Review: On History, by Eric Hobsbawm

New York: New Press, 1997, pp. 305.

As the title of his book implies, here historian Eric Hobsbawm is writing less of history here than of historiography. Academic a subject as this may sound, however, this is not a collection of minutely academic articles for ultra-specialists. Over half of the pieces (eleven) are lectures given not in the classroom but at special events at various institutions around the world; two more are conference papers; and two of the pieces originally written for publication were book reviews in non-academic forums--the Times Literary Supplement and the New York Review of Books. It is the case, too, that Hobsbawm is an unfashionably staunch, forceful and persuasive defender of reason and the Enlightenment that he is, and of the value of history and historians as well.

Consequently, despite the methodological emphasis of the book, and the fact that most of his pieces raise more questions than answers, he does not retreat into quasi-metaphysical abstraction, but keeps close to actual practice, with much to say about the investigation of specific historical problems, from social history, history-from-below and urban studies to the historiography of the Russian Revolution. His two-part "Historians and Economists," despite his protestations of being out of his depth in the subject at the start, presents an extremely well-informed and incisive critical intellectual history of the economics profession, and especially its longtime failure to, even disinterest in, grappling with a historical reality that time and again proves the utter worthlessness of their models and their apologia. Despite the methodological emphasis of the book, he does not retreat into quasi-metaphysical abstraction, but keeps close to actual practice, with much to say about the investigation of specific historical problems, from social history, history-from-below and urban studies to the historiography of the Russian Revolution. His two-part "Historians and Economists," despite his protestations of being out of his depth in the subject at the start, presents an extremely well-informed and incisive critical intellectual history of the economics profession, and especially its longtime failure at, and even disinterest in, grappling with a historical reality that time and again demonstrates the utter worthlessness of their models and their apologia (fitting them, as he remarks, for the "dog-collar of the (lay) theologian").

Of course, more than two decades have passed since the publication of this collection, and even at the time many of the pieces were already a generation old. Still, if in places they show their age by treating old phenomena as if they were new (as when he writes of the arrival of Marxism in the Academy, Walt Whitman Rostow's modernization theory, cliometrics, and the break-up of Yugoslavia), they retain their interest because what is past is not past, and in some cases more present than ever--and often, more pervasive, more dominant, more damaging than before. Certainly this the case with his critique of orthodox economists' pieties, but this goes, too, with what he has to say of other unhealthy tendencies of the late twentieth century, like postmodernism and identity politics. As he memorably writes regarding the latter, "few relativists have the full courage of their convictions, at least when it comes to deciding such questions as whether Hitler's Holocaust took place or not," while at any rate, "relativism will not do in history any more than in law courts." There, "[w]hether the accused in a murder trial is or is not guilty depends on the assessment of old-fashioned positivist evidence," and any of his readers who find themselves wrongly placed "in the dock will do well to appeal to it. It is the lawyers for the guilty ones who fall back on postmodern lines of defence."

Indeed, reading Hobsbawm I find myself remembering another book by another great of the past century who "writes of the Enlightenment without a sneer," C. Wright Mills' The Sociological Imagination. Mills was a sociologist who called on social scientists (or "social students?") to be more historically minded, while here Hobsbawm as a historian made a not dissimilar case. Both were entirely right, and that they have been so little heeded has impoverished the lines of inquiry with which they were concerned, and our collective understanding of our own world.