The Bourgeois Eric Hobsbawm

The famed Communist historian had distinctly non-Marxist views of high culture.

David A. Bell

August 26, 2014

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September-October 2014

Eric Hobsbawm, Fractured Times: Culture and Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: The New Press, 2014), 336 pp., $27.95.

 

IN A FAMOUS exchange in 1994, Michael Ignatieff asked Eric Hobsbawm whether the vast human costs inflicted by Stalin on the Soviet Union could possibly be justified. Hobsbawm replied, "Probably not. . . . because it turns out that the Soviet Union was not the beginning of the world revolution. Had it been, I'm not sure." Do you mean, Ignatieff pressed him, that "had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of fifteen, twenty million people might have been justified?" Hobsbawm answered, "Yes."

Two years after Hobsbawm's death at the age of ninety-five, his lifelong, unapologetic Communism remains for many the most important thing about him. To his critics on the right, it discredits him, pure and simple. On the left, even some commentators who took more admirable stances on Communist tyrannies treat his steadfast commitment to the USSR as, to quote Perry Anderson, "evidence of an exceptional integrity and strength of character." They refer with something approaching reverence to the justification he formulated in his 2002 autobiography, Interesting Times: "Emotionally, as one converted as a teenager in the Berlin of 1932, I belonged to the generation tied by an almost unbreakable umbilical cord to hope of the world revolution, and of its original home, the October Revolution."

But in what ways did Hobsbawm's politics really shape the voluminous writings that made him one of the most famous historians of the past century? Certainly, the dynamic and destructive energies of capitalism constitute the central theme of his most famous work: the grand quartet of general histories that proceed from The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848 to The Age of Extremes, 1914–1991. Without whitewashing Stalin's crimes, the last of these nonetheless argued that the Soviet example led directly to the West's adoption of Keynesian economics and the welfare state. Yet the books offered anything but a rigidly Marxist interpretation, and generally eschewed sharply polemical language. It is doubtful that a true Stalinist ideologue could have been saluted at his death (admittedly, by the Guardian) as "arguably Britain's most respected historian of any kind," or received the title of "Companion of Honour" from Queen Elizabeth II in 1998. Niall Ferguson (hardly an ideological soulmate) called him a "truly great historian." Among the members of the left-wing student group called the Cambridge Apostles, it was Kim Philby, not Eric Hobsbawm, who actually went to work for Stalin, and lived out his final decades in lonely, crapulous Moscow exile.

Hobsbawm's posthumous book of essays, Fractured Times, gives considerable insight into the factors other than Communist politics that shaped his outlook—and that shaped it more strongly. Like most such collections it is something of a mixed bag, with forgettable book reviews and superficial lectures jostling for space with several trenchant and beautifully written essays. At first glance it also seems to be detached from the main themes of Hobsbawm's historical work—namely, capitalism, revolution, war and the "primitive rebels" against the social order whom he examined in his 1959 book of that title (the book that first brought him real fame). Fractured Times deals mostly with high culture in the twentieth century, in an unapologetically elitist tone. But it is precisely this subject matter and this tone that reveal something often overlooked about Eric Hobsbawm. For all his commitment to international Communism, he was also profoundly, if paradoxically, bourgeois, and in a distinctly Jewish way.

 

HOBSBAWM'S UPBRINGING was certainly that of a bourgeois Jew. His father came from a Jewish trade background in the East End of London; his mother was the daughter of a Jewish Viennese jeweler. Born in Alexandria in 1917, Eric spent his childhood in Vienna and then, from 1931, after the death of his parents, with an aunt and uncle in Berlin. Although English was the language of his homes, his larger middle-class milieu was characterized by a deep reverence for German high culture: Goethe and Schiller, Mozart and Beethoven. In Berlin, amid the misery of the Depression and the turmoil accompanying the collapse of the Weimar Republic, the teenage Hobsbawm was swept into street politics. He later compared the intense experience of "participation in a mass demonstration at a time of great public exaltation" to sex. But after Hitler's seizure of power the family relocated to London, where Hobsbawm finished his secondary education at that most middle-class of British institutions, the grammar school, and spent his spare hours reading Romantic poetry and listening to jazz, along with selling Communist Party pamphlets. From there, it was off to Cambridge, and his exceptionally long and productive intellectual career.

Politics, in fact, shaped this career less than many of Hobsbawm's obituaries suggested. His membership in the British Communist Party and on the editorial board of the party's main organ Marxism Today may have kept him from a glittering Cambridge professorship, and made travel to the United States difficult, but his position at Birkbeck College, University of London hardly amounted to Siberian exile. Nor did he do much of the actual street-level work—leafleting, picketing, organizing—of ordinary Communist militants (he famously chastised fellow left-wing historian and peace activist E. P. Thompson for neglecting historical scholarship in favor of political organizing). Like most intellectuals who had come of age in the thirties, Hobsbawm also had trouble taking the political and cultural upheavals of the sixties seriously. Rather than making common cause with the British New Left, he talked about the impending death of socialism and supported the New Labour movement eventually headed by Tony Blair. He proudly boasted that he had never worn blue jeans, and once attributed the success of rock and roll to "infantilism." His own musical passion remained jazz, which for many years he reviewed with great flair, under the pseudonym Francis Newton, for the New Statesman.

The essays in Fractured Times that deal with Hobsbawm's formative bourgeois Jewish milieu do so not just with insight, but also with respect. They take as a starting point the intense identification that middle-class European Jews of the late nineteenth century felt with their countries' high cultures: French, Russian, Hungarian and especially German. Throughout Central Europe, Jews seeking emancipation from the "self-segregation" of the shtetl (it was not, of course, entirely the Jews' own choice) found in German culture a path toward professional and social distinction. Embracing it, Hobsbawm notes, also proved the most effective way of separating themselves, in their own eyes as well as those of their gentile neighbors, from the uneducated, religious, Yiddish-speaking Jewish masses to the east. Hobsbawm also makes, quite keenly, another point: "The passion of emancipated Jews for the national languages and cultures of their gentile countries was all the more intense, because in so many cases they were not joining, as it were, long-established clubs but clubs of which they could see themselves almost as founder members." What we now see as German high culture, at least in philosophy, literature and the visual arts (Kant, Goethe, etc.), took shape in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, just as German Jews were first gaining civil rights and prominent positions in gentile society. In the great multilingual stew of Austria-Hungary, the Jewish passion for everything German was unrivaled (although in Hungary itself, some Jews did prefer the local vernacular). Hobsbawm offers as an example (twice!) the heavily Jewish town of Brody, in Galicia, once Austro-Hungarian, and subsequently Polish, Soviet and Ukrainian. In the nineteenth century, its principal languages were Yiddish and Ukrainian, but the Jewish town fathers nonetheless insisted that its schools adopt German as their language of instruction.

In these essays, Hobsbawm dwells on past Jewish achievements with something approaching ethnic pride. He enumerates Jewish Nobel Prize winners, and gives long lists of Jews who dominated their respective fields ("Heine, Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Ricardo, Marx, Disraeli. . . . Modigliani, Pascin, Marcoussis, Chagall, Soutine, Epstein, Lipchitz, Lissitzky, Zadkine"). He speaks of the "enormous oilfield of [Jewish] talent . . . waiting to be tapped by the most admirable of all human movements, the Enlightenment." And this refugee from Hitler says of German culture: "Only those who have experienced the force, the grandeur and the beauty of that culture, which made the Bulgarian Jew Elias Canetti write in the middle of the Second World War that 'the language of my intellect will remain German,' can fully realise what its loss meant." It is no wonder that Hobsbawm was a devotee of Joseph Roth, the Jewish novelist who composed that piercing elegy for the German-speaking Habsburg Empire, Radetzky March.

Hobsbawm also perceptively notes that in many cases, Jews did not simply embrace high culture, but also ended up giving it a distinctly Jewish flavor. In Vienna, where the Jewish population soared from less than four thousand in 1848 to 175,000 in 1914, Jews played an outsized role in shaping middle-class institutions, artistic genres and forms of humor (the same, it might be noted, was true of Budapest and, later, New York). By the twentieth century, Jewish writers and artists were weaving more and more recognizably Jewish themes into their work. Hobsbawm muses that when it comes to Jewish cultural creativity, "a certain degree of uneasiness in the relationship between them and non-Jews has proved historically useful," pointing out that the end of the nineteenth century—the years of the Dreyfus Affair in France and the anti-Semitic Mayor Kurt Lueger in Vienna—was in fact a time of "maximum stimulus for Jewish talent."

 

IN NONE OF these essays does Hobsbawm let drop even a hint of contempt for the bourgeois settings in which the cultural developments in question took place. Unlike, say, Karl Marx, he does not poke beneath the surface of Enlightenment philosophy in search of a rancidly selfish "bourgeois ideology." And unlike the cultural radicals of the sixties, he does not reject high culture as the suffocating exhalations of a dead, white, male Establishment. Quite the contrary. He speaks of the Enlightenment with pure admiration, and at the end of the book laments the retreat of its values, "faced with the anti-universal powers of 'blood and soil' and the radical-reactionary tendencies developing in all world religions."

The chapters that deal with twentieth-century culture feel very similar in tone. Indeed, while Hobsbawm has characteristically smart things to say along the way, these essays also voice exasperation with cultural experimentation that sometimes verges on the curmudgeonly. Hobsbawm regrets the fact that so little contemporary classical music and opera reaches popular audiences, leaving performers to live on dead repertoires. "Overwhelmingly, operatic production . . . consists of attempts to freshen up eminent graves by putting different sets of flowers on them." Contemporary sculpture, he says, has a "miserable existence," while the break with pictorial representation a hundred years ago put avant-garde painting "on the way to nowhere." Indeed, Hobsbawm speaks of the "historic failure" of pictorial art in the twentieth century. As for philosophy, he writes, a little cringe-inducingly, that its practitioners can no longer compete with "Bono or Eno," or the "universal noise of Facebook." An essay simply titled "The Avant-Garde Fails," originally published in 1998, states, "Disney's animations, however inferior to the austere beauty of Mondrian, were both more revolutionary than oil-painting, and better at passing on their message."

These assessments may be defensible, but Hobsbawm, at least here, doesn't really try to defend them. Rather, he simply pronounces, and therefore sounds too much like an indignant middle-aged museumgoer circa 1950 expostulating about the dots and drips of abstract expressionism. At least he does not try to assign blame for the "failures," and makes sensible if unoriginal points about the way the invention of mechanical reproduction changed representational art. As early as 1850, he notes, critics were warning of the threat posed by photography to lithography and portraiture. But he leaves readers with the strong sense that he would have felt much more comfortable in the long-vanished cultural world of German-speaking Central Europe.

 

THESE EX cathedra judgments will hardly surprise longtime readers of Hobsbawm. One collection of his lectures bore the title Behind the Times: The Decline and Fall of the Twentieth-Century Avant Gardes. Much of what he says in Fractured Times he also said there, and in his autobiography. His four-part world history brims with sharp, confident pronouncements on all manner of artistic and literary endeavors. But this new collection underlines Hobsbawm's belief in the essential autonomy of these endeavors. Politics and economics, in his view, can powerfully affect the arts—he considers periods of political anxiety and economic crisis particularly useful for spurring creativity. Technology can do so as well. But in no way can works be read primarily as reflections of their social and economic origins. For Hobsbawm, the difference between a bourgeois work of art and a proletarian one matters less than the difference between a good work of art and a bad one. In this, he not only indicates his own good sense, but also echoes the stance taken by the late nineteenth-century bourgeoisie, which embraced the idea of "art for art's sake" and believed that raising children in the properly "cultivated" manner meant equipping them with the ability to make proper critical distinctions.

In the preface to Fractured Times, Hobsbawm relates its essays to the larger themes of his historical work, and formulates the following thesis. "The logic of both capitalist development and bourgeois civilisation itself," he writes, "were bound to destroy its foundation, a society and institutions run by a progressive elite minority." Technological innovation, mass politics and above all the rise of "mass consumption" made it impossible for the educated bourgeoisie to dictate taste to the rest of the population, or even to preserve their own cultural practices and institutions. In a world of mass entertainment, swept by constant technological innovation and the ceaseless pursuit of the new, artistic and literary production could no longer consist primarily of adding a steady stream of fresh, critically approved works to a stable canon. The traditional forms themselves—orchestral music, opera, framed painting—waned, and the cultural initiative passed to the producers of film, television and rock music. Symphony halls closed while Hollywood grew fat.

It is a compelling thesis, one that jibes well with the story Hobsbawm told in his histories about the power of capitalism to make and unmake societies: to hasten revolution, transform living conditions, beget empires and finally lead the world into the massively destructive "age of extremes." But it does not cast capitalist development as the "structure" that determines the actual content of culture. And so it allows him, at least in part, to rescue the ideals that governed the bourgeois Jewish mitteleuropäisch world of his childhood from the cynical condescension of posterity. Hobsbawm freely admits the socially elitist nature of this world. He notes that on the eve of World War I, in Britain, France and Germany, only a tiny percentage of the population attended university. Total enrollment in higher education, out of a combined population of 150 million, barely reached 150,000. If pressed, Hobsbawm would certainly have conceded that even among these educated thousands, many came closer to the satirical figure known as the Spießbürger (the Philistine petty bourgeois) than to an embodiment of proper Kultur. He ends the preface with a frail paean to the "century of common men and women" which followed, and which produced new, original, hybrid art forms (jazz?), and he quotes the familiar mocking lines of "Prufrock" on the limits of bourgeois culture: "In the room the women come and go, / Talking of Michelangelo." But in the end he cannot hide his fear that mass culture has fundamentally corrupted the arts, while the essays themselves, as noted, breathe with more than a little nostalgia for a world in which people did, at least, talk about Michelangelo.

 

AS A HISTORIAN, Hobsbawm's great strength was always as a synthesizer. He was not an "archive hound" who lived to track down new facts amid the dusty cartons of a provincial public-records office. Nor was he a theorist who cogitated in thick, jargon-filled prose about the ideological structures underpinning historical change. He relied heavily on the work of other historians, and his writing was enviably lucid, witty and accessible. He was in fact a master of this style of history, which has long flourished in Britain, but also has something in common with the entertaining works (Stefan Zweig's and Emil Ludwig's, for instance) that appealed to the history-reading public of prewar Central Europe. For these reasons, while fellow historians generally speak of Hobsbawm with great respect, they do not actually cite him very often. There was never a real "Hobsbawm School," and a generation from now, his works are unlikely to find a wide readership.

Yet Hobsbawm's theses about capitalism and culture, however impressionistically sketched out, remain worthy of attention. In some ways, interestingly, they recall a far more self-consciously theoretical, far more difficult work by the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, initially published in 1962 and entitled, in English translation, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Habermas, born just twelve years after Hobsbawm, was then a Marxist of sorts, although an eclectic one. This work tells the story of how the commercial capitalism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, thanks to the premium that merchants placed on timely and accurate news, spurred the development of new forms of public communication. Newspapers were born, and, along with them, new spaces to discuss the news, such as coffee houses, literary salons and lending libraries. New forms of public discussion followed, in which contributors participated as equals and placed few if any topics outside the reach of rational critique. From such forms of discussion and such spaces—the "bourgeois public sphere"—arose a spirit of critique and contestation that eventually expressed itself in revolutionary action. The vision of the public sphere as rational and free was always, Habermas recognized, more an ideal than a reality. Only educated men of a certain social class could actually participate, and a spirit of rational exchange did not always predominate. But however imperfect, it did exist—for a time. It could not, however, survive the further development of capitalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As voracious new business interests came to dominate newspaper publishing, and to dictate the content of publications, the older forms of free discussion were corrupted beyond recognition. Habermas's book, while much debated, remains an intriguing, powerful and much-read account of the birth of the modern age.

Habermas's story has quite a bit in common with Hobsbawm's, despite their differences in emphasis, chronology and style. Each of these two Marxisant thinkers hoped to trace the way capitalist development, at one stage of history, helped to generate certain identifiably bourgeois ideals. Both then saw these ideals undermined by the further progress of capitalism. But both showed a surprising appreciation for the initial ideals—the "public sphere" for one, and the reverence for a tolerant, high-minded high culture for the other. In fact, both scholars took these ideals seriously enough to use them as yardsticks against which to measure the flaws of the modern age.

Somewhat ironically, given Hobsbawm's vocal Communist politics, it is this side of his work, rather than his Marxism, that now does the most to keep it readable and relevant. The political tyrannies to which he professed loyalty have collapsed so completely that even the ideals they proclaimed can no longer function seriously as yardsticks against which to measure anything. The hope of a world revolution springing from the source of the October Revolution has joined its original exponent, Leon Trotsky, in the place he himself named the "ash heap of history." But the impulse that drove the doomed Jews of Central Europe to define their new, emancipated status by their veneration for high-minded, beautiful poetry and painting, novels and plays, symphonies and operas—surely that is something for which we should all continue to feel more than a little nostalgia.

 

David A. Bell is the Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor in the Era of North Atlantic Revolutions at Princeton University.

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