Eric Hobsbawm passed away yesterday at the age of ninety-five. He had enough time to cement his status as his generation’s most important historian. Enough time to write obituaries for critics many years his junior. And enough time to see the communist political project to which he devoted his life collapse.

Thankfully, he fell just short of being able to read Dissent today, which features a dazzling and dizzying example of how to critique something you don’t understand.

Timothy Shenk is right that hagiography does a disservice to Hobsbawm, a man with no shortage of intellectual rigor. The remembrance for In These Times that I should be writing right now is in this vein — about the apolitical way these memorials have been handled.