Memoir, social history and commitment: Eric Hobsbawm's interesting times

Journal of Social History

Volumn 37, Issue 1, 2003, Pages

  Cronin, James E ^a  

^a Department of History ^*  (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0141541813     PISSN: 00224529     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jsh.2003.0132     Document Type: Review

References (15)

1. On the role of Past and Present in shaping the new history, see Jim Obelkevich, "New Developments in History in the 1950s and 1960s," Contemporary British History, XIV, 4 (Winter, 2000), 125-142; and the accompanying "Witness Seminar" on the same topic, 143-167.
2. Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life (London, 2002); The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991 (New York, 1994).
3. Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life (London, 2002); The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991 (New York, 1994).
4. Appropriately, the book has been widely and critically reviewed. For an overall assessment by a former colleague, see Roy Foster, Irish Times (October 26, 2002).
5. Perry Anderson, "The Age of EJH," London Review of Books (October 3, 2002).
6. See Richard Vinen, Times Literary Supplement, October 4, 2002; Niall Ferguson, Daily Telegraph, September 22, 2002.
7. See Richard Vinen, Times Literary Supplement, October 4, 2002; Niall Ferguson, Daily Telegraph, September 22, 2002.
8. See the important essay by Perry Anderson, "Confronting Defeat," London Review of Books (October 17, 2002).
9. See Hobsbawm, Politics for a Rational Left: Political Writing, 1977-1988 (London, 1989).
10. Perry Anderson, "Confronting Defeat," complains that over the course of the four volumes the bourgeoisie itself gets lost and no other actor replaces it in the historical drama. Perhaps, but if so maybe it is a testament to Hobsbawm's recognition of the growing complexity of the advanced societies.
11. Elsewhere Hobsbawm is very clear on historians' responsibility to enter public debate and to use their knowledge to debunk myths and combat the lies about the past that empower contemporary demogogues. See, for example, his lecture to students at the Central European University in Budapest, reprinted as "Outside and Inside History," in Hobsbawm, On History (New York, 1997), 1-9.
12. Hobsbawm is careful to reference the work of Charles Maier, Dissolution: The Crisis of Communism and the End of East Germany (Princeton, 1997) as a basis for understanding the DDR. But the sympathy and the ambivalence are of a piece with his overall view of the Soviet Union and the hopes it inspired.
13. This particular quotation - Interesting Times, 279 - ends with a question mark, but there is no question it is his view.
14. In discussing his emotional attachment to the communist movement Hobsbawm makes much of having joined before the era of the "popular front," which began in 1935, and belonging therefore "to the generation tied by an almost unbreakable umbilical cord to hope of the world revolution, and of its original home, the October Revolution ..." (218). There is no reason to doubt this, but it might well be useful to add that it was the experience of the great worldwide mobilization against fascism that, for many even of Hobsbawm's cohort, gave the attachment to the left a firmer moral grounding and a sense that it might actually prevail.
15. Anderson, "Confronting Defeat," 13. Anderson also notes the relative neglect of the enormous economic growth that has occurred in Asia over the period since 1945 and especially since the end of the "golden age," and of the simultaneous advance in the status of women and the steady spread of democracy. Presumably the absences are connected and spring from a reluctance to acknowledge the economic and social dynamism of capitalism.