The Web-site Philosophical Thoughts sent this image of Eric Hobsbawm to my Facebook home-page a few days ago. Hobsbawm was alternately celebrated and reviled as a lifetime member of the British Communist Party and an academic mainstay of Marxist thinking. His high intelligence and literary skill fueled his noteriety and kept him in the public eye till his death at 95 in 2012. But who and what was this man, really?
My critical thinking demands a better explanation for Hobsbawm, why a well-read, if tendentious, intellectual would support, to his dying day, an economic, political, and social system, which has let down every nation that embraced it—instead has stifled the human spirit, caused unceasing misery, a backward, parsimonious lifestyle, and a concentration of power in the hands of a few, that rivals dictatorships from any era.
His childhood must account for his enduring attitude toward life. A reader cannot miss the frequent relocations and residual sense of alienation from it all. His paternal grandparents lived in Warsaw, Poland, before emigrating to Great Britain—named "Obstbaum", but changed by an immigration officer to "Hobsbawm".
During World War I, his father worked in the British Foreign Office, and his parents married at the Consulate in Zürich, Switzerland, mainly because his Ausrian mother, named Grün, could not travel to Britain, Austria being at that time at war with Britain. The young couple lived away from it all in Egypt, where Eric was born, until after the War when they moved to Vienna.
His father died in 1929, when Eric was just 12, and his mother two years later. He continued on in Vienna, living with relatives, until the Nazi Party came to power in 1933, and they had to flee the country. From then on, he lived in London, enabled by his father's British citizenship, and the fact that his birth took place in a British Consulate.
Hobsbawm's Communist-Party membership held him back from advancing in his career, or gaining employment on professional fronts. Nevertheless, as knowledge of the atrocities committed by the Soviet Union's leaders increased, he held firm that, in the end, history would somehow justify the loss of life and unending repression. After the Soviet Army cracked down on the Hungarian revolt of 1956, for instance, when half the Party membership defected, Hobsbawm remained; and again in 1968 when the Soviets crushed the Prague spring.
In his book Reappraisals, published just after Hobsbawm's death, author Tony Judt tried to make sense of him, limiting himself to a seven-page essay. "And unlike almost every other intellectual to fall under the Communist spell, Hobsbawm evinces no regrets . . . though he concedes the utter defeat of everything Communist stood for . . . 'The dream of the October Revolution is still there inside me.'" Judt remembers one interview conducted with Hobsbawm in which he said that "the prices in human lives and suffering under Stalin would have been worth paying, if the outcomes had been better."
I only bring up Hobsbawm because he is, in a sense, correct. The October Revolution lived on in him. Judt describes this as Hobsbawm's "keping faith with his adolescent self". This says to me that Hobsbawm never really grew up. He reminds me of all the Facebook adolescents who continually praise their favorite historical Marxists, like Paulo Freire and Antonio Gramsci. The adolescent FB-bloggers would rather dish out payback than discuss how to run a country, formulate its policies, or write its constitution.