(Redirected from E. J. Hobsbawm)
CHFRSLFBA | |
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Born | Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm 9 June 1917 Alexandria, Sultanate of Egypt |
Died | 1 October 2012 (aged 95) London, England |
Occupation | Historian, social theorist and author |
Citizenship | British |
Alma mater | King's College, Cambridge |
Genre | World history, Western history |
Spouse |
|
Children | Joshua Bennathan, Julia and Andy Hobsbawm |
Eric John Ernest HobsbawmCHFRSLFBA (/ˈhɒbz.bɔːm/; 9 June 1917 – 1 October 2012) was a British historian of the rise of industrial capitalism, socialism and nationalism. He is considered one of the world's best-known historians.[1] Ideologically a life-long Marxist, his socio-political convictions influenced the character of his work.[2] His best-known works include his trilogy about what he called the 'long 19th century' (The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848, The Age of Capital: 1848–1875 and The Age of Empire: 1875–1914), The Age of Extremes on the short 20th century, and an edited volume that introduced the influential idea of 'invented traditions'.
Hobsbawm was born in Egypt but spent his childhood mostly in Vienna and Berlin. Following the death of his parents and the rise to power of Adolf Hitler, Hobsbawm moved to London with his adoptive family, then obtained his PhD in history at the University of Cambridge before serving in the Second World War. In 1998 he was appointed to the Order of the Companions of Honour.[3] He was President of Birkbeck, University of London, from 2002 until his death.[4] In 2003 he received the Balzan Prize for European History since 1900 '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.'
- 5Politics
Early life and education[edit]
Eric Hobsbawm was born in 1917 in Alexandria, Egypt. His father was Leopold Percy Hobsbaum (né Obstbaum), a merchant from the East End of London of Polish Jewish descent.[5] His mother was Nelly Hobsbaum (née Grün), who was from a middle-class Austrian Jewish family. Eric's early childhood was spent in Vienna, Austria and Berlin, Germany. A clerical error at birth altered his surname from Hobsbaum to Hobsbawm.[6] Although the family lived in German-speaking countries, Eric grew up speaking English as his first language.[1] His childhood spent in Austria and Germany also created the widespread belief that Hobsbawm was a refugee who had left Germany for England in 1933, though he was English by birth because of his father.[1]
In 1929, when Hobsbawm was 12, his father died, and he started contributing to his family's support by working as an au pair and English tutor. Upon the death of their mother in 1931, he and Nancy were adopted by their maternal aunt, Gretl, and paternal uncle, Sidney, who married and had a son named Peter. Hobsbawm was a student at the Prinz Heinrich-Gymnasium Berlin (today Friedrich-List-School) when the Nazi Party came to power in 1933. That year the family moved to London, where Hobsbawm enrolled in St Marylebone Grammar School (now defunct).[6]
Hobsbawm attended King's College, Cambridge, from 1936,[7] where he joined the Communist Party 'in the form of the university's Socialist Club.'[1] He also took a double-starred first in History and was elected to the Cambridge Apostles. He received a doctorate (PhD) in History from Cambridge University for his dissertation on the Fabian Society. During the Second World War, he served in the Royal Engineers and the Army Educational Corps.
Eric Hobsbawm - Bandidos.pdf - Ebook download as PDF File (.pdf) or read book online.
Personal life[edit]
Hobsbawm's first marriage was to Muriel Seaman in 1943. They divorced in 1951.[5] His second marriage was to Marlene Schwarz, with whom he had two children, Julia Hobsbawm and Andy Hobsbawm. Julia is chief executive of Hobsbawm Media and Marketing and a visiting professor of public relations at the College of Communication, University of the Arts London.[8][9] He also had an out-of-wedlock son, Joshua Bennathan, who died in November 2014.[5][10]
Academia[edit]
His political affiliation sometimes impacted Hobsbawm's ability to find employment.[11] In 1945 he applied to the BBC for a full-time post making educational broadcasts to help servicemen adjust to civilian life after a long period in the forces, but the appointment was swiftly vetoed by MI5. MI5 found Hobsbawm not likely 'to lose any opportunity he may get to disseminate propaganda and obtain recruits for the Communist party”.[12] In 1947, he became a lecturer in history at Birkbeck. He became reader in 1959, professor between 1970 and 1982 and an emeritus professor of history in 1982. He was a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, from 1949 to 1955.[6] Hobsbawm said there was a weaker version of McCarthyism that took hold in Britain and affected Marxist academics: 'you didn't get promotion for 10 years, but nobody threw you out'.[13] Hobsbawm was also denied a lectureship at Cambridge by political enemies, and, given that he was also blocked for a time from a professorship at Birkbeck for the same reasons, spoke of his good fortune at having got a post at Birkbeck in 1948 before the Cold War really started to take off.[13] Conservative commentator David Pryce-Jones has questioned the existence of such career obstacles.[14]
Hobsbawm helped found the academic journal Past & Present in 1952.[13] He was a visiting professor at Stanford in the 1960s. In 1970s, he was appointed professor and in 1976 he became a Fellow of the British Academy.[15] He was elected 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.[16]
He retired in 1982 but stayed as visiting professor at The New School for Social Research in Manhattan between 1984 and 1997. He was, until his death, president of Birkbeck (from 2002) and professor emeritus in the New School for Social Research in the Political Science Department. A polyglot, he spoke German, English, French, Spanish and Italian fluently, and read Portuguese and Catalan.[6]
Works[edit]
Hobsbawm wrote extensively on many subjects as one of Britain's most prominent historians. As a Marxist historiographer he has focused on analysis of the 'dual revolution' (the political French Revolution and the British Industrial Revolution). He saw their effect as a driving force behind the predominant trend towards liberal capitalism today. Another recurring theme in his work was social banditry, which Hobsbawm placed in a social and historical context, thus countering the traditional view of it being a spontaneous and unpredictable form of primitive rebellion.[6][17][18][19][20][21][22] He also coined the term 'long nineteenth century', which begins with the French Revolution in 1789 and ends with the start of the Great War in 1914.
![Eric hobsbawm bandits Eric hobsbawm bandits](http://imagens.lelivros.love/2017/06/Baixar-Livro-Bandidos-Eric-Hobsbawm-em-Pdf-ePub-e-Mobi-ou-ler-online-370x532.jpg)
Outside his academic historical writing, Hobsbawm wrote a regular column (under the pseudonym Francis Newton, taken from the name of Billie Holiday's communist trumpet player, Frankie Newton) for the New Statesman as a jazz critic, and time to time over popular music such as with his 'Beatles and before' article.[23] He published numerous essays in various intellectual journals, dealing with subjects such as barbarity in the modern age, the troubles of labour movements, and the conflict between anarchism and communism. Among his final publications were Globalisation, Democracy and Terrorism (2007), On Empire (2008) and the collection of essays How to Change the World: Marx and Marxism 1840–2011 (2011).
Politics[edit]
Hobsbawm joined the Sozialistischer Schülerbund (Association of Socialist Pupils), an offshoot of the Young Communist League of Germany, in Berlin in 1931,[13] and the Communist Party in 1936. He was a member of the Communist Party Historians Group from 1946 until its demise and subsequently president of its successor, the Socialist History Society until his death. The Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 led most of its members to leave the British Communist Party – but Hobsbawm, unique among his notable colleagues, remained in the party. He signed a historians' letter of protest against the Soviet invasion of Hungary and was strongly in favour of the Prague spring.[6]
Hobsbawm was later a leading light of the Eurocommunist faction in the CPGB that began to gather strength after 1968, when the CPGB criticised the Soviet crushing of the Prague Spring and the French CP failed to support the May students in Paris.[24] In 'The Forward March of Labour Halted?' (originally a Marx Memorial Lecture, 'The British Working Class One Hundred Years after Marx', that was delivered to a small audience of fellow Marxists in March 1978 before being published in Marxism Today in September 1978), he argued that the working class was inevitably losing its central role in society, and that left-wing parties could no longer appeal only to this class; a controversial viewpoint in a period of trade union militancy.[24][25] Hobsbawm supported Neil Kinnock's transformation of the British Labour Party from 1983 (the party received just 28 per cent of the vote in that year's elections, just 2 per cent more than the Social Democratic Party/Liberal Alliance), and, though not close to Kinnock, came to be referred to as 'Neil Kinnock's Favourite Marxist'.[24] His interventions in Kinnock's remaking of the Labour Party helped prepare the ground for the Third Way, New Labour, and Tony Blair,[24] whom Hobsbawm later derisively referred to as 'Thatcher in trousers'.[26] Until the cessation of publication in 1991, he contributed to the magazine Marxism Today. A third of the 30 reprints of Marxism Today's feature articles that appeared in The Guardian during the 1980s were articles or interviews by or with Hobsbawm, making him by far the most popular of all contributors.[24]
In addition to his association with the CPGB, Hobsbawm also developed close ties to the largest Communist Party in the western world, the Italian Communist Party (PCI), of which he declared himself a 'spiritual member'. He developed contacts with Italian left-wing academics and intellectuals in the early 1950s, which led to him encountering the work of Antonio Gramsci, whose writings were a key influence on Hobsbawm's work on the history of subaltern groups, emphasising their agency as well as structural factors. Hobsbawm spoke favourably about PCI general secretary Enrico Berlinguer's strategy of Historic Compromise in the 1970s, seeking rapprochement with the Catholic Church and the Christian Democrats, providing passive support to the latter in government in order to bring the Communists into the political mainstream by accepting Italy's position as a member of NATO, thus being able to build broader alliances and convince wider sections of society of its legitimacy as a potential governing force.[27]
From the 1960s, his politics took a more moderate turn, as Hobsbawm came to recognise that his hopes were unlikely to be realised, and no longer advocated 'socialist systems of the Soviet type'.[28] Until the day of his death, however, he remained firmly entrenched on the Left, maintaining that the long-term outlooks for humanity were 'bleak'.[29][30][31][32][33] 'I think we ought to get out of that 20th-century habit of thinking of systems as mutually exclusive: you’re either socialist or you’re capitalist, or whatever,' Hobsbawm has stated in regards to the emergence of a new historical system. 'There are plenty of people who still think so. I think very few attempts have been made to build a system on the total assumption of social ownership and social management. At its peak the Soviet system tried it. And in the past 20 or 30 years, the capitalist system has also tried it. In both cases, the results demonstrate that it won’t work. So it seems to me the problem isn’t whether this market system disappears, but exactly what the nature of the mixture between market economy and public economy is and, above all, in my view, what the social objectives of that economy are. One of the worst things about the politics of the past 30 years is that the rich have forgotten to be afraid of the poor – of most of the people in the world.'[34]
Communism and Russia[edit]
Hobsbawm stressed that since communism was not created, the sacrifices were in fact not justified—a point he emphasised in Age of Extremes:
Still, whatever assumptions are made, the number of direct and indirect victims must be measured in eight rather than seven digits. In these circumstances it does not much matter whether we opt for a 'conservative' estimate nearer to ten than to twenty million or a larger figure: none can be anything but shameful and beyond palliation, let alone justification. I add, without comment, that the total population of the USSR in 1937 was said to have been 164 millions, or 16.7 millions less than the demographic forecasts of the Second Five-Year Plan (1933–38).[35]
Elsewhere he insisted:
I have never tried to diminish the appalling things that happened in Russia, though the sheer extent of the massacres we didn't realise ... In the early days we knew a new world was being born amid blood and tears and horror: revolution, civil war, famine—we knew of the Volga famine of the early '20s, if not the early '30s. Thanks to the breakdown of the west, we had the illusion that even this brutal, experimental, system was going to work better than the west. It was that or nothing.[6]
With regard to the 1930s, he wrote that
It is impossible to understand the reluctance of men and women on the left to criticise, or even often to admit to themselves, what was happening in the USSR in those years, or the isolation of the USSR's critics on the left, without this sense that in the fight against fascism, communism and liberalism were, in a profound sense, fighting for the same cause. Not to mention the more obvious fact ... that, in the conditions of the 1930s, what Stalin did was a Russian problem, however shocking, whereas what Hitler did was a threat everywhere.[36]
He claimed that the demise of the USSR was 'traumatic not only for communists but for socialists everywhere',[37]
Miscellaneous views[edit]
Regarding the Queen, Hobsbawm stated that constitutional monarchy in general has 'proved a reliable framework for liberal-democratic regimes' and 'is likely to remain useful'.[38] On the nuclear attacks on Japan in World War II, he adhered to the view that 'there was even less sign of a crack in Japan's determination to fight to the end [compared with that of Nazi Germany], which is why nuclear arms were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to ensure a rapid Japanese surrender'.[39] He also believed there was an ancillary political, non-military reason for the bombings: 'perhaps the thought that it would prevent America's ally the USSR from establishing a claim to a major part in Japan's defeat was not absent from the minds of the US government either.'[40] Hobsbawm is also quoted as saying that, next to sex, there is nothing so physically intense as 'participation in a mass demonstration at a time of great public exaltation'.[7]
Praise and criticism[edit]
In 1994, Neal Ascherson said of Hobsbawm: 'No historian now writing in English can match his overwhelming command of fact and source. But the key word is 'command'. Hobsbawm's capacity to store and retrieve detail has now reached a scale normally approached only by large archives with big staffs'.[13] In 2002, Hobsbawm was described by right-leaning magazine The Spectator as 'arguably our greatest living historian—not only Britain's, but the world's',[41] while Niall Ferguson wrote: 'That Hobsbawm is one of the great historians of his generation is undeniable ... His quartet of books beginning with The Age of Revolution and ending with The Age of Extremes constitute the best starting point I know for anyone who wishes to begin studying modern history. Nothing else produced by the British Marxist historians will endure as these books will.'[42] In 2003, The New York Times described him as 'one of the great British historians of his age, an unapologetic Communist and a polymath whose erudite, elegantly written histories are still widely read in schools here and abroad'.[43]James Joll wrote in The New York Review of Books that 'Eric Hobsbawm's nineteenth century trilogy is one of the great achievements of historical writing in recent decades'.[44]Ian Kershaw said that Hobsbawm's take on the twentieth century, his 1994 book, The Age of Extremes, consisted of 'masterly analysis'.[45] Meanwhile, Tony Judt, while praising Hobsbawm's vast knowledge and graceful prose, cautioned that Hobsbawm's bias in favour of the USSR, communist states and communism in general, and his tendency to disparage any nationalist movement as passing and irrational, weakened his grasp of parts of the 20th century.[46]
With regard to the impact of his Marxist outlook and sympathies on his scholarship, Ben Pimlott saw it as 'a tool not a straitjacket; he's not dialectical or following a party line', although Judt argued that it has 'prevented his achieving the analytical distance he does on the 19th century: he isn't as interesting on the Russian revolution because he can't free himself completely from the optimistic vision of earlier years. For the same reason he's not that good on fascism'.[6]
British historian David Pryce-Jones conceded that Hobsbawm was 'no doubt intelligent and industrious, and he might well have made a notable contribution as a historian', but also charged that Hobsbawm, as a professional historian who has 'steadily corrupted knowledge into propaganda, and scorns the concept of objective truth', was 'neither a historian nor professional.'[14] After reading Age of Extremes, Kremlinologist Robert Conquest concluded that Hobsbawm suffers from a 'massive reality denial' regarding the USSR,[43] and John Gray, though praising his work on the nineteenth century, has described Hobsbawm's writings on the post-1914 period as 'banal in the extreme. They are also highly evasive. A vast silence surrounds the realities of communism, a refusal to engage which led the late Tony Judt to conclude that Hobsbawm had 'provincialised himself'. It is a damning judgement'.[47]
In a 1994 interview on BBC British television with Canadian author and politician Michael Ignatieff (whose grandfather and great-grandfather were ministers of the Czar prior to the Bolshevik Revolution), he shocked viewers when he said that the deaths of millions of Soviet citizens under Stalin would have been worth it if a genuine Communist society had been the result.[5][48][49] Hobsbawm argued that, 'In a period in which, as you might imagine, mass murder and mass suffering are absolutely universal, the chance of a new world being born in great suffering would still have been worth backing' but, unfortunately, 'the Soviet Union was not the beginning of the World Revolution'.[48][50] The following year, when asked the same question on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, if 'the sacrifice of millions of lives' would have been worth the future communist society, he replied: 'That's what we felt when we fought the Second World War'.[6] He repeated what he had already said to Michael Ignatieff, when he asked the rhetorical question, 'Do people now say we shouldn't have had World War II, because more people died in World War II than died in Stalin's terror?'.[48]
Tony Judt opined that Hobsbawm 'clings to a pernicious illusion of the late Enlightenment: that if one can promise a benevolent outcome it would be worth the human cost. But one of the great lessons of the 20th century is that it's not true. For such a clear-headed writer, he appears blind to the sheer scale of the price paid. I find it tragic, rather than disgraceful.'[6] Neil Ascherson believes that, 'Eric is not a man for apologising or feeling guilty. He does feel bad about the appalling waste of lives in Soviet communism. But he refuses to acknowledge that he regrets anything. He's not that kind of person.'[6] Hobsbawm himself, in his autobiography, wrote that he desires 'historical understanding ... not agreement, approval or sympathy'.[51]
The 1930s aside, Hobsbawm was criticised for never relinquishing his Communist Party membership. Whereas people like Arthur Koestler left the Party after seeing the friendly reception of Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop in Moscow during the years of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact (1939–1941),[52] Hobsbawm stood firm even after the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, though he was against them both.[6][43] In his review of Hobsbawm's 2002 memoirs, Interesting Times, Niall Ferguson wrote:
The essence of Communism is the abnegation of individual freedom, as Hobsbawm admits in a chilling passage: 'The Party ... had the first, or more precisely the only real claim on our lives. Its demands had absolute priority. We accepted its discipline and hierarchy. We accepted the absolute obligation to follow 'the lines' it proposed to us, even when we disagreed with it ... We did what it ordered us to do ... Whatever it had ordered, we would have obeyed ... If the Party ordered you to abandon your lover or spouse, you did so.'
Consider some of the 'lines' our historian dutifully toed. He accepted the order to side with the Nazis against the Weimar-supporting Social Democrats in the great Berlin transport strike of 1932. He accepted the order to side with the Nazis against Britain and France following the Ribbentrop–Molotov Pact of 1939. He accepted the excommunication of Tito. He condoned the show trials of men like László Rajk in Hungary.
In 1954, just after Stalin's death, he visited Moscow as one of the honoured members of the Historians' Group of the British Communist Party. He admits to having been dismayed when, two years later, Khrushchevdenounced Stalin's crimes at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party. When Khrushchev himself ordered the tanks into Budapest, Hungary, Hobsbawm finally spoke up, publishing a letter of protest. But he did not leave the Party.[42]
Hobsbawm let his membership lapse not long before the party's dissolution in 1991.[6] In his review of Hobsbawm's memoirs, David Pryce-Jones accuses him of actually supporting the invasion of Hungary:
[H]e carefully makes sure not to quote the letter he published on 9 November 1956 in the Communist Daily Worker defending the Soviet onslaught on Hungary: 'While approving, with a heavy heart, of what is now happening in Hungary, we should therefore also say frankly that we think the USSR should withdraw its troops from the country as soon as this is possible.' Which is more deceitful, the spirit of this letter, or the omission of any reference to it [in his memoirs]?[14]
In those memoirs, Hobsbawn wrote: 'The dream of the October Revolution is still there somewhere inside me ... I have abandoned, nay, rejected it, but it has not been obliterated. To this day, I notice myself treating the memory and tradition of the USSR with an indulgence and tenderness.'[53] Reviewing the book, David Caute wrote: 'One keeps asking of Hobsbawm: didn't you know what Deutscher and Orwell knew? Didn't you know about the induced famine, the horrors of collectivisation, the false confessions, the terror within the Party, the massive forced labour of the gulag? As Orwell himself documented, a great deal of evidence was reliably knowable even before 1939, but Hobsbawm pleads that much of it was not reliably knowable until Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin in 1956.'[41]
Reviewing Hobsbawm's 2011 How to Change the World in the Wall Street Journal, Michael Moynihan argued:
When the bloody history of 20th century communism intrudes upon Mr. Hobsbawm's disquisitions, it's quickly dismissed. Of the countries occupied by the Soviet Union after World War II—'the Second World War,' he says with characteristic slipperiness, 'led communist parties to power' in Eastern and Central Europe—he explains that a 'possible critique of the new [postwar] socialist regimes does not concern us here.' Why did communist regimes share the characteristics of state terror, oppression and murder? 'To answer this question is not part of the present chapter.' Regarding the execrable pact between Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, which shocked many former communist sympathizers into lives of anticommunism, Mr. Hobsbawm dismisses the 'zig-zags and turns of Comintern and Soviet policy,' specifically the 'about-turn of 1939–41,' which 'need not detain us here.' In one sense, Mr. Hobsbawm's admirers are right about his erudition: He possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of Marxist thought, specifically Italian communism and pre-Soviet socialist movements. But that knowledge is wasted when used to write untrustworthy history.[43]
Reviewing the same book, Francis Wheen argued in a similar vein: 'When writing about how the anti-fascist campaigns of the 1930s brought new recruits to the communist cause, he cannot even bring himself to mention the Hitler-Stalin pact, referring only to 'temporary episodes such as 1939–41'. The Soviet invasion of Hungary and the crushing of the Prague Spring are skipped over.'[54]
David Evanier, in an article published in the American neoconservative magazine The Weekly Standard, called Hobsbawm 'Stalin's cheerleader', writing: 'One can learn almost nothing about the history of communism from Hobsbawm's Interesting Times—nothing about the show trials, the torture and execution of millions, the Communist betrayal of Spain.'[55]
An alternative conservative assessment of Hobsbawm came from Matthew Walther in National Review. While attacking Hobsbawm for his communist sympathies and his purported views about Israel, Walther wrote that 'There is no denying his [Hobsbawm's] intelligence and erudition' and concluded that 'if Hobsbawm is read 50 or 100 years from now, it will probably be despite rather than because of his politics.'[56]
In 2008, the historian Tony Judt summed up Hobsbawm's career thus: 'Eric J. Hobsbawm was a brilliant historian in the great English tradition of narrative history. On everything he touched he wrote much better, had usually read much more, and had a broader and subtler understanding than his more fashionable emulators. If he had not been a lifelong Communist he would be remembered simply as one of the great historians of the 20th century'.[5]
Death[edit]
Hobsbawm's grave in Highgate Cemetery
In the early hours of 1 October 2012, Hobsbawm died at the Royal Free Hospital in London.[57] His daughter Julia confirmed that he died of pneumonia, while suffering complications of his leukemia. She said,
He'd been quietly fighting leukemia for a number of years without fuss or fanfare. Right up until the end he was keeping up what he did best, he was keeping up with current affairs, there was a stack of newspapers by his bed.[58]
Following Hobsbawm's death reactions included praise for his 'sheer academic productivity and prowess' and 'tough reasoning' in The Guardian.[59] Reacting to news of Hobsbawm's death, Ed Miliband called him 'an extraordinary historian, a man passionate about his politics ... He brought history out of the ivory tower and into people's lives'.[60] He was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium and his ashes were interred in Highgate Cemetery. A memorial service for Hobsbawm was held at the New School in October 2013.[56]
Impact[edit]
Owing to his status as a widely read and prominent Communist historian, and the fact that his ideology had influenced his work, Hobsbawm has been credited with spreading Marxist thought around the globe.[2] His writings reached particular prominence in India and Brazil in the 1960s and 1970s at a time of lively debate about these countries' political and social future.[2] Emile Chabal, in an essay for Aeon, writes that 'In the period from the early 1960s to the late ’80s, Marxists in noncommunist countries were increasingly able to participate in a transnational discussion over the past and future of capitalism, and the most promising agents of revolutionary change. Hobsbawm played a starring role in these discussions – and, occasionally, set the agenda.'[2]
Partial publication list[edit]
Book | Date | Publisher | ISBN | Notes | Cites |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Labour's Turning Point: Extracts from Contemporary Sources | 1948 | Lawrence & Wishart | ISBN0-901759-65-1 | ||
Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th centuries | 1959, 1963, 1971 | Manchester University Press | ISBN0-7190-0493-4 | in the US: Social Bandits and Primitive Rebels, Free Press, 1960 | [61][62] |
The Jazz Scene | 1959 | Weidenfeld & Nicolson | ISBN0-297-79568-6 | as Francis Newton | [5] |
The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848 | 1962 | Abacus (UK) Vintage Books (U.S.) | ISBN0-679-77253-7 | ||
Labouring Men: studies in the history of labour | 1964 | Weidenfeld & Nicolson | ISBN0-297-76402-0 | [62] | |
Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations | 1965 | Lawrence & Wishart | ISBN0-7178-0165-9 | editor; essays by Karl Marx | |
Industry and Empire: From 1750 to the Present Day | 1968 | Pelican | ISBN0-14-013749-1 | ||
Bandits | 1969 | Weidenfeld & Nicolson | ISBN0-394-74850-6 | ||
Captain Swing | 1969 | Lawrence & Wishart | ISBN0-85315-175-X | with George Rudé | |
Revolutionaries: Contemporary Essays | 1973 | Weidenfeld & Nicolson | ISBN0-297-76549-3 | ||
The Age of Capital: 1848–1875 | 1975 | Weidenfeld & Nicolson | ISBN0-297-76992-8 | [62] | |
Italian Road to Socialism: An Interview by Eric Hobsbawm with Giorgio Napolitano | 1977 | Lawrence Hill and Co | ISBN0-88208-082-2 | ||
The History of Marxism: Marxism in Marx's day, Vol. 1 | 1982 | Harvester Press | ISBN0-253-32812-8 | editor | |
The Invention of Tradition | 1983 | Cambridge University Press | ISBN0-521-43773-3 | editor, with Terence Ranger | [62] |
Worlds of Labour: Further Studies in the History of Labour | 1984 | Weidenfeld & Nicolson | ISBN0-297-78509-5 | in the US as Workers: Worlds of Labor, Pantheon Books, 1984 | [62] |
The Age of Empire: 1875–1914 | 1987 | Weidenfeld & Nicolson (First Edition) | ISBN0-521-43773-3 | [62] | |
Politics for a Rational Left: Political Writing, 1977–1988 | 1989 | Verso | ISBN0-86091-958-7 | ||
Echoes of the Marseillaise: Two Centuries Look Back on the French Revolution | 1990 | Verso | ISBN0-86091-937-4 | ||
Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality | 1991 | Cambridge University Press | ISBN0-521-43961-2 | [62] | |
The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 | 1994 | Michael Joseph (UK) Vintage Books (U.S.) | ISBN0-679-73005-2 | along with its three prequels: The Making of the Modern World, The Folio Society, London, 2005 | |
Art and Power: Europe Under the Dictators exhibition catalogue[63] | 1995 | Hayward Gallery | ISBN0-500-23719-0 | editor, with Dawn Ades, David Elliott, Boyd Whyte Iain and Tim Benton | |
On History | 1997 | Weidenfeld & Nicolson | ISBN0-349-11050-6 | [62] | |
1968 Magnum Throughout the World | 1998 | Hazan | ISBN2-85025-588-2 | editor, with Marc Weitzmann | |
Behind the Times: Decline and Fall of the Twentieth-Century Avant-Gardes | 1998 | Thames and Hudson | ISBN0-500-55031-X | ||
Uncommon People: Resistance, Rebellion and Jazz | 1998 | Weidenfeld & Nicolson | ISBN0-297-81916-X | ||
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto: A Modern Edition | 1998 | Verso | ISBN1-85984-898-2 | editor | |
The New Century: In Conversation with Antonio Polito | 2000 | Little, Brown | ISBN0-316-85429-8 | in the US: On the Edge of the New Century, The New Press, 2001 | |
Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century life | 2002 | Allen Lane | ISBN0-7139-9581-5 | autobiography | |
Globalisation, Democracy and Terrorism | 2007 | Little, Brown | ISBN0-316-02782-0 | a part of it in the US: On Empire: America, War, and Global Supremacy, Pantheon, 2008 | |
How to Change the World: Tales of Marx and Marxism | 2011 | Little, Brown | ISBN1-4087-0287-8 | [64] | |
Fractured Times: Culture and Society in the 20th Century | 2013 | Little, Brown | ISBN14087-0428-5 | ||
Viva la Revolucion: Hobsbawm on Latin America | 2016 | Little, Brown | ISBN14087-0707-1 | Collected political and historical essays on the history of Latin America |
Honours and awards[edit]
Insignia of C.H.
- 1973: Honorary Fellow, King's College, Cambridge
- 1978: Fellow of the British Academy
- 1995: Deutscher Memorial Prize; Lionel Gelber Prize
- 1996: Wolfson History Oeuvre Prize
- 1998: Companion of Honour, Order of the Companions of Honour
- 1999: Buchpreis zur Europäischen Verständigung Leipziger Buchpreis zur Europäischen Verständigung (Hauptpreis)
- 1999: Honorary degree from Universidad de la RepúblicaMontevideo, Uruguay
- 2000: Ernst Bloch Prize
- 2003: Balzan Prizerecipient
- 2006: Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature[65]
- 2008: Honorary citizenship from Vienna
- 2008: Honorary degree from University of Vienna
- 2008: Honorary degree from Charles University in Prague
- 2008: Bochum History Prize
See also[edit]
Notes[edit]
- ^ abcdEvans, Richard J. (17 January 2019). 'Was Eric Hobsbawm a dangerous Communist?'. The Guardian. ISSN0261-3077. Retrieved 17 January 2019.
- ^ abcd'How Eric Hobsbawm helped shape the global Marxist imagination – Emile Chabal | Aeon Essays'. Aeon. Retrieved 17 January 2019.
- ^'Companions of Honour'. The Official Website of the British Monarchy. Archived from the original on 23 December 2011. Retrieved 11 January 2012.
- ^'Officers of the College'. Birkbeck. Retrieved 11 January 2012.
- ^ abcdefWilliam Grimes (1 October 2012). 'Eric J. Hobsbawm, Marxist Historian, Dies at 95'. The New York Times. Retrieved 4 October 2012.
- ^ abcdefghijklmMaya Jaggi (14 September 2002). 'A question of faith'. The Guardian. Retrieved 11 January 2012.
- ^ abThe Economist, 6 October 2012, p. 108.
- ^Julia Hobsbawm (4 April 2005). 'My Life In Media'. The Independent. Retrieved 11 January 2012.
- ^'Author profile: Julia Hobsbawm'. Atlantic Books. Archived from the original on 13 January 2012. Retrieved 11 January 2012.
- ^John Nathan, 'Interview: Joss Bennathan', The Jewish Chronicle Online, 14 January 2010; retrieved 2 June 2013.
- ^Mazower, Mark (1 October 2012). 'Eric Hobsbawm: the history man'. The Guardian. ISSN0261-3077. Retrieved 17 January 2019.
- ^The Guardian, January 17, 2019
- ^ abcdeAscherson, Neil (2 October 1994). 'Profile: The age of Hobsbawm'. The Independent on Sunday. Retrieved 24 May 2012.
- ^ abcPryce-Jones, David (2003). 'Eric Hobsbawm: lying to the credulous'. The New Criterion. Vol. 21 no. 5. Retrieved 24 May 2012.
- ^'Professor Eric Hobsbawm'. The British Academy. Retrieved 17 January 2019.
- ^'Book of Members, 1780–2011: Chapter H'(PDF). American Academy of Arts and Sciences. p. 277. Retrieved 11 January 2012.
- ^'Eric Hobsbawm (1990): Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (excerpt)'. The Nationalism Project. Retrieved 11 January 2012.
- ^Brad DeLong (9 March 2007) [1995]. 'Low Marx: A Review of Eric Hobsbawm's Age of Extremes'. DeLong's personal blog. Retrieved 11 January 2012.
- ^'Eric Hobsbawm Speaks on His New Memoir'. UCLA International Institute. 29 January 2004. Archived from the original on 2 March 2004. Retrieved 9 January 2012.
- ^Perry Anderson (3 October 2002). 'The Age of EJH'. London Review of Books. Vol. 24 no. 19. Retrieved 11 January 2012.
- ^Danny Yee. 'Book Reviews: Eric Hobsbawm'. DannyReviews.com. Retrieved 11 January 2012.
- ^'Author profile: Eric Hobsbawm'. Random House. Retrieved 11 January 2012.
- ^Eric Hobsbawm (8 November 1963). 'Beatles and before'. New Statesman. Retrieved 11 January 2012.
- ^ abcdePimlott, Herbert (2005). 'From 'Old Left' to 'New Labour'? Eric Hobsbawm and the rhetoric of 'realistic Marxism''. Labour/Le Travail. 56: 175–197. Retrieved 24 May 2012.
- ^Hobsbawm, Eric. 'The Forward March of Labour Halted?'(PDF). Marxism Today. No. September 1978. Retrieved 11 January 2012.
- ^Hunt, Tristram (22 September 2002). 'Man of the extreme century'. The Observer. Retrieved 24 May 2012.
- ^Broder, David (18 November 2018). 'Hobsbawm in Italy'. Jacobin. Retrieved 21 November 2018.
- ^Eric Hobsbawm (10 April 2009). 'Socialism has failed. Now capitalism is bankrupt. So what comes next?'. The Guardian. Retrieved 11 January 2012.
- ^John Crace (Summer 2007). 'Interview with Eric Hobsbawm on his 90th birthday'. BBK Magazine. Birkbeck. Retrieved 11 January 2012.
- ^'Eric Hobsbawm: Observer special'. The Observer. 22 September 2002. Retrieved 11 January 2012.
- ^Carlin, Norah; Birchall, Ian (Autumn 1983). 'Eric Hobsbawm and the working class'. International Socialism Journal. Vol. 2 no. 21. pp. 88–116. Retrieved 11 January 2012.
- ^Tim Adams (21 January 2001). 'The lion of the Left'. The Observer. Retrieved 11 January 2012.
- ^Eric Hobsbawm (24 January 2008). 'Diary'. London Review of Books. Vol. 30 no. 2. Retrieved 11 January 2012.
- ^'Eric Hobsbawm'. 032c. Retrieved 17 December 2013.
- ^The Age of Extremes. p. 393.
- ^How to Change the World. p. 268.
- ^How to Change the World. p. 386.
- ^'Long live the Queen?'. Prospect. No. 181. 23 March 2011. Retrieved 6 March 2012.
- ^The Age of Extremes, p. 42.
- ^The Age of Extremes, p. 27.
- ^ abDavid Caute (19 October 2002). 'Great helmsman or mad wrecker'. The Spectator. Retrieved 9 January 2012.
- ^ abFerguson, Niall (22 September 2002), 'What a swell party it was ... for him', The Daily Telegraph, retrieved 24 May 2012
- ^ abcdMichael Moynihan (20 August 2011). 'How a True Believer Keeps the Faith'. The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 9 January 2012.
- ^Quoted on the dust jacket of The Age of Extremes.
- ^Kershaw 2001, p. 597, note 1.
- ^Tony Judt (20 November 2003). 'The Last Romantic'. The New York Review of Books. Vol. 50 no. 18. Retrieved 9 January 2012.
- ^John Gray (20 January 2011). 'The piety and provincialism of Eric Hobsbawm: Following a false prophet'. New Statesman. Retrieved 10 January 2012.
- ^ abc'Michael Ignatieff interviews Eric Hobsbawm'. The Late Show. BBC. 24 October 1994. Retrieved 5 June 2013.
The exchange in question occurs at 10:57 on YouTube. - ^Oliver Kamm (23 July 2004). 'It takes an intellectual to find excuses for Stalinism'. The Times. Retrieved 8 January 2012.
- ^Ghodsee, Kristen (2017). Red Hangover: Legacies of Twentieth-Century Communism. Duke University Press. pp. 137–138. ISBN978-0822369493.
- ^Interesting Times. p. xii.
- ^Snyder 2010, p. 116.
- ^Interesting Times. p. 56.
- ^Wheen, Francis (21 January 2011). 'Review: How to Change the World'. Financial Times. Retrieved 24 May 2012.
- ^David Evanier (19 May 2003). 'Stalin's cheerleader'. The Weekly Standard. Retrieved 8 January 2012.
- ^ abWalther, Matthew (25 November 2013). 'Eric the Red'. National Review. pp. 27–28.
- ^'Historian Eric Hobsbawm dies, aged 95'. BBC News. 1 October 2012. Retrieved 1 October 2012.
- ^'Historian Eric Hobsbawm dies at 95'. The Hindu. 1 October 2012. Retrieved 1 October 2012.
- ^'Eric Hobsbawm 1917–2012: not the end of history'. The Guardian. 1 October 2012. Retrieved 3 October 2012.
- ^'Historian Eric Hobsbawm dies, aged 95'. BBC News. 1 October 2012. Retrieved 3 October 2012.
- ^Primitive rebels; studies in archaic forms of social movement in the 19th and 20th centuries
- ^ abcdefghKelly Boyd, Encyclopedia of Historians & Historical Writing, Volume 14, Issue 1, p. 547.
- ^'Art and Power: Europe Under the Dictators (1930–1945)'. Deutsches Historisches Museum. 1996. Retrieved 26 January 2012.
- ^Terry Eagleton (3 March 2011). 'Indomitable'. London Review of Books. Vol. 33 no. 5. Retrieved 11 January 2012.
- ^'Royal Society of Literature All Fellows'. Royal Society of Literature. Archived from the original on 5 March 2010. Retrieved 9 August 2010.
References[edit]
- Blackledge, Paul (2012). 'Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012)'. Socialist Review. No. 374. London.
- Bounds, Philip (2012). 'From Folk to Jazz: Eric Hobsbawm, British Communism and Cultural Studies'. Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory. Vol. 40 no. 4. pp. 575–593.
- Campbell, J. (12 February 1988). 'Towards the Great Decision: review of The Age of Empire'. Times Literary Supplement. Vol. 4428. p. 153.
- Carlin, Norah; Birchall, Ian (Autumn 1983). 'Eric Hobsbawm and the working class'. International Socialism. Vol. 2 no. 21.
- Cronin, J. (1979). 'Creating a Marxist Historiography: the contribution of Hobsbawm'. Radical History Review. 19: 87–109.
- Elliott, Gregory, Hobsbawm: History and Politics, London: Pluto Press, 2010.
- Evans, Richard J. (2019). Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History. London: Little, Brown. ISBN978-1-408-70741-8.
- Genovese, Eugene 'The Squandered Century: review of The Age of Extremes' from The New Republic, Volume 212, 17 April 1995, pp. 38–43
- Hampson, Norman. 'All for the Better? review of Echoes of the Marseillaise' from Times Literary Supplement, Volume 4550, 15 June 1990, p. 637.
- Judt, Tony. 'Downhill All the Way: review of The Age of Extremes' from New York Review of Books, 25 May 1995, Volume 49, Issue # 9, pp. 20–25.
- Kershaw, Ian (2001) [1998]. Hitler: 1889–1936: Hubris. London: Penguin. ISBN978-0-14-013363-9.
- Landes, David 'The Ubiquitous Bourgeoisie: review of The Age of Capital' from Times Literary Supplement, Volume 3873, 4 June 1976, pp. 662–664.
- McKibblin, R. 'Capitalism out of Control: review of The Age of Extremes from Times Literary Supplement, Volume 4778, 28 October 1994, p. 406.
- Mingay, G. E. 'Review of Captain Swing' from English Historical Review, Volume 85 (337), 1970, p. 810.
- Samuel, Raphael & Jones, Gareth Stedman (editors) Culture, Ideology and Politics: essays for Eric Hobsbawm, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982.
- Seton-Watson, H. 'Manufactured Mythologies: review of The Invention of Tradition' from Times Literary Supplement, Volume 4207, 18 November 1983, p. 1270.
- Smith, P. 'No Vulgar Marxist: review of On History'from Times Literary Supplement, Volume 4917, 27 June 1997, p. 31.
- Snowman, Daniel. 'Eric Hobsbawm' from History Today, Volume 49, Issue 1, January 1999, pp. 16–18.
- Snyder, Timothy (2010). Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. London: The Bodley Head. ISBN978-0-224-08141-2.
- Thane, P.; G. Crossick & R. Floud (editors) The Power of the Past: essays for Eric Hobsbawm, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
- Thane, P., & E. Lunbeck. 'Interview with Eric Hobsbawm', in: Visions of History, edited by H. Abelove, et al., Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983; pp. 29–46.
- Weber, Eugen. 'What Rough Beast?' from Critical Review, Volume 10, Issue # 2, 1996, pp. 285–298.
- Wrigley, Chris. 'Eric Hobsbawm: an appreciation' from Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History, Volume 38, Issue No. 1, 1984, p. 2.
External links[edit]
Wikiquote has quotations related to: Eric Hobsbawm |
- Catalogue of Hobsbawm's papers, held at the Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick
- Eric Hobsbawm on IMDb
- Eric Hobsbawm page at David Higham.
- Profile in the London Review of Books
- Maya Jaggi, 'A question of faith', The Guardian, 14 September 2002.
- Richard W. Slatta, 'Eric J. Hobsbawm’s Social Bandit: A Critique and Revision', A Contracorriente, 2004.
- Interview with Eric Hobsbawm and Donald Sassoon: European Identity and Diversity in Dialogue, Barcelona Metropolis, Spring 2008.
- Eric Hobsbawm interviewed by Alan Macfarlane, 13 September 2009 (film).
- Where have the rebels gone? An interview with Eric Hobsbawm (video), Books & Ideas, 21 January 2010.
- Hobsbawm, Eric (interview) (January – February 2010). 'World Distempers'. New Left Review. II (61).
- Brief bio and links to articles, Spartacus Educational
- 'Professor Eric Hobsbawm' on Desert Island Discs, 10 March 1995.
- Remembering Eric Hobsbawm, Historian for Social Justice. Eric Foner for The Nation. 1 October 2012.
- Eric Hobsbawm's histories by Christian Hogsbjerg, International Socialism 157 (2018)
Retrieved from 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Eric_Hobsbawm&oldid=897193144'
THE REVIVAL OF NARRATIVE: SOME COMMENTSLAWRENCE STONE BELIEVES THAT THERE IS A REVIVAL OF 'NARRATIVEhistory' because there has been a decline in the history devoted to asking 'the big why questions', the generalizing 'scientific history'. This in turn he thinks is due to disillusionment with the essentially economic determinist models of historical explanation, Marxist or otherwise, which have tended to dominate in the post-war years; to the declining ideological commitment of western intellectuals; contemporary experience which has reminded us that political aaion and decision can shape history; and the failure of 'quantitative history' (another claimant to 'scientific' status) to deliver the goods.1 Two questions are involved in this argument, which I have brutally oversimplified: what has been happening in historiography, and how are these developments to be explained? Since it is common ground that in history 'the facts' are always selected, shaped and perhaps distorted by the historian who observes them, there is an element of parti pris, not to say intellectual autobiography, in Stone's treatment of both questions, as in my comments on it. I think we may accept that the twenty years following the Second World War saw a sharp decline in political and religious history, in the use of 'ideas' as an explanation of history, and a remarkable turn to socio-economic history and to historical explanation in terms of 'social forces', as Momigliano noted as early as 1954.2 Whether or not we call them 'economic-determinist', these currents of historiography became influential, in some cases dominant, in the main western centres of historiography, not to mention, for other reasons, the eastern ones. We may also accept that in recent years there has been considerable diversification, and a marked revival of interest in themes which were rather more marginal to the main concerns of the historical outsiders who in those years became historical insiders, though such themes were never neglected. After all, Braudel wrote about Philip II as well as the Mediterranean, and Le Roy Ladurie's monograph on Le carnaval de Romans of 1580 is anticipated by a much briefer, but most perceptive, account of the same episode in his Les paysans du Languedoc? If Marxist historians of the 1970s write1 Lawrence Stone, 'The Revival of Narrative: Reflections on a New Old History', Past and Present, no. 85 (Nov. 1979), pp. 3-24. 1 Arnaldo Momigliano, 'A Hundred Years after Ranke', in his Studies in Historiography (London, 1966), pp. 108-9. 3 Fernand Braudel, La Miditerranie et le monde miditerranien a I'ipoque de Philippe II (Paris, 1960); Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Le carnaval de Romans (Paris, 1979); Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Les paysans du Languedoc, 2 vols. (Paris, 1966), ' PP- 394-9. *Downloaded from past.oxfordjournals.org by guest on February 13, 20114PAST AND PRESENTNUMBER 8 6entire books on the role of radical-national myths, such as the Welsh Madoc legend, Christopher Hill at least wrote a seminal article on the myth of the Norman Yoke in the early 1950s.4 Still, there probably has been a change. Whether this amounts to a revival of 'narrative history' as denned by Stone (basically chronological ordering of the material in 'a single coherent story, albeit with sub-plots' and a concentration 'on man not circumstances') is difficult to determine, since Stone deliberately eschews a quantitative survey and concentrates on 'a very tiny, but disproportionately prominent, section of the historical profession as a whole'.5 Nevertheless there is evidence that the old historical avantgarde no longer rejects, despises and combats the old-fashioned 'history of events' or even biographical history, as some of it used to. Fernand Braudel himself has given unstinted praise to a notably traditional exercise in popular narrative history, Claude Manceron's attempt to present the origins of the French Revolution through a series of overlapping biographies of contemporaries, great and small.6 On the other hand the historical minority whose supposedly changed interests Stone surveys, has not in fact changed over to practising narrative history. If we leave aside deliberate historiographical conservatives or neo-conservatives such as the British 'antiquarian empiricists', there is very little simple narrative history among the works Stone cites or refers to. For almost all of them the event, the individual, even the recapture of some mood or way of thinking of the past, are not ends in themselves, but the means of illuminating some wider question, which goes far beyond the particular story and its characters. In short those historians who continue to believe in the possibility of generalizing about human societies and their development, continue to be interested in 'the big why questions', though they may sometimes focus on different ones from those on which they concentrated twenty or thirty years ago. There is really no evidence that such historians the ones Stone is mainly concerned with have abandoned 'the attempt to produce a coherent.. . explanation of change in the past'. 7 Whether they (or we) also regard their attempt as 'scientific' will no doubt depend on our definition of 'science', but we need not enter this dispute about labels. Moreover I very much doubt whether such historians feel that they are 'forced back upon the4 Christopher Hill, 'The Norman Yoke', in John Saville (ed.), Democracy and the Labour Movement: Essays in Honour of Dona Torr (London, 1954), repr. in Chriftopher Hill, Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution of the 17th Century (London, 1958), pp. 50-122. 3 Stone, op. cit., pp. 3, 4. * Fernand Braudel, 'Une parfaite reussite' [review of Claude Manceron, La Revolution qui live, 1785-178; (Paris, I979)L L'histoire, no. 21 (1980), pp. 108-9. 7 Stone, op. cit., p. 19.Downloaded from past.oxfordjournals.org by guest on February 13, 2011THE REVIVAL OF NARRATIVE85principle of indeterminacy', any more than Marx felt his writings about Louis Napoleon to be incompatible with the materialist conception of history. No doubt there are historians who have abandoned such attempts, and certainly there are some who combat them, perhaps with a zeal increased by ideological commitment. (Whether or not Marxism has declined intellectually, it is hard to detect much muting of ideological controversy among western historians, though the participants and the specific issues may not be the same as twenty years ago.) Probably neo-conservative history has gained ground, at any rate in Britain, both in the form of the 'young antiquarian empiricists' who 'write detailed political narratives which implicitly deny that there is any deep-seated meaning to history except the accidental whims of fortune and personality',9 and in the form of works like Theodore Zeldin's (and Richard Cobb's) remarkable plunges into those strata of the past, to which 'almost every aspect of traditionalist history' is irrelevant, including the answering of questions.10 So, probably, has what might be called anti-intellectual leftist history. But this, except very tangentially, is not what Stone is concerned with. How then are we to account for the shifts in historical subjectmatter and interests, in so far as they have occurred or are occurring? One element in them, it may be suggested, reflects the remarkable widening of the field of history in the past twenty years, typified by the rise of 'social history', that shapeless container for everything from changes in human physique to symbol and ritual, and above all for the lives of all people from beggars to emperors. As Braudel has observed, this 'histoire obscure de tout le monde' is 'the history towards which, in different ways, all historiography tends at present'. 11 This is not the place to speculate on the reasons for this vast extension of the field, which certainly does not necessarily conflict with the attempt to produce a coherent explanation of the past. It does, however, increase the technical difficulty of writing history. How are these complexities to be presented? It is not surprising that historians experiment with different forms of such presentation, including notably those that borrow from the ancient techniques of literature (which has made its own stabs at displaying la comidie humaine), and also from the modern audio-visual media, in which all but the oldest of us are saturated. What Stone calls the pointilliste techniques are, at least in part, attempts to solve such technical problems of presentation. Such experiments are particularly necessary for that part of history Ibid., p. 13. Ibid., p. 20. 10 Theodore Zeldin, France, 1848-1945,2 vols. (Oxford History of Modern Europe ier.,Oxford, 1973-7), tram. atMstoire da passions francaiscs (Paris, 1978); Richard Cobb, Death in Paris (Oxford, 1978). 11 Braudel, 'Une parfaite reunite', p. 109.Downloaded from past.oxfordjournals.org by guest on February 13, 20116PAST AND PRESENTNUMBER 8 6which cannot be subsumed under 'analysis' (or the rejection of analysis) and which Stone rather neglects, namely synthesis. The problem of fitting together the various manifestations of human thought and action at a specific period is neither new nor unrecognized. No history of Jacobean England is satisfactory which omits Bacon or treats him exclusively as a lawyer, a politician, or a figure in the history of science or of literature. Moreover even the most conventional historians recognize it, even when their solutions (a chapter or two on science, literature, education or whatnot appended to the main body of politico-institutional text) is unsatisfactory. Yet the wider the range of human activities which is accepted as the legitimate concern of the historian, the more clearly understood the necessity of establishing systematic connections between them, the greater the difficulty of achieving a synthesis. This is, naturally, far more than a technical problem of presentation, yet it is that also. Even those who continue to be guided in their analysis by something like the 'threetiered hierarchical' model of base and superstructures which Stone rejects,12 may find it an inadequate guide to presentation, though probably a less inadequate guide than straight chronological narrative. Leaving aside the problems of presentation and synthesis, two more substantial reasons for a change may also be suggested. The first is the very success of the 'new historians' in the post-war decades. This was achieved by a deliberate methodological simplification, the concentration on what were seen as the socio-economic base and determinants of history, at the expense of sometimes, as in the French battle against the 'history of events', in direct confrontation with traditional narrative history. While there were some extreme economic reductionists, and others who dismissed people and events as negligible ripples on the tongue duree of structure and conjoncture, such extremism was not universally shared either in Annales, or among the Marxists who especially in Britain never lost interest in events or culture, nor regarded 'superstructure' as always and entirely dependent on 'base'. Yet the very triumph of works like those of Braudel, Goubert and Le Roy Ladurie, which Stone underlines, not only left 'new' historians free to concentrate on those aspects of history hitherto deliberately set aside, but advanced their place on the 'new historians' agenda. As an eminent Annalist, Le Goff, pointed out several years ago, 'political history was gradually to return in force by borrowing the methods, spirit and theoretical approach of the very social sciences which had pushed it into the background'. 13 The new history of men and minds, ideas and events may be seen as comStone, op. cil., pp. 7-8. ' J. Le Goff, 'Is Politics Still the Backbone of History?', in Felix Gilbert and Stephen R. Graubard (edl.), Historical Studies Today (New York, 1972), p. J40.12Downloaded from past.oxfordjournals.org by guest on February 13, 2011THE REVIVAL OF NARRATIVE7plementing rather than as supplanting the analysis of socio-economic structures and trends. But once historians turn to such items on their agenda, they may prefer to approach their 'coherent explanation of change in the past' as it were ecologically rather than as geologists. They may prefer to start with the study of a 'situation' which embodies and exemplifies the stratified struaure of a society but concentrates the mind on the complexities and interconnections of real history, rather than with the study of the structure itself, especially if for this they can rely partly on earlier work. This, as Stone recognizes, lies at the root of some historians' admiration for works like Clifford Geertz's 'close reading' of a Balinese cock-fight.14 It implies no necessary choice between monocausality and multicausality, and certainly no conflict between a model in which some historical determinants are seen as more powerful than others, and the recognition of interconnections, both vertical and horizontal. A 'situation' may be a convenient point of departure, as in Ginzburg's study of popular ideology through the case of a single village atheist in the sixteenth century or a single group of Friulian peasants accused of witchcraft.15 These topics could also be approached in other ways. It may be a necessary point of departure in other cases, as in Agulhon's beautiful study of how, at a particular time and place, French villagers converted from Catholic traditionalism to militant republicanism.16 At all events, for certain purposes historians are likely to choose it as a starting-point. There is thus no necessary contradiction between Le Roy Ladurie's Les paysans du Languedoc and his Montaillou, any more than between Duby's general works on feudal society and his monograph on the battle of Bouvines, or between E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class and his Whigs and Hunters.11 There is nothing new in choosing to see the world via a microscope rather than a telescope. So long as we accept that we are studying the same cosmos, the choice between microcosm and macrocosm is a matter of selecting the appropriate technique. It is significant that more historians find the microscope useful at present, but this does not necessarily mean that they reject telescopes as out of date. Even the historians of14 Clifford Geertz, 'Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cock-Fight', in his The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973). 15 Carlo Ginzburg, II formaggio e i vermi (Turin, 1976); Carlo Ginzburg, / benandanti: ricerche sulla ttregoneria e sui culti agrari tra Cinquecento e Seicento (Turin, 1966). 16 Maurice Agulhon, La Ripublique au village (Paris, 1970). ' Le Roy Ladurie, Les paysans du Languedoc; Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou, village occitan de 1294 d 1324 (Paris, 1976), trans. B. Bray as Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village, 1294-1324 (London, 1978); Georges Duby, Le dimanche de Bouvines, 2j juillet 1214 (Paris, 1973); E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1963); E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters (London, 1975).Downloaded from past.oxfordjournals.org by guest on February 13, 20118PAST AND PRESENTNUMBER 8 6mentalite, that vague catch-all term which Stone, perhaps wisely, does not try to clarify, do not exclusively or predominantly avoid the broad view. This at least is a lesson they have learned from the anthropologists. Do these observations account for Stone's 'broad cluster of changes in the nature of historical discourse'?18 Perhaps not. However, they demonstrate that it is possible to explain much of what he surveys asthe continuation of past historical enterprises by other means, instead of as proofs of their bankruptcy. One would not wish to deny that some historians regard them as bankrupt or undesirable and wish to change their discourse in consequence, for various reasons, some of them intellectually dubious, some to be taken seriously. Clearly some historians have shifted from 'circumstances' to 'men' (including women), or have discovered that a simple base/superstructure model and economic history are not enough, or since the pay-off from such approaches has been very substantial are no longer enough. Some may well have convinced themselves that there is an incompatibility between their 'scientific' and 'literary' functions. But it is not necessary to analyse the present fashions in history entirely as a rejection of the past, and in so far as they cannot be entirely analysed in such terms, it will not do. We are all anxious to discover where historians are going. Stone's essay is to be welcomed as an attempt to do so. Nevertheless it is not satisfactory. In spite of his disclaimer the essay does combine the charting of 'observed changes in historical fashion' with 'value judgements about what are good, and what are less good, modes of historical writing', 19 especially about the latter. I think this is a pity, not because I happen to disagree with him about 'the principle of indeterminacy' and historical generalization, but because, if the argument is wrong, a diagnosis of the 'changes in historical discourse' made in terms of this argument must also be inadequate. One is tempted, like the mythical Irishman, asked by the traveller for the way to Ballynahinch, to stop, ponder, and reply: 'If I were you, I wouldn't start from here at all'. Birkbeck College, London E. J. HobsbawmDownloaded from past.oxfordjournals.org by guest on February 13, 2011' Stone, op. cit., p. 23. ' Ibid., p. 4.