Thoughts on Eric Hobsbawm? | AskHistorians Archive Observer

I would just add a handful of additional points about Hobsbawm as an historian to u/voyeur324's helpful listing of earlier posts.

First, while he was politically a Marxist, he's generally lauded for never having allowed his politics to get in the way of the evidence he collected and assessed. His books were neither doctrinaire nor any sort of propaganda. Second, he possessed almost all of the qualities historians need to be read and remembered in ways the vast majority of us not only aren't, but can't be – Richard J. Evans, in his recent biography of Hobsbawm, notes his books combine "analytical rigour, stylistic brilliance, interpretative brio and entertaining detail" in ways that are "impossible to resist."

Third, Hobsbawm came along and wrote what he wrote at an especially propitious time – the time of the rise of what he himself called "historiographical 'modernity' against the old Rankean historiography". And he had an impact for two reasons. Because he was a Marxist, and in common with some of the other members of the old British Communist Party Historians Group like EP Thompson and Christopher Hill, he was interested in social history and "history from below" just at the time that history as a discipline that studied great men and high politics was finally yielding to the more modern focuses on society, economy and culture that continue to characterise it today. He was a trailblazer in that respect, and is rightly respected for the pioneering work he did in urging that history should be the study of the whole of humanity, not just the story of ruling elites. And because he had such an unusual personal background – born in Alexandria, from a Jewish family, grew up in the Vienna and Berlin of the early Nazi period – he tended not to restrict himself to the silos of national histories that were in fashion then; he was a pioneer of global history as well.

Fourthly, Hobsbawm was a "parachutist," in Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's well-known categorisation of historians – the sort who tries to look down from a great height and discern macro patterns – rather than a "trufflehunter" with limited objectives and his nose pressed to the ground in search of detail. Parachutists were rare beasts then and they are rarer now, at a time when all academics are under constant pressure to publish rapidly and regularly. One interesting result of this big change in the way that history is actually done is that Hobsbawm's old books are still relevant and are still read, if only because the conditions under which they could feasibly be replaced have almost ceased to exist.

If you're a history student in the Anglophone world and get handed a reading list covering any period from the French Revolution onwards, take a look at the titles on it. Odds are almost none of them will have been published before 1990/2000, because history moves on and older works get superseded by new ones with fresher interpretations. The four books in Hobsbawm's central quartet of works covering 1789-1994 – Age of Revolution, Age of Capital, Age of Empire, Age of Extremes – were written between 1962 and 1994, but they're still in print, still read, and still featuring on reading lists, and they're not going to be replaced any time soon, if only because few if any historians working nowadays could justify devoting 10 years to the work required to produce just one of those volumes. Those four books have sold over half a million copies to date, and reached hundreds of thousands of people outside the professional ranks, informing public debate, something that's given to very few of us to achieve.

Fifth (and, I personally would argue, most importantly of all), Hobsbawm was a master at doing something that lies at the heart of innovative historical enquiry – that is, asking and answering useful questions. Because he was, as he himself admitted, someone who "approach[ed] history intuitively, and without much planning," he published on a very wide variety of topics and was at the forefront of some impressive advances, of which his work on "the invention of tradition" (indeed, he coined that term) may well be the most lasting; not since Hobsbawm and Ranger published on that topic back in 1983 have historians been able to look at the past without noticing the distorting effects that the lens of nationalist myth-making has on the stories that it tells.

I can draw on the summary offered by u/commiespaceinvader in the post linked to elsewhere in this thread to explain what the "invention of tradition" means:

Invented tradition, writes Hobsbawm, "is taken to mean a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behavior by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past. In fact, where possible, they normally attempt to establish continuity with a suitable historic past."

What does Hobsbawm mean with this? In the same volume British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper provides a perfect example: Scottish Highland Tradition. Detailing how today whenever Scotsmen gather to celebrate their national identity, they do so by wearing kilts woven in a tartan whose color and patterns indicate their "clans" and play seemingly ancient Scottish music on their bagpipes. However, as Trevor-Roper makes clear, "the whole concept of a distinct Highland culture and tradition [including kilts woven in specific tartans and bagpipes] is a retrospective invention."

It's also well worth pointing out that, while some of the work that Hobsbawm did produced some wrong answers, it remains useful because the questions were, nonetheless, useful ones. A great example is his book Bandits (1969), which posited the existence of a category of criminals he termed "social bandits" – Robin Hood figures who were out to right social wrongs rather than to enrich themselves. Publication of this book led a large number of other historians to hit the archives in search of social bandits from the areas they specialised in. Few if any were actually found, and today it's generally accepted that the idea such "social bandits" actually existed in any distinct sense, or in any numbers, is misguided. But because Hobsbawm had his idea and wrote his book, we have a large corpus of detailed studies of banditry, and what banditry really was, that we wouldn't otherwise have.

Hobsbawm himself put it this way, in a memorable example of his own memorable style

I would most like to describe myself as a kind of guerrilla historian, who doesn't so much march directly towards his goal behind the artillery fire of the archives, as attack it from the flanking bushes with the Kalashnikov of ideas.

Of course, Eric Hobsbawm was also far from perfect. His books are, by modern standards, light on original archival research, light on coverage of women (as a good Marxist he always prioritised class over gender), hostile to the modern world and the avant garde, and, for all their global ambition, still noticeably Eurocentric and all but ignorant of topics such as African history – "Well, you know, it's not as if all places are equally important," he said. And many, many people never forgave him for remaining a member of the Party after the Soviet invasion of Hungary made it impossible to ignore what Russian-style Communism actually was. But he himself was the opposite of a dictator; he never sought to gather disciples around him, and while we might speak of a Rankean school of history, we don't, and likely never will, speak of a "Hobsbawmian" school.

Ultimately, I think, what we need to remember is this: history is not a science, and it does not make progress via experiments that can be replicated and allow for consensus on what reality is. History is a debate, and it makes progress via argument. Eric Hobsbawm was a provocateur with whom most modern historians have, at some time or other, found it necessary to argue. Hence he's been responsible for more progress in our discipline than almost anyone who's written history since 1945.

Source

Richard J. Evans, Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History (2019)