A man of faith

National Interest, The, Summer, 2003 by 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: