Eric Hobsbawm’s Marxism Was Central to His Work as a Historian
Some of Eric Hobsbawm’s academic admirers would rather forget about his socialist political commitments. But those commitments formed an essential part of the great historian’s life and work.
Eric Hobsbawm gives a lecture shortly before his death in 2012.
There have been several studies of the work of the British Marxist historians, but the epic biography of Eric Hobsbawm by Richard Evans is the first to explore the life of one of these figures in any detail.
It is in that respect closer to Jonathan Haslam’s book on E. H. Carr, The Vices of Integrity, than to Bryan Palmer’s study E. P. Thompson: Objections and Oppositions. Evans does of course discuss Hobsbawm’s writings, but his focus here is more on how they came to be written and published, rather than an assessment of their content.
It might be asked whether we require a biography at all. Hobsbawm’s last publication of all-new material was, after all, his 2002 autobiography, Interesting Times. Yet, as Evans points out, one of the peculiarities of that book is precisely how little the reader learns about the author’s inner life.
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