My Never-Published Review of Eric Hobsbawm’s "Þhe Age of Extremes", &

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FIRST: My Unpublished Review of Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Extremes

From early 1995. People have been asking me why I am not especially enamored of Eric Hobsbawm: The Age of Extremes <https://archive.org/details/ageofextremeshis00hobs_0>.

Hobsbawm was, of course, the pre-eminent Marxist historian of the late-20th century. Born in Alexandria, the son of a middle-class Jewish Polish Briton and a Jewish Austrian, he grew up in Vienna and Berlin before fleeing Hitler with his family to Britain in 1933 at the age of sixteen, and then becoming an academic superstar at Cambridge before the “soft McCarthyism” of post-WWII Britain set in. But his influence on how everyone—Marxist and non-Marxist alike—viewed the economic history of the Industrial Revolution century was and is immense.

My title was David Landes’s idea. My overall view is that up until 1870 Hobsbawm is brilliant, if often wrong in the extent to which his relatively orthodox Marxism closes his mind. But even when his mind is closed, his wrongness is a powerful and stimulating irritant to thought. After 1870, however, his relatively orthodox Marxism keeps him from being able to even see much of what is in front of his face, and that becomes worse as he moves closer to the present, and what is in front of his face is very awkward not just for the movement he committed himself to, but for his own assessment of himself as a man.

My closing:

Brad DeLong: Low Marx: Eric Hobsbawm’s “Age of Extremes”: Eric Hobsbawm might complain that I have been unfair: that my real gripe is that I wish that he had written another, different book. He might say that I want a Book Written for the Ages, that reflects what historians in future centuries will find of greatest interest. And he is right, I do. By contrast, he might say, his book is “written by a twentieth-century writer for late-twentieth-century readers,” to whom “the history of the confrontation between capitalism and socialism… social revolutions, the Cold War, the nature, limits, and fatal flaws of `really existing socialism’ and its breakdown” are worth discussing at length. He is writing for readers who take the central theme of twentieth-century history to be the tragical-heroic course of World Communism.

But the tragical-heroic course of World Communism is simply not the central theme of 20th-century history.

And so for what audience is Hobsbawm writing his book? To what “late 20th-century readers” can we recommend The Age of Extremes, as covering the pieces of 20th-century history they want and need to learn?

For new students seeking a genuine overview, the flaws, euphemisms, and silences arising from Hobsbawm’s past political commitments are too mischievous. Hobsbawm’s past political commitments lead him to believe both that (a) Kim Il Sung was a megalomaniac tyrant, and that (b) U.S. intervention to stop his extending his empire by conquest was a backward step for humanity. You cannot understand the twentieth century without finding an answer to the question of how as keen-eyed an analyst as Eric Hobsbawm can have held both these beliefs—without apparent strain—for more than forty years. Yet Hobsbawm’s book is constructed as if he wants to make it as hard as possible for a new student to figure out that this is an important question to ask.
For informed and experienced students seeking an overview of how the twentieth century changed the world, its focus is awry. Forty percent of space on the rise and fall world religion of Communism, and ten percent on the rise and growth of social democracy with its triple successes—material prosperity, political democracy, and successful creation of middle-class societies—is the wrong balance. Ten percent on the world religion of Communism and forty percent on social democracy would be infinitely preferable
For students of Communism who believe that on balance it—a social movement that has, after all, contributed two of the twentieth century’s three members of the I-killed-thirty-million club (Hitler, Mao, and Stalin), and at least four members of the I-killed-one-million club (Kim Il Sung, Pol Pot, Vladimir Lenin, Mengistu)—was not one of the brighter lights on humanity’s tree of good ideas, the book will be profitable. But it will be profitable as an index of the impact decades of doublethink can leave on a good mind, as well as as an interpretation of history.

How many potential readers are left?

LINK: <https://delong.typepad.com/delong_long_form/1995/05/low-marx-eric-hobsbawms-age-of-extremes.html>

Writing today, in mid-2022, and looking back at this from 27 years later, one point strikes me as of especial interest. It is that my review hints at how much different my forthcoming Slouching Towards Utopia <bit.ly/3pP3Krk> would have been had a written it in the late 1990s and published it as the history of the long 20th century 1870-2000. That would've been much more of a triumphalist-left-neoliberal book:

The explosion of technology at its deployment starting in 1870…
Creating the possibility of grasping utopia…
But also requiring the reinvention of institutions for production, organization, distribution, and utilization every generation…
A process of necessary reinvention that stress societies to the max and caused great misery and destruction…
But humanity finally got it almost right with the 1945 creation of social democracy in the Atlantic west and the 1989 fall of really existing Socialism in the Eurasian heartlands…
And then the fending-off in the 1990s of the rate the liberal reactionary clock turning back challenge gives us great hope for the future…

Now from today’s perspective, you can laugh at even the implicit portrayal of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair as the leading-edge self-consciousness of the World Spirit at the End of History. But there were possibilities in the mid-1990s that we might have been able to grasp. And perhaps George W. Bush’s election “victory” by his 5-4 vote of the only voters who really counted was a decisive and destructive hinge of history. Certainly our world climate thinks so.

As for my major complaints about Hobsbawm, I still think that (1) is dead-on. It is a fact that in the age of extremes the history of what was going on behind the Iron and Bamboo curtains is re-counted twice. First, in its proper place in the chronological sequence of the book, Hobsbawm presents what he thought and wished was going on. Then, later in the book, out of chronological sequence, he has relatively short sections on what was actually going on. And he does this twice: once for Stalin, and once for Mao. Given that he devotes about 40% of his book to the trajectory of really-existing socialism, this makes it very confusing as an introduction to 20th-century history, and thus unsuitable as the first book anybody reads.

I also think (2) is dead-on: the rise and fall of really-existing socialism and it's roll in the first defeat of fascism are important themes of 20th-century history, but they are not the main event.

And as for (3)—well, understanding the self-delusions of the Communists of the interwar and post-WWII period—those whose Kronstadt-moments never came, or came only when the Kosygin economic-reform wing of the CPUSSR was outweighed by the Brezhnev third-world-adventurist wing in the 1970s (rather than coming when they should have, with the December 1917 dissolution of the Constituent Assembly)—that seems to be a matter only for specialists right now. For we have many others whose destructive and demented self-delusions cry out for understanding and action today.

So, no, I do not think there is a mass audience of 21st-century readers for whom The Age of Extremes is worth their time. And that is too bad, for there are a lot of good individual pages in that book, but its flawed architecture is just too great a hobble.

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