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ERIC HOBSBAWM’S LAMENT FOR THE TWENTIETH CENTURY  
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Patrick Iber
September 24, 2024
The New Republic
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_ Where some celebrated the triumph of liberal capitalism in the
1990s, Hobsbawm saw a failed dream. _

, Illustration by Aaron Lowell Denton

 

When it was released in 1994, the British historian Eric Hobsbawm’s
_The Age of Extremes _was a global bestseller, translated into many
languages. It was a sensation in Brazil, for example, where Hobsbawm
was known as a friend to peasants and future presidents alike (and
where nearly one million copies of his books have sold
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Readers responded to Hobsbawm’s effort to write contemporary history
that explained their own times, as the book described the years from
1914 to 1991. _The Age of Extremes
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tetralogy that Hobsbawm had begun in the 1970s. _The Age of Revolution
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of Capital [[link removed]] _(1848–1875),
and _The Age of Empire [[link removed]]
_(1875–1914) covered what Hobsbawm described as the “long
nineteenth century,” which begins with the French Revolution but was
defined by the rise of industrial capitalism, the consolidation of the
nation-state, and the global dominance of Europe. _The Age of
Extremes_ describes what came next: the “short twentieth century”
to follow the long nineteenth. 

In the 77 years of the “short twentieth century,” enormous changes
occurred. The world population more than tripled. Global economic
production expanded even faster: It was almost 10 times greater in
1991 than it was in 1920. People were, on average, healthier and
better educated. Empires fell: The world was no longer Eurocentric.
Economically, the world was more than ever a single unit, more
“globalized.” And old patterns of social relationships were swept
away with new forms of living. Capitalism was, Hobsbawm argued,
echoing Marx, “a permanent and continuous revolutionizing force.”

But Hobsbawm was no end-of-history liberal, eager to celebrate the
death of the Soviet Union and the permanent victory of liberal
capitalism. The years covered by Hobsbawm’s “short twentieth
century” coincided with the existence of the Soviet Union, a project
that Hobsbawm believed in for much of his adult life; he joined the
Communist Party of Great Britain in the 1930s and had only
half-heartedly let his membership lapse in 1991. He was too honest a
historian to deny that ultimately the Soviet Union had not produced an
appealing alternative to capitalism. But he was too attached to his
political hopes not to feel that this was something to be lamented,
rather than celebrated. “The dream of the October Revolution is
still there somewhere inside me,” he wrote in his autobiography
[[link removed]]. “I have abandoned,
nay, rejected it, but it has not been obliterated.” In the long
nineteenth century, he thought, there had been almost “unbroken
material, intellectual _and moral _progress.” The twentieth century
had instead been marked by regression.

Thirty years later, does _The Age of Extremes _hold up? Many of its
good qualities remain. Hobsbawm remains a brilliant writer and
communicator. It is impressively wide-ranging, covering the arts and
sciences along with politics and economics. Its Marxism both helps and
hinders the text. At times, he strains to explain things that don’t
need explaining, and he seems uneasy with social changes that another
historian might see as demonstrations of moral progress. But if a
classic is a work that remains worth reading both for what it is and
for what it tells us about the time it was created, Hobsbawm’s text
deserves that status. It rewards the reader not because a historian
would write the same book today but precisely because they would
not. 

 
 
_The Age of Extremes _begins with catastrophe: the years from 1914 to
1945, saddled by a global Depression and bookended by two wars whose
destructiveness showed the dark side of humanity’s material and
scientific advancement. Hobsbawm renders events compactly. “Millions
of men faced each other,” he writes of World War I, “across the
sandbagged parapets of the trenches under which they lived like, and
with, rats and lice.” Hobsbawm is also brilliant in connecting
political developments to those in other domains, making small points
of data into powerful observations. To mark the changes in science, he
notes that the total number of German and British chemists in 1910 was
8,000. By the 1980s the number of people employed in scientific
research surpassed five million. 

Hobsbawm, who had a side career as a jazz critic, is similarly adept
at connecting changes in the arts to historical shifts. This is where
his Marxism is most powerful, as Marxists are taught to think about
the subterranean power lines that run from economics through politics,
society, and culture. He begins his discussion of modernism in the
arts—cubism in painting, atonality in music—with the observation:
“Why brilliant fashion-designers, a notoriously non-analytic breed,
sometimes succeed in anticipating the shape of things to come better
than professional predictors, is one of the most obscure questions in
history; and, for the historian of culture, one of the most
central.” The avant-garde, in his view, both reflects and sometimes
prefigures the breakdown of European civilization.

Most crucial of all—to Hobsbawm’s understanding of the
century—was an unintended consequence of World War I: the Russian
Revolution. Hobsbawm finds much to praise. First, it created a model
for transforming a backward agrarian society into a modern industrial
one (something that partially explained its appeal to leaders of
“Third World” countries later hoping to do the same). Lenin,
observes Hobsbawm, did not shy away from use of the term
“backward” to describe the Soviet Union, and Hobsbawm has no
problem with the term either, for he expects progress from the world.
But Lenin’s organizational model, the disciplined party under
central control, would eventually come to rule over a third of the
world’s population. It was inefficient and frequently cruel. But it
was, in its own way, effective, and Hobsbawm credits it with making
victory over fascism possible in World War II.

When _The Age of Extremes _was released, the Canadian liberal Michael
Ignatieff asked Hobsbawm
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had known the number of people dying in the Soviet Union in the 1930s,
it would have made a difference to his commitment to being a
Communist. “That is a sort of academic question to which an answer
is simply not possible,” Hobsbawm began. “If I were to give you a
retrospective answer, which is not the answer of a historian, I would
have said probably not.” Ignatieff pressed for an explanation.
“Because in a period in which … mass murder and mass suffering are
absolutely universal, the chance of a new world being born in great
suffering would still have been worth backing,” Hobsbawm said.
Ignatieff paraphrases: “Had the radiant tomorrow actually been
created, the loss of 15-20 million people might have been
justified?” And Hobsbawm simply answered: “Yes.”

Though many found this answer appalling, it has the virtue of honesty
without self-pity. To understand _The Age of Extremes_ it is essential
to grasp that Hobsbawm came to accept many critiques of communism but
still resisted membership in the community of embittered (and
frequently reactionary) ex-Communists. This identity does mean that he
sometimes finds things surprising that others take for granted, and
vice versa. The second third of the book concerns what the French
called “_les treinte glorieuses,_” the 30 glorious years after the
end of World War II. In the rich world, living standards rose
dramatically. Goods that would once have been luxuries became
accessible commodities for a wide range of people, with concomitant
changes in the arts democratized by cheap broadcast and mechanical
production. Some might see this as the recovery of productive capacity
in a market economy, made more inclusive in part because of the
solidarity brought about by war. Hobsbawm, instead, strains to explain
why capitalism is suddenly working better than he expects that it
should.

He even reaches for the notion of the cyclical “Kondratiev wave”
of discovery within capitalism used by some Marxists. He may as well
be saying that capitalism’s fortunes improved because Saturn was in
retrograde. Plausibly enough, he credits a marriage of “economic
liberalism and social democracy” but overreaches in attributing the
idea of economic planning to the influence of the Soviet Union. It
makes sense, given his worldview, that Hobsbawm would underestimate
the resilience of market economics, and later he admits that their
absence was part of the problem in the Soviet Union. But even if his
reasoning is off, he does reach the right conclusion: namely, that the
twentieth-century’s great economic innovation was the expansion of
the mixed economy, with a commitment to welfare and social security
across the life cycle. 

In a certain way, his arguments about the Soviet Union itself are
among the most interesting, because here he cannot rely on Marxist
critiques of capitalism to explain the outcomes. Instead he often
draws on his own emotional experiences to explain what, to many, will
feel impossible to explain. Without ignoring the role of terror to
rule the Soviet Union, Hobsbawm reminds us that “communist militants
outside the ‘socialist’ countries … wept genuine tears as they
learned of [Stalin]’s death in 1953.” Hobsbawm probably insists
too much that Stalin may have wished for “totalitarian” control
but never achieved it (for that is true of all regimes that might be
given the label). But it is insightful to recall that the regime’s
public propaganda was most often ignored by its citizens. “Only the
intellectuals were forced to take them seriously,” he argues, but
the fact that the system needed intellectuals and gave them special
privileges created some space outside of state control that would
eventually emerge to challenge the system. 

Hobsbawm calls the final third of the book “The Landslide.”
Beginning in the 1970s, the engines of the capitalist and socialist
systems began to sputter. The Socialist bloc was hindered by the
inflexibility and paranoia of its political and economic system. But
in Europe and the United States, welfare capitalism strained to
maintain itself too. It is perhaps not surprising that these pages,
closest in proximity to the time of their writing, are the ones that
an author would be most likely to handle differently today. Though the
book has two chapters on the “Third World,” Hobsbawm is locked
into a fairly Eurocentric main narrative because of the book’s three
predecessors. More than 500 pages pass, for example, before there is
any sustained treatment of China. Hobsbawm is more interested in Third
World revolutionaries than in changing patterns of migration, or the
movement for racial equality. “Women” as a category of analysis
are attended to primarily in a section on the “cultural
revolutions” brought about by new ways of work. It is hard not to
reach the conclusion that he would have been inclined to take some of
the twentieth century’s moral advances in civil rights more
seriously if they had come wrapped in the packaging of a different
economic system.

 
 
The life and death of the Soviet Union was the defining political fact
of Hobsbawm’s life. Even as he writes that a “revival, or a
rebirth of this pattern of socialism is neither possible, desirable,
nor—even assuming conditions were to favor it—necessary,” he
still believes that it was the fundamental feature of the short
twentieth century. An organized alternative to capitalism existed,
even if it proved not a superior one. Hobsbawm is surely being cheeky
when he says that the collapse of the Soviet Union _validated _Marx,
when he wrote that “the material productive forces of society come
into contradiction with the existing productive relationships.” But
the end to history that Marx imagined did not come. Thirty years
later, few imagine that it will.

That this was a tragedy rather than a triumph shapes the mood of _The
Age of Extremes_ and probably explains part of what made it a
bestseller in the mid-1990s. It was a kind of counterprogramming to
liberal triumphalism. And with the blessings of liberal institutions
so unevenly granted around the globe, it is no wonder that he found
enthusiastic readers in many countries and languages. There are
moments in _The Age of Extremes _when Hobsbawm still seems to grip too
tightly to the ropes of sand holding his belief system together.
Still, this is part of what makes his book valuable. The twentieth
century contained millions of people who thought the way he did. And
if they made both moral and analytical errors, they were also
skeptical that liberalism would know what to do with its victory. When
Francis Fukuyama wrote of the “end of history,” he too warned
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might be “a very sad time,” in which people struggled for meaning
in a world without ideological contestation. On this, he and Hobsbawm
probably would have agreed. 

“It may well be,” Hobsbawm writes with self-awareness in _The Age
of Extremes,_ “that the debate which confronted capitalism and
socialism as mutually exclusive and polar opposites will be seen by
future generations as a relic of the twentieth-century ideological
Cold Wars of Religion … as irrelevant to the third millennium as the
debate between Catholics and various reformers in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries on what constituted true Christianity proved to
be in the eighteenth and nineteenth.” Probably so: Already it seems
to me unlikely that the Soviet Union would be treated as the crucial
feature of the twentieth century. But historians need records like
_The Age of Extremes_ so that we can remember what the world felt like
to someone who belonged to a time that is no longer our own, with
neither condescension nor nostalgia. 

Patrick Iber [[link removed]]
@PatrickIber [[link removed]]

Patrick Iber is an associate professor of history at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison and co-editor of _Dissent_ magazine.

* Eric Hobsbawm; The Age of Extremes; 20th Century History;
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