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The early reviews of Richard J. Evans’ biography of the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012) fell into two distinct categories. From the one side came straightforward intimations of contempt, in which an “evil sod”, as one anonymous critic put it, was roundly excoriated for his want of patriotism, his sympathy for Stalin and his alleged treachery.
From the other came more measured accounts of his professional triumphs and the vagaries of his private life, punctuated by a steady drip of regret that he had never felt able to recant his support for the Soviet regimes of the 1930s. Even the Observer review by Neil Ascherson, a one-time pupil who spoke at his memorial service, admitted that his former tutor’s political statements up until 1956 – the year of the Hungarian uprising – “make unhappy reading”.
There is a quite a bit of unhappy reading in Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History, which turns out to be overlong (650 pages of text plus another 100 or so of end-notes), over-admiring, over-defensive, and heroically over-absorbed in such weighty matters as the editorial finesse brought to bear on its subject’s autobiography, Interesting Times.
On the other hand, there are two areas in which Evans – Regius Professor of History emeritus at Cambridge and a world authority on the Third Reich – scores highly. The first is what might be called the question of Hobsbawm’s political upbringing in pre-Nazi Germany, from which his businessman father sprang him in 1933. The second takes in his conception of what the role of a Left-wing historian in a western parliamentary democracy ought to be.
To return to the intimations of contempt, there is no getting away from Hobsbawm’s inflexibility over Stalin, for it runs through his career like quartz through a rock. All very well for Evans to protest that the question put to him by Michael Ignatieff in a notorious TV interview (“What it comes down to is saying that had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of 15, 20 million people might have been justified?”) was “hypothetical”, but the fact remains that Ignatieff asked it and Hobsbawm by no means reluctantly answered “yes”. To Evans, the explanation lies in “tribal” loyalties: the reaction of a teenager who had seen Nazism at work, clung limpet-like to the only force he believed to be capable of opposing it, and could never quite bring himself to forswear the affiliations of his formative years.
Communism, to Hobsbawm, was never a ‘God that failed’, to borrow the title of that famous symposium from 1949 by a collective of ex-Communists headed by Arthur Koestler; it was simply a God who had made the fatal mistake of manifesting himself in the wrong place and at the wrong time: come the collapse of the Berlin Wall, he veered much closer to the traditional territory of the Labour pragmatist, for whom even an electoral pact with the LibDems was not too insensate a step if it meant the end of the hated Tories.
But as well as being a tribalist, Hobsbawm was also, as Evans shows in extravagant detail, a classic example of a type of apparatchik that Left-wing political parties of the 20th century, whether British or continental, have always hastened to attract: the intellectual guru.
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