A man of faith

Paul Hollander

Eric Hobsbawn, Interesting Times: A Twentieth Century Life (London: Penguin Books, 2002) 448 pp., $30.

ERIC Hobsbawm's Interesting Times is a highly readable and interesting autobiography, providing a wealth of information about the professional and (to a lesser extent) personal life of its author, as well as the times in which he lived. There is no shortage of revelations, intended and unintended.

Born in 1917, Hobsbawm has been a man of the Left throughout his long life. He has enjoyed an extraordinary global reputation in the academic world, foremost among left-leaning intellectuals and liberals. He has been showered with honors as a champion honorary doctorate recipient, conference invitee and subsidized world traveler. He has also been a regular commentator in the mass media of several countries. (A photograph in this volume shows him on Dutch television in the apparently congenial company of Markus Wolf, former head of the East German intelligence service. He appears to share with Mr. Wolf a distaste for expressing regrets about his longstanding political commitments and convictions.)

Like many leftist Western intellectuals, Hobsbawm managed to be at once an egalitarian and an elitist. On the one hand, he believes that his work has considerable historical importance and sees himself belonging to an international fraternity of enlightened intellectuals. On the other he is a champion and brother of the downtrodden. He writes: "The enormous advantage of communism, especially when reinforced by friendship, that one could simply not treat a comrade other than an equal."

A considerable amount of namedropping supports the imputation of the elitist inclinations. Hobsbawm takes great pleasure in naming his innumerable distinguished "friends" who achieved high office, renown or distinguished intellectual status. He relishes his own high-flying career, as he recalls the good old days when the Rockefeller Foundation flew him first class to various exotic destinations. He comes across as a tireless net-worker affably cultivating his global connections and heartily enjoying the status he had achieved--after overcoming earlier difficulties in his career caused by his obstinate attachment to the British CP. Indeed, this was an attachment that not only ceased to matter after the 1960s but that had in fact become an asset.

Hobsbawm's global acclaim is not merely a reflection of his excellence as a historian, however. His fame and reputation rest in large measure on his successfully personifying a particular political position and mindset--that of the unrepentant leftist and unrepentant believer in Marxism who has held on to his convictions in face of a vast accumulation of historical evidence that should have undermined them. (1) He has not just been the common garden variety leftist academic so abundant in our times, but a remorseless member of the British Communist Party--a "card-carrying communist", as they used to say--and therein may lie the secret of his acclaim.

Those seeking to retain their leftist beliefs have found encouragement and comfort in Hobsbawm's steadfast loyalty to what strike them as noble and idealistic impulses. Hobsbawm has shown such people how one may admit that all existing communist systems were deeply flawed, ("it must now be obvious that failure was built into this enterprise from the start"), concede that the original good intentions of their creators had horrific unintended consequences, and yet continue to regard these intentions and the ideas underpinning them admirable and inspiring. He has thus come to personify idealism in the face of adversity. His high-minded refusal to give in to discouragement or yield to disillusionment, and his unswerving membership in the Party, has come to be seen as an emblem of pride and courage.

Hobsbawm is no doubt aware of all this. He contrasts the seriousness of his youthful commitments with the far more frivolous political play-acting of Sixties radicals: "Unlike the 1968 generation, few inter-war communists went into the revolution as into a political Club Med ...." He also makes clear that he was never a Sixties-style radical "cultural dissident." Unlike the radicals of that decade, his loyalties were firmly anchored in the Party:

The Party was what our life was about. We gave it all we had. In return we got from it the certainty of our victory and the experience of fraternity....It represented the ideal of transcending selfishness.

Another special bond linked him to the Russian Revolution: "I belonged to the generation tied by an almost unbreakable umbilical cord to hope of the world revolution and its original home, the October Revolution."

Hobsbawm insists that

people like myself did not remain in the Party because we had many illusions about the USSR, although undoubtedly we had some. For instance we clearly underestimated the horrors of what had gone on ... under Stalin until it was denounced by Khrushchev in 1956.

Elsewhere, too, he pleads ignorance of the worst Soviet atrocities:

Of course we did not, and could not, envisage the sheer scale of what was being imposed on the Soviet people under Stalin at the time when we identified ourselves with him and the Comintern, and were reluctant to believe the few who told us what they knew or suspected.

Nonetheless, a few lines later he observes that "it is anachronistic to suppose that only genuine or willful ignorance stood between us and denouncing the inhumanities perpetrated on our side", and ht adds: "In the total war we were engaged in, one did not ask oneself whether there should be a limit to the sacrifices imposed on others any more than on ourselves." This reminds one not of Marx and Engels but of Martin Heidegger, who said in 1935 (and had published in 1953):

in the domain of the essential, half-measures are always more fatal than the Nothing that is so terribly feared.... [W]hat is peddled about nowadays as the philosophy of National Socialism... has not the least to do with the inner truth and greatness of this movement. (2)

Of course, the siren of "total war" has been the time-honored excuse that each and every modern dictatorship has offered for its repressive policies, and the Soviet one for its campaigns of terror in the 1930s here rather unoriginally embraced by Hobsbawm. Stalin's favorite phrase here rises to the mind: "When the forest is cut down, splinters fly."

The abstract quality of Hobsbawm's youthful affections for the Soviet Union is also revealed in his negative reactions to his limited exposure to Soviet realities during the visit he paid in 1954-55, of which he returned "depressed and without any desire to go there again." But even the partially chastened, mature Hobsbawm has retained blind spots of impressive proportions which, for example, enable him to believe that East Germany (he insists on calling it the "German Democratic Republic")

was not a bad society: work and careers for all, universal education... social security and pensions, holidays in a firmly structured community of good people doing a honest day's work... open-air leisure and sports, no class distinctions.

His worldview still requires, too, a perception of the Soviet Union as having been relatively weak and lacking in the "global ambitions and aggressiveness of the USA."

These remarks highlight the degree to which Hobsbawm's alignments and beliefs were predicated on the appeal of good intentions, potentialities and a future superior to the present. It was the attribution of these great hopes to the USSR that prevented him from a proper appreciation of its "severe defects" and that enabled him to give them little weight in his moral-political accounting. Neither knowledge nor a certain amount of self-reflection has prevented him from effortlessly subordinating intellect to emotion--a condition far from unknown among politically committed intellectuals. Recalling his teenage years in Germany, he writes:

The months in Berlin made me a lifelong communist, or at least a man whose life would lose its nature and its significance without the political project to which he committed himself as a schoolboy, even though that project has demonstrably failed, and, as I now know, was bound to fail. The dream of the October Revolution is still there somewhere inside me. ... To this day I notice myself treating the memory and tradition of the USSR with an indulgence and tenderness.

Such affirmations and reaffirmations are scattered throughout the volume, which is permeated by a taken-for-granted Marxist view of the world. He never discusses how Marxism influenced the failed policies of communist states, and why, if it lent itself to such chronic misuse, it should still be revered. He seems to equate Marxism with truth-seeking and with the endemic struggle against injustice. Never do intentions and consequences really meet. (3)

HOBSBAWM HAS been a student of modern European history and is well acquainted with the communist systems and movements of the past century. Hence, an ignorance of their failures could not play a substantial part in the retention of his early loyalties largely unrevised in ripe old age; nor is he an unreflective individual, as this autobiography indicates. How, then, does one reconcile all of these seeming contradictions?

Hobsbawm's early life offers clues. His childhood and adolescence were overshadowed by the threat of Nazism, a disorganized family life and the downward social mobility of his parents. Not only had his father been a highly unsuccessful breadwinner, but there was a great deal of social, economic and emotional instability early in his life, years of what he calls "tragedy, trauma, loss and insecurity." His father died when he was twelve, his mother when he was 14. He and one younger sister were raised in different places by relatives.

It was also the period of the Great Depression. From an early age he was one of many Jews (and liberal gentiles) who believed that only the communist movements and the Soviet Union were steadfast opponents of Nazism and its attempt to take advantage of the Depression. Even sixty years later in an autobiography full of historical facts, Hobsbawm could not bring himself to mention the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 1939.

He attended seven different "educational establishments" in Austria, Germany and England before landing at Cambridge University. His political beliefs and affiliations apparently became the essential foundation of his sense of identity and provided him with life long emotional support, coherence and focus. He recalls with great warmth the mass demonstrations in which he took part as a young man:

Next to sex, the activity combining bodily experience and intense emotion to the highest degree is the participation in a mass demonstration at a time of great public exaltation. . . . It implies some physical action-- marching, chanting slogans, singing--through which the merger of the individual in the mass . . . finds expression. The occasion has remained unforgettable.

Later in life he still found satisfaction in such activities as shown in the photographs of him protesting nuclear weapons in Trafalgar Square reproduced in the book. He includes such a "sense of mass ecstasy" among the five components of his communist disposition in addition to "pity for the exploited, the aesthetic appeal of a perfect and comprehensive intellectual system, 'dialectical materialism', a little bit of the Blakean vision of the new Jerusalem and a good deal of intellectual anti-philistinism." Elsewhere he writes that "what made Marxism so irresistible was its comprehensiveness."

Upon arrival to Cambridge University Hobsbawm was in the position to join or overlap with what he called "the reddest and most radical generation in the history of the university", which included some of the notorious spies of the period such as Blunt, Burgess, Maclean and Philby. He writes:

I knew those of my contemporaries who became Soviet agents as militant members of the student Party.... We knew such work was going on, we knew we were not supposed to ask questions about it, we respected those who did it, and most of us--certainly I--would have taken it on ourselves, if asked.

In light of these sentiments it does not shock us to learn that in 1950, while still associated with King's College, he made a special point of inviting Alan Nunn May, "just released from jail for nuclear espionage, to a King's feast."

Besides the weight of youthful commitments and the rewards he reaped on their behalf later in life, Hobsbawm also persisted in his beliefs because he simply disliked those who opposed them: "I was strongly repelled by the idea of being in the company of those ex-communists who turned into fanatical anti-communists." He was also "repelled" by "Cold War rhetoric and free market liberalism" during the 1980s, and much disapproved of Francois Furet's belief that communism was "a dangerous dream." He further explains that "what made it easier... to maintain the old faith, more than anything else, [was] the crusading global anti-communism of the West in the Cold War." It remains his sustaining belief that no matter what the communist systems have done, or failed to accomplish, the corruptions of capitalism greatly outweigh their evils and demand undiminished critical attention.

Hobsbawm reserves his most hostile comments, however, for Israel--"the small, militarist, culturally disappointing and politically aggressive nation-state"-- that asks, in vain, for his solidarity on racial grounds. He granted such solidarity far more readily to the Palestinians during his visits to "occupied Palestine."

Hobsbawm did deviate some from the loyalties sketched above. The crushing of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 moved him to challenge the Party line in a letter published in the non-party press. Elsewhere he muses about

living in a land of the blessed: a region [central and western Europe] without war, without the prospect of fear of social upheaval, in which most people enjoyed a life of wealth, a range of choices in life and leisure, and a degree of social security beyond the reach of all but the very rich in our parents' generations.

If so, he seems to admit that there is, after all, such a thing as capitalism with a human face. Toward the end of the book it unexpectedly emerges that "in some ways the United States represent the best of the twentieth century... [and] promises greater openness to talent, to energy and novelty than other worlds." Tributes are also paid to American economic, technological and scientific achievements. But these tributes are followed, "on the other hand", by a listing of some of the "human costs" of the system, including the "unspeakable" prisons and huge prison population.

AS AN OLD leftist and old-style Marxist, Hobsbawm is properly critical of identity politics and intellectual undertakings such as black, queer or woman's studies. Commendably enough, he favors moving "beyond one's roots.... History needs distance not only from the passions, emotions ideologies and fears of our own wars of religion but from the even more dangerous temptations of identity." As to his own identity, Hobsbawm sees himself as one who "recycled" himself

from militant to sympathizer or fellow traveller, or... from effective membership of the British Communist Party to something like spiritual membership of the Italian CP, which fitted my ideas of communism rather better.

But this progression understates his commitments and obscures the bases of his sizeable self-esteem. Besides pride in his wordly successes he sees himself as a man of the best possible intentions, a Candide stripped of naivete, and a fighter for a better world who has tried to ensure that humanity will not "live without the ideals of freedom and justice."

If he is anything, Hobsbawm has been and remains an orthodox man of faith seeking a new Jerusalem--his words of choice, not mine. As is the case with all orthodox religion, the devotion to a belief is praiseworthy the more improbable the belief is, not the less. (4) Had Hobsbawm not rejected the religious heritage of his birth, it is as certain as such a thing can be that he might have been not a Reform or an assimilated Jew, but an Orthodox one. The fulfilment he has found in Party camaraderie and mass demonstrations he may have found studying Talmud in a yeshiva and in communal worship. As it happened, Hobsbawm elected to reject most vigorously the other religion, the one into whose heritage he was born. Since one cannot believe in two demanding religions simultaneously, special effort must be made to put distance between the accepted creed and the renounced one.

It is ironic and sad that a man who devoted much of his life and work to support, directly or indirectly, some of the most inhumane and mendacious political systems and movements of modern times is capable of such self-satisfaction at the end of his long life. Such is life, however, and human nature.

(1.) See Neil McInnes, "The Long Goodbye", The National Interest (Summer 2001).

(2.) Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics (New Haven: Yale Nota Bene, 2000), p. 213.

(3.) See James Kurth, "'If Men Were Angels...' Reflections on the World of Eric Hobsbawm", The National Interest (Summer 1995).

(4.) The phenomenon of cognitive dissonance that helps to explain this was treated classically by Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken and Stanley Schechter in When Prophecy Fails (New York: Harper's, 1956).

Paul Hollander's latest book is Discontents: Postmodern and Postcommunist (2002).

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