Eric Hobsbawm
Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm CH FRSL FBA (/ˈhɒbz.bɔːm/; 9 June 1917 – 1 October 2012) was a British historian of the rise of industrial capitalism, socialism and nationalism. His best-known works include his tetralogy about what he called the "long 19th century" (The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848, The Age of Capital: 1848–1875 and The Age of Empire: 1875–1914) and the "short 20th century" (The Age of Extremes), and an edited volume that introduced the influential idea of "invented traditions". A life-long Marxist, his socio-political convictions influenced the character of his work.[1]
"Hobsbawm" redirects here. For the British businessman, son of Eric Hobsbawm, see Andy Hobsbawm. For the British academic, daughter of Eric Hobsbawm, see Julia Hobsbawm.
Eric Hobsbawm
Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm
9 June 1917
Alexandria, Sultanate of Egypt
1 October 2012 (aged 95)
London, England
Historian
British
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Muriel Seaman(m. 1943; div. 1951)
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Marlene Schwartz(m. 1962)
Hobsbawm was born in Alexandria, Egypt, and spent his childhood mainly in Vienna and Berlin. Following the death of his parents and the rise to power of Adolf Hitler, Hobsbawm moved to London with his adoptive family. After serving in the Second World War, he obtained his PhD in history at the University of Cambridge. In 1998, he was appointed to the Order of the Companions of Honour. He was president of Birkbeck, University of London, from 2002 until his death.[2] In 2003, he received the Balzan Prize for European History since 1900, "for his brilliant analysis of the troubled history of 20th century Europe and for his ability to combine in-depth historical research with great literary talent."
Early life and education[edit]
Eric Hobsbawm was born in 1917 in Alexandria, Egypt. His father was Leopold Percy Hobsbaum (né Obstbaum), a Jewish merchant from the East End of London of Polish Jewish descent [the name Obstbaum ("Fruit Tree") is German, however, not Polish].[3] His mother was Nelly Hobsbaum (née Grün), who was from a middle-class Austrian Jewish family. Although both of his parents were Jewish, neither was observant.[4] His early childhood was spent in Vienna, Austria, and Berlin, Germany. A clerical error at birth altered his surname from Hobsbaum to Hobsbawm.[5] Although the family lived in German-speaking countries, he grew up speaking English as his first language.[6]
In 1929, when Hobsbawm was 12, his father died, and he started contributing to his family's support by working as an au pair and English tutor. Upon the death of their mother in 1931, he and his sister Nancy were adopted by their maternal aunt, Gretl, and paternal uncle, Sidney, who married and had a son named Peter. Hobsbawm was a student at the Prinz Heinrich-Gymnasium Berlin (today Friedrich-List-School) when the Nazi Party came to power in 1933. That year the family moved to London, where Hobsbawm enrolled in St Marylebone Grammar School.[5] His migration from Germany created the false belief that Hobsbawm was a refugee, which persisted throughout his life, while he was actually British by birth because of his father's nationality.[6][7]
Hobsbawm attended King's College, Cambridge, from 1936,[8] where he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain "in the form of the university's Socialist Club."[6] He took a double-starred first in History and was elected to the Cambridge Apostles. He received a doctorate (PhD) in History from Cambridge University for his dissertation on the Fabian Society. During the Second World War, he served in the Royal Engineers and the Army Educational Corps. He was prevented from serving overseas after he attracted the attention of the security services by using the wall newspaper he edited during his army training to argue for the opening up of a Second Front, which was a demand made by the Communist Party of Great Britain at the time. He applied to return to Cambridge as a research student, and was released from the military in 1946.[4]
Academia[edit]
MI5 opened a personal file on Hobsbawm in 1942 and their monitoring of his activities was to affect the progress of his career for many years.[7] In 1945, he applied to the BBC for a full-time post making educational broadcasts to help servicemen adjust to civilian life after a long period in the forces and was considered "a most suitable candidate". The appointment was swiftly vetoed by MI5 who believed Hobsbawm was unlikely "to lose any opportunity he may get to disseminate propaganda and obtain recruits for the Communist party".[6] In 1947, he became a lecturer in history at Birkbeck College, University of London which, unusually at the time, lacked any inclination towards anti-communism among staff or students.[7] He became reader in 1959, professor between 1970 and 1982 and an emeritus professor of history in 1982. He was a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, from 1949 to 1955.[5] Hobsbawm said there was a weaker version of McCarthyism that took hold in Britain and affected Marxist academics: "you didn't get promotion for 10 years, but nobody threw you out".[9] Hobsbawm was denied a lectureship at Cambridge by political enemies, and, given that he was also blocked for a time from a professorship at Birkbeck for the same reasons, spoke of his good fortune at having got a post at Birkbeck in 1948 before the Cold War really started to take off.[9] Conservative commentator David Pryce-Jones has questioned the existence of such career obstacles.[10]
Hobsbawm helped found the academic journal Past & Present in 1952.[9] He was a visiting professor at Stanford University in the 1960s. In 1970s, he was appointed professor and in 1976 he became a Fellow of the British Academy.[11] He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1971 and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2006.[12]
Hobsbawm formally retired from Birkbeck in 1982, becoming Emeritus Professor of History, and was appointed as president of Birkbeck in 2002.[2] He remained as visiting professor at The New School for Social Research in Manhattan between 1984 and 1997. He was, until his death, professor emeritus in the New School for Social Research in the Political Science Department. A polyglot, he spoke English, German, French, Spanish, and Italian fluently, and read Dutch, Portuguese, and Catalan.[5]
Works[edit]
Hobsbawm wrote extensively on many subjects as one of Britain's most prominent historians. As a Marxist historiographer he has focused on analysis of the "dual revolution" (the political French Revolution and the British Industrial Revolution). He saw their effect as a driving force behind the predominant trend towards liberal capitalism today. Another recurring theme in his work was social banditry, which Hobsbawm placed in a social and historical context, thus countering the traditional view of it being a spontaneous and unpredictable form of primitive rebellion.[5][13][14][15][16][17][18] He coined the term "long nineteenth century", which begins with the French Revolution in 1789 and ends with the start of World War I in 1914.
He published numerous essays in various intellectual journals, dealing with subjects such as barbarity in the modern age, the troubles of labour movements, and the conflict between anarchism and communism. Among his final publications were Globalisation, Democracy and Terrorism (2007), On Empire (2008) and the collection of essays How to Change the World: Marx and Marxism 1840–2011 (2011).
Outside his academic historical writing, Hobsbawm wrote a regular column about jazz for the New Statesman (under the pseudonym Francis Newton, taken from the name of Billie Holiday's communist trumpet player, Frankie Newton). He had become interested in jazz during the 1930s when it was frowned upon by the Communist Party.[6] Hobsbawm occasionally wrote about other forms of popular music, such as in his 1963 article "Beatles and before", in which he predicts that the Beatles "are probably just about to begin their slow descent" and that "[i]n 29 years' time nothing of them will survive."[19]
Personal life[edit]
Hobsbawm's friend, historian Donald Sassoon, wrote that: "Hobsbawm was not a Jewish historian; he was an historian who happened to be Jewish."[54] His first marriage was to Muriel Seaman in 1943. They divorced in 1951.[3] His second marriage was to Marlene Schwarz (in 1962), with whom he had two children, Julia Hobsbawm and Andy Hobsbawm. He had an out-of-wedlock son, Joshua Bennathan, who was born in 1958[55] and died in November 2014.[3][56]
Impact[edit]
Owing to his status as a widely read and prominent Communist historian, and the fact that his ideology had influenced his work, Hobsbawm has been credited with spreading Marxist thought around the globe.[1] His writings reached particular prominence in India and Brazil in the 1960s and 1970s at a time of lively debate about these countries' political and social future.[1] Emile Chabal, in an essay for Aeon, wrote: "In the period from the early 1960s to the late '80s, Marxists in noncommunist countries were increasingly able to participate in a transnational discussion over the past and future of capitalism, and the most promising agents of revolutionary change. Hobsbawm played a starring role in these discussions – and, occasionally, set the agenda."[1]