Eric Hobsbawm’s personas and histories revisited
Bryan D Palmer’s review of Richard Evans life of Eric Hobsbawm is I think the most insightful I’ve read (link below)
Palmer is a distinguished and long standing socialist historian himself who has written a good deal about E P Thompson amongst a range of subjects.
Two points in particular I’d pull out.
Firstly Palmer argues, correctly I think, that Hobsbawm’s capacity as a Marxist historian to analyse capitalism and where it might be going was diminished after the demise of the Soviet Union. He had perhaps become sceptical about the material basis of progress in history before that, for example with his essay The Forward March of Labour Halted whose title hints at the point.
Secondly Palmer is particularly good on Hobsbawm’s multiple personas. Hobsbawm saw himself as the perpetual outsider, the refugee from Germany, who as a Communist was kept out of much official life. His advancement as an academic was long delayed and his request to review his security service files was denied.
Yet at the same time Hobsbawm was appointed a Companion of Honour a mark of an insider in the British Establishment. Palmer’s point is that Evans was the ideal person to write a biography which positions Hobsbawm in this area but less good on Hobsbawm as an outsider.
There is certainly space for more biographies of Hobsbawm. Evans is not the last word.
Evans provides the final irony. Hobsbawm resisted handlers all his life, but he has succumbed to one in death. If he had any choice in naming his biographer, Hobsbawm may well have given Evans his blessing in taking up the task, for he could probably intuit that Evans would do little to disturb his reputation as a “National Treasure.” Such a designation, for a Marxist of Hobsbawm’s internationalist sensibilities, would surely have elicited public mockery from “Eric the Red,” who treasured no identification with any national entity, considering himself always “someone who does not wholly belong to where he finds himself.” Yet at the same time, the Hobsbawm we have come to know better through Evans’s account would undoubtedly have taken a certain private pleasure in being fêted in this way.
https://jacobinmag.com/2020/07/eric-hobsbawn-life-history-richard-evans
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