HOBSBAWM, Eric J. 1917-

(Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm, Francis Newton)

PERSONAL: Born June 9, 1917, in Alexandria, Egypt; son of Leopold Percy and Nelly (Grtin) Hobsbawm; married Muriel Seaman, 1943 (marriage ended, 1951); married Marlene Schwarz, 1962; children: (second marriage) Andrew John, Julia Nathalie. Education: King's College, Cambridge, B.A., 1939; Cambridge University, M.A., 1943, Ph.D., 1951. Hobbies and other interests: Jazz, urban culture.

ADDRESSES: Home—10 Nassington Rd., London NW3 2UD, England; fax: 0044-20-7433-1798. Office—c/o Department of History, Birkbeck College, University of London, London WC1E 7HX, England. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Cambridge University, King's College, Cambridge, England, fellow in history, 1949–55; University of London, Birkbeck College, London, England, lecturer, 1947–59, reader, 1959–70, professor of economic and social history, 1971–82, professor emeritus, 1982–. Stanford University, visiting professor, 1960; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, visiting professor, 1967; Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, visiting professor, 1971; Cornell University, Andrew D. White Professor at Large, 1976–82; Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France, visiting director of research associates, 1978–83; College de France, visiting professor, 1982; New School for Social Research, university professor of politics and society, 1984–98, emeritus professor and senior lecturer, 1989–; lecturer at other educational institutions in Canada, Latin America, Europe, and Asia. Cambridge University, honorary fellow of King's College, beginning 1973. European Council of History Museums, member, 2000–; Comite Scientifique aupres du Ministere de l'Education Nationale (France), member. Military service: British Army, 1940–46; became sergeant.

MEMBER: Economic History Society (past member of council), Society for the Study of Labour History (chair, 1966–72; president), British Academy (fellow), American Academy of Arts and Sciences (honorary foreign member), American Historical Association (honorary member), Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Accademia delle Scienze di Torino.

AWARDS, HONORS: D. Phil., University of Stockholm, 1970; D.C.L., University of Chicago, 1976; Premio Viareggio (Italy), 1991; decorated chevalier, Palmes Academiques (France), 1993; Lionel Gelber Prize (Canada), 1995, for The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991; Victor Adler Staatspreis (Austria), 1996; named commander, Order of the Southern Cross (Brazil), 1996; Wolfson Foundation Prize for History, 1997; premio, Storia Cherasco (Italy), 1997; decorated Companion of Honor, 1998; honorary doctorates from University of Buenos Aires, 1998, Universidad Artes y Ciencias Sociales ARCIS (Santiago de Chile), 1998, and Universidad de la Republica (Uruguay), 1999; Leipziger Buchpreis zue europaischen Verstandigung (Germany), 1999; Ernst Bloch Preis, Ludwigshafen, 2000; honorary degrees from University of Torino, 2000, Oxford University, 2002, and University of Pennsylvania, 2002, and from University of East Anglia, New School for Social Research, Bard College, York University (Downsview, Ontario, Canada), University of Pisa, University of London, University of Essex, and Columbia University.

WRITINGS:

(Editor) Labour's Turning Point, 1880–1900, Lawrence & Wishart (London, England), 1948.

Social Bandits and Primitive Rebels, Free Press (New York, NY), 1959 (published in England as Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement, Manchester University Press, [Manchester, England], 1959).

(Under pseudonym Francis Newton) The Jazz Scene, MacGibbon & Kee (London, England), 1959, Monthly Review Press (New York, NY), 1960, revised edition published under name Eric J. Hobsbawm, Pantheon (New York, NY), 1993.

The Long Nineteenth Century, Volume 1: The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848, World Publishing (New York, NY), 1962, Volume 2: The Age of Capital, 1848–1875, 1963, Scribner (New York, NY), 1975, Volume 3: The Age of Empire, 1875–1914, 1964.

The Twentieth Century: The Age of Extremes; The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991, Michael Joseph (London, England), published as The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991, Pantheon (New York, NY), 1994.

Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (London, England), 1964, Basic Books (New York, NY), 1965.

Industry and Empire: The Making of Modern English Society, Pantheon (New York, NY), 1968 (published in England as Industry and Empire: An Economic History of Britain since 1750, Weidenfeld & Nicolson [London, England], 1968).

Bandits, Delacorte (New York, NY), 1968, 3rd edition, Pantheon (New York, NY), 2000.

(With George F.E. Rude) Captain Swing: The English Farm-Labourers' Rising of 1830, Lawrence & Wishart (London, England), 1969, Norton (New York, NY), 1975.

En torno a los origenes de la revolucion industrial, Siglo XXI (Buenos Aires, Argentina), 1971.

Revolutionaries: Contemporary Essays, Pantheon (New York, NY), 1973.

(With Giorgio Napolitano) Intervista sul PCI, Laterza, 1976, translation by John Cammett and Victoria DeGrazia published as The Italian Road to Socialism: An Interview, Lawrence Hill (Westport, CT), 1977.

(Editor, with others, and contributor) Storia del Marxismo, four volumes, Einaudi (Torino, Italy), 1978–82.

(With others) The Forward March of Labour Halted?, edited by Martin Jacques and Francis Mulhern, NLB/Marxism Today (London, England), 1981.

(Editor) Marxism in Marx's Day, Indiana University Press (Bloomington, IN), 1982.

(Editor, with Terence Ranger) The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge, England), 1983.

Workers: Worlds of Labor, Pantheon (New York, NY), 1984 (published in England as Worlds of Labour: Further Studies in the History of Labour, Weidenfeld & Nicolson [London, England], 1984).

Politics for a Rational Left: Political Writing, 1977–1988 (essays), Verso/Marxism Today, 1989.

Echoes of the Marseillaise: Two Centuries Look Back on the French Revolution, Rutgers University Press (New Brunswick, NJ), 1990.

Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1990, revised edition, 1992.

(Editor, with Paul Bairoch, and coauthor of introduction) Storia d'Europa, Volume 5: L'eta contemporanea, secoli XIX-XX, Einaudi (Torino, Italy), 1996.

On History, 1997.

Uncommon People: Resistance, Rebellion, and Jazz, 1998.

(Author of text) 1968: Magnum throughout the World (photographs), [Paris, France], 1998.

Behind the Times: The Decline and Fall of the Twentieth Century Avantgardes, 1998.

(With Antonio Polito) On the Edge of the New Century, 2000.

Author (with Krzysztof Pomian and Alain Finkielkraut), Reflexions sur le xxe siecle, Editions du Tricorne (Geneva, Switzerland). Contributor to books, including author of introduction, Communist Cartoons: Cartoons from "The Communist," 1921–1922, J. Klugman Pictorials (London, England), 1982. Contributor to New Statesman, Times Literary Supplement, Economic History Review, Past and Present, and other professional and general journals.

Hobsbawm's works have been translated into several dozen languages, including Hebrew, Arabic, Farsi, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Bahasa Indonesian, and Bangladeshi.

SIDELIGHTS: Eric J. Hobsbawm has long been considered one of the leading European experts on the history of the working classes. "Hobsbawm is a most accomplished historian," A.J.P. Taylor wrote in the Observer. Taylor noted that "as an historian of economic and social developments [Hobsbawm] has two special gifts. He has taken to heart Lenin's dictum's 'patiently explain.' At each stage of his narrative he seeks to provide full and precise explanation for what happened." "Hobsbawm's other virtue is to be always aware of the British people," Taylor concluded. "Most historians, by a sort of occupational disease, are interested only in the upper classes and assume that they themselves would have been numbered among the privileged if they had lived a century or two ago—a most unlikely assumption. Mr. Hobsbawm places his loyalty firmly on the other side of the barricades."

Historian Asa Briggs cited in Book World a reason why Hobsbawm's approach is appealing to many readers of history. He wrote in his review of Captain Swing: The English Farm-Labourers' Rising of 1830, that Hobsbawm and his coauthor George F.E. Rude "ask different questions and, as Marxists, they give different answers. They are less concerned with literary evidence, more concerned with seeking to relate economic and social structure to the pattern of agitation." New Statesman reviewer James Joll explained that "Hobsbawm writes extremely well: his description of the lot of the proletariat has an eloquence worthy of Marx himself…. Hobsbawm is very successful in retaining a world-wide perspective while necessarily concentrating on conditions in Europe, the cradle of the middle class and of capitalism…. It is exceptional to read a work of general history which it is hard to put down."

Despite his reputation as a historian of revolution and the lower classes, one of Hobsbawm's most popular works is a study of jazz. The Jazz Scene, which was originally published in 1959 under a pseudonym (the author felt that a work on popular culture would hurt his professional reputation), is the work of "an abject jazz fan who sees his subject, good and bad, in the full economic, social, and political perspective of a historian," declared Roderick Nordell in the Christian Science Monitor. "He is also a supple writer who is always throwing out lifelines of analogy or metaphor to readers who want to inquire what jazz is but feel rebuked by Louis Armstrong's classic reply: 'Man, if you gotta ask you'll never know.'" "Hobsbawm is important," stated Historian contributor Ronald Story, "for students of mass and popular culture generally as well as of music and jazz, because his Marxist grounding allows him to see jazz as socially produced and in international perspective."

Working-class issues and revolution are major themes throughout Hobsbawm's work. In Politics for a Rational Left: Political Writing, 1977–1988, the historian argues against the Conservatism of British politics during the 1980s. Workers: Worlds of Labor "is primarily the story of the emergence of the 'lower poor' into the working class between the late 18th and mid-20th centuries," stated Arthur Weinberg in the Los Angeles Times Book Review. "Workers is a major reference source for those interested … in … the culture of the laboring class, how men and women who worked for wages lived in a world of haves and have-nots."

One of Hobsbawm's early works, Captain Swing (written with fellow historian George Rude), looks at nineteenth-century English working-class issues. It tells of a series of uprisings by agricultural laborers in rural England during the 1830s. The bands gathered together under the leadership of a mythical captain "Swing," whose name was signed to threatening letters addressed to local landowners. When the uprisings were suppressed, the convicted rebels were deported to Australia and Tasmania. "Perhaps the greatest merit in thus choosing 'Swing' as the subject of a monograph," stated a Times Literary Supplement reviewer, "is that it reveals, at least through the distorting lens of repression, a whole layer of English society that had previously been hidden from historical awareness." "It is not even sure that those who were deported and who thus acquired an historical identity, were the leaders," the reviewer concluded; "all we know is that they were singled out from the general mass of several thousand brought to trial, for reasons best known to the repressive authorities."

Hobsbawm looks at the question of revolution and its relationship to the development of the nation-state in Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality. The historian "has devoted his long and distinguished career to bringing the common people into history," noted James North in Tribune Books, "and he explains that the typical poor country person in most of the [nineteenth] century would have felt loyalty to his village, or his local lord, but that 'Italy' or 'Germany' would have meant nothing to him." The existence of a nation is something that developed only in the recent past, the historian concludes, and nationalism developed to its greatest extent (in one direction) in Nazi Germany during the 1930s and early 1940s. "Hobsbawm points out that more than half of today's States are less than forty years old," explained Eugen Weber in the Times Literary Supplement, "which seriously limits the possibilities of traditional national references; and he concludes that the historical significance of nationalism is in decline."

So influential have Hobsbawm's writings been in the field of historical study, Tony Judt pointed out in the New York Review of Books, that "among historians in the English-speaking world there is a discernible 'Hobsbawm generation.' It consists of men and women who took up the study of the past at some point in the 'long nineteen-sixties,' between … 1959 and 1975, and whose interest in the recent past was irrevocably shaped by Eric Hobsbawm's writings, however much they now dissent from many of his conclusions." "But Hobsbawm's most enduring imprint on our historical consciousness," Judt continued, "has come through his great trilogy on the 'long nineteenth century,' from 1789 to 1914, the first volume of which, The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848, appeared in 1962." The interpretation put forth by Hobsbawm in this volume is that a single social class from northern Europe—the bourgeoisie—rose to power in a time of great social upheaval. Hobsbawm's conclusions, the critic concluded, "became the 'conventional' interpretation, now exposed to steady criticism and revision."

The Age of Revolution was followed by The Age of Capital, 1848–1875, a study that begins with another series of revolutions—the series of uprisings that shook Europe in 1848—and ends with an economic catastrophe: an economic depression that stretched across the world in 1875. "This brief period truly marked 'the creation of a single world under capitalist hegemony,'" said David Brion Davis in the New York Times Book Review. Hobsbawm relates many events in world history during this time to the influence of capitalism: the collapse of black slavery in the United States, the urbanization of Western Europe, the massive emigration of agricultural and light industrial workers to the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand, and, Davis concludes, "the realization that no corner of the globe could escape the irresistible impact of Western capitalism and Western culture."

The Age of Empire, 1875–1914, continues Hobsbawm's examination of the expansion of capitalism into the twentieth century. "Hobsbawm devotes the bulk of his book," Chicago Tribune writer Alden Whitman stated, to "the development of an imperial ethos, or superstructure," including such disparate elements as "the growth of mass democracy, increasing literacy and the birth of feminism. He argues dazzlingly that empires necessarily lead to the growth of an education and sophisticated ruling class at the seats of empire. This resulted in the phenomenon of the belle epoque, whose glow concealed the sharpening national rivalries of imperial expansion." "This history," proclaimed Robert Wohl in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, "manages to be both provocative and judicious, wide-ranging in its generalizations and revealing in its details, witty and wise." "Though Hobsbawm's sympathies are clearly with the leaders of those working masses who sought to overthrow their capitalist and bourgeois oppressors," the reviewer concluded, "he cannot help but look back with grudging respect at a society whose idea of catastrophe was the sinking of an ocean liner and which was capable of mobilizing itself politically because of the unjust conviction of a single French Jew."

Hobsbawm continues his examination of the twentieth century with The Twentieth Century: The Age of Extremes; The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991, which won the Lionel Gelber Prize in 1995. When Lenin's socialist revolution failed to spread to the West "and Western powers recognized the Soviet regime, the idea of a worldwide workers' revolt was effectively abandoned," explained Boston Globe contributor David Mehegan. "That is important because it effectively allied the Soviet empire, despite the later hostility of the Cold War, with the bourgeois West against the fascist alternative." In the so-called "golden age"—the period from 1945 to the early 1970s—reviewer Michael Kazin stated in the Washington Post Book World, "the pleasures and pitfalls of consumer capitalism spread throughout the globe, making peasants into urbanites and child-laborers into full-time students—even as the Cold War threatened periodically to reduce all the gains to ashes." The Twentieth Century, declared New York Times Book Review contributor Stanley Hoffman, "is powerful and thought-provoking, demonstrating once again that when it comes to interpretation, the best works of history are those in which the author's own special perspective is given free play."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Samuel, R., and G. Stedman Jones, editors, Culture, Ideology, and Politics: Essays for Eric Hobsbawm, [London, England], 1982.

Thane, P.G. Crossick, and R. Floud, editors, The Power of the Past: Essays for Eric Hobsbawm, [Cambridge, England], 1984.

PERIODICALS

Book World, May 4, 1969, Asa Briggs, review of Captain Swing: The English Farm-Labourers' Rising of 1830, p. 10.

Boston Globe, February 12, 1995, David Mehegan, review of The Twentieth Century: The Age of Extremes; The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991, p. 59.

Chicago Tribune, February 28, 1988, article by Alden Whitman, p. 5.

Choice, February, 1995, pp. 901-909.

Christian Science Monitor, April 23, 1993, Roderick Nordell, review of The Jazz Scene, p. 13.

Economist, December 27, 1969.

Historian, spring, 1994, Ronald Story, review of The Jazz Scene, pp. 564-565.

London Review of Books, April 4, 1985, pp. 17-18: July 7, 1988, pp. 12-13; June 22, 1989, pp. 8, 10.

Los Anqe1es Times Book Review, May 15, 1985; February 28, 1988, Arthur Weinberg, review of Politics for a Rational Left: Political Writing, 1977–1988, pp. 1, 15; February 21, 1993.

New Statesman, November 21, 1975, article by James Joll.

New Statesman & Society, September 25, 1992, p. 57.

New Yorker, April 29, 1985, p. 133.

New York Review of Books, June 19, 1969, p. 36; April 14, 1988; May 25, 1995, p. 20.

New York Times Book Review, May 9, 1976, David Brion Davis, review of The Age of Capital, 1848–1875, pp. 27-28; February 21, 1988, pp. 15-16; October 7, 1990, p. 24; February 19, 1995, Stanley Hoffman, review of The Twentieth Century, pp. 28-29.

Observer, May 5, 1968; October 18, 1987; June 11, 1989.

Spectator, June 3, 1989, pp. 27-29; January 16, 1993, pp. 32-33.

Times Literary Supplement, September 11, 1969, pp. 989-992; June 4, 1976, p. 662; May 26-June 1, 1989, pp. 569-570; October 26-November 1, 1990, Eugen Weber, review of Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, p. 1149.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), July 22, 1990, James North, review of Nations and Nationalism since 1780, p. 4; July 30, 1995, pp. 6, 10.

Washington Post Book World, February 14, 1988; January 29, 1995, Michael Kazin, review of The Twentieth Century, p. 1.