losing its central role in society and that left parties could no longer appeal to it alone. This was a controversial position during a period of intense trade union militancy. He supported Neil Kinnock's reshaping of the Labour Party after 1983, the year the party won 28 per cent of the vote, and came to be called "Neil Kinnock's Favourite Marxist". He later described Tony Blair, whom his political groundwork had helped bring to power, as "Thatcher in trousers". A third of the 30 reprints of Marxism Today feature articles that appeared in The Guardian during the 1980s were written by or about Hobsbawm, making him the magazine's most popular contributor.

• 7. The Communist Question

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  In a 1994 television interview on BBC with the Canadian academic Michael Ignatieff, Hobsbawm said that the deaths of millions of Soviet citizens under Stalin would have been worth it if a genuinely communist society had been the result. He argued that "the chance of a new world being born in great suffering would still have been worth backing" but that, unfortunately, "the Soviet Union was not the beginning of the World Revolution". The following year, on Desert Island Discs on BBC Radio 4, he was asked again whether the sacrifice of millions of lives would have been worth a future communist society. He replied: "That's what we felt when we fought the Second World War". The Kremlinologist Robert Conquest concluded after reading Age of Extremes that Hobsbawm suffered from "massive reality denial" regarding the USSR. Tony Judt praised his knowledge and prose while arguing that his bias toward communism had weakened his grasp of the 20th century and prevented the analytical distance he achieved in his work on the 19th. John Gray described Hobsbawm's post-1914 writings as "banal in the extreme" and "highly evasive", citing "a vast silence" around the realities of communism. Hobsbawm himself, in Age of Extremes, quoted figures suggesting that the victims of the Soviet system must be measured "in eight rather than seven digits" and called any such total "shameful and beyond palliation, let alone justification". In his autobiography he wrote of a desire for "historical understanding... not agreement, approval or sympathy". He let his party membership lapse not long before the CPGB dissolved in 1991, and wrote in his memoirs that "the dream of the October Revolution is still there somewhere inside me... I have abandoned, nay, rejected it, but it has not been obliterated".

• 8. Beyond the Archive

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  Hobsbawm was a polyglot who spoke English, German, French, Spanish, and Italian fluently, and could read Dutch, Portuguese, and Catalan. Under the pseudonym Francis Newton, a name taken from Billie Holiday's communist trumpet player Frankie Newton, he wrote a regular jazz column for the New Statesman. He had grown interested in jazz during the 1930s, when the Communist Party looked down on it. In 1963 he published an article titled "Beatles and Before", in which he predicted that the Beatles "are probably just about to begin their slow descent" and that "in 29 years' time nothing of them will survive". His writings reached particular prominence in India and Brazil during the 1960s and 1970s, at a period of active debate about those countries' political futures. Emile Chabal described Hobsbawm as playing "a starring role" in the transnational Marxist discussion of capitalism and revolutionary change from the early 1960s to the late 1980s. He was appointed president of Birkbeck, University of London, in 2002 and held that role until his death. His daughter Julia described him in his final days: "Right up until the end he was keeping up with current affairs, there was a stack of newspapers by his bed". He was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium, and his ashes were interred at Highgate Cemetery, very close to the grave of Karl Marx.