By his death in 2012, Eric Hobsbawm had become something of a national treasure in Britain. If never a “pop” or TV historian, his work and in particular his Age of  . . .  series made him known to millions of students and lay readers. Britain’s leading Marxist historian is however easily depoliticized. His late efforts to emphasize the German thinker’s present relevance tended to stress his role as a theorist of capitalist globalization, more than his attachment to the communist project.

Indeed, while Hobsbawm wrote pioneering works on the history of social revolt, focused on shoemakers or bandits, he was not a historian of communism itself. These studies were themselves political: they were tied to the British Communist Party Historians’ Group’s effort to rediscover a national tradition of rebellion. But Hobsbawm was not for the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) what Paolo Spriano was for the Italian Communist Party (PCI) — a Communist intellectual who wrote a scholarly history of his own party.

It is thus worth asking why Hobsbawm stayed in the CPGB, hardly a mass party, until its demise in 1991. It is commonplace to see 1956 as the real moment of choice: that year, Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin and then the Soviet invasion of Hungary rocked the world Communist movement, in a moral setback which led most of Hobsbawm’s colleagues to break with the CPGB. In this narrative, Hobsbawm is often presented as remaining in party ranks out of residual loyalty, particular to a Jewish man who had escaped Nazi Germany and lived through the golden age of Communist antifascism.