Ayear or so ago, the journalist Nick Cohen, reviewing a book by the English Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, made the mistake of guessing what Hobsbawm’s obituaries would look like. Those who shared Hobsbawm’s political commitments would laud his work, Mr Cohen predicted. Those who did not would say “his loyalty to totalitarianism disfigured his writing”. There would be little agreement between the two camps.
Hobsbawm died last week at the age of 95 and Mr Cohen turns out to have been wrong. Whatever the view in recent years, there is today a remarkable consensus about Hobsbawm. Almost no one makes big claims for the communism that he professed, but almost no one dissents, either, from the view that places him among the great historians of his time.
No matter how loudly Hobsbawm proclaimed the communist dogma, his cast of mind was independent. It was too independent for the Soviet Union, which translated none of his sweeping narratives on nationalism, industrialism, imperialism and globalism. Whether or not Hobsbawm is considered a radical communist, he was an impenitent communist. He clung to his party card through the invasions of Czechoslovakia and Hungary, and past the fall of the Berlin Wall. He was sometimes biased. He blamed the liberal democracies for Stalin’s decision to ally himself with Hitler.