What do we get when we lend our ears to Eric Hobsbawm? Passion. Energy. Exhilarating sweeps of time; giddy swoops into political darkness and gloom. Ethics and engagement. These pervade Eric’s work over the decades. Through the composition of history, he attempts not only to uncover the past, but to create it and to create us through critical dialogic exchange.
We have each come to Eric in different ways. For me, it was through his work on the working-class; those Uncommon, common people. Millions of people have been captivated by his work on Thomas Paine, his shoemakers, peasant revolutionaries, or Count Basie. Still others have followed him down dark passages pulsing with anxiety. Eric lived through times of terror and inhumanity. He grappled with torture; consumerist madness; and more revolutions and revolts than can be counted. He saw the edifices assembled by the greatest manifesto of the nineteenth century, The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) come tumbling down.
As an historian, there are three characteristics of his work that I want to highlight: ethics, practice, politics.
The first is Eric’s contributions to the ethics of writing history. Discourses – all discourses – are exercises in power. Historians have an obligation to people who lived in the past: we strive to be true to their lives. Eric was passionate about exposing those things that seem (wrongly) to be universal features of humanity – showing the specificities of past. Showing the how and why these things came to past – and, thus enabling us to imagine more emancipatory futures.
The second is his contributions to the practice of history. More than any scholar, Eric popularised a kind of history that was primarily social – that is, a history dedicated to the manners, customs, and patterns of everyday life, including the social and economic production of power relations. As he once wrote,
The intellectual historian may (at his risk) pay no attention to economics; the economic historian to Shakespeare, but the social historian who neglects either will not get far.
In other words, it was a call for eclectic, interdisciplinary, expansive, total history – which casts a sharp, forensic eye on the dancer as well as the dance; the slave-owner as well as the slave; the ideological as well as the economic. It was a vision that was fundamentally drawn to questions of causality as opposed to resting content with discourse or representation. So, of course, he always examined historical actors within their contexts. After all, as he said in How to Change the World,
It is an elementary observation of Marxism that thinkers do not invent their ideas in the abstract but can only be understood in the historical and political context of their times. If Marx always stressed that men made their own history…. he also insisted that they do so only under conditions in which they find themselves.
History-writing was also—and this is my third point – a political event for Eric. Throughout his life, he remained deeply committed to the present and to current struggles. This was what made him a public intellectual – effectively critiquing those conventional historians who were too timid to effectively exploit their potential political and cultural acumen. He returns time and again to the tension between intellectual detachment and political engagement – often suggesting that detachment is nothing more than a cover-up for the lack of civic courage or imagination.
Of course, this was always going to be controversial. There were notorious attacks on Eric for his lifelong commitment to the Communist Party (Christopher Hitchins’ famously claimed to be bewildered by the ‘willingness of such a civilised man to align himself with such barbaric and philistine politics’). For me, though, Eric was blind in another way as well: that is, for so much of his career, he ignored women as historical actors. And, it must be admitted, when he did turn to them, he frequently encountered the great wrath of feminist scholars – distinguished historian Ruth Richardson famously fumed that she was ‘made deeply angry…. [an anger] which has endured…. [He] purported to offer a non-sexist examination of socialism iconography…. [and only] compounded its sexist’.
It was an omission that he courageously admitted to in 1997 when he republished an essay he had written in 1970, more than one-quarter of a century earlier. In it, he admitted that he
cannot but note with embarrassed astonishment that it [the essay] contained no reference at all to women’s history. Admittedly this field had scarcely begun to develop before the end of the 1960s, but neither I nor any of the other contributors to the volume, among the most distinguished in the profession – all males— appears to have been aware of the gap.
In all fairness, what historians of my generation found so illuminating about Eric’s approach, albeit not his actual writing, was the space it gave for a flourishing of our history. Through the prism of social history, women as major social actors moved to the centre. And this was not simply a history of powerful women but of the housewife, the domestic servants, the women labouring in the bogs of Donegal. In other words, by drawing our attention to those Uncommon People – people whose names are usually unknown to everyone except family and neighbours – he drew our attention to women; those ‘ordinary’ women who turn out to be extraordinary.
I would like to conclude these reflections by setting Eric alongside another hero of mine – that great poet Adrienne Rich. My excuse for throwing these two brilliant but very different minds together are many – their glossolalia; their worldly sophistication; their political commitment to causes that were sometimes – often – unpopular; and their reflections on the worlds of pain and suffering.
Both wrote about finding themselves in hospitals when massacres took place: for Rich, it was the Yom Kippur war of 1973; for Eric, the terrorist attack on 11 September 2001. ‘There is no better place than a hospital bed’, Eric wrote, to reflect on the world – the hospital bed was the ‘quintessential locus of a captive victim’. As he recalled,
I saw it [9/11] on a London hospital television screen as it happened. For an old and sceptical historian born in the year of the Russian Revolution, it had everything that was bad about the C20; massacres, high but unreliable technology, the announcements that a global struggle to the death between the causes of God and Satan was now taking place once again.
Rich also wrote lying in a hospital bed after another one of her many gruelling operations and listening to a radio account of massacre. She asked her readers to remember that:
‘the body’s pain and the pain on the streets
are not the same but you can learn
from the edges that blur O you who love clear edges
more than anything watch the edges that blur’.
It is a politics that encourages readers to dive into unfamiliar waters – into the ‘stew of contradictions’ that make up human lived experiences; into solidarity with other tormented bodies. By writing with the suffering body, Rich holds open the possibility of solidarity with others who are also living their lives
‘not under conditions of [their] choosing
wired into pain
rider[s] on the slow train’.
It was a Marxist and Hobsbawnian comment. Both embraced a poetics and a history that resisted passive suffering, drenching the body-in-pain with a ‘recognition of the What if – the possible’. Indeed, this was what Eric was also gesturing towards when he wrote:
As I lay in [my hospital] bed, I concluded that the world needs historians more than ever, especially skeptical ones.
And he hoped that reading his histories would
assist the young to face the darkening prospects of the C21st, not only with the requisite pessimism, but with a clearer eye, a sense of historical memory and a capacity to stand away from current passions and sales pitches…. Let us not disarm…. Social injustice still needs to be denounced and fought. The world will not get better on its own.
As he wrote as early as 1970 – and I believe it is even more the case today – ‘It is a good moment to be a social historian’.
Comments