"If men were angels...": reflections on the world of Eric Hobsbawm.

• Author: Kurth, James

As the twentieth century draws to its end, we can expect a parade of books that win purport to tell us its meaning. The last fin de siecle was rich in artistic innovation; this one is more likely to be rich in historical reflection.

But in a certain sense the twentieth century has already ended. It did so half a decade ago. Historians for quite some time have seen the nineteenth century as really lasting from 1789 (the beginning of the French Revolution) to 1914 (the beginning of the First World War), and they have accordingly termed it "the long nineteenth century." So too, historians have recently begun to see the twentieth century as lasting from 1914 to 1989 (the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe) or to 1991 (the end of the Soviet Union), what Eric Hobsbawn in his new book calls "the short twentieth century."(1) As it happens, the two historical centuries -- the long nineteenth and the short twentieth -- add up neatly to two conventional centuries.

Hobsbawm is an obvious candidate to be the premier historian of the short twentieth century. He has already written a long (three volumes, 1300 pages) history of the long nineteenth century,(2) and he intends this volume on the short twentieth century to be the fourth and concluding volume in a series. He has also written a dozen other major books that deal with basic themes of the two centuries -- industrialization, labor movements, revolutionary politics, and even jazz music. He is widely recognized as the most distinguished British historian of a Marxist persuasion.

Hobsbawm's own life began in 1917, soon after the beginning of the short century. While his book is indeed, as its subtitle states, a history of the world, it is also in a sense a biography of Eric Hobsbawm. Both the strengths and the weaknesse -- the extremes as it were -- of The Age of Extremes are a result of Hobsbawm's combination, and at times confusion, of the two.

Hobsbawm divides the twentieth century into three distinct eras: "the Age of Catastrophe" (1914-1945); "the Golden Age" (1945 -- 1973); and "the Landslide" (1973 to the present). This particular periodization has become conventional among historians of the twentieth century, and it is a useful way to order things. Each age is given its own section or Part. Somewhat less explicitly, Hobsbawm also divides his account into three broad areas. the advanced capitalist world (especially Western Europe and the United States) the "socialist" or communist world (the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China); and the underdeveloped world. This too is conventional, corresponding to the long-established, but now-obsolete, division into First, Second, and Third Worlds. As we shall see, some of the flaws in Hobsbawm's book result from particular, and peculiar, combinations of his three-part era periodization with his three-part area division.

A Tak of Three Ages

Hobsbawm's account of the Age of Catastrophe in Part One is generally excellent. His chapters on the two world wars, and the Great Depression that linked them, masterfully integrate events around the world, as well as the realms of politics, economics, and culture. In these chapters, he is focusing principally upon the advanced capitalist world. Although this account presents nothing that is particularly original, it is generally comprehensive, coherent, and concise.

In it, however, one chapter, that on "The World Revolution, and the Soviet Union, fits in oddly. For although this chapter is included in the part that covers the Age of Catastrophe, there is virtually no mention in it of the great catastrophes that occurred within the Soviet Union itself during the 1920s-1930s: the Russian Civil War, the Russian famine, the Ukrainian famine, the Great Terror, and the Gulag Archipelago. These catastrophes were as extreme as the others that occurred during 1914-1945 -- together, they took the lives of more than thirty million people -- but they are almost completely omitted from this chapter and indeed from the whole of Part One. Rather, the picture given in "The World Revolution" is one of the political creativity of Lenin, the worldwide enthusiasm for the Bolshevik Revolution, and the heroic exertions of the Soviet Union in the Second World War. We shall return to this anomaly shortly.

Hobsbawm's account of the advanced capitalist countries in the Golden Age (Part Two) is also generally excellent. Once again, he masterfully integrates events around the world, as well as the realms of politics, economics, and culture. Because this age is closer to the present, it has not received the full treatment that historians have given the Age of Catastrophe, and there is less of a settled, consensual interpretation. But although Hobsbawm again presents little that is particularly original, he does draw upon the best accounts of others, ones that are both innovative and sound. He demonstrates that the Golden Age of economic prosperity and social peace resulted from the lessons that the advanced capitalist countries drew from the preceding catastrophes.

In the same Part Two, Hobsbawm includes a chapter that is entitled "Real Socialism." This is a discussion of the Soviet Union and communist Eastern Europe. But, curiously, unlike the rest of this section of the book, this chapter on the communist world does not begin after 1945. Instead, it begins with 1917, thus returning to the period already addressed in Part One. And now, for the first time, we learn of those early Soviet catastrophes -- particularly the Ukrainian famine and the Stalinist terror -- although the length of the treatment is still hardly up to the scale of the events described.

The chapter on "The Third World" and the Marmist movements within it during the 1940s-1970s, has some of the tone of the earlier chapter on "The World Revolution" during 1917-1945. And just as with the treatment of the Soviet Union, in this first chapter on the Third World and communist China, there is no mention of the great catastrophes that occurred in these regions during these years, especially the Chinese famine that followed "The Great Leap Forward," and the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Treatment of these disorders is delayed and given out of sequence in Part Three.

Hobsbawm's account of the Landslide in Part Three is probably the most innovative section of the book. He is consistently penetrating and realistic about events in each of the three worlds. He is particularly lucid and useful in demonstrating how the very economic achievements of the Golden Age in the advanced capitalist countries underlined the foundations of their national states and welfare societies. The result is that we are now living in the midst of a long slide into political paralysis, cultural squalor, and social disintegration. Hobsbawm ends his book with a chapter entitled "Towards the Millennium." In it, he concludes:

The structures of human societies themselves, including even some of die social foundations of the capitalist economy, are on the point of being destroyed by the erosion of what we have inherited from the past. Our world risks both explosion and implosion. It must change.

The Case of the Misplaced Catastrophes

What explains the odd disjunction between when the communist catastrophes occurred in history and when they appear in Hobsbawm's book? Why are the catastrophes of Soviet communism during the 1920s-1930s described not in Part One, where they chronologically belong, but in Part Two dealing with the period 1970s? And why is the treatment of the catastrophes of Chinese communism and Third World Marxism during the 1960s-1970s postponed from Part Two, where they chronologically belong, to Part Three, dealing with the period from the 1970s to the present?

The answer is, I believe, that if Hobsbawm had chosen to describe the Soviet catastrophes in their proper place, it would have been clear that the World Revolution was as great a catastrophe -- as much a contributor to the Age of Catastrophe -- as were the two world wars. Further, it would have been clear that such extreme catastrophes should...