ERIC HOBSBAWM does not address in these papers and essays the question as to why most abstract discussions of the nature of history are achingly dull. This collection does, however mark a rare exception.
This week he attains his eightieth year. He was born in Alexandria in 1917; his life (unlike his ideology) has traced a steadily westward trajectory: Vienna, Berlin, London, Cambridge, New York. A historian of great distinction, he has been for long a communist, and latterly a tutelary eminence of the broad British left. He can truly be described as humane and cosmopolitan (the equivalent epithets for a historian of the right being "urbane" and "highly civilised").
His writing is a corrective to the dispiriting complacency of conservative historians in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. He rightly loathes the historically illiterate pronouncements of American foreign policy or economic "wonks": W.W. Rostow takes a particular hammering. He is puritanically indifferent to what Sir Stafford Northcote wrote to R.A. Cross on October 8th, 1875, and deplores "a deliberately neo-conservative reversion to the most obsolete form of nineteenth century archive-grubbing". He doubts the statistical underpinnings of the alleged bestseller status of "those fat neo-Victorian biographies of politicians which have recently become the fashion again", and the inevitable swipe at Roy Jenkins duly follows.
While he does not seek to deny its excesses, he is subtly but inexorably recidivistic on all matters pertaining to the Soviet Union. Without defending the Bolshevik regime and its ideological successors and appendages, he calls a remarkable number of shots in their favour. To take just one example, he refers to "the greatest school of barbarism of all, the second world war". It was not the war that was barbaric, but the conduct of the Nazi regime in Germany that provoked it: the oddity of the formulation is due to Hobsbawm's desire to retain a theory of the war as a capitalist crisis. While prepared to lay off his bet, he refuses to cash in his chips. If he does not predict the demise of capitalism, he croaks raven-like at its shudders. He insists that now is not the time to draw up the balance of the Soviet achievement. The greatest tribute to Hobsbawm as a historian is that his intelligence and scholarly integrity is such that this sentimental obduracy does not vitiate any of the historical arguments he advances.
He retains a radical's belief that there are contemporary lessons to be gleaned from history, even if they rarely are: "the safest empirical generalisation about history is that nobody heeds even its obvious lessons much - as any student of the agrarian policies of socialist regimes or Mrs Thatcher's economic policies will confirm." Hobsbawm has elsewhere written superbly of the contrived nature of nationalist dogma, and is a mordant observer of cultural incongruities (he writes here of "the Rhineland managing director hunting elk and boar in the implausible surroundings of socialist republics").
Ireland is a recurrent theme, introduced first in a passage which carries a greater charge than he perhaps intended: "I used to think that the profession of history, unlike that, of say, nuclear physics, could at least do no harm. Now I know it can. Our studies can turn into bomb factories like the work-shops in which the IRA has learned to transform chemical fertilizer into an explosive."
It is not in writing of Ireland but in a criticism of the want of analytical rigour of the Annales school of history, which he otherwise admires, that Hobsbawm raises a central issue in the history of modern Ireland:
Why do peasants demand land, why do peasants demand only land to which they believe they have certain types of legal or moral claims? What is the nature of these claims? Why do they not listen to people who ask them to demand land on other grounds, such as, for instance, the grounds put forward by modern political radicals? . . . It is not because they are stupid. It is not because they don't know any better . . .
What I would like to do is not simply, like Edward Thompson, to save the stockinger and the peasant, but also the nobleman and the king of the past, from the condescension of modern historians . . . I would like to restore to the men of the past, and especially the poor of the past, the gift of theory. Like the hero of Moliere, they have been talking prose all the time. Only whereas the man in Moliere didn't know it himself, I think they have always known it, but we have not. And I think we ought to.
On the strength of writing such as this, one can only commend this collection, and wish Eric Hobsbawm well in his ninth decade.