A daughter remembers her famous father: Julia Hobsbawn on Eric Hobsbawn

Thanks to Jim Johnson's excellent and informative blog Notes on Politics, Theory and Photography I found this link to a wonderful article by Julie Hobsbawn about her father, the distinguished historian Eric Hobsbawn, who died in late 2012.

Beautifully written and heartfelt Julie Hobsbawn's piece provides a revealing insight into a man considered one of the greatest historians of the 20th Century.  

My father died at the age of 95 with scores of global editions of his books in print, countless honorary doctorates and visiting fellowships and something close to a cult following among people of all classes, ages and types. He had political enemies in death as he had in life – he was resolutely a Marxist historian and never relinquished his membership of the Communist party – but mostly people seemed as upset as we were, which was a comfort. In the hours after he died, while the Twitter feeds lit up and the news agencies rang in alongside relatives, I phoned through a death notice to The Times. The young man taking copy on the phone sounded stressed: he asked me to repeat the credit card number several times and then blurted out suddenly that he had read history at university and had loved my father’s books. Former students rang in tears from time zones which suggested they had woken to the news and had acted on impulse........

He must have felt an affinity with the hospital workers because he would introduce them to us admiringly as we visited: they were from the Philippines or Nigeria; they had a PhD. I think that he saw in them the thing he valued greatly as someone who started poor and worked his way up in life through his curiosity and ability to learn. I think they reminded him of the students he loved during a 65-year association with Birkbeck College, University of London, which specialises in evening degrees for daytime workers. The life of the immigrant, of the émigré, of the student, lifting themselves from desperate lives through education, was what he understood. In return the ward nurses and nursing assistants leaned in close to him as they did dressings and lifts, saying cheerfully “Hello, professor!” and mostly doing their very best.

 ....

At home in Hampstead every one of my parents’ rooms had a table covered with hardbacks, paperbacks, manuscripts and papers which he could graze at. Up until the end he was writing something new or editing something old. Although he could use email and read internet links, he was a book man. We are still sorting through them.

....

We used to range widely in our chats in those ending years, discussing everything from gossip, which he loved, to the goings-on in the political world. He was always completely up to speed. He engaged in the lives of all of us, his two sons and his daughter, his nine grandchildren, and his young great-granddaughter. He always asked me avidly “How’s business?” during each visit, enjoying my tales from the front line of capitalism. He celebrated every entrepreneurial step forward but was always a bit anxious, leaving answerphone messages saying: “It’s Dad. Just checking in to see how you are. Don’t overdo it. Kiss, kiss.” My dad, the academic historian and giant of “the left”, and me, his degreeless, politically plural daughter who loves doing business. I never felt so close to him as towards the end.
. . .
Now in the closing months of 2012 there would be no more discussions about ideas, frivolous or intense – no more hearing his panoramic view of the present viewed through an immaculately detailed grasp of the past. No more watching him steeple his fingers in deep listening interest at the ideas of one of his army of devoted friends who came calling wherever they could find him, in London at home, in Wales, and in the stygian holding pen of the Royal Free Hospital, London.

Remembering Eric Hobsbawn

Two fine obituaries for Eric Hobsbawn here from Dissent and The Nation. Couple of quotes that captured my eye.

First from the article in The Nation:

Eric Hobsbawm, who died on October 1 at the age of 95, was perhaps the twentieth century’s preeminent historian and a life-long advocate of social justice. Born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1917 to a British father and Austrian mother, he was educated in Vienna and Berlin. His family sent him to London in 1933 when Hitler came to power and he lived for the rest of his life in England, where he taught for many years at London’s Birkbeck College.

As a teenager, Hobsbawm not only witnessed the rise of Nazism but was present in 1936 at the massive popular demonstration in Paris that celebrated the electoral victory of the Popular Front. The events of that turbulent time led him to join the Communist party and he remained a member until its disappearance in the 1990s, mostly, he wrote, out of respect for the memory of comrades who had suffered persecution or death for their political beliefs.

Hobsbawm’s historical writings brought to bear a sophisticated Marxist analysis that saw class conflict as a driving force of historical change but rejected narrow economic determinism and teleological frameworks. Like Marx himself, Hobsbawm saw capitalism as a total social system, which had to be analyzed in its entirety, and rejected notions of historical inevitability. He insisted that people must strive to envision a more humane social order, but that history had no predetermined trajectory. His 1978 essay “The Forward March of Labor Halted?” offered a prescient and disturbing warning that the postwar expansion of social democracy and the power of organized labor, considered irreversible by many leftists, had reached a crisis point. His writings on the history of British labor helped to launch the “new social history” that dominated historical scholarship in Britain and the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet in an influential 1971 essay, “From Social History to the History of Society,” he warned that studies of the agency of ordinary people, so important in expanding the cast of historical characters, must be placed in the broader context of how social and political power is exercised.

But Hobsbawm is best known for his magisterial four-volume series The Age of Revolution (1962), The Age of Capital (1975), The Age of Empire (1987) and The Age of Extremes (1994), which together chronicles world history from the beginning of the French Revolution to the end of the Soviet Union. Long before the current vogue for “internationalizing” the study of history, Hobsbawm insisted that capitalism is a global system, which must be studied in a global context. The books drew on events in every region of the world, and on sources and scholarship in multiple languages. Hobsbawm was comfortable discussing subjects as far afield from Great Britain as the Latin American wars of independence, the Meiji Restoration in Japan and the rise to global power of the United States, yet he was able to merge local details into a coherent account of global political, economic and social change. The account also delves into art, culture, science, technology and other realms of human creativity and experience. These books remain the starting point for anyone who seeks a comprehensive history of the modern world.

From Dissent 

Even in this crowd, Hobsbawm was notable for his commitment to a vision of history as the working out of grand processes and tectonic forces over centuries, or millennia. The rise of capitalism provided the master narrative, a unifying system that gave structure and logic to history. The British Marxists inspired some of the best of a generation of historians that came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, a cohort that dedicated countless dissertations to filling out small pieces of the story Hobsbawm and his allies had sketched with the hope that a synthesis would emerge.

Eric Hobsbawn: The world's greatest historian is 93 and still going strong

Thanks to Jim Johnson's always excellent blog Notes on Politics, Theory and Photography (which I read every day) I was alerted to this interview with 93 year old British historian Eric Hobsbawm in the UK Guardian. Hobsbawn is recognized as one of the finest English speaking historians of all time.

Hobsbawm's book The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991 is  perhaps the finest history books I have read on the history of the 20th Century.

The Guardian interview serves as an opportunity for Hobsbawn to explore the themes and ideas contained in his new book  How to Change the World: Tales of Marx and Marxism. Some quotes from the interview are below:

"On the other hand, I think there's a risk in assuming, as neoliberals and free marketeers do, that there's only one type of capitalism. Capitalism is, if you like, a family, with a variety of possibilities, from the state-directed capitalism of France to the free-market of America." 

"How to Change the World is an account of what Marxism fundamentally did in the 20th century, partly through the social democratic parties that weren't directly derived from Marx and other parties – Labour parties, workers' parties, and so on – that remain as government and potential government parties everywhere. And second, through the Russian Revolution and all its consequences.

"The record of Karl Marx, an unarmed prophet inspiring major changes, is undeniable. I'm quite deliberately not saying that there are any equivalent prospects now. What I'm saying now is that the basic problems of the 21st century would require solutions that neither the pure market, nor pure liberal democracy can adequately deal with. And to that extent, a different combination, a different mix of public and private, of state action and control and freedom would have to be worked out.  What you will call that, I don't know. But it may well no longer be capitalism, certainly not in the sense in which we have known it in this country and the United States"