Oct 29, 2026 09:50 PM
(This post was last modified: Yesterday 02:25 AM by C C.)
Review of "The Age of Hobsbawm: The Life of a Revolutionary Historian" (by Emile Chabal)
https://jacobin.substack.com/p/eric-hobs...-of-defeat
EXCERPTS: For a new generation of politically committed historians, the struggles of Eric Hobsbawm — a communist who had lived in Berlin when the Nazis came to power, been in Paris at the height of the Popular Front in 1936, and traveled to Spain during the civil war — could be inspiring.
[...] In 2018, the historian Emile Chabal traveled to Delhi where he encountered a group of left-wing students who admired Hobsbawm’s work. ... But as Chabal asks, what can the life of Hobsbawm — the historical figure rather than the myth — teach us about the prospects of the Left today?
[...] Emile Chabal’s The Age of Hobsbawm ... enters crowded territory. Yet his new biography provides an excellent opportunity to revisit the life of a committed communist through the wider history of twentieth-century communism and to ask what Hobsbawm might teach us at another moment of profound uncertainty for the international Left.
[...] Chabal critically reconstructs how Hobsbawm remained skeptical of, and at times openly hostile toward, aspects of the legacy of the New Left and postmodernism. One revealing example is a letter reproduced by Chabal in which Hobsbawm responded to a student who proposed reconstructing a historical narrative in which gender, race, sexuality, and subjectivity would be central rather than adjuncts to a “grand narrative.” Hobsbawm rejected the proposed approach as neither his “kind of history” nor, in his view, Karl Marx’s, and regarded the project as symptomatic of the retreat of the Left.
[...] Hobsbawm’s attitude toward the New Left had two important and contradictory consequences. It left him poorly equipped to understand some of the new political forces that emerged after the 1960s, including feminism, identity politics, new social movements, cultural politics, and some forms of anti-colonial and postcolonial politics. It narrowed his political analysis, but in some respects it also strengthened it. Less attached to the revolutionary optimism associated with parts of the New Left, Hobsbawm became one of the first major Marxist intellectuals in Britain to confront directly the decline of traditional industrial working-class politics.
[...] Finally came the collapse of communism in 1989–91 and the emergence of the post–Cold War world ... For Hobsbawm, the collapse of communism was therefore not simply a geopolitical event. It represented the disappearance of the world that had shaped his political and intellectual imagination since his youth.
[...] His biography reveals that his greatest political strength was not his loyalty to a particular communist doctrine but his capacity to rethink socialist strategy after defeat. This is why returning to Hobsbawm now is more useful than simply celebrating him as the great historian of a vanished left. The value of his life lies neither in nostalgia for twentieth-century communism nor in finding a political blueprint among his writings.
It lies instead in his persistent willingness to ask difficult questions after defeat. Who are the agents of political transformation when the old working class changes? How can movements with different interests be brought into a common political project? How should the Left respond when its inherited organizations cease to command loyalty? And, most importantly, how can political defeat become an opportunity for strategic reconstruction rather than permanent retreat? (MORE - missing details)
https://jacobin.substack.com/p/eric-hobs...-of-defeat
EXCERPTS: For a new generation of politically committed historians, the struggles of Eric Hobsbawm — a communist who had lived in Berlin when the Nazis came to power, been in Paris at the height of the Popular Front in 1936, and traveled to Spain during the civil war — could be inspiring.
[...] In 2018, the historian Emile Chabal traveled to Delhi where he encountered a group of left-wing students who admired Hobsbawm’s work. ... But as Chabal asks, what can the life of Hobsbawm — the historical figure rather than the myth — teach us about the prospects of the Left today?
[...] Emile Chabal’s The Age of Hobsbawm ... enters crowded territory. Yet his new biography provides an excellent opportunity to revisit the life of a committed communist through the wider history of twentieth-century communism and to ask what Hobsbawm might teach us at another moment of profound uncertainty for the international Left.
[...] Chabal critically reconstructs how Hobsbawm remained skeptical of, and at times openly hostile toward, aspects of the legacy of the New Left and postmodernism. One revealing example is a letter reproduced by Chabal in which Hobsbawm responded to a student who proposed reconstructing a historical narrative in which gender, race, sexuality, and subjectivity would be central rather than adjuncts to a “grand narrative.” Hobsbawm rejected the proposed approach as neither his “kind of history” nor, in his view, Karl Marx’s, and regarded the project as symptomatic of the retreat of the Left.
[...] Hobsbawm’s attitude toward the New Left had two important and contradictory consequences. It left him poorly equipped to understand some of the new political forces that emerged after the 1960s, including feminism, identity politics, new social movements, cultural politics, and some forms of anti-colonial and postcolonial politics. It narrowed his political analysis, but in some respects it also strengthened it. Less attached to the revolutionary optimism associated with parts of the New Left, Hobsbawm became one of the first major Marxist intellectuals in Britain to confront directly the decline of traditional industrial working-class politics.
[...] Finally came the collapse of communism in 1989–91 and the emergence of the post–Cold War world ... For Hobsbawm, the collapse of communism was therefore not simply a geopolitical event. It represented the disappearance of the world that had shaped his political and intellectual imagination since his youth.
[...] His biography reveals that his greatest political strength was not his loyalty to a particular communist doctrine but his capacity to rethink socialist strategy after defeat. This is why returning to Hobsbawm now is more useful than simply celebrating him as the great historian of a vanished left. The value of his life lies neither in nostalgia for twentieth-century communism nor in finding a political blueprint among his writings.
It lies instead in his persistent willingness to ask difficult questions after defeat. Who are the agents of political transformation when the old working class changes? How can movements with different interests be brought into a common political project? How should the Left respond when its inherited organizations cease to command loyalty? And, most importantly, how can political defeat become an opportunity for strategic reconstruction rather than permanent retreat? (MORE - missing details)