Eric Hobsbawm's Vile Politics

Eric Hobsbawm (Photo by Gérard Rondeau)

Mark Mazower, in his “Clear, Inclusive, and Lasting” (The New York Review of Books, July 23, 2020) says of historian Eric Hobsbawm, “The works themselves are his memorial. What is there to learn from his biography?” Well, one thing I learned is that his life and work are intertwined. Hobsbawm was a lifelong member of the Communist party. Even as other writers around him – George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Robert Conquest, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, among others – exposed Soviet Communism's monstrousness, Hobsbawm kept his membership. Hobsbawm’s vile politics distorted his view of history. You don’t have to take my word for it; read Tony Judt’s great essay “Downhill All the Way” (The New York Review of Books, May 25, 1995), a dissection of Hobsbawm’s The Age of Extremes.

Mazower doesn’t mention Judt’s piece. He doesn’t mention the twenty million Soviet citizens killed by Stalin. He treats Hobsbawm’s Communism as a “personal matter” unrelated to his writing. He praises Hobsbawm’s politics for “providing both a kind of ethics of scholarly practice and a vision of collective readership.” That’s bullshit. What it provides is evidence of moral rot.