The Centuries of Eric Hobsbawm II: THURSDAY HISTORIOGRAPHY
Hobsbawm’s Long Nineteenth Century—in which his unshakeable bedrock foundational commitment to Marxist teleology is both his superpower & his Akhilleus's heel...
Eric Hobsbawm’s Marxist teleology made him both the greatest narrator of the 1776-1875 not-so-long nineteenth century and a spectacularly poor guide to the 1875-2010 genuinely long twentieth. His political-moral-ideological commitments powered The Age of Revolution and The Age of Capital, making them brilliant. But they became a crippling Procrustean Bed once the Belle Époque, Modern Economic Growth, mass prosperity, nationalist insanity, and stalled socialism made their entrance onto the stage of history.
Last week I read this piece: half Enzo Traverso, and half Emile Chabal, whose forthcoming Hobsbawm biography Traverso is reviewing.
Eric J. Hobsbawm… published critically acclaimed memoirs, and today—fourteen years after his death—is the subject of two biographies, the latest of which… by Emile Chabal…. Richard J. Evans knew Hobsbawm… and his book… stands as… official biography…. Evans carefully reconstituted a historian’s life and wrote with empathy, not without an apologetic touch. Chabal’s… acknowledged distance is beneficial… his gaze more analytical… a fascinating critical portrait. Hobsbawm is… the greatest historian of the twentieth century… if [that] means that he was the most important scholar to have written on the history of the past century…
Chabal, Emile. 2026 (August 18). The Age of Hobsbawm: The Life of a Revolutionary Historian. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Hobsbawm’s work is not simply descriptive history. It is an argument about the direction of human history. That argument is embedded in nearly every page he wrote. It is a Marxist teleology. It treats the trajectory toward socialism not as a mere possibility but as the gravitational center of modern development. The World-Spirit, Providence, History-with-a-capital-H—or, in more modern guise, the real Anthology Super-Intelligence of the collective human mind since the year -3000—is thinking and acting through us, and in Hobsbawm’s view what it is thinking and acting is the Long March to fully automated luxury communism.
This is, of course, false. All Grand Narratives are false. It was, as applied to the eras of and in his works The Age of Revolution) and The Age of Capital, nevertheless useful. Industrial capitalism and the rising public reason of democracy were producing new classes, new social relations, new forms of collective organization pointing to more than the possibility of a better world than the same-old same-old societies-of-domination enspelled by the Devil of Malthus. But, in my view at least, his rigid attachment to this particular Grand Narrative was a Procrustean Bed-trap as Hobsbawm ventured beyond 1870, and became more and more of a trap the more and more fully automated luxury communism failed to materialize.
As a political actor, Hobsbawm in the end—after 1956—turned into a strange chimerical Tory Communist. He was committed to discipline and common purpose. Which meant hierarchy. And obedience. Above all else. Before 1956 Hobsbawm found the question of who was (or should be) at the top of the hierarchy and to whom obedience was owed was unproblematic. History had installed Marx’s vicar on earth in Moscow’s Kremlin.
He had joined the Communist Party in 1930 at age 17.
Christopher Hitchens put it mordantly: Hobsbawm’s commitment to Communism was driven by what Hitchens called “a displaced yearning for family values, religion and patriotism: the Tory virtues.” The Communist International supplied community and belonging for a Jewish orphan whose only teenage solace was the Ernst Thaelmann section of the Communist Party. He never deserted them, even though he owed it to history itself to do so.
From 1930 to 1956 the Party line shifted on fundamental questions from one extreme to another with remarkable speed, and Hobsbawm followed each shift with what he later admitted was “uncanny obedience” which would have put him in good company with our modern apparatchiks like JD Vance and Marco Rubio. He accepted the Comintern’s directive that German Communists should undermine the Social Democrats rather than ally against the Nazis (the disastrous 1932 Berlin transport strike). He accepted the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact line after June 1939. When Khrushchev denounced Stalin at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, he was “dismayed.” Only when Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest in 1956 did he finally break—without ever fully disavowing the project that not only made Stalin possible, but made him nearly inevitable.
He remained a member of the Communist Party until its dissolution in 1991.
There is a strange 1994 interview with Michael Ignatieff in which Hobsbawm dances with the idea that even in 1934, when millions were dying in the Soviet experiment, he would probably not have backed out of his alignments had he known the full truth. His answer: “the chance of a new world being born in great suffering would still have been worth backing.” The sacrifices of the Russian people were “probably only marginally worthwhile” by his own standard—but a socialist revolution might have justified them.
This is, in my view, not merely an error of judgment but a failure of moral reasoning. To say that mass murder could be justified by a future utopia that never materialized is to adopt an ethical framework so remote from ordinary human concern that it becomes indistinguishable from amorality. As Tony Judt wrote, Hobsbawm’s language in politically sensitive zones retreats into “hooded, wooden language, redolent of Party-speak.” When describing Khrushchev’s secret speech as “the brutally ruthless denunciation of Stalin’s misdeeds,” the epithets apply to the denunciation, not to Stalin’s misdeeds.
The deepest problem was that Hobsbawm’s framework for judging error was itself corrupted. He could see Stalin’s errors (eventually) but only within the broader project, which remained inviolate. He could denounce Stalin as an aberration while never fully disavowing the Leninist project that made him possible. He was blinded by faith, and when the faith was gone he was blinded by habit.
And yet his towering achievement and the moral blindness went together.
They were not in tension; they were inseparable.
His greatness as a historian partly depended on the very commitments that made him a failure as a moral agent, for those commitments underpin his belief in his Grand Narrative of 1776-1870. And only someone certain that that Grand Narrative was true could have written The Age of Revolution and The Age of Capital. Hobsbawm argues that 1789–1875 is a single, world‑shaping era driven by the twin forces of the French and Industrial Revolutions, transforming economies, societies, and politics from a largely agrarian, feudal Europe into an emerging capitalist, industrial world.
The Industrial Revolution in Britain was a true qualitative rupture: cotton, steam, coal, iron, and later railways created self‑sustaining growth, vast new markets, and a modern working class. The French Revolution shattered the old aristocratic order, spread ideas of popular sovereignty, rights, nationalism, and mass politics, and set the template for later revolutions and reaction. That duality—Britain as economic engine, France as political‑ideological epicenter—anchors his whole narrative. In this choice, Hobsbawm strictly follows the party line laid down by Friedrich Engels in his footnote to the 1888 English edition of The Communist Manifesto:
Generally speaking, for the economical development of the bourgeoisie, England is here taken as the typical country, for its political development, France…
That there was in fact no country in the world with an economic history tracking England’s and a political history tracking France’s does not faze Hobsbawm. But the mind does boggle at the grafting of France’s political history onto England’s industrial one. No country, anywhere, anytime has had the political history of France and the industrial history of England. Taking France’s political and England’s economic history as the ultimate ideal-typical underlying reality that would lead to mass revolution to produce a utopian leftist anarchy, and trying to explain every deviation from that as second-order factors imposing transitory disturbances on that dominant tendency—well, that is not an easy task. And yet that is the direction in which Hobsbawm’s Age of Revolution and Age of Capital claim history was then moving.
Nevertheless, these “dual revolutions” did remake land, labor, class structure, international power, and all the rest of society. Land and labor were torn from old structures. Hobsbawm maps the moment when the modern world really begins: when capitalism becomes self‑propelling, when “industry,” “middle class,” “working class,” “capitalism,” “socialism,” “nationalism,” “crisis,” and “proletariat” enter the vocabulary because the things they name have suddenly become real. By connecting agrarian structures, war finance, technology, class formation, and ideology, he shows why post‑1800 history can’t be understood as slow “evolution” from the ancien régime but as a compressed, violent restructuring of economic and political life—one whose patterns still echo through and so shape us today.
In Hobsbawm’s telling, 1848 fails as a social revolution. However, it succeeds in killing the old order: thereafter, rulers know that they must reckon with capitalism, mass politics, and national movements, and that if anything is going to stay the same, everything must change. 1848-1875 is a period of economic expansion and immense bourgeois self‑confidence, as capitalism becomes global and infrastructural, with railways, steamships, telegraph cables, and gold discoveries fusing previously separate regions into a single, interdependent world economy, with Britain at its center, but with rapidly rising Germany and the US as industrialization spreads beyond Britain and Belgium in a lopsided way. Global railway mileage explodes from 4.5 thousand in 1840 to 24 in 1850, 66 in 1860, 128 in 1870, and 228 thousand in 1880. Hobsbawm’s core interpretive move and the end of the story of democratic revolution, industrial revolution, rise of capital, and creation of the global economy is to claim that bourgeois triumph was both real and short‑lived: It was “brief and impermanent. At the very moment when it seemed complete, it proved to be not monolithic but full of fissures.”
And then, in my view, Hobsbawm’s Orthodox Marxist Engelsian Grand Narrative betrays him. The Age of Empire: 1875–1914 is, again, a masterpiece of historical narration, but it tells the wrong story. He insists that we must see 1875-1914 not through any nostalgic haze as a Belle Époque, but as a period of deep contradictions: spectacular economic growth and integration, mass migration and rising living standards in the core, alongside widening global inequality, agrarian crisis, imperial conquest, and mounting social and political tensions. These are driven by imperialism and mass politics. Imperialism comes in new guise—economic, political, and cultural—through which a small group of industrial powers carve up most of the world, bind it into a single capitalist system, and export their institutions, sciences, and elites, while creating dependent peripheries. Mass politics comes as the democratization of the franchise, the emergence of organized mass parties (especially socialist and labor movements), the spread of nationalism, and the first large-scale welfare and regulatory interventions by states. On the economic side, we see the rise of tariff protection, consolidation into cartels and trusts, “scientific management,” and a new phase of “organized” or corporate capitalism.
All of these reshape and destabilized bourgeois rule. Bourgeois liberal capitalism in its 1875-1914 imperial heyday is not any sort of institutional endpoint or stable system of progress, but a transient, self-undermining stage. As he writes: “This book surveys the moment in history when it became clear that the society and civilization created by and for the western liberal bourgeoisie represented not the permanent form of the modern industrial world, but only one phase of its early development.”
Here is what I think The Age of Empire leaves out:
First and most important, it leaves out the arriving demographic transition and its consequences: In 1870, J.S. Mill in the seventh edition of his Principles of Political Economy had written: “Hitherto it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being. They have enabled a greater population to live the same life of drudgery and imprisonment.” The demographic transition had not yet taken hold. The four-fold step-up of the pace of global economic-technological growth to 2%/year had not arrived. And without both of those, there was no Kuznetsian Modern Economic Growth. There was, still, the slow grinding of population against resource constraints. And the result, as Mill had written, was a global working class that remained immiserized—albeit with a fabulous expansion of production, fabulous wealth at the top of society, and an increasing proportional slice of the population able to grasp for and hold on to middle-class comforts.
Mill’s Principles remained the Oxford textbook in 1919.
After 1870… an unprecedented situation… unstable and peculiar. The pressure of population on food… became for the first time in recorded history definitely reversed…. In this economic Eldorado, in this economic Utopia, as the earlier economists would have deemed it, most of us were brought up. That happy age lost sight of a view of the world… [of] Malthus [who had] disclosed a Devil…. For the… half century he was chained up and out of sight….
Second, it misses the true explosion of western European, European, and indeed global productivity and living standards not just at the top but for the middle and working classes over 1875-1914. From 1790 to 1848 or so, we have, in Britain at least, what Robert C. Allen calls “Engels’s Pause”: more than half a century in which output per worker and per‑capita GDP rise quite rapidly by historical standards—perhaps 0.6% per year, standing 40% above its 1790 level by the 1840s, while real wages for the working classes stagnated as the labor share dropped like a stone. That was the world Friedrich Engels saw when he in 1844 wrote his Condition of the Working Class in England. Then between 1848 and 1875 real wages in Britain grew cumulatively by perhaps 40%. And between 1875 and 1914 another 70%, placing the British working class in 1914 at a level of living that was 2.5 times that of 1790 or 1848.
John Maynard Keynes was not exaggerating when he praised the Belle Époque thus:
What an extraordinary episode in the economic progress of man that age was which came to an end in August, 1914! The greater part of the population, it is true, worked hard and lived at a low standard of comfort…. But escape was possible… into the middle and upper classes, for whom life offered, at a low cost and with the least trouble, conveniences, comforts, and amenities beyond the compass of the richest and most powerful monarchs of other ages. The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth… and reasonably expect their early delivery… adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world… secure forthwith… cheap and comfortable… transit to any country or climate….
Most important of all, he regarded this state of affairs as normal, certain, and permanent… and any deviation from it as aberrant, scandalous, and avoidable. The projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions, and exclusion, which were to play the serpent to this paradise, were little more than the amusements of his daily newspaper, and appeared to exercise almost no influence at all on the ordinary course of social and economic life, the internationalization of which was nearly complete in practice…
And with the very real and substantial increases in working-class incomes not just in Britain and western Europe but in all of Europe, and all of its settler colonies, and—we now think—all across the world as well. As Chinua Achebe writes in his novel Things Fall Apart, set in the Igbo provinces of Nigeria in the late 1890s:
The white man had indeed brought a lunatic religion, but he had also built a trading store and for the first time palm-oil and kernel became things of great price, and much money flowed into Umuofia…
Hobsbawm’s narrative misses this.
Third, TheAge of Empire tells a story about the last gasp of liberal capitalist imperialism before its self-immolation in 1914. But if you step back ad ask what actually happened to the ordinary human beings who lived through 1875–1914, a different story emerges. They lived through an era of staggering technological advance that was one of the most important transformation in human history: the transition from a Malthusian world to one in which mass poverty—not merely income inequality but absolute deprivation—became something that could be eliminated. As of 1875, a better world of fully automated luxury communism was simply not possible: the productivity level was too low, productivity growth was too slow, and Malthusian population pressure was too strong. A more fair world was possible: one that was less a society-of-domination in which a predatory élite grabbed 1/3 of everything so that it could have enough. But three meat dinners a week was beyond humanity’s grasp.
By 1914 that had changed: a better world was possible. That better world was already there. And advancing science and technology coupled with the fertility declines of the demographic transition promised an even much better world in the future The project of attempting to restore the Belle Époque of 1875-1914 so that the world could have another generation and a half in which nearly all living standards would triple again was not, ex ante, the craziness that Hobsbawm’s talk of the bourgeois order’s total self-undermining tells us that it was.
Hobsbawm’s Age of Empire, moreover, also misses the fourth biggest story of 1875-1914 as well: the forward march of Second International socialism halted. Friedrich Engels’s most consequential and most deeply mistaken confidence was not that capitalism would collapse—his earlier, mechanical readings of crisis theory were already trembling by the mid-1870s—but that the manner of its collapse would be self-evident. He imagined, with characteristic rhetorical force, that the process of industrial production itself would teach the working class its own emancipation: as factories grew more concentrated, as crises sharpened, as the proletariat swelled and cohered, the truth of communism would become obvious in the way that arithmetic is obvious. The logic of the economy’s development was the logic of history; to witness one was to recognize the other. Engels came to believe that the workers’ would be defeated but that their defeats would mount up to a Xanatos gambit—the opposite of a Pyrrhic Victory—as they would demonstrate the inadequacy of reformist panaceas, and fuel the drive toward revolutionary consciousness. that vision failed spectacularly between 1875 and 1914 along three dimensions: empirical, institutional, and epistemological.
Empirical Failure:Engels’s dream required that the organization of production point unmistakably toward socialism. But by 1900 it was no longer doing so. Real wages rose steadily, even spectacularly. The process of production did not concentrate workers into a single antagonistic immiserated mass; it stratified them into foremen, skilled artisans, white-collar clerks, sales managers, and an expanding middle layer whose interests diverged sharply from the proletariat at the bottom. The very proletarian cohesiveness Engels expected from steampower society collapsed into a diversity of occupational and industrial identities.
Institutional Failure: Engels’s 1890 preface to the Communist Manifesto expressed his core Xanatos Gambit hope with devastating clarity: workers were supposed to organize, agitate, vote, and strike—and then lose. Their defeats would demonstrate that reform was impossible, that the system could not be ameliorated but only overthrown. But—the nightmare—the workers won, or at least won enough, and victory weakened rather than strengthened revolutionary consciousness. The British trades unions rejected the Zurich Congress in 1892 not out of conviction about socialism’s truth but out of what Engels called the “parliamentary spirit of compromise”; English workers, he lamented bitterly, were “deeply infected” by it. Engels complained that Lancashire textile workers had found a leader “Mawdsley” who pushed for direct parliamentary representation as the answer. Class consciousness did not arise “of itself” from shared Workers became interested in bimetallism, national superiority, and trade policy for cotton—precisely the “bourgeois ideas” Engels despised most of all.
Germany’s Social Democrats grew from a fringe sect to the largest party in the Reichstag by 1912, but never a majority. And trade unionism, pension reform, and universal suffrage did not teach workers that capitalism must be overthrown. They taught workers that capitalism could be worked—and worked well.
Epistemological Failure: The “logic of development” Engels traced was real enough—the concentration of capital, the expansion of world trade—but its interpretation was never singular. Two competing logics coexisted:
The communist logic: production concentrated workers, crises deepened[?], proletariat seizes the means of production.
The social-democratic logic: production generated wealth, crises could be mitigated by reform, working class uses political power to reshape capitalism.
There was no neutral observational ground between them. The factory floor did not emit a Marxian signal any more than it emitted an answer to arithmetic.
The period witnessed mass literacy, mass education, mass party organizations, mass newspapers, and mass leisure. These were not epiphenomena of production; they were autonomous forces that reshaped consciousness independently of economic structure. The Catholic Centre Party in Germany drew millions of voters rooted in faith, not class. Anti-colonial nationalism had nothing to do with the “process of production.” Psychological and cultural forces operated with full independence of any economistic logic. The working-class world between 1875 and 1914 was not arithmetic. It was a field of contested meanings, where the same factories that produced surplus value also produced reformist parties, where the very coherence of the working class turned out to be stratified, divided, and politically unpredictable. The process of production did not make communism obvious; it made contestation inevitable—and contestation is the opposite of arithmetic.
From my perspective, Hobsbawm goes further off the rails in his The Age of Extremes, the final tetrology book focused on what he called the “short twentieth century,” which Hobsbawm dates from the start of World War I in 1914 to the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. It was a century in which really-existing socialism and fascism really did shake the world. But, still, they were not the main story. My view of The Age of Extremes is that it is history gone badly awry. It is not a sketch of the twentieth century as it was lived on planet earth, but instead on some Planet Hobsbawm where:
The fall of the Soviet Union was a disaster.
Stalin planned multi-party democracies for Eastern Europe after 1945, but reversed himself because Truman started the Cold War.
Hungarian collectivized agriculture was more productive than modern French small-scale agriculture.
Modern democracy is fundamentally bad: its elections “contests in fiscal perjury”.
Remember: the last word of The Age of Extremes is darkness. And yet the imperfect world of 1994 was one of more human flourishing than ever before.
But to get my full take, you will have to read for the subtext in my Slouching Towards Utopia.
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It is striking that the arch-capitalist "effective altruists" of today share the communist Hobsbawm's utilitarian calculus: it is a worthwhile exchange if billions die today for the sake of the trillions yet to be born who will be uploaded to the cloud, there to enjoy unending life. Of course, we may question the degree of actual altruism underlying this reasoning; it reeks of the rationalization of their own enrichment, whereas Hobsbawm presumably really did hope for improvement in the human condition. And yet Hobsbawm and the oligarchs share a rather unattractive overconfidence in their own moral reasoning, even when it leads them to absurd conclusions.
It is striking that the arch-capitalist "effective altruists" of today share the communist Hobsbawm's utilitarian calculus: it is a worthwhile exchange if billions die today for the sake of the trillions yet to be born who will be uploaded to the cloud, there to enjoy unending life. Of course, we may question the degree of actual altruism underlying this reasoning; it reeks of the rationalization of their own enrichment, whereas Hobsbawm presumably really did hope for improvement in the human condition. And yet Hobsbawm and the oligarchs share a rather unattractive overconfidence in their own moral reasoning, even when it leads them to absurd conclusions.
An alternate view of Hobsbawm: https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/the-age-of-hobsbawm-review-from-a-marxist-perspective-61b5653a
Might be paywalled though.