Emile Chabal is a professor of contemporary history at the University of Edinburgh, where he works on twentieth-century European political and intellectual history. His most recent book is The Age of Hobsbawm: The Life of a Revolutionary Historian.
Emile Chabal, author of a new biography of the massively popular and influential historian Eric Hobsbawm, explains how Hobsbawm’s Central European roots set him apart in Britain — and why he kept faith with communism through the devastation of his century.
Jean-Marie Le Pen, who died last month, attempted to forge an alliance between neo-fascists, apologists for French colonialism, and neglected working-class communities. Today this coalition threatens the foundations of the Fifth Republic.
Eric Hobsbawm's work spanned everything from jazz to the history of banditry, in thousands of texts he wrote in several languages. A new project has brought together his writings in a searchable database — offering readers a goldmine of work by Britain's greatest Marxist historian.
Histories of Marxism frequently imagine an essentially European body of thought spreading around the world. Yet, as Eric Hobsbawm’s work shows, revolutionary breakthroughs in the “periphery” could profoundly reshape Western Marxists’ own thinking.