When future generations come upon the webpages and news bulletins of the last 24 hours, something may puzzle them about their contents. How was it, they may ask themselves, that the death of a venerable Marxist historian could be seen as such a large shared national loss by so many people whose assumptions and worldviews often had so little in common with his? Worthy of an obituary, of course. But a front-page news story?
It is not an unreasonable question. Part of the answer lies in the late Eric Hobsbawm's sheer academic productivity and prowess. He cast the net of his curiosity far wider than most historians. He knew so much about so many things in the history of so many countries. And he had an unrivalled ability to marshal them in clear prose. No wonder he was such a sage to so many.
Part of the answer also lay in his longevity. Mr Hobsbawm was still writing until within a few days of his death at 95. His final book of essays has yet to be published. He was lecturing and broadcasting until very late on. He was not just one of the master historians of the era but one of the last remaining first-hand witnesses of so many of its decisive events, too. Few historians were as interested as Mr Hobsbawm in explaining the politics and economics of the present in the light of the lessons of the past. He looked the facts in the eye and drew his conclusions – occasionally wrong ones. But it helped him progress from the communist rigidities of his youth – and it may explain why the Soviet Union never published his books. A few weeks before his death, Mr Hobsbawm remarked that he was amazed to have lived long enough to see another global capitalist crisis. But the existence of such crises was not a surprise to someone who had seen it all before.
Yet the one thing that, more than any other, accounts for Mr Hobsbawm's status in his own country was his readiness, at a crucial time in the late 20th century, to acknowledge the historical exhaustion of the dogma that industrial labour would overthrow capital and construct a socialist order. His essays in Marxism Today in the late 1970s and early 1980s – many of them reprinted and debated in this newspaper – marked the moment when the left painfully began to assess its failures and prospects. Some of it still has barely started to do so even now.
"We have no clear perspective on how the crisis can lead to a socialist transformation and, to be honest, no real expectation that it will," he wrote in 1978. More than 30 years on, we still live in that world today and that tough message is still true. Making sense of it requires tough reasoning. That was always Mr Hobsbawm's kind. It is needed more than ever now that he is no longer able to provide it.
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