Uncommon People - Resistance, Rebellion and Jazz, by Eric Hobsbawm, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 360pp, £20 in UK
For Western Europeans today political revolution in their own societies is inconceivable. By way of compensation, social reforms, such as the altered relationship between men and women, are described as revolutionary, which they are not, though this may indicate a hankering after revolutionary transformation within the acquisitive society. In an essay here entitled "Revolution and Sex", Eric Hobsbawm points out that where revolutions have occurred in the 20th century their specific value to women has lain not in abolishing sexual prohibitions but in a "major act of social emancipation: the liberation of women from their oppression".
Anarchism in its classical phase conceived of free love not as promiscuous abandon but as monogamy without legal contract - and without drink or drugs. Revolutions have been at all times similarly characterised by puritanism rather than permissiveness. The latter, Hobsbawm argues, is widely used by ruling elites to sustain bourgeois hegemony: "rulers find it convenient to encourage sexual permissiveness or laxity among their subjects if only to keep their mind off their subjection". In any event cultural revolts are marginal to revolutionary projects: these derive their effectiveness from politics itself rather than from culture.
"Revolution and Sex" is one of twenty-six essays in a collection written between the 1950s and the present. A particularly telling test of Hobsbawm's abilities is an essay published in 1969 on events in France during May of the previous year. Although formulated so soon after the revolt, Hobsbawn's analysis has an abiding value particularly in its emphasis on the ten million striking workers whose role has been overshadowed by that of the more colourful students. The latter he sees as over-revolutionary, aiming their attack at a vaguely-formulated "system" rather than evolving a precise political programme. The failure of the French Communist Party to establish a popular-front government under its own leadership is an issue which has particular pertinence for Hobsbawm, a lifelong member of the British Communist Party.
The French Communist Party had the trust of the workers but was unable to recognise "when the normal conditions of routine politics cease to operate and to adapt its behaviour accordingly". Every significant turn of events took it by surprise - the success of the student revolt, the general strike and the rejection by the workers of the settlement arranged between government and union leaders. Instead the Party was obsessed with the threat by ultra-leftists to Party ascendancy in the trades unions.
He argues that 1968 was not a classical revolutionary situation, although the remarkable fragility of the Gaullist regime meant that a revolutionary situation could have developed. Yet for all its weakness, the regime's refusal to invoke significant force was probably the most astute move by any side. Hobsbawm expresses this point with a characteristic capacity for le mot juste: "Once the velvet glove has been put on the iron fist, it is politically very risky to take it off."
If the student revolutionaries were victims, in part at least, of the vapid borderlessness of their aims, peasant revolts were likely to fail because of the excessive precision of their aims and purposes. Peasant ignorance of a world beyond themselves and the intense localism of their aims meant that national peasant revolts could never occur. The great peasant movements were either regional in character or were coalitions of regional movements and their power was far less than their numerical strength might have suggested. Illiterates in a world of documents, their revolts had to take place outside of harvest-time and were often premised on a belief that all would be put to rights if the far-away king or emperor could only know how things were.
Kings, churches and "proto-nationalism" integrated peasant movements into national politics, the politics of the right more often than of the left, and peasants were principally united, as an essay entitled "Peasants and Politics" points out, in a shared belief that every other class was determined to rob them.
The book also includes seven essays on jazz, a form of music having its roots in oppression, which he suspects may be "terminally fossilised". In all of the essays the common people - you and I - become uncommon people, transforming circumstance and shaping history.
Proinsias O Drisceoil is a critic and Arts administrator