Eric Hobsbawm, the Foreign Office & Revolutionaries (1973)
DeClassified have unearthed some open files at the National Archives which deal with the UK operations of a Foreign Office Unit mainly focused on what it saw as subversion elsewhere in the world.
The files (details below) cover the work of a Unit that focused on communists in the trade union movement the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm and World in Action journalists.
Since the activities of the CP in the unions were no doubt also being monitored elsewhere the selection of Hobsbawm and a couple of journalists to focus suggests a private obsession by one or more senior officials.
The specific interest in Hobsbawm relates to his 1973 volume Revolutionaries. It is a collection of short pieces, reviews etc that appeared in New Left Review, the Times Literary Supplement, Marxism Today etc.
Hobsbawm was always an engaging and interesting historian even if one doesn’t agree with this or that point, and the book stands up well 60 years on.
The file notes that the FO Unit saw the publication of Revolutionaries as the ‘peg’ to have a go at Hobsbawm over the Nazi-Soviet Pact at the start of World War Two. ‘Peg’ is the key word here because none of the chapters in the book focuses on that subject.
The interesting thing is that the FO Unit wanted to use this as a way of getting a piece notionally authored by Lord Chalfont in the Times, attacking Hobsbawm. When this didn’t work out they tried Robert Conquest etc etc.
It can be seen as part of the ideological Cold War, history department, perhaps.
It is worth reflecting however that Eric Hobsbawm ended up as a Companion of Honour
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